Naturally Interesting

Sunrgi expects to be producing solar energy at $0.05 / kWh (equivalent to coal) within the next 12-15 months. How do they do it? By using glass to concentrate the solar power 1600 times and focus it on a tiny square of the most efficient photovoltaic material on the planet.

Photovoltaic material is expensive, but glass is cheap, so Sunrgi’s method effectively brings down the price of solar to be as cheap as coal. An added benefit is that there is no need for an expensive system to track the movement of the sun.

I wrote previously about controlling invasive species by eating them and why I support whaling, now the NY Times has an article about saving endangered species by eating them. Gary Paul Nabhan, Director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at NAU, has written a new book titled “Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods.”

He has spent most of the past four years compiling a list of endangered plants and animals that were once fairly commonplace in American kitchens but are now threatened, endangered or essentially extinct in the marketplace. He has set out to save them, which often involves urging people to eat them.

Mr. Nabhan worked with groups like Slow Food U.S.A. and the Chefs Collaborative to identify items for the list and and “engaged hundreds of chefs, farmers and curious eaters to grow and cook some of the lost breeds and varieties.”

Fun graphic here.

I’m working on a list of the best books about the environment. Check it out at Green Reading List and let me know any suggestions you have.

Start Here:

Raw Milk Debate at Wikipedia

The revolution will not be pasteurized: Inside the raw-milk underground in Harpers

The Udder Truth in Salon

Further Information Here:

FDA - On the Safety of Raw Milk

Real Milk - A Rebuttal to the FDA Presentation

David Gumpert’s blog The Complete Patient

In the Oregonian:

That movement — dispersed, diverse, leaderless, independent and incongruous in its assembly of anarchists, billionaires, street clowns and computer geeks — began, Hawken said in a phone interview, “when people looked around to see an insult to their property, their river, their forest, their future, their children or their dignity.

“Then they looked around for an institution to do something about it . . . and they find out government is corrupt. It’s either bought off or it doesn’t have the skills.

“That’s how the nonprofit world was formed. It’s not a well-oiled machine. But it’s the fastest growing movement in the world, the largest social movement in the history of humanity, and the one addressing the salient issues of our times.”

“Specifically, the shared activity of hundreds of thousands of nonprofit organizations can be seen as humanity’s immune response to toxins like political corruption, economic disease and ecological degradation.”

The United Nations is the main global policeman in an effort by wealthy nations to reduce the impact of their own pollution by paying for cleanups in the developing world. The program, known as the Clean Development Mechanism, is one of the most important coordinated efforts to attack global warming.

In recent months, however, U.N. regulators who administer the program have objected to dozens of these developing-world projects, ranging from hydroelectric plants to wind farms, questioning whether the projects would produce a real environmental payoff.

U.N. regulators are also concerned that some independent auditors of these projects, who are responsible for vetting their environmental legitimacy, have been letting project developers push through ventures of questionable environmental value.

The issue is two pronged: Corporations buying carbon offsets want to get the most bang for their buck. And project developers want to build high value projects for cheap, increasing their bottom line. This creates a tremendous incentive for fraudulent, or at least cheap offset projects. Add to that the fact that many of these offset projects are in developing countries, and the administrative and oversight problems become enormous.

The U.N. says it isn’t suggesting that most of the developing-word projects are illegitimate. Evaluating whether a project would have been built without carbon-credit revenue is a complex judgment call,

The U.N. is taking a closer look at project developers, mostly Europe based companies, who set up projects to sell credits to buyers. Also facing scrutiny are the 3rd party auditing firms who inspect and certify to the U.N. that the projects are environmentally sound.

A member of the U.N. board, Christiana Figueres, expressed concern that the system may be open to what she called “collusion” between auditors and project developers to push through environmentally dubious projects.

We’ve heard the reports of political interference with scientific work before, but I had no idea how widespread it was. More that half those responding to a survey of scientists at the EPA reported they had experienced political interference in their work. To some degree this group may be self-selecting, so here are the numbers from the Union of Concerned Scientists report:

The online questionnaire was sent to 5,419 EPA scientists last summer; 1,586 replied, and of those, 889 reported that they had experienced at least one type of interference within the last five years.

889 scientists at the EPA reporting that science has been abrogated for politics! Interestingly the scientists singled out the Office of Management and Budget at the White House as one of the main sources of interference.

Skip to 1:00 for the message. Sign the petition here.

Michigan State University professor Philip Howard has documented the tangled web that are organic products today.

Have fun seeing who owns your favorite organic brand. The same sort of chart can be found here too.

A while back James Hansen, chief climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, published a paper Target Atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim? I finally got around to reading it, you should too.

Decreasing CO2 was the main cause of a cooling trend that began 50 million years ago, large scale glaciation occurring when CO2 fell to 425±75 ppm, a level that will be exceeded within decades, barring prompt policy changes. If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm. If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.

The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture
CO2, is herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II. The
stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is
continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.

Mr. Hansen uses some pretty strong language, but backs it up with some equally strong data. There is also a Powerpoint presentation available here.