in vitro meat

This is where most of us get our ground beef. (credit: www.marlerblog.com)

Seed Magazine (my favorite science publication), has an interview with Jason Matheny of New Harvest, a non-profit organization aimed developing scalable and tasty meat grown on a petri dish (basically). Growing meat in a controlled environment like a petri dish is more environmentally efficient, in energy, in water, in land usage. As developing nations like China and India become wealthier, the demand for meat only increases.

Of course, the best scenario is that we all become vegetarians, both because it’s healthier and more environmentally friendly. However, I’m not quite there yet myself (my mind can’t quite overpower my evolved lust for high-protein, high-energy flesh) and so can’t demand that the rest of the world must be as well. If we assume that people are going to eat meat, why not have it come from a controlled environment, where fat content and every other chemical can be controlled?

Interestingly, the technology used to grow little bits of meat is hijacked from the field of tissue engineering, which aims to grow everything from skin to muscle to organ tissue. The limiting factor for tissue (be it for eating or healing) is getting the blood vessels built so the tissue can be sufficiently large. Vascularization of artificial tissue is very tricky thing that we haven’t quite mastered yet.

Thus, the applications for this technology would only be (for the present) in ground meat, where the small amounts grown in vitro (meaning in the lab, not in a real animal) could be put together like we’re used to. But still, ground meat comprises a very large part (Matheny claims roughly half, but I don’t have an independent number) of the world’s meat consumption and so could still have a significant impact.

You might react to this idea of eating meat grown in a test tube as just another part of our over-commercialized, over-scientificized (my own word), over-supply-chain-ized agricultural industry. We should be eating our meat from local, grass-based, holistic farms. I agree that the nice local farm alternative feels better (and IS better at the moment), but if we can produce meat that’s healthier, cheaper, significantly more environmentally friendly, and perhaps even tastier than our local farm, how long are you going hold out just on principle?

eco-stunts, book deals, and their effects on the rest of us

Hmmm, a major motion picture now, eh? I'm glad he was doing it for the right reasons.

The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert has a wonderful undercut of the so-called eco-stunts, or living an extremely environment-friendly lifestyle, and the publicity surrounding them. Her primary targets are bloggers-et-book writers Colin Beaven (No Impact Man) and Vanessa Farquharson (Sleeping Naked Is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days), both of whom adopted extreme eco-lifestyles for a period of time, blogged about it, and then got a book deal. After describing all the measures they take, like going without a refrigerator, toilet paper, and cars/trains/buses/subways, her closing paragraph sums it all up particularly well:

The real work of “saving the world” goes way beyond the sorts of action that “No Impact Man” is all about.

What’s required is perhaps a sequel. In one chapter, Beavan could take the elevator to visit other families in his apartment building. He could talk to them about how they all need to work together to install a more efficient heating system. In another, he could ride the subway to Penn Station and then get on a train to Albany. Once there, he could lobby state lawmakers for better mass transit. In a third chapter, Beavan could devote his blog to pushing for a carbon tax. Here’s a possible title for the book: “Impact Man.”

Seriously, take the fifteen minutes to read this article. It’s good.

I’m going to take her criticism of such publicity stunts (she reminds us that Colin Beavan’s idea of living a no impact life arose from a lunch conversation with his agent about his next book project) one step further: not only are they inane and self-promoting, but they trivialize environmental measures the rest of us — in the real world — take.

Notice that once the book deal is finished, these authors revert mostly back to their original, planet-killing lifestyle. If I were to read such a book, I would probably feel some mixture of shame — that my own life was not more environmentally efficient — and humor — because the life described by the authors sounds so crappy.

Such accounts of “extreme” lifestyles seem to trivialize the things the rest of us do to help out, like switching in CFL bulbs, recycling, and turning the lights off. Compared to the “extreme” lifestyles, some might think that these small measures don’t have as significant an impact and thus aren’t worth being as diligent about. What a shame, because those small measures we all take work into our life are by far the best sources of energy efficiency.

Someone needs to write a book about reinsulatining his house, riding his bike more, installing a smart electricity meter, going to the farmer’s market, and installing solar panels on his roof. The book needs to span a year, and then another, and then another, and another. That stuff doesn’t make us feel bad about what we do. It makes us think, “Hmm, that sounds pretty doable.” The key part is that there’s no end point to “experiment.” It’s a sustainable (ahh…wordplay) lifestyle.

