An interesting and thought provoking article on the risks of carbon capture, popular now with the leaders of the United States and Canada. I don't know if the described risks are true, but they are worth debating.

Urban Renaissance Institute
Urban Renaissance Institute in the News: Monday, February 23, 2009
Our web site is www.urban-renaissance.org

The dirty truth

Barack Obama and Stephen Harper are all for carbon capture technology. Too bad it's not as green as it seems.
by Lawrence Solomon, National Post, February 20, 2009

During President Barack Obama's visit to Canada this week, he and Prime Minister Stephen Harper pledged to spend billions developing technologies that would capture carbon and then store it underground.

Carbon capture and storage, as these schemes are known, is misguided environmentally, economically, and in the long term, politically too. Carbon capture has only one virtue: It solves short-term political problems for both leaders.

Harper has an overarching aim in funding carbon capture - the continuing development of the Alberta tar sands. Environmentalists castigate oil from tar sands as "dirty oil" for one reason above all: Tar sands oil generates more carbon dioxide than does oil from conventional sources. With carbon capture technology promising to counter much of the greenhouse gas associated with tar sands development, Harper can neutralize the main opposition to more tar sands projects.As a bonus, he will be fulfilling a campaign promise to address global warming.

Obama has two aims in funding carbon capture. For one thing, he needs oil from Canada's tar sands to fulfill his campaign promise of weaning the U.S. off Middle-Eastern oil; for another, as this week's U.S.-Canada Clean Energy Dialogue makes clear, he wants to exploit America's vast coal reserves, both for their economic benefits and to promote U.S. energy independence, another campaign promise.

Carbon capture and storage, however, is not as green as it seems - underground burial of carbon dioxide presents immense new risks to society. If the carbon dioxide is stored in deep ocean masses, as sometimes proposed, environmentalists fear that ocean acidification could devastate marine eco-systems. If the carbon dioxide is stored in geologic formations near fossil fuel plants, as is more commonly proposed, the harmful effects would directly affect human life: Research at Columbia University by one of the world's leading geohazard scientists ranks carbon storage as one of the five top coming causes of man-induced earthquakes, a prediction all the more scary because the earthquakes would tend to occur near the fossil fuel plants, and population centres. In another potential danger, some fret about the consequences of an accidental release of carbon dioxide from underground storage facilities. In Cameroon in 1986, 1,800 people died after an unexplained release of carbon dioxide from beneath Lake Nyos, which has deep stores of carbon dioxide beneath its bottom.

Apart from these unknown future risks of stuffing carbon dioxide underground, carbon capture technologies are chock-a-block with known problems, all stemming from the fact that these technologies are, in the parlance of environmentalists, energy pigs. As one example, a typical coal plant employing carbon capture technology requires between 24% and 50% more energy for every kilowatt-hour produced.

At this level of resource gluttony, the world's store of non-renewable fossil fuels would be consumed at a fast clip wherever carbon capture technology was applied. Worse, other pollutants that environmentalists have long fought would also increase. The "clean coal" plants that President Obama touts would produce one-third more in nitrous oxides, a major contributor to smog. Likewise, carbon capture technology applied to tar sands plants would mean that additional tar sands plants would need to be developed just to run the tar sands carbon capture facilities.

Ironically, carbon capture technology would not only worsen air quality and more rapidly scar the tar sands landscape, it may also harm the global environment if it is successful in its goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon dioxide stimulates plant growth and leads to a greening of the planet. In fact, satellite measurements now show the planet to be the greenest in decades. Little wonder that, in surveys of scientists, the great majority view carbon dioxide as a beneficial gas that's indispensable to plant growth, and insignificant to any deleterious global warming.

To add to the irony, even if carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that plays a significant role in warming the planet, there may be good reason to encourage its release into the atmosphere. A decade ago, the planet stopped warming and a year ago, global temperatures began to decline markedly. If, as many scientists now speculate, Earth could be entering a new Little Ice Age, carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases could mitigate the hardship that would come with a cooling planet.

The environmental drawbacks in carbon capture also spell economic trouble. The complexity of the technology, and its energy inefficiency, translate into high prices. Estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show customers should be prepared to pay as much as 50% to 70% more for their power. With cost penalties on that scale, industries will leave carbon capture jurisdictions for less punitive climes, and captive consumers will rebel.

