Discovery News: Environmental

Green Life at the Fair

So... summer's over. I know because the Minnesota State Fair ended yesterday.

State law says school can't start before the fair is over. People here say things like, "I can't believe the fair starts tomorrow!" (i.e. "I can't believe a few days of livestock showings, Whac-a-Mole games, and fried food on a stick is all that stands between us and six months of -40-degree weather!") One of the public radio hosts even said, on the night before it started, "It's State Fair Eve!!!"

So it's a big deal. And it's a heckuva lot of fun. I went over this weekend, partaking of delicacies like a grilled chocolate sandwich, and all-you-can-drink milk for $1. I went to see the prize-winning pumpkin (834 pounds), and a whole bunch of newborn piglets. I missed checking out the butter booth in the dairy building where the dairy queens of the fair--the finalists for the title of Princess Kay of the Milky Way--each have their busts carved in 90-pound blocks of butter on display.

I also went over to check out the "Progress Center", the headquarters for all things green. Outside the center was a single, full-sized wind turbine blade, planted in the ground like a statue. It was absolutely immense--123 feet long--and elegantly shaped, twisting slightly as it thinned to the tip.

According to the stats printed at its base, the single blade weighed six tons, as much as an African elephant. When in place, at the top of a wind turbine, the tip would rise more than 389 feet into the air, taller than the Statue of Liberty. A turbine made of such blades would produce 1.5 megawatts, which would offset 90,000 tons of CO2 over its 20-year lifetime.

Other highlights from the center included an exhibit showing off how much trash the average Minnesota family of four generates in a year: four tons. The model heap must have been 15-20 feet across and equally tall. It would certainly take up most of my backyard. Thirty-two percent of that is packaging.

One way to reduce all of that trash is by composting... which a Progress Center exhibit described in terms a Minnesotan could really understand: "microbe hotdish".

Hmm... I'll hold out for the more appetizing kind now that winter is just around the corner.

(Image: J. Marshall. For more images of the Minnesota State Fair, check out this NYT slideshow.)

More Math at $4 a Gallon

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about one way that $4 a gallon gasoline might get us looking at things differently.

It is interesting to see stories emerging about other ways that fuel at $4 a gallon is causing changes.

First, Reuters had a story late last week about how home buyers are abandoning the 'burbs in favor of cities, partly driven by the higher fuel prices. The article mentions a survey of realtors, 80 percent of whom reported that higher fuel costs are making buyers more interested in living in cities.

The New York Times ran a story a couple of weeks ago with a similar message. It says:

In 2003, the average suburban household spent $1,422 a year on gasoline, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By April of this year -- when gas prices were about $3.60 a gallon-- the same household was spending $3,196 a year, more than doubling consumption in dollar terms in less than five years.

Meanwhile high oil prices effect more than just fuel. Petroleum provides the raw materials for making plastics, paints, adhesives, soaps, fibers, pharmaceuticals and more. Just as people are looking for alternatives to using petroleum for fuel, others are trying to obtain the carbon molecules necessary to make this array of products from renewable sources.

Plastic made from corn is one example, and DuPont is making a fiber that comes partly from corn that it is using in carpets.

Of course, the expense of these alternative products has been an obstacle, because commodity chemicals derived from oil have been cheap, cheap relative to developing new, bio-based materials. But, as a Cargill executive told me when I spoke with him more than a year ago, "When you have 75 dollar a barrel oil, a lot of things can happen."

That threshold seems a quaint memory now, and the chemical industry is feeling the heat. Dow announced price hikes of up to 25 percent on commodity chemicals a couple of weeks back.

So, by the executive's estimation, bio-based processes ought to be looking pretty good. And, one researcher told me, because the amount of carbon needed for chemicals is just a teeny trickle compared with what's needed for fuels, sending some biomass to chemical processes to make plastics and other non-fuel applications should not create the competition for food that we're seeing with corn-derived ethanol and other biofuels.

(Image: Flickr user KB35, some rights reserved.)

How Green Is Your Hometown?

The Brookings Institution today released a report ranking the nation’s 100 biggest metropolitan areas by their residents’ average carbon footprint—the amount of CO2 they are responsible for releasing based on vehicle transportation (including freight and personal) and home energy use.

City living is greener overall: Although two-thirds of the U.S. population lives in the 100 biggest urban areas, they are responsible for only 56 percent of the carbon emissions. These urbanites’ footprint is 14 percent less than the country average.

So… who are the winners and losers?

Here are the 10 metropolitan areas with the lowest carbon footprint…and the highest (per capita CO2 emissions in metric tons in parentheses):

BEST
1.  Honolulu, HI (1.356)
2.  Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA (1.413)
3.  Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, OR-WA (1.446 )
4.  New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA (1.495)
5.  Boise City-Nampa, ID (1.507)
6.  Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA (1.556)
7.  San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA (1.573)
8.  San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA (1.585)
9.  El Paso, TX (1.613)
10. San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA (1.630)

WORST
91.  Knoxville, TN (3.134)
92.  Harrisburg-Carlisle, PA (3.190)
93.  Oklahoma City, OK (3.204)
94.  St. Louis, MO-IL (3.217)
95.  Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro, TN (3.222)
96.  Louisville, KY-IN (3.233)
97.  Toledo, OH (3.240)
98.  Cincinnati-Middletown, OH-KY-IN (3.281)
99.  Indianapolis, IN (3.364)
100. Lexington-Fayette, KY (3.455)

Here in Minneapolis-St. Paul we rank 45th.

How dense the city is, how much home heating and cooling the city requires, and whether the city uses primarily coal or a less carbon-intensive form of energy all contribute to where it sits in the green rankings.

Check out the whole report here (click on "Download"), and the complete rankings, clicking on "Download  Per Capita Footprints Supporting Material."

Don't Self-Sequester Carbon

Doing its part?

If you were thinking of sequestering carbon yourself—like, on yourself—by fattening up, you’d better skip it. Of course it’s bad for your heart and your brain and whatever else—but it’s also bad carbon counting.

There’s a letter published this week in The Lancet by Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine arguing that competition for fuels and food—now widely discussed thanks to the surge in demand for biofuels--is not a new phenomenon. Both agriculture (making fertilizer is energy intensive) and transportation are heavy users of fossil fuels, so rising oil prices affect both.

But the authors also argue that our over-consumption of both food and cars is making us obese, and conversely, that obesity is contributing to climate change and the food crisis.

They write:
Compared with the normal weight population, the obese population consumes 18% more food energy.  Additionally, more transportation fuel energy will be used to transport the increased mass of the obese population, which will increase even further if, as is likely, the overweight people in response to their increased body mass choose to walk less and drive more.

It’s not the first time researchers have made these points. Roberts makes it here and related work is here, but it gets me thinking because I've written about food recently, and come across the statistic that it takes eight pounds of grain to make one pound of cow. Researchers have estimated that the greenhouse gas impact of red meat is 2.5 times greater than chicken or fish.

So I wonder: what’s the carbon footprint of every extra pound we pack? Of course, it depends on whether we’ve made it via beef or beans, but as the authors note, that pound consumes daily metabolic energy, and we drive it around and fly it places. A 2004 study found the average 10 lb weight gain of Americans during the 1990s cost airlines $270 million and released 3.8 million additional tons of CO2 in 2000.

So if I’m going to avoid beef because of its carbon footprint, I’d better cut back across the board, because making an extra pound of me is probably not any greener.

…Now, I also want to know, could carbon offset companies start selling offsets through health clubs or individuals who lose weight and keep it off?

(Photo: James Phelps)