Columbia University scientists say that technologies to extract carbon dioxide from the air will likely become a critical part of any strategy to stabilize the global climate and should not be abandoned because of high costs. Writing in the Proceedings…
Tags: · Carbon sequestration, Columbia University, curbing climate change, Earth Institute, extracting carbon to reduce greenhouse gas warming
Biochar has emerged over the last couple years as a ray of hope on the otherwise bleak horizon of the planet’s environmental future. It has been hailed as a possible solution to climate change, world hunger, and rural poverty — though doubts are being raised in some quarters.
Last year, some of the world’s most eminent biochar experts gathered for a biochar conference at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst to discuss this ancient technology that is getting a new look by scientists, governments and investors. To the packed audience, this promising technology sounded like a panacea for a whole host of problems. Biochar, the speakers said, could soak up large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, supercharge soil fertility to feed the world’s hungry, promote jobs and economic opportunities for farmers, safely get rid of animal and plant waste, heat buildings greenly, and slash the kind of fertilizer use that is creating vast dead zones in coastal waters from nitrogen runoff.
Tags: · biochar, biochar conference, biochar in soil, biochar reducing carbon emissions, Carbon sequestration, Climate Change, Cornell University, enriching soil, International Biochar Initiative, Iowa State University, National Laboratory for Agriculture and The Environment, pyrolysis, Soil
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
Barbara Ettinger and Sven Huseby knew their documentary about ocean acidification would have to pass a high test to avoid overwhelming a public already challenged to understand 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.
Tags: · A Sea Change: Imagine a World Without Fish, American Museum of Natural History, Barbara Ettinger, Carbon sequestration, Downtown Film Festival-Los Angeles, Elizabeth Kolbert, global warming, Maya Lin, Ocean chemistry, Permafrost melt, Sven Huseby, Wildlife extinctions
By Barbara Kessler Green Right Now 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 [...]
Tags: · American Chesnut Foundation, American chesnut tree, Carbon sequestration, Douglas Jacobs, Native Plants, native trees, Purdue University, reforestation, shade trees
By John DeFore
Green Right Now
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.
Tags: · American Planning Association, Botanical Garden, Bromeliad, Carbon sequestration, Corcovado mountain, eco-tourism, green spaces, heat island effect, Judith Layzer, MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, pollution mitigation, Rio de Janeiro, Tijuca National Park, urban forests, urban parks, water
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
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 today, 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!)
Tags: · American Clean Energy and Security Act, cap-and-trade, Carbon sequestration, clean coal, clean energy, Climate Change, economy, Emissions, Fossil Fuels, global warming, Green jobs, petroleum, Waxman-Markey
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
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.
Tags: · Carbon Dioxide, Carbon sequestration, Columbia University, Earth Institute, Juerg Matter, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, ultramafic rocks
By Julie Bonnin and Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
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.
Tags: · biochar, biomass, Carbon sequestration, green waste, Houston, Hurricane Ike, methane capture, pyrolysis, Rice University
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.
Tags: · Carbon sequestration, Coal Power, Democrats, Montana Governor Schweitzer, Offshore Drilling, oil, Wind Power
By John DeFore 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 [...]
Tags: · Carbon sequestration, Carbonates, CO2, Columbia University, Pacific Ocean
Barbara Kessler
Andrew Winston
Danielle Nierenberg
Anthony Swift