For Americans, simple lifestyle changes could effectively add up to a massive cut in greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to France’s entire annual emissions, according to a new study.

Thomas Dietz of Michigan State University’s department of sociology and environmental science and policy issued a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Tuesday that outlines 17 simple activities for Americans to reduce their carbon footprint.

Activities include purchasing a more fuel-efficient vehicle, using a clothesline for drying clothing and monitoring the thermostat more closely.

The activities have been grouped into five sectors: weatherization, switching to more efficient equipment, maintaining equipment, adjusting appliance settings, and modifying daily personal use.

Taking part in such activities could lead to a reduction of 123 metric tons of carbon emissions each year by the 10th year, said Dietz.

“This amounts to… 7.4 percent of total national emissions — an amount slightly larger than the total national emissions of France,” the study said.

“It is greater than reducing to zero all emissions in the United States from the petroleum-refining, iron and steel, and aluminum industries, each of which is among the largest emitters in the industrial sector.”

According to AFP, household energy makes up 38 percent of carbon emissions in the US. That’s about 626 metric tons of carbon, or eight percent of global emissions.

Study authors noted that US household energy accounts for more than the emissions of any country except China.

In other climate change news, Lord Stern of Brentford, a leading global warming authority, told the UK Times that people would be more effective at fighting climate change if they stopped eating meat.

“Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases,” said Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank. “It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”

Stern noted that methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. Methane is 23 times as potent as carbon dioxide.

“I think it’s important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating,” he said.

“I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food.”

Additionally, Stern said that President Barack Obama must be present at the UN’s global climate summit in Copenhagen in December in order to reach a comprehensive climate deal.

“I am not sure that people fully understand what we are talking about or the kind of changes that will be necessary,” said Stern.

By Daniel Fineren

LONDON (Reuters) – Canadian oil sands are vital to North America’s energy security and are being developed in an environmentally responsible way, Canadian Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt said in an interview.

Several U.S. states are considering introducing low carbon fuel standards which would make fuels that emit the highest levels of climate-warming carbon dioxide more expensive.

U.S. President Barack Obama has expressed support for the idea but his administration has not taken a tough stance against carbon-intensive Canadian oil sands.

“Canada’s oil sands are an incredibly important part of energy security for the United States,” Raitt told Reuters at a carbon capture and storage (CCS) conference in London.

“If you don’t purchase from Canada, who are you going to purchase from? It’s going to be more reliance on OPEC nations,” she said.

With an estimated reserve of 173 billion barrels, Canadian oil sands are the largest source of crude oil outside the Middle East. But development of Alberta’s huge reserves requires open pit mines and carbon-spewing processing plants, placing producers at a disadvantage under any fuel standard that rewards low carbon sources.

Last week, the Canadian and Alberta governments promised C$865 million ($823 million) to help oil major Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSa.L) develop carbon capture and storage technology to trap the harmful gas at its oil sands processing plant.

“The government will be involved in the promotion of the oil sands … it is a great asset, it is imperative to energy security in North America and it is being developed in a responsible manner and will continue to do so,” Raitt said.

“We are very close to the province of Alberta in that outreach program. So we are here in London doing it … and certainly I will be engaging with the United States as well.”

Raitt said the two governments were working together to address environmental concerns with oil sands and coal-fired power stations with CCS technology.

After backing away from the Kyoto agreement signed by a former Liberal government, arguing the sharp cuts required would do too much damage to Canada’s economy, the Conservative government has pledged to cut Canada’s carbon emissions by 20 percent from 2006 levels by 2020.

“We are leading the way on carbon capture and storage technology and funding of real demonstration projects to remove greenhouse gases from the use of coal and the use of oil and gas, recognizing as well the importance of energy efficiency and renewables,” Raitt said.

CHINA INTEREST

In August, PetroChina (PTR.N) agreed to pay C$1.9 billion for a 60 percent stake in two planned Canadian oil sands projects.

