Link Banana

The Economist’s Tech.view columnist thinks that the time is ripe for disappearing ink (or erasable paper) to replace the old-fashioned kind:

But once we’ve finished with the hard copies, they are often dumped in the recycling container, rubbish bin or even shredder. In a survey of its own printers, copiers and waste-paper bins, Xerox found that two out of five sheets printed were used only once and then discarded after a day.

That seems an awful waste. It takes around 200,000 joules of energy to make a sheet of paper. The average office worker in America prints out 1,200 sheets a month. The energy consumed in manufacturing that amount of paper—not to mention the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in the process—is equivalent a 100-watt light bulb burning for a month.

Pundits reckon over 15 trillion pieces of paper are printed annually around the world—a figure that is expected to grow 30% over the next ten years. To feed our appetite for paper, whole forests have to chopped down. Surely it would be better if we could reuse our paper—in short, stick it back in the printer or copier rather than trash it.

It’s a hard question, and Salon’s Pablo Päster doesn’t give a broad answer — though he offers how to figure it out for yourself. For a 1986 Mercedes-Benz W126:

Given that your car is already built, we can write off the energy used in making it. We can also write off the emissions that it has already created from burning gasoline. That means that over the next 116,000 miles, your car’s greenhouse gas emissions will essentially break even with the emissions from the production and use of a Prius. I’m guessing your 22-year-old car probably has over 200,000 miles on it. If you’re lucky, you can get another few years out of it. So if you can afford a new Prius, you are better off switching now. And think of the fewer hassles of owning a new car.

In his overgrown plea that people grow at least a little of their own food, Michael Pollan eloquently expressed a theory of change I’ve been wrestling with for a while:

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives “as if” they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

They meet in the zeroHouse.

(via Magnetbox)

The epic battle that accompanies every children’s toy.

(via clusterflock)

I hate presenting “yesterday’s Op-Eds today,” but that’s what happens with I get behind. Monica Prasad made some interesting — and sure to be controversial — claims in yesterday’s New York Times.

What did Denmark do right? There are many elements to its success, but taken together, the insight they provide is that if reducing emissions is the goal, then a carbon tax is a tax you want to impose but never collect.

This is a hard lesson to learn. The very thought of new tax revenue has a way of changing the priorities of the most hard-headed politicians — even Genghis Khan learned to be peaceful, the story goes, when he saw how much more rewarding it was to tax peasants than to kill them. But if we want lower emissions, the goal of a carbon tax is to prompt producers to change their behavior, not to allow them to continue polluting while handing over cash to the government.

This isn’t so much news as a reminder of long established facts. Americans can love driving far more than anyone else because gasoline here is so much cheaper than anywhere else.

Though you may think a column called Green.view would be unabashedly against the creation of vast artificial islands off the coast of Dubai, you’d only be partially right.

If one’s philosophy, for example is that the ocean should be largely left alone, then whether reclamation provides homes for more fish will not matter. Others, though, may take a more pragmatic view, thinking that the development has essentially created something from nothing. Indeed, many artificial reefs—scuttled ships and aircraft, sunken tyres and shopping trolleys—house marine life in otherwise empty waters.

That conclusion, however, risks oversimplification. While there may be more substrate for coral to grow, the question of whether there is actually more marine life is complicated. Do artificial structures in the ocean actually promote more life, or do they simply attract it? Dr Love reckons some reefs do one, some do the other and some do both. So while the artificial reefs have certainly created new habitats, it isn’t clear whether this is as a net benefit for the region.

The state legislators in Georgia went to the history books to try to cure their water problem:

SOON after James Camak demarcated the border between Georgia and Tennessee in 1818, he began to develop doubts about his work. Thanks to a faulty sextant and bad astronomical charts, he had drawn the line a mile south of the intended boundary, the 35th parallel. Were the error to be corrected, Georgia would find itself in possession of a short stretch of the Tennessee river.

