Barbara Ettinger and Sven Huseby knew their documentary about ocean acidification would have to pass a high test to avoid overwhelming a public already grappling with the many technical facets of climate change.

To sound the alarm about yet another looming global warming catastrophe, the potential destruction of all marine life, their film would have to be engaging, accessible, down-to-earth.

Happily, A Sea Change: Imagine a World Without Fish succeeds on all those levels. Humanizing this critical issue like no previous film or book, it follows the soft-spoken Huseby on an odyssey of discovery as he meets with scientists and activists in Alaska, Seattle, California and Norway trying to understand the phenomenon of ocean acidification.

Gently, the story drives home what’s at stake: A healthy planet for future generations, embodied in this case by Sven and Barbara’s spirited grandson, Elias, age 5. The irrepressible Elias serves as the film’s touchstone, reminding us of the urgency of his grandfather’s mission and of the simple wonders of beach and ocean.

Sven writes “home” about his discoveries to Elias, who lives in California (where in real life, he watches Blue Planet and is known as “a very verbal fellow”). He tells him he’s deeply worried about the oceans, but adds that as a former teacher, “I really believe the power to change begins with knowledge.”

On his travels, Sven considers how he’ll explain to Elias about this problem that should rightly fall outside the scope of childhood — the potential complete destruction of the oceans via acidification, the result of the seas absorbing humankind’s carbon dioxide emissions.

In asking, what are we leaving behind for our kids and grandkids, A Sea Change doesn’t mince words.

But this inter-generational interplay also lends the film a warmth, and keeps it clear of the rocky shoals where more strident, proselytizing documentaries sometimes crash. Sven is on a fact-finding mission, not a soap box. His director and wife, Barbara Ettinger, uses ample footage from expert subjects, but also keeps them off the preaching podium.

A Sea Change deliberately reaches out to people of all ages and political stripes. Kids will enjoy Elias’s viewpoint. Newcomers to the subject will appreciate Sven’s Mr. Rogers-like approach to interviews. The film is paced to allow for periodic reflection, and beautifully filmed along the rocky coasts of the Pacific Northwest and Norway, all the way to the Arctic, where we see and hear the ice dropping into the sea.

Sven ultimately meets a score of scientists and environmentalists who are passionate about their mission to save the oceans (which cover more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface). He also visits with artist Maya Lin to ponder the psychology of why we haven’t been better ocean stewards.

The film, released this spring, is being featured this week at the Downtown Film Festival-Los Angeles on Aug. 20 (Thursday at 7 p.m.) and will have its New York City premiere at the American Museum of Natural History on Sept. 13. It is also playing at cinema festivals around the world. It was conceived of in late 2006 when Sven and Barbara were both struck by the New Yorker article, “The Darkening Sea” by Elizabeth Kolbert. Barbara, a filmmaker, and Sven, a former teacher and headmaster of the Putney School in Vermont, considered themselves enlightened people; Barbara’s last film had even tackled a regional environmental fight. Yet the ocean article was startling.

“We were flabbergasted that we’d never heard of the phenomenon of acidification of the sea,” Sven said last week from his home in upstate New York.

The couple set out to investigate. Sven pursued financing (eventually signing several foundations to back the movie), as Barbara figured out how to turn the story into a film that could reach a wide audience.

“We made a very clear decision. I guess part of it is who we are as people. We didn’t want to make an apocalyptic film. But what we see in this area of ocean acidification are some very big issues,” Sven said in an interview with GreenRightNow.

Much of what the film crew uncovered was disturbing, he said; “I got pretty depressed the first half of this film as we interviewed scientist after scientist.”

As the native Norwegian and former private school headmaster travels from Alaska to the Pacific Northwest US to a scientists’ outpost in Tromsoe, Norway, a dark cloud emerges. Everything out in the deep blue is in jeopardy. The oceans have been absorbing the earth’s mounting CO2 emissions, but now, all life, from the tiniest marine creatures to those at the top of the food chain – to humans – is paying a toll.

“For 20,000 years, we’ve had a relatively stable environment. Now, there are going to be a lot of extinctions,” reports Dr. Jeff Short, then with NOAA, now the Pacific Science director for Oceana.

“Ocean chemistry is being altered on a scale not seen for millions of years,” says marine professor, Dr. Edward L. Miles, ot the University of Washington: “And we don’t know what the consequences will be.”