Current regulations call for an automatic review of any foreign purchase of Canadian assets worth more than C$312 million and allow the government to block any investment that would adversely affect national security.

Despite the importance of its oil sands for energy security, the Canadian government said last month it would not introduce further barriers to investing in the country.

“We are a trading nation,” Raitt said when asked whether the government would take a tougher stance on future bids for its energy assets.

“We are very cognizant of the fact that if we want to trade and invest in other countries, we have to allow that trade and investment to happen in ours. However, it has got to be done within the corporate rules of the Canadian government.”

State-run Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd (AECL) is building nuclear reactors in China and hopes to win more contracts.

NUCLEAR AMBITIONS

Raitt said she was still waiting for investment bankers N.M. Rothschild & Sons to deliver a restructuring plan for AECL aimed at boosting its capacity to supply nuclear reactors to a growing global market.

AECL could be split into reactor building and research units, a decision the government expects to make when the report comes comes back this fall.

“To be able to be a vendor of nuclear reactors in the world and be able to build nuclear reactors in the world you have to have a very high degree of focus on that line of business,” Raitt said.

“We also need capacity to deal with something as large as selling nuclear reactors and we are welcoming to investment and equity to help us do that and be an international player.”

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) – The Canadian and Alberta governments said on Wednesday they will spend C$779 million ($756 million) on a carbon capture project planned by TransAlta Corp, their second such funding announcement in less than a week.

TransAlta, the country’s largest investor-owned power generator, plans the carbon capture and storage development at its Keephills 3 coal-fired power plant near Edmonton, Alberta, where it aims to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 1 million tonnes a year.

Under a letter of intent, Ottawa will invest C$343 million and the Alberta government will kick in C$436 million over 15 years.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said at a news conference at the plant that the overall cost of the so-called Project Pioneer is estimated at about C$1.4 billion.

Last week, his government and Alberta’s said they would spend C$865 million on a carbon capture and storage project proposed by Royal Dutch Shell Plc for its oil sands upgrading plant in northern Alberta.

Some environmentalists have criticized the strategy, saying public money is being funneled into projects proposed by large polluters with uncertain results when it could be invested in alternative energy sources and conservation.

“Of course, the incentive is that we all have a long-run interest, as governments, as the private sector, in developing technology that we think will be in widespread need in the decades to come,” Harper said.

TransAlta’s plan involves using chilled ammonia capture technology, developed by France’s Alstom SA, to strip out carbon dioxide from the power plant. The gas, which is blamed for global warming, would then be piped to old oil fields to boost production as well as stored in saline aquifers deep underground.

Capital Power Corp is TransAlta’s partner in the 766 megawatt power plant and the carbon capture project.

Canada has set aside C$1 billion for such ventures in a clean energy fund, and Alberta has earmarked C$2 billion for carbon capture and sequestration projects. The two governments aim to cut carbon emissions, while preventing a drop in investment in energy projects.

Ottawa has said it seeks to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent from 2006 levels by 2020.

Alberta has short-listed two other carbon capture projects that have yet to be finalized for funding commitments. They are being proposed by groups including Capital Power and Enbridge Inc as well as Enhance Energy and Northwest Upgrading.

($1=$1.03 Canadian)

By Inae Riveras

SAO PAULO, Oct 14 (Reuters) – Use of sugar cane-based ethanol as a substitute for gasoline is among the cheapest and easiest ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to a Brazilian study published on Wednesday.

Cane ethanol provides about eight times the energy used to produce it and adoption of new cane plant varieties and processes could increase its efficiency further.

The study looked only at the future production of cane over pastures or as a replacement for other crops — not over native forests.

Most new cars in Brazil can run on ethanol alone and the biofuel’s environmental benefits are redoubled by burning its bagasse byproduct in thermoelectric plants powering mills and sometimes even feeding into the grid.

