Zero-combustion Paradigm Approaching: Emissions Standards, Economics Will Push Research

As governments, businesses and scientists work toward creating cost-effective solutions for zero-emissions propulsion technologies, the possibility of a zero-combustion energy production and industrial fabrication model is emerging. Preservation of the natural environment and containment of emissions-induced global climate change both require new technologies that will allow full economic output, including industry and transport, that eliminate the need for combustible fuels.

Many renewable resource technologies currently being employed or explored require the burning of some form of fossil fuel at some stage of the production of the devices that allow for energy generation. Through a series of subtle changes to policy standards, extraction, production and transport of materials, and energy distribution networks, emissions tied to those elements of the production web.

But moving toward an entirely new standard in renewable energy extraction and implementation, we can begin to envision means by which automotive vehicles will actually be self-powering, requiring no fuel per se, and creating zero environmental disturbance aside from the space they occupy and the roads they use.

The zero-combustion standard is now within reach, as versatile revolutionary energy solutions first come online and then are expanded upon. The latest solutions will merge with emerging non-energy-related technologies and be transformed into consumer solutions for battery-like devices powerful enough to extract energy from their environment and power phones, computers, homes and even automobiles and aircraft.

Green Economy: Resilience Services Will Meet Opportunity & Urgency

The ongoing transition to an environmentally sustainable economy, focusing on energy and agricultural resources, is already opening the door to a range of new industrial and engineering services related to resource and ecosystem resilience (now understood to be vital to the stability of the natural environment whose own services underpin every element of our civilization).

More efficient management of water, better testing, diversification, distribution and self-sustainability of crop varieties, energy resources that do little to disrupt the natural environment but seriously impact the more harmful tendencies of our economic activity, sustainable transport (increasingly shifting toward the low-emissions and emissions-free standards), each play a vital role in the emerging resilience economy.

What we are building into the global economy, in the same present tense, are both severely damaging extensions of now primitive industrial methods and also the antidotes or successors to those practices. As one after another city, province, region or state, begins to view its own natural habitat as an economic asset, resilience services and the goal of self-regulating elasticity become key market-altering forces, on both the conceptual and practical levels.

New technologies may go a long way to helping us serve the resilience interests of local and international markets, in ways that remain difficult to envision. The first wave of such technologies will likely be those that supplement energy production and reduce demand for high-polluting carbon-based fuels, while advances in overall efficiency and resource-light information distribution will continue to reshape economic output in favor of resilience and sustainability.

Transport habits may change, or standards for fuel-use (partly driven by escalating costs of burning fossil fuels), while energy-efficient modes of production may allow a vast expansion of industrial productionin clean-fuel transport and the necessary support infrastructure.

HotSpring is planning research communities that will take the technical riddle of how to make the zero-combustion, zero-emission drive mechanism that fits this vital new economic outlook. Our focus on the green economy will be tied to the quest for daring, responsible, practicable advances that help us reduce the negative impact of industrial-scale human activity on the natural environment.

Green Investment Boom Gets Traction: Fund Promises $10 Billion for Clean Energy

The private investment fund Ceres, a group of institutional investors, has promised to devote $10 billion to investment in clean energy sources. The news comes as 3 of the world’s major oil companies call for coordinated policy on how to face climate change, constrain emissions, and a couple of months after 150 global corporations asked for a major boost in subsidized research into transitioning to clean energy technologies.

The Financial Times reports “A group of nearly 50 institutional investors has pledged to invest at least $10bn (£5.1bn) in environmental technologies and to incorporate ‘green’ standards in investment decisions”. The fund’s president, Mindy Lubber, said during the press conference at UN Headquarters in New York, “This action plan reflects the many investment opportunities that exist today to put a dent in global warming pollution, build profits and benefit the global economy”.

The cost of the climate change burden is increasingly on the minds of corporate leaders, financiers and investors, and the glittering potential of economic windfall in pioneering the green economy is catching the eyes of investors and political leaders. Bio-ethanol, a crop-based fuel source, considered cleaner than fossil fuels, and having the benefit of being a renewable fuel source, has shown tremendous potential for financial growth.

The Daily Green reported yesterday that:

Today, Deer & Co. reported $5.2 billion in first-quarter profits, 55% higher than expected, because it is providing farm equipment to farms that are making record investments.

Monsanto, the maker of genetically modified corn and soy seeds, saw its stock jump nearly 200% in a year, as its sales grew 36%.