Of course, such a book would be quite boring. But that’s the point, isn’t it. It’s not about selling copies. It’s getting us to change our lifestyles — for good.

greening the transportation of ice cream (and others)

(credit: polyvore.com)

Anyone who’s thought about the environmental cost of the various products we consume, from plastic spoons to produce to toys, has thought about the costs involved in shipping these times. If you’re like me, you might think about the fossil fuels required to move a teddy bear from China to Pennsylvania: the gas of the truck from the factory to the shipping yard in China, the diesel of the ocean liner from China to Los Angeles, and then more gas for the truck from LA to Philadelphia. Usually, the longer the journey, the more environmentally expensive it is.

What many don’t consider (or at least not me) is the requirements of some products, especially food, in that transportation. For example: ice cream. It must be made, stored at the factory, shipped, and then stored at our grocery store all at freezing point. As you know, keeping food this cold requires a hefty amount of energy in addition to that required simply to transport it. Thus, as the Times of London and Scientific American report, Unilever (which owns Ben & Jerry’s) is embarking on the crazy-sounding idea of making ice cream that’s made, shipped, and stored at room temperature only to be frozen once you put it in your own freezer.

While the science behind fat, sugar, and consistency has been studied for a good while, it still sounds crazy. I’m quite skeptical that they’ll be able to do it and still have it taste as good as the real deal. But, never underestimate those food scientists, who’ve been able to create ice cream that doesn’t melt (although, again, who knows how it tastes).

Although food science hasn’t really improved the quality of our food that much, it certainly has its advantages (like decently ripe fruit 12 months out of the year), many of which we’re willing to compromise a bit on taste in order to get. And once (as I hope), we start having to confront the calories (or if you prefer metric, joules) of energy the products we buy cost (as the Brits have begun to do), we may be more willing to make sacrifices in flavor for the good of the planet, just like we often do for the good of our waistline and arteries.

intro to weather control

Fair weather cumulous clouds (credit: Wikimedia)

Even though it’s been around for over fifty years, the idea of controlling the amount of precipitation in an area with chemicals still seems quite futuristic to me. I know many ski resorts seed their environs for more fresh power and had heard stories of China’s preventing rain from its opening Olympic ceremonies last year, but this new report about China’s efforts to again ensure dry skies for next year’s Asian Games got me wondering just how cloud seeding (as it’s called) works. Here’s a brief discussion from my research:

The entire process revolves around the phases of water in clouds. Such weather control can either be used to promote precipitation (like rain or snow) or inhibit it (like rain or often hail).

The water vapor in clouds is very, very cold (well below its freezing point, called supercooled) due to its height in the atmosphere. The problem is that in order for the vapor to turn into liquid or solid droplets, it usually needs a seed or starting particle (natural dust particles usually serve this role). One of the most common seeding chemicals, silver iodide, which has a crystalline structure very similar to that of water, is used to start these water (or ice) particles forming in the cloud.

Other chemicals like dry ice (solid CO₂, liquid nitrogen, or liquid propane) can be used to cool down the water vapor so much that it spontaneously forms small droplets without the need for a starter particle, so to speak.

When enough of these little droplets in a cloud form, they can start clumping together, and eventually the droplets become so large that the air currents can no longer support them, and they fall to earth as either rain, snow, or hail.

However, if you’re like China and want to avoid precipitation, you can seed the clouds just a little bit, and the ice particles produced actually form at the detriment of the natural water particles, thus reducing their size and likelihood of falling to earth.

It’s somewhat hard to measure exactly how efficacious cloud seeding actually is since there’s no way to do a counterfactual weather experiment, but it’s been successful enough for a number of countries, including the U.S., China, Russia, and Australia, to have used it at one point or another (China’s the most aggressive at it).

For those of you who are a bit wary of dropping chemicals like silver iodide into the sky, it seems that in the amount they’re currently being used, the health and environment impacts are negligible.

As many of you may know, there’s talk of creating more clouds in the atmosphere by either spraying water droplets up from the sea with vast fleets of autonomous sailboats or dropping seeding chemicals from the sky as previously discussed. It’ll be interesting to see how this last ditch option changes (or doesn’t) as our understanding of weather control improves.

Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding
http://www.lightwatcher.com/chemtrails/cloud_seeding.html
http://theblanketeffect.blogspot.com/2008/02/note-we-conclude-our-series-featuring.html

water vigilantism

(credit: Science Progress)

The U.S. Global Change Research Program recently released a study, which, among many daunting scenarios, projects the change in precipitation between 1961-79 to 2080-99. Needless, to say, there’s going to be a good bit less water falling over the coming years in the the southwest. This oncoming drought threatens both the future of agriculture and domestic and commercial water use in the area.

The politics of water rights in the West are fascinating and far to complicated to describe here. But the idea is that people who were “first in line,” so to speak, to sign up for the right of a certain amount of water from a river or other source get first dibs. What this translates into, though, is that preventing water from going into those natural channels is in effect “stealing” from the large pot that eventually gets divided along various lines.

I might be more sympathetic to this “crime” were it not for the following:
1) the way in which water rights are divided is incredibly complicated and often outdated;
2) it’s much more efficient to capture water on your own property, for your own use, than to let that water flow into natural channels only to have it pumped back to your house or building.

In April, Colorado passed a limited measure allowing people off the water grid to collect their own water for use in watering lawns and gardens. While a step in the the right direction, it’s not clear that other states will follow suit and/or expand water collection rights to those on the water grid.

Many homeowners have taken matters into their own hands regarding water usage, breaking the existing water laws. I support these measures both because I think they’re simply more efficient and because they set the stage for future improvements in water usage.

Some (mainly homeowners) have taken to collecting their roof water in barrels or cisterns. Others recycle greywater from washing machines, sinks, and showers (note, not toilets or sinks with garbage disposals) back into their yards. Allowing this kind of intelligent recycling promotes conservation on a local level as well as prevents us from wasting potable, treated water for things that don’t need it.

What’s more, in these two systems, the water not sucked up by the plants simply goes back into the natural aquifers.

We need to move to a more efficient and smart way of using this ever-dwindling resource in the West. Everyone acknowledges water shortage is a large problem, which may explain why many authorities sometimes look the other way over these types of infractions. When enough people embrace a technology or behavior that aims to ameliorate a serious problem, it becomes acceptable and can then become law.

simple, cheap, scaleable solar

Raw-Solar's mirror concentrates sunlight to instantly vaporize water into steam.

This news actually broke about a year ago, but I doubt many of you saw it.

A few MIT students took a class on solar concentrators and then built one. The main advantage of this design is that it’s cheap, simple, and fairly easy to build while still being incredibly powerful. It concentrates the sun’s light roughly a thousand-fold at the focal point, enough to cause a two by four too spontaneously combust. The short descriptive video is well worth the watch.

Some of the students founded a startup, RawSolar to take the idea to the marketplace.

The current models produces steam, which can be used in a number of ways, including generating electricity. Another idea (posted as a YouTube comment, actually) is to put a thermal-electric resonator at the focal point and generate straight up electricity from the concentrated electromagnetic radiation of the sun (similar in function but different in design from a photovoltaic cell).

It’s a tough climate to be starting a company, but I really hope these guys at RawSolar make it. In a time where there’s so much competing information and technology, disagreement about the expense and scalability of clean energy with and without subsidies, this device is simple, efficient, and cheap. It represents a democracy of innovation as well. It wasn’t some big VC-funded company the built this. It was a handful of MIT kids in a class. Successes like this one make the solutions to our energy crisis seem (naively) simple. But given the generally depressing climate of energy policy and the ever-looming specter of global warming, I can do with a bit of naive optimism.

To succeed, they probably will need some VC funding to get off the ground. They’ve got some smart people on their team, so hopefully they’ll make it to production. If (When) they do start cranking these out, though, I want to get one for my roof.

freedom of overpopulation?

US Population Growth from Census Numbers up to 2000 and projected to 2025. (credit Wikipedia commons)

This issue of Scientific American is running a story by Robert Engleman about population control that’s informative and quite troubling. The essential message is that our global population is dramatically increasing and could hit 9 billion by mid century, and that growth seriously threatens our environment. While population growth in itself provides challenges, especially in developing countries, where adequate space and employment for all these people are often scarce, the real issue is the energy and other natural resources that they’ll use. I don’t think I need to go into why this is a big, big problem, even with the future efficiencies and cleaner technologies we hope to use.