“As ethanol is already competitive with gasoline at current oil prices, the additional cost (in adopting ethanol) is zero,” said Isaias Macedo, from the Interdisciplinary Center of Energy Planning at the University of Campinas, one of the study’s authors.

“And the possibility of producing ethanol in several countries makes it especially attractive,” Macedo added.

Brazil is the world’s largest producer of cane-based ethanol. The United States is the No. 1 ethanol maker but its fuel is made from corn whose energy output is roughly equal to that used to produce it.

Ethanol’s gradual replacement of gasoline since the introduction of flex-fuel cars in early 2003 and the blending of 20 to 25 percent of ethanol in all gasoline sold in Brazil, combined with the co-generation of energy through the burning of bagasse at mills, has slashed greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2006 alone, the drop in emissions by the transport and energy sectors was 22 percent of what they would be if the country’s cars were burning gasoline, according to the study.

Still, Brazil remains one of the top emitters of greenhouse gases due to destruction of its massive Amazon rain forest. Trees release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when they’re felled or burned.

Considering Brazil’s total emissions unrelated to deforestation, ethanol helped reduce overall emissions by 10 percent that same year, according to the study which also involved researchers at the University of Sao Paulo.

Considering fuel production and emission-cutting targets set by Brazil in its 2008’s climate change plan, ethanol could reduce emission levels in the transport and energy sector by 43 percent in 2020 and 18 percent for all emissions excluding deforestation.

Brazil is seeking to play a leading role in talks in Copenhagen in December aimed at agreeing a new climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.

The ethanol industry does not want Brazil’s poor ranking for total emissions to tarnish its environmental credentials. It has been fighting to show the world how cane is the most energy-efficient raw material for ethanol.

About 90 percent of Brazil’s sugar cane is produced in the center-south region, which includes Pantanal wetlands. But the main producing areas are about 2,000 km (1,250 miles) from the Amazon forest. The rest in the north/northeast of the country.

Macedo said that, based on an estimated cost of $100 per tonne of CO2 avoided in 2020 or 2030, it would be possible to attribute to ethanol an additional value of 20 U.S. cents per liter.

“When you decide to use ethanol, this is how much you’ll avoid paying for another option,” the researcher said.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide if coal emissions are phased out between 2010 and 2030.
Courtesy Hansen et al./Open Atmospheric Science Journal

A group of 10 prominent scientists says that the level of globe-warming carbon dioxide in the air has probably already reached a point where climate will change disastrously unless the level can be reduced in coming decades. The study is a departure from recent estimates that truly dangerous levels would be reached only later in this century.  The paper appears in the current edition of the Open Atmospheric Science Journal.

“There is a bright side to this conclusion,” says lead author James E. Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, part of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. “”By following a path that leads to lower CO2, we can alleviate a number of problems that had begun to seem inevitable.” Hansen said these include expanding desertification, reduced food harvests, increased storm intensities, loss of coral reefs, and the disappearance of mountain glaciers that supply water to hundreds of millions of people.

The scientists say now that CO2 needs to be reduced to the level under which human civilization developed until the industrial age—about 350 parts per million (ppm)—to keep current warming trends from moving rapidly upward in coming years. The level is currently at 385 ppm, and rising about 2 ppm each year, mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels and incineration of forests. As a result, global temperatures have been creeping upward. The authors say that improved data on past climate changes, and the pace at which earth is changing now, especially in the polar regions, contributed to their conclusion. Among other things, ongoing observations of fast-melting ice masses that previously helped reflect solar radiation, and the release of stored-up “greenhouse” gases from warming soils and ocean waters, show that feedback processes previously thought to move slowly can occur within decades, not millennia, and thus warm the world further. Once CO2 gas is released, a large fraction of it stays in the air for hundreds of years.