Mosaic, the world’s largest phosphate fertilizer producer, saw its profit quadruple.

Chemical giant DuPont saw its corn sales volume increase 52% recently, and expects double-digit earnings growth in 2008.

The value of the U.S. farm economy is expected to hit a record in 2008, $144.1 billion, 38% above the 10-year average.

There are serious drawbacks to increasing reliance on ethanol: burning organic materials or extracts also emits carbon, albeit in lower doses; food prices have been soaring across the world as a result of shifting agricultural production to meet demand for bio-fuels; land-use policy may not keep pace with the rush to exploit the economic boom ethanol presents; worldwide, arable land and water for irrigation are already severely strained, not able to meet food production needs in a sustainable way.

So it is of paramount importance that new funding is being offered for new research into potential alternative methods of truly “clean” energy, meaning fuel sources or electricity production methods that require no combustion and emit no harmful toxins or heat-trapping gases into the environment.

In July 2006, Sentido.tv [a project of Hot Spring's publisher], reported that:

The global wind-generation resource has been estimated at 72 terawatts, 40 times the entire global demand for 2000. Eliminating peat bogs and other highly vulnerable ecosystems from that resource potential will cut into the global capacity, but at 40 times demand, or 20 times or even at 10 times, there is clearly room to work with.

Finding the right combination of resources, in terms of cost-effective construction and maintenance, infrastructure development and ugrading, and stabilizing the role of consumers in both production and usage (solar and wind energy permit fitted individual homes to become production mechanisms expanding grid potential), will allow for the creation of a far more efficient and by extension, economically viable and sustainable energy market. This could be extended to a global scale, if investment accurately discerns and follows opportunity.

• Financial Times: “Oil groups urge clarity on tackling emissions [inset: Green energy to get $10 billion boost]“
• Guardian: “Investment fund giants demand 90% reduction in carbon emissions”
• Daily Green: “Want Real Economic Stimulus? Jump-Start the Green Collar Economy”
• Quipu Economic Forum: “The 12-year Sea Change, the Green Economy”
• Ceres: “Investors and Environmentalists for Sustainable Prosperity”
• Quipu [from EPI]: “Why Ethanol Production Will Drive World Food Prices Even Higher in 2008″
• Sentido.tv: “WORKING OUT THE KINKS IN RENEWABLE ENERGY’S GREATEST PROMISE”
• Ceres: “Climate Investment OpEd by Ceres President Mindy Lubber in Pensions & Investments magazine on 9/19/05″

Dawn of the Anthropocene Epoch

HUMAN BEINGS HAVE BECOME SO INFLUENTIAL IN NATURAL PROCESSES THAT SCIENTISTS NOW WORRY NATURE HAS LOST VITAL RESILIENCE MEASURES

At a meeting of European scientists, in Stockholm, Sweden, the man who coined the term ‘anthropocene’ to describe the new geological epoch in which human influence dominates natural processes, announced that the term has gained acceptance in a growing number of fields. The real import of the term, and of its increasing relevance to what science is showing about the effects of human civilization on the environment, globally, is that ecological information is increasingly vital to implementing human ambitions in a responsible and sustainable way.

Paul J. Crutzen, of the Max-Planck-Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, wrote in the year 2000 that:

The name Holocene (”Recent Whole’) for the post-glacial geological epoch of the past ten to twelve thousand years seems to have been proposed for the first time by Sir Charles Lyell in 1833, and adopted by the International Geological Congress in Bologna in 1885 (1). During the Holocene mankind’s activities gradually grew into a significant geological, morphological force, as recognised early on by a number of scientists. Thus, G.P. Marsh already in 1864 published a book with the title ‘Man and Nature’, more recently reprinted as ‘The Earth as Modified by Human Action- (2). Stoppani in 1873 rated mankind’s activities as a ‘new telluric force which in power and universality may be compared to the greater forces of earth” [quoted from Clark (3)]. Stoppani already spoke of the anthropozoic era. Mankind has now inhabited or visited almost all places on Earth; he has even set foot on the moon.

The Financial Times, of London, is reporting “The EuroScience forum in Stockholm heard on Thursday that climate change was the most obvious of a complex range of man-made effects that is rapidly changing the physics, chemistry and biology of the planet.” Other effects will have a lot to do with crop resilience, soil fertility, elasticity of habitats vital for species on which our sustenance environment —the realm of ecosystems and resource production that feeds our species and its habits— depends.