The richest countries use by far the most energy per capita, making their population control all the more important (credit: Frank van Mierlo using IEA 2006 Key World Energy Statistics)

While the US gained about 3 million people in 2007, according to Engleman, India gained roughly 17 million. So shouldn’t most of the pressure go on countries like India and China that contribute the most to the global population each year to reduce their population growth?

Absolutely not, the U.S. is the number one culprit. Here’s why…

According to the World Resource Institute’s Energy Consumption Database, in 2005 the per capita energy use for the U.S. was 7,885.9 kgoe (kg of oil equivalent). The per capita energy use for India was 491.0 kgoe. So, doing some rough math, the total kg oil equivalent used in 2007 for the U.S. is more than 2.5 times that of India.

Of course we must make global efforts to reign our population, but it begins here, and now we get into delicate territory. We love our “freedom” here in the U.S., and that means the freedom to decide how many kids we have. Eventually we’ll have to come to terms with the fact that having more than two children is, in some sense, environmentally immoral. I have family and friends who are members of more-than-two-kid households, so I appreciate how sensitive this issue can be. Like recycling, conservation, and green technology, the number of children we have must also fall into the category of environment responsibility.

I’m not saying we need to go the route of China’s 1 baby per couple policy yet, but it might benefit us to start thinking about some sort of incentive system for having fewer kids rather than more, especially since it’s generally known that lower-income families (or single mothers) tend to have more children than those in the higher-income brackets.

The obvious first step is much more thorough and comprehensive sexual education and availability of contraceptives and, yes, abortion providers. The second step must be an understanding that the more children we have, the more strain we’re putting on our–and their–environment.

a progressive energy tax

(cartoon by David G. Klein)

The recent American Clean Energy and Security Act (Waxman-Markey) bill proposes a host of new economic measures and climate mandates aimed at creating green jobs and reducing the flow of carbon into our atmosphere. Dan Weiss at CAP has a nice summary with good links if you’d like to read more about it.

While this legislation is all well and good and should have happened ten years ago, I can’t help but be troubled by its complexity and loopholes.

Now let’s get a few things straight before I throw in my suggestion. I don’t know a ton about environmental policy and know even less about the economics of it all. There are probably wonks out there who, upon reading my suggestion, will say, “Oh, that won’t work for x, y, and z…” That’s fine with me, but I feel that I must at least outline the thought on (digital) paper. So, here goes:

The plan is simply a progressive energy tax: People who use less energy will pay less per kilowatt-hour than those who use more energy. (For now, I’ll just consider electricity for simplicity’s sake, although it could easily be extended to other forms of energy.) I’m taking this notion directly from our progressive income tax system. Economists can figure out the pricing and scale of all this, but I can still talk about the general idea.

The two other major climate policy initiatives out there are cap and trade and an outright carbon tax. While I think both of these ideas have merit and probably belong in a pantheon of climate legislation, they each have some problems. Briefly, calculating how much carbon a product or service emits into the atmosphere so as to put a tax on it is quite tricky. Where do you draw the line with transportation, and other aspects not directly involved in its production. Scandinavian countries, who have implemented carbon taxes, mostly just place flat rates on major energy sources like oil, natural gas, and coal. I’ve already mentioned what I see as some weaknesses with the cap and trade plan in the Waxman-Markey bill.

Ok, so let me explicate this idea a bit…

As with all progressive taxes, the idea is to transfer the largest economic burden to the biggest users. The incentive, of course, is that the largest users of energy have the biggest impetus to become more efficient. One the other end of the spectrum, the tax would have a relatively low cost for small businesses or low-income families because they’d simply be using the least amounts of energy in the lowest tax bracket. While a carbon tax and cap and trade also encourage big users to cut back, a progressive energy tax is more aggressive.

The other main advantage is its (relative) ease of implementation and transparency. Quite simply, utility companies could submit something like a W-2 to the IRS, detailing how much energy we used in the year. We all pay taxes on that usage at the end of the year. We don’t need to create huge new regulatory agencies or government apparatuses in order to make it work.

Furthermore, and perhaps almost as important, it’s simple, transparent, and provides a real, tangible impetus for families and businesses–or really anyone who uses energy–to cut back and become more efficient. A good deal can be shrouded in complicated solutions like cap and trade and even a carbon tax. This energy tax is simple enough for everyone to understand and easy to see how direct measures you take reduce your taxes that year.