The scientists, from the United States, United Kingdom and France, are optimistic that current atmospheric CO2 could be reduced if emissions from coal, the largest contributor, are largely phased out by 2030.  Use of unconventional fossil-fuel sources such as tar sands also would have to be minimized, they say. They predict that oil use will probably decline anyway as reserves shrink. So-called “geoengineering” solutions that would remove CO2 from the air have been proposed by others, but the group is skeptical; they estimate that artificially removing 50ppm of CO2 from the atmosphere would cost at least $20 trillion, or twice the current U.S. national debt. They suggest that reforestation of degraded land and use of more natural fertilizers could draw down CO2 by a similar amount.

“Humanity today, collectively, must face the uncomfortable fact that industrial civilization itself has become the principal driver of global climate,” says the paper.  “The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which would make tragic consequences unavoidable.”

The other authors are Makiko Sato and Pushker Kharecha, both also of the Earth Institute; David Beerling of the University of Sheffield (UK); Robert Berner and Mark Pagani of Yale University; Valerie Masson-Delmotte of the University of Versailles (France); Maureen Raymo of Boston University; Dana Royer of Wesleyan University; and James Zachos of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Stanford Report, June 18, 2003 BY MARK SHWARTZ

Doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the air significantly reduces the number of plant species that grow in the wild, according to a newly released study on climate change in California.

The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), are the latest findings from the Jasper Ridge Global Change Project at Stanford University — a multiyear experiment designed to demonstrate how grassland ecosystems will respond to predicted increases in temperature and precipitation caused by the continual buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Writing in the June 16 edition of PNAS Online, researchers found that exposing open grasslands to large doses of carbon dioxide gas for three years caused a nearly 20 percent reduction in wildflower species and an 8 percent decline in plant diversity overall. The addition of excess nitrogen and other predicted climate changes caused diversity to plunge even further, the study found.

“I was surprised how quickly we lost species over such a short time,” said the study’s lead author, Erika S. Zavaleta, a former Stanford doctoral student who recently joined the faculty at the University of California-Santa Cruz. “It only took three years in our experiment. What does that say about the impact global change will have on plant diversity in the longer term?”

Global changes

Located in the grassy foothills of Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, the Global Change Project relies on a system of infrared heat lamps, sprinklers and emitters to simulate four conditions that climate experts predict could exist a century from now as a result of continued fossil fuel consumption and deforestation:

Doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the air significantly reduces the number of plant species that grow in the wild, according to a newly released study on climate change in California. Photo: L.A. Cicero ]]> http://www.offsetcarbonfootprint.org/library/2009/08/plant-diversity-threatened-by-climate-change-greenhouse-gas-buildup-study-finds/feed/ 0 http://www.offsetcarbonfootprint.org/library/2009/08/columbia-scientists-find-undersea-volcanic-rocks-may-offer-vast-repository-for-greenhouse-gas/ http://www.offsetcarbonfootprint.org/library/2009/08/columbia-scientists-find-undersea-volcanic-rocks-may-offer-vast-repository-for-greenhouse-gas/#comments Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:28:24 +0000 admin http://www.offsetcarbonfootprint.org/library/?p=871 Jul. 15, 2008

A group of scientists at Columbia has used deep ocean-floor drilling and experiments to show that volcanic rocks off the West Coast and elsewhere might be used to securely sequester huge amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, captured from power plants or other sources. In particular, they say that natural chemical reactions under 78,000 square kilometers (30,000 square miles) of ocean floor off California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia could lock in as much as 150 years of U.S. carbon dioxide production. The findings are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Deep-sea basalt on the seafloor Photo credit: David S. Goldberg

Deep-sea basalt region for carbon dioxide sequestration Photo credit: David S. Goldberg

Anne Trafton, News Office
February 17, 2009

In the search for answers to the planet’s biggest challenges, some MIT researchers are turning to its tiniest organisms: bacteria.

The idea of exploiting microbial products is not new: Humans have long enlisted bacteria and yeast to make bread, wine and cheese, and more recently discovered antibiotics that help fight disease. Now, researchers in the growing field of metabolic engineering are trying to manipulate bacteria’s unique abilities to help generate energy and clean up Earth’s atmosphere.