Until recently, Georgia’s politicians did not pursue their claims to this sliver of territory very vigorously. But a bad drought, and the growing militancy of two other neighbouring states about the sharing of water, have prompted a change of heart. Last month Georgia’s state assembly passed a resolution calling on the governor to set up a commission to look into the disputed boundary.

Slate’s Green Lantern takes on the question of cans versus glass bottles and comes up with a typically nuanced answer:

If your chosen tipple is produced very close to home and your town has a robust recycling program, then glass bottles are probably the way to go. But if your preferred suds are brewed far away, by a company that’s even mildly eco-aware, aluminum cans are the wiser choice.

I should note that Salon’s Pablo Päster tackled a similar question over a month ago, deciding that plastic bottles are better than aluminum cans. Assuming both columnists’ logic is sound, that means: plastic bottles are better than cans, and cans are (generally) better than glass bottles.

The Economist argues that trade bans may actually do more harm them good for the animals they seek to protect. They offer these solutions:

A better policy is to make wildlife more valuable to man, not less. One way that suits everybody is tourism. The gorillas in the Virunga mountains of Rwanda attract a lot of money from visitors. They are doing well, unlike their cousins over the border in Congo which do not earn their keep, and are prey to hunters who want to clear them out and take their land. Tourism is one way to help the Indian tiger, which is much rarer than people thought.

A second, less popular way to make money is to exploit animals sustainably. Killing individual creatures need not harm populations. Many animals may be farmed or ranched to create a valuable legal trade. That is what has happened with the vicuña, and with crocodiles and their kind. Rhino horns can be cut off without even killing rhinos.

I’ve always liked the idea of being able to monitor home electricity consumption. The Economist tackles some of the possibilities, problems, and pitfalls of the available options.

In an ideal world, every home would have a smart meter. But they are not the sort of thing you can go out and buy—let alone install for yourself. Even if they were given away it would take years to replace the millions of existing meters around the world. So small, cheap devices like the Owl and the Wattson can be useful in the meantime. No doubt some of the novelty of monitoring your power consumption will wear off, but the evidence from fuel-efficiency gauges in cars suggests that when something clearly shows people how to save money, they will follow its advice.

Unlike Wired’s Chris Anderson who counter-intuitively argues that it’s greener to read that magazine in print, Slate’s Green Lantern says — as do I — that’s unlikely.

The greener choice would be to read the paper online, correct?

The Lantern believes so, but the environmental difference between dead-tree newspapers and their online editions is a lot smaller than you might imagine. In fact, there are learned experts who contend that traditional newsprint ultimately comes out ahead, at least in terms of net carbon-dioxide emissions. Though the Lantern disagrees with some of the assumptions these contrarians make, it’s worth exploring their arguments in order to better understand how hard it is to calculate a product’s cradle-to-grave impact.

I’ve seen many references to new ways of making solar power more efficient recently, The Economist’s article is the only one I bookmarked.

As their name suggests, CSP plants generate electricity by concentrating the sun’s rays, usually to boil water. The resulting steam drives turbines similar to those found at power plants that run on coal or natural gas. There are several different designs. The Nevada plant uses long curved mirrors, called parabolic troughs, to focus light on a tube of fluid running just above them. The Spanish plant uses a forest of smaller mirrors to focus light on a tower in their midst. Other concepts involve long flat mirrors and devices resembling satellite dishes.

The good-as-always Green Lantern column tackles an interesting question this week: what’s the least-harmful way to buy orange juice. The answer:

In the end, not-from-concentrate orange juice sold by the carton comes out slightly ahead of frozen OJ sold by the canister in terms of energy use. As a green consumer, your worst choice would be to buy juice that’s been rehydrated by the supplier, then placed in cartons (such as Minute Maid Original). If you prefer juice from concentrate, whether for the lower price or more Tang-y taste, it’s better to rehydrate it yourself.

