TerraPass Footprint

New project: Pagel's Ponderosa Dairy

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:52:35 -0800

Another project up for public comment

by Tim Varga

Pagel�s Ponderosa Dairy is located in Kewaunee, Wisconsin, near Lake Michigan and Green Bay. The dairy has been family owned and operated for over 60 years, and is currently run by Innovative Dairy Farmer of the Year Award winner John Pagel. The project has recently installed an 800kW generator and 4 MMBtu/hr boiler that is powered by gas collected from its anaerobic digester.

TerraPass makes all of its projects available for public comment before they are admitted to the retail portfolio. You should know the drill by now! Check out the project and please send any questions or comments to projects@terrapass.com by December 11.

Are livestock responsible for 51% of greenhouse gas emissions?

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:43:29 -0800

New report makes questionable claim

by Adam Stein

Conventional wisdom has it that meat production is responsible for about 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions — a shocking enough figure as it is. But lately a much higher number has been circulating, with some claiming that meat is responsible for an astonishing 51% of worldwide emissions.

Some skepticism is in order here, so I went looking for the source of the figure. It appears to be this recent report from the Worldwatch Institute. Long story short: I read about 2 pages into the report and then gave up, because its conclusions appear to be hopelessly addled.

Among several “overlooked” sources of emissions, the report attributes a whopping 13.7% of worldwide CO2 to breathing by livestock. This is odd, because breathing is normally considered part of the natural carbon cycle. That is, the CO2 we breathe out is constantly being recycled by plants, which we then ingest, and so on in a cycle that doesn’t add any net CO2 to the atmosphere.

Does the Worldwatch report expose some previously unseen flaw in this reasoning? No:

Livestock (like automobiles) are a human invention and convenience, not part of pre-human times, and a molecule of CO2 exhaled by livestock is no more natural than one from an auto tailpipe.

Natural doesn’t enter into the picture here. The question is whether the CO2 comes from some previously sequestered source, such as a coal bed, or whether it was in the air to begin with. Cars run on oil. Cows run on plants. Enough said. (Before people rush to point out that industrial agriculture requires the use of lots of fossil fuels, keep in mind that these emissions are already accounted for in previous estimates of emissions from livestock. Adding breathing into the mix just double-counts them.)

Today, tens of billions more livestock are exhaling CO2 than in pre-industrial days, while Earth�s photosynthetic capacity (its capacity to keep carbon out of the atmosphere by absorbing it in plant mass) has declined sharply as forest has been cleared.

This is a non sequitur. Again, deforestation from livestock production was already accounted for in previous estimates. I took a quick skim through the rest of the report and saw nothing that inspired any greater confidence (in fact, just the opposite). For now, I’ll stick with the 18% figure.

Meanwhile, Nicolette Hahn Niman, of Niman Ranch fame, takes to the pages of the New York Times to launch an equally confused defense of beef — or at least grass-fed beef. The crux of her argument is that the problem isn’t beef so much as how the beef is produced.

Now, this is already a somewhat dubious claim. The greenhouse gas implications of grass-fed beef seem to be fairly difficult to tally, and Niman doesn’t grapple with the numbers in any way that clarifies. But her argument really goes off the rails when she looks askance at vegetarians who eat soy beans of unknown provenance:

Unfortunately for vegetarians who rely on it for protein, avoiding soy from deforested croplands may be more difficult: as the Organic Consumers Association notes, Brazilian soy is common (and unlabeled) in tofu and soymilk sold in American supermarkets.

Although I happen to think the Niman Ranch does good work, this statement strikes me as almost sleazy in its implication that American grass-fed beef is somehow better for the environment than Brazilian-grown soy. Soy is a commodity traded on a global market. It doesn’t matter where you personally get your tofu from. What matters is the aggregate demand. In this regard, soy is like oil, which is also why it doesn’t really matter whether you buy gasoline that comes from U.S. well fields or from some nasty regime.

So what’s putting pressure on aggregate demand? Livestock, of course. The reason those Brazilian rainforests are getting mowed down is not because of unethical vegetarians, but because so much land is needed in order to feed cattle and pigs and fish.