When the oceans turn acidic, Sven explains in our interview, “it’s like dropping a piece of chalk into vinegar.” That’s an exaggeration, but what happens to the chalk shows how shellfish, coral and the delicate, tiny pterapods at the foundation of the marine food chain are being affected.

Increasing carbon emissions here on land mean more ocean acidity, which is sapping the oceans’ capacity to support life and pushing them to the brink. Fish populations are thinning, coral is dying and the Ph of the water is nearing fatal levels for many species.

We get many visuals. Sven interviews a chemistry teacher who demonstrates with baby teeth what acid (in the form of a soda) can do to a calcium coating, like those on the pterapods. (You’ll understand the oceans better, and reconsider your next Coke.)

Similar mini-tutorials keep us hanging in with Sven as he bikes, hikes and hovers on several coastlines, explaining the threat to our oceans – and during the last part of the film, what can be done to save them.

It’s an enjoyable ride, even under that brooding cloud. Our amazingly robust 65-year-old narrator, his glib grandson, and the fleet of people working to solve things make for an eye-opening tale. There are poignant moments, like when the author of the New Yorker piece Kolbert commiserates with Sven about leaving such an ailing planet for our children.

“I continue to think about that remark and trying to turn this thing around,” Sven says in our interview.

A Sea Change does offer hope, on several coasts. There are the lawyer activist in California, wind engineers in Norway, executives at Google and others, who believe pollution can be stopped and alternative energy harnessed to turn back the carbon clock.

Even in unlikely spots, such as the century-old Solstrand Hotel in Norway, which now operates on renewable energy from the ocean, there’s hope.

How can ordinary people help? “They can think about their carbon footprint,” says Huseby. “They can ask themselves how can they decrease the fossil fuel they use for transportation. They can ask how well have they insulated their homes…through conservation alone we can do the most. It’s not that expensive and it can have a huge impact.”

And, he adds, you should contact your Congressional representative.

“It sounds old-fashioned, even quaint. But it’s really important that people write to their representatives and stress that they want to get off fossil fuels…They all say they need the push. So let’s start pushing.”

Details:

A Sea Change: Imagine a World Without Fish
Director/producer: Barbara Ettinger; co-producer: Sven Huseby; co-producer: Susan Cohn Rockefeller; editing: Toby Shimin; cinematography by Claudia Raschke-Robinson; associate producer: Ben Kalina.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Related video:

Watch the trailer for A Sea Change:

As summer sets in, many of us are looking to shade those windows any way we can, and one of the greenest solutions is to add greenery. Outside the window, that is.

A shade tree can mitigate the heat gain on a west or south-facing window and truly cut down on electricity costs. The trouble is — it takes a few years to maximize its effect. Even if you plant a big tree, it will be a while before it’s settled in and leafing out.

Which brings us to a project at Purdue University. Scientists there have been studying a new hybrid species of the American chestnut, a tree that can grow much faster and larger than other hardwood varieties. They think it could be a good bet to shade your windows, built new forests that could be sustainably harvested and in the process sequester a whole lot of carbon more efficiently than many other trees could.

They’ve compared the American chestnut to quaking aspen, red pine and white pine and found that the chestnut grew faster and had three times more biomass than the other species. It also sequestered more carbon than the other trees, except when compared with a black walnut in one study location.

“Each tree has about the same percentage of its biomass made up of carbon, but the fact that the American chestnut grows faster and larger means it stores more carbon in a shorter amount of time,” said Douglas Jacobs, an associate professor of forestry and natural resources at Purdue.

As a bonus, much of that carbon could be retained when the chestnuts are converted into wood products, he noted.

Many years ago, the original (non-hybrid) American chestnut was used for fine furniture because it is a dense hardwood. However, beginning in the early 1900s, it experienced a blight caused by a fungus that spread across it’s natural U.S. territory from New England, across New York and south to Alabama. Fifty years later, the tree was nearly gone, according to a report on the Purdue project in Science Daily.

But arborists are creating a hybrid American chestnut through interbreeding with the blight-resistant Chinese chesnut that results in a tree that’s “94 percent American chestnut,” according to the report.

The catch: That hybrid tree will be available sometime in the next decade.

“We’re really quite close to having a blight-resistant hybrid that can be reintroduced into eastern forests,” Jacobs said. “But because American chestnut has been absent from our forests for so long now, we really don’t know much about the species at all.”

