Association of Energy Engineers
New York Chapter
July 2008 NewsletterPart 1
Andy Grove Offers an Energy Solution
By John Markoff, The New York Times, Jun 27 08
Andrew S. Grove, Intel’s former chairman and chief executive, is wading into the energy debate, arguing that America’s national goal of energy independence is misguided. He reasons that a more sensible approach for both environmental and political reasons would be shifting to a goal of “energy resilience.”
In the July/August issue of the The American, a business publication, Mr. Grove spells out his ideas for creating an alternative energy policy focused on shifting away from petroleum and toward electricity, which he argues has the advantage of being produced from many independent sources both renewable and non-renewable.
Calling energy independence “the goal that failed,” Mr. Grove argues that transportation, which uses more than half of the petroleum consumed in the United States, is the crucial energy consumer to focus on. He believes that a significant impact could take place quickly by focusing on converting the more energy-inefficient vehicles among the 250 million vehicles on the roads in the United States to a dual-fuel capability.
“Pickups, SUVs, vans, and the like represent about 80 million vehicles, with mileage of perhaps 13 to 16 miles per gallon,” he writes. “Converting those should be our first priority.”
A modest change in the worst offenders from an energy efficiency point of view, would have the biggest impact: Converting the worst gas guzzlers to use electricity even for as little as 50 miles of driving range on a daily basis could cut petroleum imports by 50 to 60 percent, Mr. Grove states.
Energy became of a passion for Mr. Grove in 2006 after he realized that the United States had failed to meet presidential goals set toward energy independence going as far back as President Nixon. Shortly afterwards he watched the “Who Killed the Electric Car?” documentary which fueled his interest even though he felt the film was “ridiculously conspiratorial.” He has devoted the past nine months to intensely studying the energy issues, leading up to his current article titled, “An Energy Policy We Can Stick To.”
There are parallels between the challenge faced by the automotive industry and lessons Mr. Grove learned in the PC industry: “As with PCs, the work of advocates and hobbyists shows the way out of this dilemma.” He points to alternative vehicle hobbyists who are now experimenting with replacing gasoline engines in cars with electric engines.
In addition to making it easier to control carbon emissions by centralizing the source of the pollution, Intel’s former chairman wrote that the political stakes are crucial. He points to a statement made by Henry Kissinger drawing an analogy between today’s relationship between China and the United States and that of Germany and England during the 1930s. The conflict over resources eventually led to war, he quotes Kissinger as stating.
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Big Coal Fires Back Over James Hansen’s Criminal Complaint
By Andrew C. Revkin, The New York Times, Jun 25 08
An 80-foot wall of coal at Peabody Energy’s North Antelope Rochelle mine in the
Powder River Basin of Wyoming. (Credit: Peabody Energy)
BIG COAL is firing back at James Hansen, NASA’s top climate expert, who on Monday told a House committee on energy and climate that he thought top executives of coal and oil companies should be tried for “crimes against humanity and nature.”
Below is a note sent to me by Vic Svec, who you heard from here earlier in the year in relation to efforts by Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, a rising star in the Democratic Party, to deny permits for two proposed coal-burning power plants because of their potential contribution to global warming. Mr. Svec is a senior vice president for Peabody, which is the largest private coal producer in the world (to get an idea of their volume, and mission, visit peabodyenergy.com and watch the amazing coal-sales “ticker” at the bottom reel off tons of coal sold per second.
Here’s what Mr. Svec said about Dr. Hansen’s assertions:
1. His use of Holocaust analogies is outrageous and demeaning. It cheapens the dialogue and invites ridicule.
2. The suggestion that a dissemination of ideas be criminalized –- coming from a government employee no less –- does hearken back to World War II. It is stunning and should be pounced upon by everyone who advocates free speech, from the ACLU and talk radio complex to yourself.
3. Blaming big oil and big coal for the broad array of opinions about climate change is disingenuous. If he would imprison those who don’t march in lockstep with his views, the jails would be very, very big. It would include thousands of scientists and university professors and the likes of the president of the CzechRepublic, a former founder of Greenpeace and the former founder of The Weather Channel.
4. Speaking for Peabody, our time and energy are being devoted to satisfying an energy-hungry world’s need for coal and advancing the commercialization of carbon capture and storage technology. Among other initiatives, we’re proud to have reduced our greenhouse gas emissions intensity by more than 30% since 1990; to be the initial developer of a supercritical coal plant that will emit 15% lower carbon dioxide than existing plants; to be a founding member of the FutureGen Alliance; to be a part of Australia’s low-carbon Coal 21 program; and to be the only non-Chinese partner in China’s zero-emissions GreenGen project.