So, yeah, if you’re in the mood for a burger, the environment is probably better off if it comes from a grass-fed cow. But given the reality of the global meat supply, the planet would probably prefer that you have a salad.

Comprehending the Pacific Garbage Patch

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:20:48 -0800

Some extraordinary -- and upsetting -- pictures show directly how our waste impacts our environment

by Pete Davies

Chris Jordan uses his photographs to illustrate the complexities and enormities of the problem with have with our consumption and its impact on the environment. Until recently his work focused on a series called �Running the numbers� which attempts to give some meaning to all the huge statistics we hear about our environmental problem. Such as…

Two million plastic bottles are used in the US every five minutes.

Chris� approach is to use photographs to illustrate just how big a number this is. The plastic bottles sequence can be seen at here at monoscope.com.

A similar idea has been applied to paper grocery store bags (1.14 million used every hour), mobile phones (nearly half a million retired in the US every day) and barbie dolls (used to illustrate the 32,000 elective breast augmentation surgeries performed in the US every month during 2006). You can see the full collection on Chris Jordan�s website.

But in 2009 he changed tack and began working with some NGOs trying to raise awareness of what they call the �Pacific Garbage Patch�, an unimaginably vast stretch of trash floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

So, how to illustrate this? Jordan has used his distinctive collage approach, mapping the Gyre. But this paled in comparison to the raw imagery of the albatross carcasses on Midway Atoll, a tiny island in the North Pacific. Here, baby albatross are fed plastic picked out of the ocean and are consequently dying. The pictures of the exposed carcasses with what sometimes looks to be the contents of someone�s emptied-out pockets are extraordinary and upsetting.

You can see a video slideshow of the pictures here or see the full set of photographs here.

Torn-down forests and stranded polar bears make impressive and stirring imagery. But I don�t recall ever seeing anything as powerful as the Midway pictures that presents so clearly and directly the consequences of mass consumption and disregard for the environment. Please forward it to your friends.

Gore's hopeful new climate book

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:42:07 -0800

Essential reading for Copenhagen and beyond

by Adam Stern

When Al Gore released his movie and book An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, he was praised for raising awareness about global warming. For those who wished he had included more information about solutions, the former vice president has responded forcefully with a new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.

Published just weeks before UN climate talks get underway in Copenhagen, Gore’s book is a valuable summary of the ready-to-go policy options that could dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Gore lays out the choices in a practical, accessible format and shows how the solutions to global warming can also help address other problems such as poverty, hunger, and natural resource-driven wars.

Gore developed the content for the book during more than 30 “Solution Summits” he held in recent years. He convened leading experts in specific fields such as forests, soil, wind, solar and geothermal and compiled the most authoritative scientific references. In direct and dispassionate language, Gore distills this intelligence to present solutions in each major area.

What I liked most about the book is that it helps one distinguish between carbon-reducing ideas that are viable and ready for implementation and those that are pie-in-the-sky and won�t happen for decades, if ever. For instance, Gore points out the huge potential for combined heat and power to make better use of the fuels we’re already burning. He also describes the leading technologies for generating power from the sun and wind and the improved efficiencies that will come from a smarter transmission grid. In addition, he describes the limitations of carbon capture and sequestration (no large-scale project in the near future), while highlighting the shortcomings of the new generation of nuclear plants (exceedingly expensive when all costs are considered). In every case, Gore gives readers a context for evaluating the ideas and specific examples of projects underway around the world. The book is also very current: many citations are from 2009, something that the publishing lag doesn�t usually allow.

To the extent it’s possible with a subject like climate change, Gore�s book is pleasing to look at. Stunning photos like ones you might see in National Geographic jump out from the pages. The book has pictures and sidebars about climate change effects as well as solutions in action. My favorite is an image of 1,000 photovoltaic panels in operation at the Vatican.

Gore does not shy away from controversy in this book. He includes an entire chapter about population and observes how critical stabilizing the number of people on the planet is to dealing with the climate crisis. He also has a compelling account of the systematic effort by the fossil fuel industry to obfuscate the truth about climate change, confuse the public, and delay meaningful responses to the problem.