The dawn of the Anthropocene epoch in geological history brings with it numerous challenges and opportunities. In terms of transitioning sweeping economic models and trends to sustainable methods, there is a vast opportunity to expand the potential output of the global economy, but meeting the challenges that create this opportunity will require massive amounts of ingenuity and investment.

A group of 21 leading scientists and researchers has published its study of the geological timescale topic in the GSA Journal, concluding that the fundamental shift to a human-altered geological environment occurred at the beginning of the 19th century. What is now occurring, however, is that awareness of the potentially severe impact of 200 years of rampant industrial expansion, resource exploitation, urban construction and terrain remodeling appears to have reached a tipping point, after which science cannot ignore the human element in the natural world, i.e. ecological impact.

That study specifically notes that human activity has led to fundamental alterations in sediment layering, soil quality, geological patterning, the biological habitat and its flora and fauna, as well as the obvious impact on the breathable atmosphere. Specifically:

From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the present day, global human population has climbed rapidly from under a billion to its current 6.5 billion (Fig. 1), and it continues to rise. The exploitation of coal, oil, and gas in particular has enabled planet-wide industrialization, construction, and mass transport, the ensuing changes encompassing a wide variety of phenomena, summarized as follows. [...]

Humans have caused a dramatic increase in erosion and the denudation of the continents, both directly, through agriculture and construction, and indirectly, by damming most major rivers, that now exceeds natural sediment production by an order of magnitude [...]

Carbon dioxide levels (379 ppm in 2005) are over a third higher than in pre-industrial times and at any time in the past 0.9 million years [...]

The projected temperature rise will certainly cause changes in habitat beyond environmental tolerance for many taxa (Thomas et al., 2004). The effects will be more severe than in past glacial-interglacial transitions because, with the anthropogenic fragmentation of natural ecosystems, ‘escape’ routes are fewer.

Resilience mechanisms are eroded, and the natural environment is less able to adapt suitably to changes within its sometimes competing ecosystems. The study also cites evidence of increasing levels of species extinction, and the growing likelihood of a major wave of mass extinction, directly related to human activity.

“Scientists are building computer models that give a view of the whole ‘earth system’ in the Anthropocene era. These are beginning to show the hot spots or Achilles’ heels in Earth’s defenses against catastrophic change, said John Schellnhuber, director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change at the University of East Anglia”, also according to the Financial Times.

If we are to continue expanding our technological abilities, our industrial production, our standard of living, and the integration of human society across the planet (with the fuel demand and resource-stress this implies), then there will need to be a major change in the way in which policy-makers, private enterprise, consumers and markets generally, conceive of the human effect in the natural environment.

That change in consciousness will allow for a new approach to funding and producing major technological innovations that will make it far easier to gracefully slip away from reliance on carbon-based combustible fuels. That will, however, be only one thread in the fabric of advances needed to help human industrial civilization outpace its own capacity for mass resource depletion.

• Geological Society of America: “Are we now living in the Anthropocene”
• Financial Times / MSNBC: “Scientists warn of a new Anthropocene age”
• About.com Geology: “Introducing the Anthropocene”
• Max-Planck-Institut für Chemie: “Anthropocene” [article that coined the term]
• Resilience 2008: “Resilience, Adaptation & Transformation in Turbulent Times” [Conf., Stockholm 14-17 April]
• Albaeco, Sustainability School: “Masking Environmental Feedbacks”

Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

BOOK REVIEW & INTRODUCTION TO ONGOING HOT SPRING DISCUSSION

Ecologist and researcher Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, has issued the 3rd installment of his ‘Plan B’ books —Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (2008)—, which lay out the most vital research underlying and the most optimal means of meeting the need to transition to a sustainable economy that not only works in harmony with natural system, but also helps to reverse the excesses of the existing industrial model.

The alterations to the Earth’s climate that are resulting from centuries of burning fossil fuels, rich in carbon and which release unnatural amounts of carbon-dioxide into the environment, are presenting current and future costs that have not been integrated into pricing models:

When Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, released his ground-breaking study in late 2006 on the future costs of climate change, he talked about a massive market failure. He was referring to the failure of the market to incorporate the climate change costs of burning fossil fuels. The costs, he said, would be measured in the trillions of dollars. The difference between the market prices for fossil fuels and the prices that also incorporate their environmental costs to society are huge.

