Ocean Acidification

The world's oceans are currently threatened by a wide variety of environmental impacts. A few months ago, I described some of these threats, which include growing dead zones, pollution, and overfishing. Even noise pollution is causing problems. One of the most critical threats is ocean acidification, which is closely linked to carbon emissions, and it has the potential to destroy many unique and diverse ecosystems.

The oceans are a natural carbon sink, meaning they have always absorbed a large amount of carbon from the atmosphere. Since the industrial revolution, however, we have been pumping more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through our accelerating use of fossil fuels. As the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, the oceans begin to absorb more of it. This makes the acidity of the water increase, just like a carbonated drink is more acidic than regular water.

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Wood Pellets as Alternative to Coal

On a recent episode of Quirks & Quarks, a segment was devoted to looking at the feasibility of using wood pellets as an alternative to coal in Ontario's coal-fired power plants. While this alternative energy source does have the ability to produce power with much lower carbon emissions than coal, the cost is several times higher, and even if exploited on a massive scale, could only provide a tiny percentage of Ontario's electrical needs.

Dr. Heather MacLean from the University of Toronto did a full lifecycle analysis of the proposal, which took into account the carbon emissions generated from extraction, processing, transportation and combustion. In the case where coal was completely replaced by wood pellets, a substantial reduction in emissions was possible, as much as 91 percent less than burning coal. One problem, however, is that the cost of electricity would be about four times higher, though this is primarily because the cost of greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental damage is not included in the price of coal.

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SDB News

I have recently added a new secondary blog to the site focused on news stories. It is available at the following address:

http://news.selfdestructivebastards.com/

The goal of this new blog is to essentially serve as a newswire, providing links to important news about the environment and climate change, along with a summary of the important points, and links to more information. I intend to keep this feed free from any fluff pieces, greenwashing, and thinly veiled corporate press releases. I would also encourage readers to submit any news items or articles they feel are important and relevant.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please let me know. Thanks very much.

Too Much TV

Televisions are popping up in more and more places these days, and it seems almost impossible to avoid them. We are buying more and more of them, buying larger ones, and buying them much more frequently. At the same time as we continue to watch more television, the messages being transmitted are less and less accurate, relevant, intelligent or meaningful. This isn't to say that a television isn't a useful device, and there are not valuable, informative and entertaining shows to watch. However, we need to reduce the number of televisions, the frequency with which we dispose of them, the amount of time we watch them, and the number of commercials we see.

People used to keep their television sets for decades. Even when colour TV was introduced, many people still kept their black and white models, often moving them to another room, the basement, or the cottage. It was not uncommon for a colour set to be in use for 30 years. When HDTV became available, many of the initial products were unreliable and would fail after only a few years, meaning people would have to frequently replace them. Now there that HDTV is becoming common, there is already talk of new 3D models. It seems as though we are no longer capable of just being satisfied with what we have, even for a little while.

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Deforestation

Deforestation is not something new. The ancient greeks and their neighbours deforested much of their surrounding area, leading to the abandonment of cities in some cases. During the late medieval period, the UK and much of Europe was deforested. The residents of Easter Island cut down every single tree, and then suffered a massive population collapse. Deforestation is not something new, but the scale and rate of deforestation has reached epic proportions in the modern age, and we are quickly running out new areas to exploit.

By 1947, roughly half of the world's tropical forests were gone. Some scientists have estimated than only ten percent might remain by 2030 unless they are protected. In the United States, old growth forest began to disappear rapidly after colonization by Europe. Prior to this, roughly half the entire country was forest, and today most of this is gone. The rate of deforestation has slowed since the early twentieth century, mostly because the US was able to import lumber from other countries, but the damage has largely been done.

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Car Free Cities

Over the past decade, many cities around the world, though primarily in Europe, have put in place limits on the use of cars in their city centres, in some cases banning them outright. This has had several benefits, including reducing pollution and fossil fuel use, increasing walkability, and making it safer for bicyclists. It's also a great first step towards sustainability. This is an idea that needs to spread to more cities, and also be expanded beyond the downtown core to eventually include most of the area within city limits.