By the end of the book (414 pages), I felt more hopeful than when I started. While there are enormous political and economic challenges to putting the solutions into practice, at least Gore has compiled a full package that could get the job done. His timely work should influence the deliberations in Copenhagen and the climate talks that will surely follow.

Solar power gets thirsty

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:44:51 -0800

Even renewable energy can be resource intensive

by Peter Freed

I’d love to believe that all renewable energy projects are a great way to generate power without putting a strain on our resources and the planet. Unfortunately, many projects present uncomfortable tradeoffs. The New York Times’ greeninc blog reported recently that utility-scale solar power projects can be incredibly water intensive.

Solar power projects are all about concentrating the energy of the sun, which is, well, hot. The problem is most machinery doesn’t have a limitless tolerance for heat and so must be cooled down. In one common, simple technology called “wet-cooling”, solar thermal projects are cooled with running water. The two projects mentioned in the Times article will use more than a billion gallons of water every year. While this isn’t anywhere near the volumes of water used for agriculture, it’s not a drop in the bucket either: look at the specifics of one particular project.

NextEra Energy Resources, a subsidiary of the utility FPL Group, is developing the Genesis project in the Chuckwalla Valley in the Californian Sonoran Desert. This project. combined with a similar one nearby, would tap about 5 percent of the valley�s available water.

Five percent of the water resources of the local ecosystem is significant, even for an undeveloped desert environment. I’m not saying I’m opposed to solar, but rather that it’s important that we look at all the impacts of these projects and consider other options. In this case “dry cooling” technology uses significantly less water (but costs significantly more). As these projects progress through California�s permitting process, it will be interesting to see how decision makers balance these tradeoffs. It�s a great reminder that no renewable energy project is a silver bullet and that it will take a mix of technologies to address our growing energy demands responsibly.

New project: Crow Wing County landfill

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:13:35 -0800

Another project up for public comment

by Adam Stein

Crow Wing County landfill is in Brainerd, Minnesota, about two hours north of Minneapolis. Despite its small size, the landfill is an innovator that has achieved extraordinarily high recycling rates. One of their most recent initiatives is a landfill gas collection and flaring operation, which TerraPass has the pleasure of presenting to you now.

You know the drill. Check out the project and please send any questions or comments to projects@terrapass.com by Dec. 4.

Cities: still greener than small villages

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:55:51 -0800

Access to supermarkets is more important than access to farms

by Adam Stein

The review of Green Metropolis kicked off a discussion that illustrates some of the confusion that crops up in discussions of density. Hoisting a representative snippet up from comments:

I think people can be extremely green in either rural or urban settings, it’s a matter of intent. Hard to measure the difference in impact - an urban setting allows for a much more communal way of using and reusing resources, but on the other hand, if the concentration of people is greater than the city can naturally sustain, the expense and difficulty of importing food and fuel and exporting waste may mitigate what is saved by sharing.

This was followed by some further speculation that maybe the ideal density is some village type thing where people are reasonably close together, but still able to sustain themselves from the surrounding land.

Partly this line of thinking reflects the ongoing myth that sustainability is best measured by proximity to a farm. I recently read that a freight train can move a ton of goods 460 miles on a single gallon of diesel. Your car can move a bag of groceries about 20 miles on a single gallon of gasoline. Sustainability is best measured by proximity to a supermarket, not a farm.

The bigger conceptual problem, though, is the conflation of population size and population density as determinants of environmental impact. Any population of a given size requires a certain amount of agriculture to support it. If the attendant farming places excessive pressure on natural ecosystems or otherwise threatens to exhaust the land itself, then it might be said that the population is “unsustainable.” But that issue has little to do with where those people live in relation to the farmed land. Generally speaking, greater density is always going to come out ahead from an environmental perspective.

Take a state with a lot of agriculture like, say, Nebraska. Imagine two extremes: in the first scenario, the population of 1.7 million Nebraskans are distributed evenly throughout the state, so that all the lawyers, accountants, school teachers, and dentists (because even in Nebraska relatively few people work as farmers) are scattered amongst the corn fields; in the second scenario, the entire non-farming population of the state is placed in downtown Omaha.