In short, while some are interested in sound bites, we’ll keep going about the serious work of providing clean coal, energy solutions and environmental improvement.
Best Regards,
Vic Svec
Can Weeds Help Solve the Climate Crisis?
By Tom Christopher, The New York Times, Jun 29 08
Lewis Ziska, a lanky, sandy-haired weed ecologist with the Agriculture Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, matches a dry sense of humor with tired eyes. The humor is essential to Ziska’s exploration of what global climate change could do to mankind’s relationship with weeds; there are many days, he confesses, when his goal becomes nothing more than not ending up in a fetal position beneath his battleship gray, government-issue desk. Yet he speaks of weeds with admiration as well as apprehension, and even with hope.
It is easy to share the admiration and apprehension when you consider the site that Ziska planted with weeds in downtown Baltimore in the spring of 2002. Tucked in next to the city’s inner harbor, the site is part of a barren expanse of turf rolled out over a reclaimed industrial landscape. This unfertile scrap seems an unlikely choice for growing anything, but Ziska saw in it, ominously perhaps, a model of where the global habitat as a whole is headed.
“Ingenuity,” Ziska says, “may be the mother of invention, but poverty is definitely the father.” For some time, he had wanted to create in a laboratory setting the elevated temperatures and increased concentrations of atmospheric CO2 predicted for the mid-21st century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading international scientific authority on the subject. Carbon dioxide has received a lot of attention as a greenhouse gas, a major cause of global warming. But it is also, along with water, light and nutrients, one of the four essential resources for plant growth. The effect that boosting this gas’s concentration in the atmosphere will have on plants is very poorly understood.
The facilities for testing the effects of CO2 enrichment in Ziska’s lab on the U.S.D.A. research campus in Beltsville, Md., were limited. His best option there was a growth chamber, essentially an airtight, climate-controlled, artificially lighted aluminum box about as spacious as a walk-in closet. Ziska had something more ambitious in mind, but his budget, which has been cut repeatedly by an administration seemingly intent on minimizing attention to global climate change (his lab has been reduced to 3 researchers who study climate change and agriculture, from 10 in 1999), wouldn’t support the construction of special facilities. Then it occurred to Ziska that the complaints made by residents of nearby Baltimore about summer in their city — the exhaust-laden air and the way in which buildings and pavement soak up solar energy to create an abnormally warm “heat island” — could be put to good use. When he checked, he found that in fact the temperatures in Baltimore run 3 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average than those of the surrounding countryside, and the concentration of CO2 in the local atmosphere (440 to 450 p.p.m., or parts per million by volume) is well above the current global average. This, coincidentally, matched almost exactly what the panel on climate change predicted for the planet as a whole 30 to 50 years in the future in its “B2 scenario,” a middle-of-the-road projection that envisions continuing greenhouse gas increases but also some success in abatement programs.
By comparing three sites — an organic farm in western Maryland, a park in a Baltimore suburb and the one by the inner harbor — Ziska planned to study three circumstances: the present (on the organic farm), the mid-century future as predicted by the climate-change panel (in Baltimore) and something in between (the suburban site). He took soil from the organic farm, which already contained seeds of 35 common weeds, and with it created uniform beds at each of the sites, urban, suburban and rural, so that the growing medium and weed population would be the same throughout. What happened over the next five growing seasons surprised even him.
Not only did the weeds grow much larger in hotter, CO2-enriched plots — a weed called lambs-quarters, or Chenopodium album, grew to an impressive 6 to 8 feet on the farm but to a frightening 10 to 12 feet in the city — but the urban, futuristic weeds also produced more pollen. Even more alarming was the way that the increased heat and CO2 accelerated and perverted the succession of species within the plots. Typically, a cleared area in the Eastern United States, if left to itself, returns to native woodland. This process varies with the site and circumstances, but in its archetypical form fast-growing annual weeds cover the soil first, playing the role of what ecologists classify as “pioneer plants.” These gradually give way to longer-lived perennial weeds, which are in turn replaced by shrubs and trees.
In the natural version of this process, the pioneers and their successors are species indigenous to the area, and the woodland’s restoration takes decades. But what Ziska observed in his urban plots was ecology on amphetamines, a nearly completed succession to trees by the end of five years, with a domination by invasive weed trees of the most troublesome sort: ailanthus, Norway maples and mulberries. Five years after the creation of the plots, the biggest ailanthus in the rural test site measured about five feet tall. The city site boasted a 20-footer. The suburban plot was following the city’s lead, though it lagged a couple of years behind.