At heart, what politicians and the public most want is clean energy and a clean environment. Rather than sinking billions into carbon capture schemes likely to do nothing but damage the environment and the economy, Obama and Harper should target true environmental hazards such as the mercury, NOX and SOX in coal, the air and water emissions associated with tar sands. And they should come clean with the public over carbon dioxide, and admit that too little worrisome is known about its risks to start burying it, and too much worrisome is known about the risks of burying it.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute, and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 7:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

This short article from the Toronto Star speaks to the problem that material from single-stream MRFs may end up in China where sortation labor is cheap. Fine idea as long as you ignore the carbon footprint.

Recycling efforts create 'contentious' carbon footprint

Toronto Star -- February 09, 2009
MOIRA WELSH
ENVIRONMENT REPORTER

Ontario's recycling scraps – dirty peanut butter jars, plastic toys, and unsorted paper – are being shipped to Asia at a rate of thousands of tonnes a month.

The blue-box castoffs are sorted by low-paid workers in huge factories, and recycled into inexpensive toys, shoes and colourful cardboard packages, before being sold back to Ontarians, where they fill the blue boxes once again.

Garbage experts say this revolving door is a necessary evil that will continue until the province has better recycling facilities so cities can process their own garbage.

"The question is, how much do we want to transport materials around?" said Glenda Gies, executive director of Waste Diversion Ontario, which oversees the provincial blue-box program. "We really do want to support the Ontario economy, we want to process these materials here."

Most residents recycle with the belief they are helping the environment and are unaware that their municipalities are shipping materials to China and South Korea, creating a huge new carbon footprint.

"It is a contentious issue here," said Jo-Anne St. Godard, executive director of the Recycling Council of Ontario. "We took advantage of (China's) cheaper labour force to have them clean, or re-clean, our recyclables, to sort out the more valuable items from the less valuable."

With the downturn in the recycling commodities market, China's demand for low-end mixed paper and plastic "residue" from blue boxes dropped considerably. But, Toronto, which sent up to 20,000 tonnes of mixed paper to China's massive Nine Dragons mill in both 2007 and last year, reports that in January, the mill began requesting more of the city's paper.

Toronto gets paid roughly $30 to $40 per tonne of mixed paper sent to China. According to Geoff Rathbone, general manager of Toronto's solid waste department, that worked out to be about $600,000 to $800,000 in 2007 and 2008.

In addition to shipping to China, Rathbone said the city sends about 10,000 tonnes a year of its "polycoat" milk and juice cartons to South Korea. If Toronto moves ahead with plans to recycle disposable coffee cups, it will send them to the same South Korean facility, as long as the owners can handle the influx, he said.

Still, Rathbone believes local paper mills and recycling facilities are the best option. "In the long term, I don't think (shipping to Asia) is a sustainable way to go," he said.

It is not clear how many tonnes of Ontario's recycled goods are sent to Asia each year. A study published by Waste Diversion Ontario looked at shipping data – voluntarily supplied by municipalities and private recyclers. Based on their information, the authors of the report concluded that four per cent of the 937,979 tonnes of blue-box materials sold in 2006 went to China, and a lesser number to South Korea. WDO's Gies said more ongoing studies are needed before the full picture is known.

St. Godard said North American mills generally require materials be properly sorted and clean. But some municipalities, like Toronto, allow all recycled goods to be mixed into the same blue bin, because it is cheaper and easier for residents.

"You end up co-mingling materials that have to be sorted and re-sorted and re-sorted and by the time they actually reach the end market they are still so contaminated that the mills here cannot take them. But China has an extra layer of labour that can sift through them," she said.

To get to China from Toronto, the mixed paper is stacked in bales, placed in shipping containers and sent across country to the port of Vancouver by train, said Jake Westerhof, of Canada Fibres, which sells Toronto's paper to Nine Dragons.

From Vancouver, it is placed on a large freighter ship and spends several weeks at sea before arriving in one of China's southern ports. It is moved into a truck a driven several hours before arriving at the massive Nine Dragons paper mill in the province of Guangdong.

Rathbone believes the increase in orders from China means the market will slowly rebound.
He says Toronto will continue shipping its paper to Nine Dragons, and pointed out the city's contract requires that the mill adhere to environmental standards, along with health and safety rules for its workers.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 3:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It looks like Micahel Mann of the discredited climate change "hockey stick" is up to his old tricks, this time manipulating data with computer models to show a non-existent warming in Antarctica. I offer this interesting article reproduced from the Financial Post section of the National Post newspaper.