Which is likely to be more sustainable? Scenario 2, by a mile. Even in scenario 2, Omaha wouldn’t be amazingly dense — it would be considerably more spread out than, say, Brooklyn — but people would likely be driving less, living in smaller houses, and making better use of mass transit. The very small (or, more likely, non-existent) environmental impact of food transportation will be more than offset by the inherent efficiencies of city living.

Green Metropolis illustrated this point nicely with a discussion of water use. A common complaint lodged against cities is that they “steal” water from neighboring watersheds. Indeed they do: New York siphons a vast amount of water from upstate New York. But from an environmental perspective, it is far preferable to concentrate people in cities and have them draw water from the surrounding area than to sprinkle them across those watersheds. Suburbia tends to bring with it lawns and all sorts of other things that would only despoil sparsely settled areas and place even heavier pressure on water resources.

A final point, and then I’m done (for now) belaboring this issue: the comment up top suggests that either rural or urban residents can lead sustainable lives, as long as the intent is there. But that’s just it: intent doesn’t really enter into the picture for the majority of folks. Cities have a lower per-capita footprint not because their residents are more virtuous, but because efficiency is built into their basic fabric.

Parking done right

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:40:07 -0800

San Francisco skips the green garages, focuses on pricing

by Adam Stein

Let’s talk parking. Recently I suggested that building new parking garages isn’t an environmentally friendly thing to do, even if such garages are nicely landscaped and have energy-efficient lighting systems. The environmental impact of the structures themselves is minuscule in comparison to the impact of the transportation system they are part of, and the green flourishes do nothing to change this basic equation.

For making this fairly bland observation, I was accused of, variously: being an enemy of personal freedom, hating the poor, wanting people to live in mud huts, and obstructing environmental progress.

Fortunately, the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority has my back. The agency just a few weeks ago released a data-driven study on how to address the city’s parking woes. The study’s use of detailed surveys to establish actual usage patterns on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, overlaid with data on retail spending habits, provides a groundbreaking look at how people get around in cities.

San Francisco faces the same problems that plague many cities. Streets are congested, parking is chronically in short supply, and the public transportation system, though popular and heavily used, suffers from budget deficits. San Francisco employs a conventional pricing scheme for many of its metered spots: two-hour time limit, low flat rate, free after 6PM, and free on Sundays.

Unsurprisingly, the study reveals that this price structure deeply affects driver behavior. People circle endlessly looking for cheap parking, and after 6PM drivers squat in their free spots for as long as they are able. Interestingly, the study also found that the majority of people in shopping districts don’t arrive by car. About 75% come in by public transit, on foot, or on bicycle. Based on these findings, the authors make the following recommendations:

Decrease the price of parking at times of day, such as mid-morning, when spots are under-utilized
Increase the price of parking during times of heavy use, with the goal of achieving an average occupancy rate of 85%
Extend the metered parking until later in the evening in certain neighborhoods to match actual traffic flow
Start metering on Sunday in certain neighborhoods
Extend the meter time limits to four hours at certain times

The plan will have the following benefits:

Drivers will have an easier time finding spots and will be able to park for longer
Bus service will become faster and more convenient, due to a reduction in traffic and unnecessary circling in congested areas
Retailers will benefit from increased turnover and improved access to stores
The additional revenue raised from meters will plug the transit authority’s budget gap and forestall a fare hike for public transit riders

If this sounds like an “everybody wins” scenario, that’s because mispricing a scarce asset results in suboptimal use of that asset. Put more plainly, underpriced parking is wack. The only people who benefit from the old system are those drivers lucky enough to snag a cheap spot. Underpriced parking is especially wack because parking carries with it negative externalities like congestion, noise, pollution, etc. The solution is not to build more underpriced parking, but to correctly price the stuff that’s there.

After you check out the study, take a look at parking guru Donald Shoup’s related commentary. Good stuff.

Car owners in love with their free parking really want to deflect this issue into an argument over the ability of the poor to have access to downtown. Populism always plays. The problem is, the poverty argument cuts the wrong way. Most people don’t drive downtown. Poor people benefit from subsidized public transit. Poor people benefit from improved bus service. And it’s very difficult to make the case that some who drives downtown to do some shopping is going to have his personal finances devastated by a small rise in parking fees.