As a scientist, Ziska was excited by his experiment’s striking outcome. As someone who has spent his career battling weeds, though, he was frightened by the implications. Weeds already cost U.S. farmers about 12 percent of their harvest, exacting an estimated annual loss of $33 billion. What would be the additional cost in the future, not only to farmers but also to foresters, land managers and gardeners, of beating back supercharged weeds? Still, even as he contemplated this, Ziska says he couldn’t repress a certain admiration. He traces his interest in weeds to an epiphany during his undergraduate years at the University of California at Riverside: noticing a weed springing up through a crack in the Southern California pavement, he was suddenly struck with wonder at any organism that could flourish in such a hot, dry, hostile environment. That may become an essential talent, it occurred to Ziska, given the way our planet is going.
Taking the long view, it becomes apparent that the events in Ziska’s plots were just another twist in the more than 10,000 years of joint history, ours and the weeds’. We have been intimately linked since Neolithic times, for in a fundamental sense weeds are a human creation. “Weed” is a subjective label applied as a matter of personal judgment, a point that becomes obvious when you consider how many “noxious weeds” — plants now marked for destruction by federal, state or county authorities — were deliberately introduced into North America by individuals convinced of their beauty or utility. The ailanthus tree, for example, currently regarded as one of the most troublesome weeds of our urban habitats, was brought from China to eastern North America in the 19th century for use as a fast-growing shade tree and is said to have been introduced into California by Chinese immigrants who valued its medicinal properties.
There are countless definitions of weeds, ranging from the hardheaded one necessarily observed by farmers, that a weed is any plant that interferes with profit, to the aesthetic (a popular gardener’s definition of a weed is “a plant out of place”), to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sanctimonious assertion that a weed is “a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” But all agree on the central criterion: to qualify as a weed, the plant in question must be viewed with disfavor by humanity. Simply put, any plant, if we dislike it, becomes an intruder in our landscape and so a weed.
Arguably, then, there was no such thing as a weed until mankind developed the need to discriminate, which came with the development of agriculture in the Neolithic era, around 9,000 B.C. In fact, many of the wild grains like red rice or wild oats that are among our most troublesome agricultural weeds today were valued food sources until we graduated from the hunter-gatherer stage of our existence.
Much has been made of our scientific triumph in breeding modern crop plants from those wild ancestors. The transformation of an east Asian wild grass (red rice) into the crop that provides 20 percent of humanity’s caloric intake is extraordinary. What generally goes unrecognized, though, except among weed scientists, is the extent to which we also made weeds what they are.
Coexistence with mankind has given rise to the sort of tough plants that flourish despite the worst we can do — hoeing, pulling, burning and, more recently, spraying the fields with herbicidal chemicals. Weeds have adapted to every means we used to exterminate them, even turning the treatments to their own advantage. Attacking a Canada thistle (actually of Eurasian origin and a regular entry in “worst weeds of North America” lists) with hoe or plow, for example, may destroy the plant’s aboveground growth but leaves the soil full of severed bits of fleshy root, each of which may sprout a new plant.
A result of this history is that crops and weeds embody diametrically opposed genetic strategies. Over the centuries, we have deliberately bred the genetic diversity out of our crop plants. Creating crop populations composed of clones or near clones was an essential step in achieving higher yields and the sort of uniform growth that makes large-scale, mechanized cultivation and harvesting possible. Because weed populations live as opportunists, however, they must include individuals with the ability to flourish in whatever type of habitat we make available. They also need diversity to cope with the wide range of punishments we inflict. A patch of Canada thistles, if it is to survive when the farmer switches from hoeing to herbicides, must include individuals that develop a resistance to the chemicals over time. Weed populations that lacked the necessary genetic diversity faded from our fields, lawns and waste places; historians of agriculture can cite many such casualties.
The survivors are an astonishingly plastic group of plants. James Bunce, a plant physiologist with an office down the hall from Ziska’s, has been studying the effect on dandelions (that nemesis of the suburban greenskeeper) of atmospheres artificially enriched with CO2. He found in a series of trials that populations of the familiar weed evolve, changing physically to take advantage of this sort of resource enhancement, within the space of one growing season.
“When you change a resource in the environment,” Ziska said recently, sitting in his compact office, “you are going to, in effect, favor the weed over the crop. There is always going to be a weed poised genetically to benefit from almost any change.”
Ziska, together with Bunce, has been testing the effects of changing CO2 concentrations on a range of crop and weed species. Wending his way through a basement full of pumps, filters and boxlike aluminum growth chambers, Ziska showed himself to be a connoisseur of atmospheres. Peering at the instrument panel outside one growth chamber, he noted a CO2 concentration of 310 p.p.m. “That’s a 1957 atmosphere, the year of my birth,” he said. What he and his colleagues have found, he said, is that weeds benefit far more than crop plants from the changes in CO2 and that the implications of this for agriculture and public health are grave.