Climate change's Antarctic ruffle

by Lawrence Solomon, FP Comment, January 31, 2009

How does a new Nature study conclude that Antarctica is warming when actual temperature readings show it is not?

For two decades now, those predicting climate-change catastrophe have been frustrated by skeptics who ask, “If carbon dioxide is warming the planet, why does the data show Antarctica to be cooling?” Until last week, the doomsayers had all manner of complicated explanations but no slam dunk answer. Now, thanks to a new study published last week in Nature magazine, the doomsayers obtained the answer they sought — proof that any fool can understand. The bottom line: Antarctica is in fact warming, just like the rest of the planet. “Contrarians have sometime grabbed on to this idea that the entire continent of Antarctica is cooling, so how could we be talking about global warming,” elaborated Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University and a co-author of the Nature study. “Now we can say: No, it’s not true ... It is not bucking the trend.”

The press seized on the findings. “Antarctica is warming, not cooling: study,” announced a Reuters headline. “Global warming hits Antarctica,” stated CNN. “Antarctica joins rest of the globe in warming,” said the Associated Press. But this study in Nature leaves many unimpressed, including top scientists from the doomsayer camp. One week after the study’s release, it is clear this study does nothing to explain the enigma of a cooling Antarctica.

The Nature authors had a daunting challenge. For one thing, the U.S. government has maintained a scientific base at the South Pole since 1957 at which temperatures have been continuously measured. The temperature readings show a cooler climate over the past half century. For another, various weather stations in Antarctica record cooler temperatures. Moreover, satellite readings of temperatures above Antarctica show a cooling trend. Little wonder that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself rejects the warming hypothesis. In its 2007 report, the IPCC accepts that Antarctica shows a “lack of warming reflected in atmospheric temperatures averaged across the region.” To reconcile Antarctica with the rest of the globe, global warming advocates have taken the simple, if unsatisfying, view that the lack of warming in Antarctica is consistent with the presence of warming everywhere else.

How do Mann and the other scientists involved in the Nature study now conclude that Antarctica is warming when actual temperature readings show it is not? Antarctica’s weather stations cover a small fraction of the continent. Where data doesn’t exist, Mann makes various assumptions, then deduces Antarctic temperatures over the last 50 years with the help of computer models. The official explanation: “The researchers devised a statistical technique that uses data from satellites and from Antarctic weather stations to make a new estimate of temperature trends.”

Are these statistical techniques reliable?

“I have to say I remain somewhat skeptical,” states Kevin Trenberth, a lead author for the IPCC and director of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “It is hard to make data where none exist.”

Such results “have no real way to be validated,” states John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama-Huntsville. “We will never know what the temperature was over the very large missing areas that this technique attempts to fill in.”

“How do the authors reconcile the conclusions in their paper with the cooler than average long-term sea-surface temperature anomalies off of the coast of Antarctica?” asked Roger Pielke, senior scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, in noting one of several failings in the study.

Michael Mann and Nature are not new to political controversy, or dubious science. The two collaborated before — in publishing what became known as the hockey-stick graph. This graph — which showed the 1990s to be the hottest decade of the hottest century of the last thousand years — became one of the most publicized facts of the year when it was published. Then the hockey stick became slapstick as it became an object of ridicule: Mann’s statistical techniques were shown to be entirely invalid and Mann was shown to have lacked the statistical knowledge demanded by the study. Mann and Nature refused to make public the data used to produce the graph, Nature refused to publish a response rebutting the hockey stick graph and Nature’s peer review process was shown to be a sham.

It took years, and a U.S. Congressional committee, to finally resolve the dispute, to Mann’s and Nature’s shame. Mercifully, the verdict over the latest offering from these two is seeing a speedier resolution.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 5:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Often I receive news releases that aren't a great fit for the magazine or website, but are interesting, and environmentally related. The release below should be of interest to anyone who wishes to follow the issue of mountaintop removal for coal extraction -- certainly one of the most controversial and questionable activities in the United States today.