I’m probably not the only one who’s heard some bad things about newer compact fluorescent light bulbs. The most daunting fact had been the mercury (see quote), though there’s also the aesthetic case.

But what about the mercury? The toxic heavy metal is integral to the design of current CFL bulbs: Electricity agitates the mercury molecules, causing them to emit ultraviolet light. That light then spurs a bulb’s phosphor coating to give off visible light. But the amount contained in each bulb is barely enough to cover the tip of a ballpoint pen, and won’t cause any bodily harm as long as simple precautions are taken. The National Electrical Manufacturers Association has voluntarily imposed a limit of 5 milligrams per bulb on all CFLs sold in the United States—about 1 percent of the mercury contained in an old home thermometer. Since manufacturers are well aware that health fears are preventing the widespread adoption of CFLs, most have committed to making bulbs with even less mercury than NEMA’s standard. The average CFL bulb now contains around 4 milligrams of mercury, and that figure should drop closer to 2 milligrams in the very near future. Much of the credit for these reductions goes to Wal-Mart, which has pressured GE, Royal Phillips, and Osram Sylvania to cut down on the quicksilver.

If they’re right — and we can only hope they are — this is great.

A biofuel startup in Illinois can make ethanol from just about anything organic for less than $1 per gallon, and it wouldn’t interfere with food supplies, company officials said.

Coskata, which is backed by General Motors and other investors, uses bacteria to convert almost any organic material, from corn husks (but not the corn itself) to municipal trash, into ethanol.

“It’s not five years away, it’s not 10 years away. It’s affordable, and it’s now,” said Wes Bolsen, the company’s vice president of business development.

Unfortunately, the idea’s at least a year away from producing meaningful quantities.

 Nuclear power’s — I hope — coming back. In The American Duncan Currie says so. And though this isn’t new news (The Economist put it on the cover months ago), Currie does a good job rounding up opinions and facts on the issue. That does not, however, make the piece a breeze to read.

The Whitman-Moore coalition supports fur­ther research into renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and geothermal power. But it counsels a realistic assessment: geothermal is often impractical and capital-intensive, while wind and solar remain “intermittent and unre­liable.” According to CASEnergy, “A wind farm would need 235 square miles to produce the same amount of electricity as a 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant. The nuclear plant would occupy less than one-half of 1 percent of that area. A 1,000-megawatt power plant can meet the needs of a city the size of Boston or Seattle.”

The most recent Tech.view column over at The Economist is both long and meandering. Though that makes it hard to draw a single conclusion from it, it’s got a lot of interesting tidbits about America’s crazy policies for determining if a car or fuel is “green.” Take this, for example, which explains how CAFE standards are calculated (something I didn’t know), and how E85’s even worse than higher fuel prices:

Car companies in America get a fuel-economy credit for every flex-fuel vehicle they sell. The government rates the fuel economy of flex-fuel vehicles at about 165% the miles per gallon (mpg) they would get on straight petrol. In reality, vehicles running on E85 get 25-30% fewer mpg than their petrol equivalents.

As it costs only $200 to turn a conventional car or light truck into a flex-fuel vehicle, the industry can save itself billions in potential fines that would otherwise accrue for failing to meet the government’s CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) requirements. CAFE is the sales-weighted average mpg figure for all the cars or light trucks a manufacturer sells in any given model year.

I remember hearing about this idea a few months ago, but it appears that someone is actually thinking about building one. It’s essentially what it sounds like, a farm that stretches vertically rather than horizontally.

This $200 million project would be able to feed 72,000 people for a year and would grow everything from apples to winter squash. Of course, all of the products would be distributed directly to the casinos and hotels, who will be funding the project in the first place. The farm could potentially make up to $25 million a year, plus $15 million in potential tourist revenue. That means that it would eventually recoup the enormous start-up costs, especially with it’s projected $6 million per year operating costs.

(via Slashfood)