The limits on cars can take several forms. In some cases, cars are only allowed in downtown areas on certain days or between certain hours. In some cities tolls are imposed to discourage traffic, and in others they are simply banned. Legislation is currently being considered in many other cities, not just in Europe but across the US and Canada as well, to put in place similar restrictions.

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Energy Efficiency

Many economists have argued that increasing energy efficiency tends to result in an increase in energy use, rather than conservation. This is known as the Jevons paradox. By using energy more efficiently, its cost is lowered, which means increased demand. Higher efficiency, then, results in the greater use of an energy resource, such as fossil fuels. Some people have used this as an argument against any efforts at conservation, since it appears futile and counter-productive. While the Jevons paradox does accurately describe our history since the Industrial Revolution, it is not a physical law, and if we want to live sustainably in the future, energy efficiency will be very important.

The Industrial Revolution began in England in the mid eighteenth century, and spread to the rest of the Western world by the nineteenth century. This was all made possible through the use of coal. The first steam engines were bulky, inefficient, and expensive. Yet, they still provided an advantage over manual human labour. With new technology, efficiency improved, which allowed the steam engine to be much more widely used, instead of being limited to specialized applications. While a newer engine might require less coal to do the same amount of work, the number of engines increased by orders of magnitude, obviously leading to a much higher consumption of coal.

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Review: Human Footprint

I recently happened to see a National Geographic documentary called Human Footprint. This was made in 2008, but this was the first time I saw it, so I decided to write a short review. The main idea of this documentary is to show the impact of an average American on the environment visually. The quantities of products consumed over a year or a lifetime are actually physically laid out in various different configurations. Rather than just using numbers, which often be very abstract to many people, this physical presentation is an effective way to communicate the message. It should be noted that this is essentially a remake of a UK documentary with the same name, narrated by David Tennant, which aired a year earlier.

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Capitalism During a Crisis

Many scientists and environmentalists are often accused of trying to undercut capitalism simply because they are pointing out the tremendous damage we are doing to the environment and are warning us about the consequences. By saying that we cannot continue growth because we have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet, they are seen as deliberately trying to sabotage the predominant Western economic ideology. Of course, science is only about facts, not ideology, so if the facts are telling us something that is in conflict with our beliefs, perhaps we need to adjust our beliefs. Still, let's set that aside for the moment and look at how Western capitalist countries, and the US in particular, have dealt with serious crises in the past.

We have several examples in the twentieth century that can provide some insight. The first is the Great Depression. During the twenties, there was a period of rapid growth in the economy and accelerating speculation in the stock market. Investing in stocks had previously been limited to relatively wealthy individuals, but during this period a much wider segment of the population began to put their money in the stock market, encouraged by good financial news, opportunistic brokers, and outright Ponzi schemes. Many didn't really understand what they were investing in, and there were few regulations requiring accurate reporting by public companies. Not surprisingly, an unsustainable bubble was created, which popped in the crash of 1929.

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Carbon Storage

Carbon sequestration, or carbon storage, is one method proposed to help reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the effects of global warming. The idea is that activities that generate massive carbon emissions, such as oil refining or coal-based power production, can be modified so that much of the carbon is stored instead of released into the atmosphere. Various new technologies have been proposed to separate the carbon at the point of production, and then store it in some way, underground for example. Unfortunately, none of this technology has yet been proved, and there is no non-experimental application of it anywhere at this point. Additionally, carbon storage, even if feasible, does not address many of the other environmental impacts of the industrial activities involved.

One problem with carbon storage is that it usually requires the construction of new plants or facilities. Even in that case the best estimates suggest that a coal-fired plant, for example, could require 25-40 percent more fuel, and could increase the cost of energy production by as much as 90 percent. This also requires the construction of a storage facility which will demand significant energy and financial resources. Modifying existing plants for carbon storage would be vastly more expensive, making the viability of doing so questionable.

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