I recognize that, politically, no one likes taxes, that we prefer cap and trade because it seems more free market-ish (i.e. better for most people). But ultimately they’ll both end up raising the cost of using energy (which currently also usually entails putting carbon into the atmosphere), so the actual difference is small.

Once people get over the initial fear of “another tax” (the horror!), we can explain that an energy tax could just partially shift the tax burden from income to energy use. Both taxes are progressive, so the scaling could be similar, but the difference is that most people like having lots of income and grumble about the taxes, but no one likes using lots of energy, especially if there are high taxes involved.

I also recognize that this plan does nothing directly to benefit those using (or producing) alternative energy sources. Well, even if you’re using an alternative energy source, energy conservation is still important. And the government can always use this new source of cash to give some tax breaks to alternative energy companies and fund alternative energy research.

So readers, tear the plan apart. I want to hear all the objections. I’m merely throwing this idea out there to get some discussion going.

the world ends because of…lack of carbon dioxide

This just in from Science Magazine News:

Sometime between 100 million and 1 billion years from now, Earth will have lost so much carbon dioxide from its atmosphere that plants and trees will literally begin suffocating, eventually taking all life with them. In a new study, researchers propose one way to delay this Armageddon: reduce the pressure of the atmosphere, effectively creating conditions where we all feel like we’re living at high altitudes.

Huh…I always thought the earth would perish because of too much carbon dioxide. Apparently the perpetrator are rocks!

The compounds somehow turn carbon into bicarbonate and pull it out of the biosphere. If the trend continues, researchers have found, Earth would not be able to sustain photosynthesis for more than about a billion years.

Those damned rocks. I always knew they’d be our downfall. The article suggests that to forestall this apocalypse, some future version of us should reduce the air pressure by pumping nitrogen out of the atmosphere.

Better idea: let’s just drive a bunch of four-wheelers around a lot and build some coal (dirty, not “clean”) power plants.

lawn = happiness?

Housing Costs in Cincinnati.
Yellow: 0-30% of Income; Green: 30%+ of Income

Housing + Transportation Costs in Cincinnati. Yellow: 0-45% of Income; Green: 45%+ of Income

A recent study put out by the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) looks at how population density in a number of different-sized cities and their surrounding suburbs affects things like the cost of housing + transportation (important since conventional knowledge usually just considers housing costs alone–”it’s cheaper to live in the suburbs”) and the carbon dioxide emitted per household. This study is simply more evidence of what most of us already know, which is that it’s much more efficient environmentally to live in high-density population areas. The interesting thing about this study, is that it also shows the economic efficiencies we also usually get living in high-density areas by saving on transportation costs.

Most of us have grown up in one sense or another that part of the American Dream is to own a house, your own little kingdom that you have entire control over. It usually involves having a nice lawn, a place for a grill, an opportunity for your kids to play with the neighbors, a safe neighborhood, and relatively convenient to things like grocery stores, etc. Unfortunately, fulfilling these dreams usually means moving to the ‘burbs.

Make no mistake, I love being the master of my own domain, having grass to take naps in (and mow), being able to grill whenever I want, and all the rest. But ultimately this dream is unsustainable. It’s unsustainable both because there’s just not enough land close enough to areas of high economic activity (i.e. cities) for our current and growing population and because it’s terrible for the environment.

We need to adapt our understanding of what’s desirable and now begin to incorporate factors outside of ourselves in how we think about out domestic dwelling. There’s still plenty of room for public lawns, parks and other greenspace in high-density population areas, so we need not give that up. And perhaps if/when more people move into the cities, there will be even more demand for such quality of living spaces.

Most of us who appreciate and enjoy nature have a very understandable desire to live in it. It’s becoming more and more clear, though, that we’re not terribly good at taking care of nature when we live in it (akin to the 4 year old girl who lovingly carries the household cat dangling from its neck and front leg).

We need to quarantine ourselves from nature so that it’s still around in 150 years for successive generations to enjoy. This means increasing the areas owned and protected by our national parks system (which also means increasing funding to them) and decreasing the areas owned and developed into suburbs. This battle is going to be a very difficult one, but hopefully as more evidence like that published in this CNT study emerges, the economic reasons, rather than the moral reasons, will take over as the driving force.