Re/Action on Climate Protection

How to solve global warming

Stopping "dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate" is the most important problem facing humanity today. Significant action at the local level is one of the major keys.

Zero carbon biodiesel calcs

Here are a few numbers that show the potential of the biodiesel production system shown here:

This system has the potential to operate with net zero carbon emissions.

Biodiesel Conference

After attending the Climate Protection summit on 7/14 mentioned in the previous post, I jumped on a plane (emissions from flight offset by TerraPass) and attended the B100 Coop Conference. During this conference, I got an inkling of what a sustainable community fuel system might look like.

Why S-Clusters? How does this help Climate Protection?

How does the s-cluster (sustainability cluster) help with climate protection? The s-cluster is a pattern that is extracted from real world examples of sustainability. One of the characteristics of the s-cluster is that it is zero carbon. An s-cluster provides a product or service, essential to life, without increasing the atmospheric CO2 concentration. The s-cluster allows us to identify levers or changes to existing systems that lower total GHG emissions.

The GHG emissions implications of mobile vs stationary energy use

In greenhouse gas measurement terminology, the sources of emissions can be classified either as stationary or mobile. Stationary sources would be power plants, cement plants, refineries. Mobile sources would be trains, airplanes, ships, automobiles and trucks. All of these use fossil fuels, but the nature of the energy source and the modalities of resultant emissions are profoundly different. These profound differences require different emissions reduction strategies for mobile or stationary sources.

For example, consider carbon dioxide emissions from a fossil fuel-fired electrical generating plant. The fossil fuel is burned, and the resulting gas, called "flue gas" is emitted into the atmosphere via a smokestack. Due to air quality regulations, the operators of these plants are required to "scrub" or remove, various pollutants from the flue gas. Carbon dioxide is not required to be scrubbed from the flue gas, because it has not been considered as a "pollutant" by the US government. However, technologies called "carbon capture and sequestration" (CC/S) have been proposed to remove carbon dioxide from stationary sources.

What about mobile sources of carbon dioxide?

Clean Coal - Is it necessary?

In the discussion of reduction of GHG emissions from the production of electricity, coal and nuclear are raised as an answer to the assertion that it is impractical or even technically impossible to supply current and future energy needs with renewables.

Here is a quote from Mark Jaccard, an advocate of Clean Coal:

Renewable energy is seemingly inexhaustible and environmentally benign, yet many of its manifestations are characterized by low energy density, variability of output and inconvenient location

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Starting from the negligible market share of renewables today, and in a growing global energy system, it will be an enormous and likely very expensive endeavor to force the wholesale replacement of fossil fuels with a renewables dominated system in the course of just one century.

This assertion is offered without any numbers to back it up. This is usually the case when this assertion is made by advocates of coal and nuclear power. Does it stand up to scrutiny?