Actually, there is a group of chestnut enthusiasts who know as much as there is to know and are collaborating to bring the native American tree back to its Appalachian roots. Intrigued? Visit the American Chesnut Foundation. They’re still promising a blight-resistant American chestnut that will be forest-ready before the end of the decade.

Are they jus-nuts? It doesn’t appear so. Not only are they pushing the research on the blight-resistant variety, they provide people with traditional American chestnut seeds and seedlings (if you live east of the Mississippi — they don’t want to spread any potential blight westward). Order on the site to get your personal forest underway.

The Purdue research is being funded by The Stry Foundation, Electric Power Research Institute and Hardwood Tree Improvement and Regeneration Center.

(Photo credits: Chesnut, The American Chesnut Foundation; Researcher with seedling, Purdue University/Nicole Jacobs.)

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Ascending through the dense greenery on the way up Rio de Janeiro’s Corcovado mountain, travelers may be caught off guard by the sight of a Toucan or the call of a far-off monkey, they may marvel at the beauty of a wild orchid, and they’ll almost certainly be struck by the size of it — the sensation of being far from civilization, not smack in the middle of a metropolitan area housing well over 10 million people.

Few visitors, one suspects, would guess that this forest is man-made — a mammoth greenification project, dating back over a hundred years, that serves as an example (albeit an over-sized one) of how governments might set out to combat the side effects that office buildings and sidewalks have on both the ecosystems surrounding them and the humans living within them.

Corcovado, home of the city’s famous Christ the Redeemer statue, is situated within the Tijuca National Park, said to be the largest urban forest in the world. I spent a couple of days in the park this spring, and barely explored a fraction of the natural attractions that could keep eco-tourists busy enough to forget that the world’s most famous beaches are only minutes away.

At Corcovado, exposure to the forest is accidental for many tourists: Visitors who want to see the mountaintop statue, and take in the spectacular views of the city below (assuming the peak isn’t shrouded in fog, as it was the day I went) must take an open-sided cog railway (see photo below). The train climbs through vegetation ranging from common looking trees to Brazilian rosewood and cinnamon. The heat of the city below is quickly replaced by cool, moist air, and, while the train passes some small hillside neighborhoods, one feels completely transported by the time the train arrives at the tourist center above.

Another of the Park’s most impressive features is one designed solely for nature-lovers. The two hundred year-old Botanical Garden is a place both for study and for pleasure, an enormous refuge whose paths wind organically past family-friendly lawns and romantically secluded benches.

Opposite sides of the moisture spectrum are represented here, with a fascinating cactus garden on one end of the garden balanced by an orchid house at the other. Most impressive is a huge Bromeliad exhibit in which the most famous member of that plant family, the pineapple, is joined by hundreds of stranger and more colorful cousins.

Wrapped around the Garden and Corcovado is a network of green spaces occupying over twelve square miles and offering a range of experiences, from casual afternoon strolls to picnic hikes and serious expeditions through Atlantic rainforest terrain, where observant hikers can see many plant and wildlife species threatened with extinction.

And yet, the area was practically barren in the mid-1800s. The land here had been deforested by years of sugar-cane and coffee farming, resulting in a disruption of the city’s water supply. (Today, 60% of Rio’s water comes from the park.) Emperor D. Pedro II set out to undo the damage caused by overuse, and hired a forester who spent the next dozen years planting 72,000 saplings; as detailed here, the process emphasized native species and was extensive enough that it fostered natural reforestation in surrounding areas.

The first full day of hearings on that proposed law known as Waxman-Markey, which would promote clean energy, foster green jobs and set up a system to curb greenhouse gas emissions, began — fittingly — on Earth Day.

But how do we make sense of this sweeping piece of legislation that affects everything from the air you breathe to the refrigerator you use? You could watch the hearings on C-Span over the next few weeks. (If you are unemployed, have all day long to plop in front of the tube and can remain alert for extended periods while people discuss abstractions like “carbon allowances” and “international offsets” this might be for you!)

Or you could read the bill. It is 648 pages. But as we learned from the recent stimulus escapades, even people in Congress don’t read these things.

So let’s stick to the executive summary of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. It is five pages long. For serious climate watchers, politicos, green collar workers and would-be Earth advocates, scanning this document is not a bad idea.