MIT chemical engineer Kristala Jones Prather sees bacteria as diverse and complex “chemical factories” that can potentially build better biofuels as well as biodegradable plastics and textiles.

“We’re trying to ask what kinds of things should we be trying to make, and looking for potential routes in nature to make them,” says Prather, the Joseph R. Mares (1924) Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering.

She and Gregory Stephanopoulos, the W.H. Dow Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, are trying to create bacteria that make biofuels and other compounds more efficiently, while chemistry professor Catherine Drennan hopes bacteria can one day help soak up pollutants such as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere.

‘Chemical factories’

Found in nearly every habitat on Earth, bacteria are chemical powerhouses. Some synthesize compounds useful to humans, such as biofuels, plastics and drugs, while others break down atmospheric pollutants. Most rely on carbon compounds as an energy source, but species differ widely in their exact metabolic processes.

Metabolic engineers are learning to take advantage of those processes, and one area of intense focus is biofuel production. At MIT, Prather is developing bacteria that can manufacture fuels such as butanol and pentanol from agricultural byproducts, and Stephanopoulos is trying to make better microbial producers of biofuels by improving their tolerance to the toxicity of the feedstocks they ferment and products they make.

The recent spike in oil prices and growing greenhouse-gas emissions have catalyzed the push to find better pathways to produce biofuels and other chemicals such as bioplastics. “You see a visible boost when you have a crisis linked to energy problems,” says Stephanopoulos.

Manufacturing plastics and textiles using bacteria can be far less energy-intensive than traditional industrial processes, because most industrial chemical reactions require high temperatures and pressures (which require a great deal of energy to create). Bacteria, on the other hand, normally thrive around 30 degrees Celsius and at atmospheric pressure.

Metabolic engineering involves not only creating new products but also developing more efficient ways of making existing compounds. Recently, Prather’s laboratory reported a new way to synthesize glucaric acid, a compound with multiple uses ranging from the synthesis of nylons to water treatment, by combining genes from plants, yeast and bacteria.

Prather is also working on bacteria that transform glucose and other simple starting materials into compounds that can be used to make biodegradable plastics such as PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate). In Stephanopoulos’ laboratory, researchers are developing new ways to produce biodiesel, plus other compounds including the amino acid tyrosine, a building block for drugs and food additives; biopolymers and hyaluronic acid, a natural joint lubricant that can be used to treat arthritis.

Both labs collaborate in a project to engineer the isoprenoid pathway in yeast and bacteria, which is responsible for the biosynthesis of many important pharmaceutical compounds. The two labs are investigating methods to make different compounds with higher activity as well as improving productivity.

Microbes express a huge range of metabolic pathways, offering great opportunities but also challenges. “Biology has a lot of diversity that’s untapped and undiscovered, but the flip side is that it’s hard to engineer in precise ways,” says Prather. “Nature has evolved to do what it does, and to get it to do something different is a nontrivial task.”

Bacterial cleanup crew

Drennan is also looking to bacteria, but with a different goal in mind. Instead of using bacteria to build things, she’s studying how they break things down — specifically, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and other atmospheric pollutants.

Her microbes, found in a range of habitats including freshwater hot springs, absorb carbon dioxide and/or carbon monoxide and use them to produce energy. Such microbes remove an estimated one billion tons of carbon monoxide from Earth and its lower atmosphere every year.

“These bacteria are responsible for removing a lot of CO and CO2 from the environment,” says Drennan, who is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “Can we use this chemistry to do the same thing?”

To answer that question, Drennan and her students are using X-ray crystallography to decipher the structures of the metal-protein enzymes involved in the reactions, which they believe will allow them to figure out how the enzymes work. That understanding could lead to development of catalysts to lower carbon monoxide levels in heavily polluted areas.

“If you’re going to borrow ideas from nature, the first step is to understand how nature works,” she says.

