Articles tagged “environment”
Earth-Friendly Elements Are Mined Destructively
Monday, 28 December, 2009 — environment unintended-consequences energy
Keith Bradsher, for the New York Times:
Some of the greenest technologies of the age, from electric cars to efficient light bulbs to very large wind turbines, are made possible by an unusual group of elements called rare earths. The world’s dependence on these substances is rising fast.
Just one problem: These elements come almost entirely from China, from some of the most environmentally damaging mines in the country, in an industry dominated by criminal gangs.
Western capitals have suddenly grown worried over China’s near monopoly, which gives it a potential stranglehold on technologies of the future.
Weaning ourselves off of petroleum is still a worthwhile goal, but the political and diplomatic environments of having to abide repressive Middle East regimes or appearing to abide don’t improve if we substitute China. Not only does it increase our strategic dependence on China (as does the national debt), but China has stability issues of its own.
There’s also no way for an outside company to figure out if the rare earth elements it’s purchasing from China are mined responsibly.
Two geothermal projects shut down
Saturday, 12 December, 2009 — technological-failure environment unintended-consequences energy
The New York Times has two pieces, both by James Glanz, talking about geothermal projects in Switzerland and California being shutdown.
The Swiss project was shutdown over concerns that it would generate millions of dollars in earthquake damage annually.
The California project was getting Dept. of Energy funding. The company’s rationale isn’t known, but several issues are mentioned, including the earthquakes caused in Basel, Switzerland:
Geothermal enthusiasts asserted that drilling miles into hard rock, as required by the technique, could be done quickly and economically with small improvements in existing methods, Professor Schrag said. “What we’ve discovered is that it’s harder to make those improvements than some people believed,” he added.
In fact, AltaRock immediately ran into snags with its drilling, repeatedly snapping off bits in shallow formations called caprock. The project’s safety was also under review at the Energy Department after federal officials said the company had not been entirely forthcoming about the earthquakes produced in Basel in making the case for the Geysers project.
Other projects at the California site have also caused earthquakes. Back in June, Scientific American looked into why geothermal drilling causes earthquakes:
About a million years ago, there was a magmatic intrusion (protovolcano) that didn’t make it to the surface. Under the surface is a rock called felsite—you can think of it like granite; it’s the heat source for the sandstone.
The new project is going to exploit the felsite directly. But there’s no water in the felsite, so they drill, then they pipe water under strong pressure and flow rate, to fracture the rock. They’ll be using earthquake-monitoring equipment and will send cameras down the hole to see which direction the fractures were occurring. Then they drill a second hole to intersect the new fracture.
So the potential is to extract much more heat, but you have to create your own fractures and you have to introduce water.
That bit of creating fractures? That creates the earthquake.
Links for Dec. 6, 2009
Sunday, 6 December, 2009 — links money environment education unintended-consequences
Is Money Tainting the Plasma Supply?
NYT piece on plasma centers in Texas and the economic attraction of plasma donation, particularly to Mexican factory workers.
Interesting figure: The average $30 donation payment results in $300 worth of product. Also, a Michigan blood center is seeing some whole-blood volunteer donors shifting to being paid for plasma elsewhere.
What’s Going to Happen to Textbooks?
With some college texts running over $200, and tuition costs increasing, there’s a bit of curiosity about the future of textbooks and how they might live on ebook readers like the Kindle or Nook. The Atlantic Wire collects some links. (Disclosure: My daytime employer, WebAssign, does business with universities and college textbook publishers)
Cancer from the kitchen?
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof looks into whether what we cook with and store our food in impacts our health.
Links for Sept. 27, 2009: Three environmental pieces
Sunday, 27 September, 2009 — links environment
Three New York Times articles suggest a very pragmatic direction to improve energy efficiency, reduce need for new power plants - or, allow for less efficient plants to be retired - and thereby reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted.
Solar Power, Without All Those Panels
…companies are now offering alternatives to these fixed installations, in the less conspicuous form of shingles, tiles and other building materials that have photovoltaic cells sealed within them.
“The new materials are part of the building itself, not an addition, and they are taking photovoltaics to the next level — an aesthetic one,” said Alfonso Velosa III, a research director at Gartner and co-author of a coming report on the market for the new field, called building-integrated photovoltaics.
By giving a home or building the capacity to satisfy some of its own power requirements, the grid itself gets a bit of an infrastructural buffer. Think fewer brownouts during high demand, or the ability to keep the fridge running if a transformer down the street blows up.
Build a Better Bulb for a $10 Million Prize
The ubiquitous but highly inefficient 60-watt light bulb badly needs a makeover. And it could be worth millions in government prize money — and more in government contracts — to the first company that figures out how to do it.
…
The L Prize has garnered significant attention in the lighting industry because 60-watt incandescent lamps represent 50 percent of all the lighting in the United States, with 425 million sold each year. The Energy Department says that if all those lamps were LED equivalents, enough power would be saved to light 17.4 million American households and cut carbon emissions by 5.6 million metric tons annually.
The article talks about Phillips’ entry for the L Prize, but I’d keep my eye on Morrisville-based Cree.
Paul Krugman:
It’s important, then, to understand that claims of immense economic damage from climate legislation are as bogus, in their own way, as climate-change denial. Saving the planet won’t come free (although the early stages of conservation actually might). But it won’t cost all that much either.
How do we know this? First, the evidence suggests that we’re wasting a lot of energy right now. That is, we’re burning large amounts of coal, oil and gas in ways that don’t actually enhance our standard of living — a phenomenon known in the research literature as the “energy-efficiency gap.” The existence of this gap suggests that policies promoting energy conservation could, up to a point, actually make consumers richer.
I’d settle for staying even.