Fortunately we’re not the only ones trying to find ways to make this incredibly complex matter digestible. The EPA is on the job. The agency that would regulate and guide many of the directives in Waxman-Markey, should it pass, has put out an analysis of how it would help grow the economy and boost personal income while transforming the U.S. energy landscape and curtailing carbon emissions. (Though we’re back up to nine pages on this one.)

The EPA review — done at the request of House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Energy and Environment Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) — looked mainly at how emissions reductions and cap-and-trade guidelines would affect the economy (Title III in the Act.). It found that the W-M bill would:

• Make it more economical to invest in energy efficient manufacturing, housing and transportation, which would reduce energy consumption, delaying until mid-century the consumption levels we’d otherwise reach by 2015.

• Grow renewable energy; push forward new technology for coal production, bringing coal carbon capture and storage online in 2015.

• Its cap-and-trade provisions would result in carbon costs of about $13-$17 per metric ton in 2015, rising to $17-$22 by 2020 – propelling the development of cleaner alternatives.

• More clean energy would offset the need for increased petroleum use (a major security issue), keeping it nearly static through 2050. (Which tells you a bit about where the opposition to W-M will come from.)

The EPA report says a lot more. But it’s as thick as Ulysses. It needs deciphering. The Natural Resources Defense Council is trying, having asked its chief economist to analyze the EPA’s analysis (only in Washington).

Laurie Johnson, chief economist for the NRDC, looked at what the EPA was (trying) to say about household income under Waxman-Markey and found that:

• Households will become 18-19 percent richer between 2010 and 2020, and 36-40 percent by 2030. By contrast, the investment of the average household in the bill would only be $98 to $140 a year.

Takeaway: The Congressional prescription for global warming and our ailing economy won’t cost us too much net-net, and could even make us better off. If all goes well.

Take it with a grain of salt. And stay tuned.

(The NRDC has other decipherers. See David Doniger’s blog “First Read” of the Waxman-Markey Energy and Climate Discussion Draft. This excellent piece breaks the Act down into its significant parts.)

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

As inventors of all varieties race to develop the magic eco-fuel, the best ion battery or the  most effective solar collection system, geologists are quietly exploring how certain types of rocks absorb our human carbon emissions.

The phenomenon is not unique. Trees and plants absorb some carbon. The ocean absorbs carbon. But trees can only do so much, and when they die, they release the carbon back into the atmosphere. The ocean has limits as well; it is already becoming acidic as gobbles our thickening stream of pollution.

Rocks, though, can capture carbon and render it into a solid, where it is virtually inert.

There’s a teeny problem. The rocks that are most effective at capturing carbon do so over thousands of years, naturally.

Researchers at the Columbia University’s Earth Institute are working on a process to speed that up a bit. It’s called mineral carbonation and involves dissolving carbon dioxide in water, injecting it into the rock and using the heat generated by the reaction to accelerate the mineralization.

Aside from tinkering with nature’s process. Certain rocks, called ultramafic, are required. They, unlike some other stone cousins, interact with carbon dioxide to form minerals. Fortunately, in the United States, thousands of square miles of these rocks – which include peridotite, dunite, lherzholite and others — can be found along the west and east coasts, beneath the earth and popping through the surface in places. The Columbia team has mapped these suddenly valuable formations in in a new report.

Now with the rock inventory identified, researchers should be ready to rock and roll.

If they’re able to perect the technology (making the chemical absorption work faster), they will have pieced together the granddaddy of closed-loop systems in the fight against global warming: Taking the fossil fuel pollution that we humans have created with oil and coal from deep in the earth and stashing it back into the earth.

At this time of year, when many municipalities are gearing up for holiday tree recycling programs, the city of Houston is dealing with something far more monumental – more than 5.6 million cubic tons of tree waste left behind after Hurricane Ike swept through Southeast Texas in early September.

The city turned some of the debris into mulch, but launched a contest in October, Recycle Ike, to spark ideas for keeping the remaining tree waste from simply being disposed of in landfills.

The winners, announced last week, are a Rice University team of students and scientists who will create a biomass charcoal from the tree remains. The group was among more than 200 entrants from around the world that submitted ideas.

The top $10,000 prize will be used to build a pilot bioreactor on campus. The “biochar” it produces helps the environment in three ways – as a soil enrichment; as a way to stop the decaying waste from releasing carbon into the atmosphere from the decaying wood; and as a method for producing methane gas during the conversion process which can be sold to generate energy.