Circulation in the waters near the Antarctic coast may be one of the planet’s critical means of regulating levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, according to researchers from MIT, Princeton and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Though climate scientists have long debated why atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide vary over lengthy periods in Earth’s history, researchers now appear to have found a clue.

In a recent issue of the journal Nature, the team reports that computer modeling has revealed that the waters in the Southern Ocean below 60 degrees south latitude — the region that hugs the continent of Antarctica — play a far more significant role than was previously thought in regulating atmospheric carbon.

The waters north of this region do comparably little to regulate it, confuting past theories, the team found.

“Cold water that wells up regularly from the depths of the Southern Ocean spreads out on the ocean’s surface along both sides of this dividing line, and we have found that the water performs two very different functions depending on which side of the line it flows toward,” said Irina Marinov, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral fellow in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

“While the water north of the line generally spreads nutrients throughout the world’s oceans, the second, southward-flowing stream soaks up carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, from the air. Such a sharply defined difference in function has surprised us. It could mean that a change to one side of the cycle might not affect the other as much as we once suspected.”

The research team also includes Professor Jorge Sarmiento of Princeton as well as Anand Gnanadesikan and Robbie Toggweiler of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Two years ago, Sarmiento and colleagues discovered that the nutrients in the world’s oceans were dependent on the Southern Ocean’s circulation pattern. Scientists have also been aware that cold Antarctic waters have the ability to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide.

What has been difficult is drawing the distinctions between one effect and another.

“The new paper shows that carbon dioxide and nutrient flow are separated quite dramatically,” Sarmiento said. “What we are trying to do is understand better the balance of forces that help our planet maintain a steady environmental state, so we can anticipate what might cause that state to change. This paper helps us clarify how those forces interact.”

Changing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have long concerned the scientific community, as this well-known greenhouse gas could be a major influence on global warming. Marinov said the discovery could shed light on how the Earth reacted far back in history, which might offer clues to how it will behave in the future.

“In the last ice age, for example, the atmosphere experienced very low levels of carbon dioxide, and no one is completely sure why,” she said. “However, we now understand the Southern Ocean plays a large role in regulating how much of the gas gets dissolved in water, and how much remains in the atmosphere.”

The current study, she said, indicates that to better understand the Southern Ocean’s effect on atmospheric carbon, scientists should pay greater attention to the Antarctic than to the more northerly sub-Antarctic region.

“In the Antarctic, the circulation pattern moves the surface water carrying carbon dioxide deep into the ocean’s depths, where the sequestered carbon could potentially be trapped for a long time,” Marinov said. “According to the models we used, the deep Antarctic is the critical region where we need to concentrate our research.”

The team also indicated that the findings had implications for future research into carbon sequestration, a strategy for coping with increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Some scientists propose that sequestration could one day capture atmospheric carbon and store it in places such as the deep ocean, thus mitigating humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“An interesting idea of recent years is that we can sequester a lot of carbon if we dump iron into the ocean to encourage the growth of certain microorganisms, which incorporate carbon as they grow,” Marinov said. “These organisms would then fall to the ocean floor after they die, taking the carbon with them. The overall effect would be to lower the concentration of carbon in the surface waters, allowing more atmospheric carbon dioxide to dissolve into the sea. Our research has implications for future iron fertilization experiments, the focus of which we conclude should shift to the Antarctic.”

Marinov said that the findings were based strongly on the team’s computer models, which have limitations that they will now concentrate on eliminating.

“While we are confident about the paper’s conclusions, we are always looking for ways to clarify our understanding of the Southern Ocean,” she said. “Our model, for example, does not take into account the fact that the circulation patterns are strongest in the winter, when the Antarctic is covered in darkness and the phytoplankton cannot grow very much. It is important that we understand the impact of this process on atmospheric carbon dioxide through future research.”

This research was sponsored in part by the U.S. Department of Energy and NOAA.