Hunters, fishers press for climate change bill

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:55:22 -0800

And the religious right gets in on the act

by Adam Stein

This isn’t exactly a new trend — I remember writing about it several years ago — but it seems to be picking up some steam:

More than 13,000 hunters and anglers from across the country joined a �virtual town hall� teleconference on Tuesday to hear a discussion of the impact of climate change on fish and wildlife populations, and to voice their support for federal action to limit carbon emissions.

Recently I whined about how environmentalists are a perennial whipping boy. Part of the issue, I think, is that most people view environmental issues as interest group politics. Where topics like employment or security are seen as matters of national importance, environmental issues — even transcendent ones like climate change — remain stuck in the green ghetto.

So I’m always a little bit heartened when I see these issues getting picked up in other venues. Evangelical Christians have likewise become increasingly vocal in their support for climate change legislation:

Remember the Christian Coalition of America?

Under the political operative Ralph Reed in the 1990s it was an electoral force to be reckoned with as it mobilized millions of conservative Christians to vote for mostly Republican Party candidates and causes.

It has since lost influence and political ground to other �religious right� groups such as the Family Research Council. But it remains a sizeable grassroots organization and is still unflinchingly conservative.

So it will no doubt surprise some to see that this week it has joined with the National Wildlife Federation � whose 4 million members and supporters includes 420,000 sportsmen and women � to run an ad urging the U.S. Senate to pass legislation that among other things addresses the pressing problem of climate change.

Good. This is how you know that progress is inevitable.

Bashing environmentalists always pays

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:38:36 -0800

It's just simple Freakonomics!

by Adam Stein

I generally don’t indulge in blog rants, mostly because I’m just not very good at them. David Roberts, on the other hand, is good at them, and he puts to words some of the deep disgust I’ve been feeling over the foofaraw kicked up by the new book Superfreakonomics, the sequel to the fairly awful and inexplicably bestselling Freakonomics.

I’m not going to rehash the Superfreakonomics episode in detail. For the gory details, go here or here and follow the thread. Better yet, check out the rigorous and entertainingly smug scientific takedown at Realclimate. In very brief: the book’s authors spend a few pages flirting with — but not explicitly endorsing! — various crusty old climate change denial talking points, and then glibly announce that we should forget about fossil fuels and just pump a few million tons of tons of sulfur into the sky to cool the planet. Cue Roberts:

Mainstream media outlets seek one thing above all else, and that�s the unexpected, the contrarian. When it comes to climate change, that generally means taking a poke at greens (or better yet, at Al Gore). It�s even better if you�re a purported green bashing other greens. That�s the kind of media crack Nordhaus & Shellenberger dealt on their way to fame and funding. Bash the greens, no matter your qualifications or the merits of your arguments, and you will find yourself on television and in opinion sections from the New York Times to Washington Post to Wired.

Helpfully, when you offer facile dismissals of science and policy to which people have devoted their lives��We could end this debate and be done with it,� sighs Dubner, �and move on to problems that are harder to solve.��they get angry, and they express that anger. Then you get to be the Brave, Persecuted Freethinker battling the Quasi-Religious Orthodoxy, and the press loves you all the more.

What’s amazing is how unfailingly successful this strategy is. It’s like the lottery ticket that always pays. I don’t really care that the Superfreakonomists have endorsed geoengineering. There’s a fine discussion to be had, blah blah blah. No, my disgust stems from how readily the authors have assumed the mantle of aggrieved victimhood, and how eagerly this narrative is taken up by the peanut gallery. No one ever goes broke beating up on the environment.

On the other hand, simply repeat the broad global consensus� climate change is an urgent problem that warrants coordinated action to reduce GHG emissions�and you get nowhere. Boooring. (I can�t tell you how many back-and-forths I�ve had with media outlets where I try to explain that the thing most people think is right actually is right, and they say, maybe so, but that�s not going to titillate our readers.)

What’s the correct response here? I really don’t know. Certainly in the case of Superfreakonomics, bored disregard would have starved the episode of the media oxygen it needs to survive. Realclimate’s attempt to embarrass one of the co-authors by calling into question his academic credibility seems like a promising avenue. I’m not sure either strategy works in the general case, though.