Using a process called pyrolysis, the bioreactor will heat the biomass tree waste to 400-500°C under low-oxygen conditions to produce the biochar, according to a report by the Rice University team.

“Approximately 50% of the carbon in the feedstock biomass is captured in the biochar, which can be used to sequester carbon in soils. Biochar is carbon-rich and chemically stable in soils, enabling carbon to be
sequestered in soils for centuries or millennia. In addition, biochar improves soil fertility by improving water holding capacity and cation exchange capacity,” the report states.

The methane gas produced during the heating process will be captured and used to generate electricity.

If the pilot project works as projected, it argues for using pyrolysis to deal with all of Hurricane Ike’s considerable waste, say the plan’s proponents. (Ike was the fourth most destructive hurricane to hit the United States.)

“Applied to the entire Hurricane Ike biomass debris, pyrolysis has the potential to sequester more than 1,000,000 metric tons of CO2 and offset an additional 280,000 metric tons of CO2 through the use of syngas [the methane] to generate electricity, removing the equivalent of 300,000 cars from Houston’s roads for a year,” according to the Rice report.

Next, pyrolysis could help the city of Houston more efficiently deal with its ongoing organic waste needs, the researchers say. By turning biomass into soil-enriching biochar and capturing the methane gas for electricity production, they estimate that the city could save carbon emissions equivalent to taking 17,000 cars off the road annually.

The Rice team is nothing if not enthusiastic, concluding: “As a leader already in energy and medicine, the city of Houston stands to become a leader in sustainability. By adopting pyrolysis to handle the Hurricane Ike debris and its annual waste stream, Houston can position itself to be at the forefront of the movement to reduce CO2 emissions and actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere…Ultimately, biochar production promises to revolutionize green waste management in Houston, combining sustainability with a global environmental outlook.”

For those yearning to hear more about the Democrats’ energy plans, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s vigorous speech Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention in Denver opened a more detailed dialogue on the subject.

Schweitzer, a first-term Democratic governor who chose a Republican lieutenant governor, called for “a new energy system that is clean, green and American-made.” He lamented U.S. dependence on foreign oil and what he labeled the Bush Administration’s single-minded focus on drilling to extract more oil, not just abroad but also domestically.

“That single-answer proposition is a dry well, and here’s why,” Schweitzer said. “America consumes 25 percent of the world’s oil, but has less than 3 percent of the reserves. You don’t need a $2 calculator to figure that one out. There just isn’t enough oil in America, on land or offshore, to meet America’s full energy needs.”

In Montana, said the rancher turned politician said, leaders are pursuing oil, but also wind power and coal operations with carbon sequestration; just as the nation will have to pursue many new avenues on the path to energy independence, and to counter global warming. And that includes conservation measures.

“Barack Obama understands the most important barrel of oil is the one you don’t use. Barack Obama’s energy strategy taps all sources and all possibilities. It will give you a tax credit if you buy a fuel-efficient car or truck, increase fuel-efficiency standards and put a million plug-in hybrids on the road,” said Schweitzer.

Read the full text of the speech on the DNC Convention website. To learn more about Montana’s energy policies, see the governor’s Office of Economic Development website.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Proposals to solve the planet’s CO2 woes through sequestering the problematic emissions — pumping them into some hole in the ground where they can’t affect the atmosphere — raise numerous concerns for skeptics. Won’t the stuff leak out, wasting the fortune we spent on sequestering, and leaving us worse off than we would have been by cutting CO2 production in the first place?

Researchers led by Columbia University geophysicist David Goldberg think they’re closer to resolving some of those concerns, with a proposal that would address the possibility of leakage on two fronts.

They suggest injecting the carbon into mammoth basalt formations located thousands of feet below the sea, far off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. There, they contend in a recently published paper, 1,000 feet of undersea sediment would block any leaks that might occur. In addition, as it interacted with water and minerals in the basalt, the carbon would transform into stable materials called carbonates. Then there’s all that water, which at the right depth can further inhibit CO2 escape.

Naysayers who are won over by the formation’s safety advantages — Goldberg described the site to Wired as “a dream reservoir” — will swoon over its size: The rock, located on the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, is so big the scientists believe it could hold well over a hundred years’ worth of emissions at the U.S.’s current level of output.

Numerous problems remain, however, such as the cost of capturing the carbon, the difficulty of getting it out to the site and the fact that much of the formation lies in international waters.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media