NEW COAL SLUDGE DANGER? CITIZENS WARN OF DANGER OF BLASTING NEAR SLUDGE DAM 10 TIMES BIGGER THAN TVA'S KINGSPORT SITE

Protest Takes Place as Massey Energy Prepares to Blast Coal River Mountain; TheCLEAN.org Joins Local Groups in Calling for More Study of Risks at CRM, Other Sites Posing Kingsport-Like Dangers.

PETTUS, W.Va.//February 3, 2009//Plans to start blasting as part of the mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining operation on West Virginia's Coal River Mountain could compromise an eight-billion-gallon coal sludge dam that is roughly 10 times bigger than the coal ash dam that was breached in late December 2008, in Kingsport, Tenn.

Local citizens gathered today at the Marfork Coal Company gate, in Pettus, W.Va., approximately one hour from Charleston, W.Va., to protest the blasting of Coal River Mountain by Massey Energy. Instead of mountaintop removal, the citizens would prefer a wind farm, which studies show would provide more tax revenue and more jobs over time than mountaintop removal. Top climate scientist James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has endorsed the residents' call for the wind farm.

"I fear for my friends and all the people living below this coal sludge dam," said Gary Anderson, who lives on the mountain near the site. "Blasting beside the dam, over underground mines, could decimate the valley for miles. The 'experts' said that the Buffalo Creek sludge dam was safe, but it failed. They said that the TVA sludge dam was safe, but it failed. Massey is setting up an even greater catastrophe here."

Today's action was organized by pan-Appalachian Mountain Justice (http://www.mountainjustice.org) and Climate Ground Zero (http://www.ClimateGroundZero.org). The citizens were joined by the nonprofit and nonpartisan Civil Society Institute (CSI) and TheCLEAN.org (http://www.TheClean.org), a collaborative movement of grassroots organizations and individuals with the common goal of implementing a new energy future through safe and clean renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Vivian Stockman, of the West Virginia-based Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, one of the co-conveners of the TheCLEAN.org, said: "The attack on Coal River Mountain has emerged as a national symbol of the foolishness of permanently sacrificing mountains, forests, streams and nearby communities. This mountain instead could support a wind farm, creating safer long-term jobs, more taxes and clean energy. The fact that Coal River Mountain blasting would jeopardize an eight-billion-gallon toxic coal sludge dam underscores why this nation needs to transition as quickly as possible to its clean energy future."

Vernon Haltom, a resident of the Coal River Valley and Mountain Justice volunteer, said: "The myth of 'clean coal' ignores the tragedy of mountaintop removal, the poisoning of our drinking water, and severe health consequences from coal mining and burning. People are no longer going to stand by silently and let coal companies destroy our communities while the government does nothing."

Haltom added: "We've worked within the West Virginia system, but now we need the support of President Obama and federal lawmakers to make sure that the risk of mountaintop removal operations is fully analyzed, disclosed and then dealt with. In practical terms, that means no mountaintop removal."

How big is the potential risk of a coal sludge spill at Coal River Mountain?

The coal sludge dam site is located over underground mines and also poses a direct risk to a nearby school, town and scores of local residents.

Massey is already clearing trees to begin work on the proposed mountaintop removal operation, the same site where residents are advocating for a wind farm as a safe alternative for cleaner energy and long-term jobs (http://www.coalriverwind.org).

Local citizens are calling on the W.V. Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) to suspend Massey's permit due to the recent coal disasters in Tennessee and revelations that the DEP has failed to properly regulate sludge dams.

Residents worry that blasting next to a sludge lake above underground mines may create a catastrophe that could kill thousands in the communities downstream.

"President Obama, please look at Coal River Mountain. Your strongest supporters are counting on you to stop this madness, " Hansen, the climate scientist, said.

A 2008 report by the federal Office of Surface Mining revealed serious deficiencies in the WV DEP's regulation of coal waste dams (http://www.wvgazette.com/News/200901110512?page=1&build=cache).

Massey also operated the Martin County, Ky., sludge dam that released approximately 300 million gallons of coal waste through underground mines in 2000. The EPA called that the worst environmental disaster in the Southeast.

Then, in December 2008, a coal ash sludge impoundment operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) failed near Harriman, Tenn. That disaster released one billion gallons that destroyed three homes, damaged twelve more and covered 300 acres.

CONTACT: Ailis Aaron Wolf, for CSI/TheCLEAN.org, (703) 276-3265 or aaaron@hastingsgroup.com.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 1:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)