The roots of our current dilemma lie in the enormous growth of the human enterprise over the last century. Since 1900, the world economy has expanded 20-fold and world population has increased fourfold. Although there were places in 1900 where local demand exceeded the capacity of natural systems, this was not a global issue. There was some deforestation, but overpumping of water was virtually unheard of, overfishing was rare, and carbon emissions were so low that there was noserious effect on climate. The indirect costs of these early excesses were negligible.

Now with the economy as large as it is, the indirect costs of burning coal—the costs of air pollution, acid rain, devastated ecosystems, and climate change—can exceed the direct costs, those of mining the coal and transporting it to the power plant. As a result of neglecting to account for these indirect costs, themarket is undervaluing many goods and services, creating economic distortions.

As economic decisionmakers—whether consumers, corporate planners, government policymakers, or investment bankers—we all depend on the market for information to guide us. In order for markets to work and economic actors to make sound decisions, the markets must give us good information, including the full cost of the products we buy. But the market is giving us bad information, and as a result we are making bad decisions—so bad that they are threatening civilization.

The market is in many ways an incredible institution. It allocates resources with an efficiency that no central planning body can match and it easily balances supply and demand. The market has some fundamental weaknesses, however. It does not incorporate into prices the indirect costs of producing goods. It does not value nature’s services properly. And it does not respect the sustainable yield thresholds of natural systems. It also favors the near term over the long term, showing little concern forfuture generations. 

A major factor in the challenge now facing human civilization is how exactly to continue to exploit the benefits of a market model, while we make sweeping industrial transitions away from fossil fuels, and ‘program’ the market to learn to account for these vital, and incomparably valuable, considerations. Lester Brown’s latest book is, as is custom with his work, a relentless and committed examination of the problem in its most vital detail, coupled with real solutions and a strategy for overcoming the global challenge of moving to a climate-safe economy.

• Earth Policy Institute: Eco-Economy Updates (plus data & translation links)
• Earth Policy Institute: Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures
• Earth Policy Institute: The Earth Policy Reader
• Sentido.tv: Informes de Eco-economía, en español
• Sentido.tv: Lester Brown presents Plan B 2.0 at Google (video)

Raindrops New Source of Low-Intensity Clean Energy

A new study has shown that raindrops can be used to produce electricity. The key is the mechanical energy of the raindrops, meaning the energy contained in their motion and in the way that force is diffused when striking a given type of surface.In this case the surface is PVDF (polyvinylidene diflouride) plastic, which is able to release a charge when temporarily “deformed” by mechanical activity, such as being struck by a moving object. A sheet of PVDF just 25 micrometers thick (1,000 = 1 milimeter) receives the impact of raindrops, and the effect is the release of energy, which can be harvested and turned into electricity.

Romain Guigon, from the research institute CEA Leti-Minatec in Grenoble, France, says the research shows that “even in the most unfavorable conditions, the mechanical energy of the raindrops… is high enough to power low-consumption devices”, but the study does not specify how well circuitry retains a minimum charge sufficient for regular functioning.

While circuitry is a vital issue related to this potential technological advance, it may also be worth looking at what uses there might be for such tools as the PVDF sheets that gather energy to the system’s electrodes. Careful adjustment of the study’s initial presumptions could lead to powerful new supplementary energy applications, saving battery life or eliminating the need for ecologically unfriendly battery systems altogether.

• Discovery: “It’s Raining Energy. Hallelujah!”

The 12-year Sea Change, the Green Economy: How Do We Get There?

Quipu Economic Forum :: Between the years 2008 and 2020, we are likely to see a still unimaginably sweeping shift away from fossil fuels and high-contamination modes of powering our economy. The transition will have a political component, but will be driven mostly by cost concerns, resource scarcity, and public demand for cleaner air and responsible climate policy, a demand which is not ideological in nature.

The long-term overhaul of the global economy, to bring it in line with what would be a responsible climate policy, will be more gradual, and has for some time now been taking its first halting steps toward acquiring momentum. But wealthy countries, ostensibly the most dependent on carbon-based fuels, also enjoy the conditions that permit broader flexibility in fuel resourcing, namely an economic cushion and variety in the marketplace.

It is often necessary to assess economic trends in emotional terms, or to use a new catch-phrase in social awareness and economic undercurrent analysis, to locate the ‘tipping point’, after which momentum becomes reality. This idea is attractive to those who want the market to ’set’ the rules, i.e., design-in public consciousness and cost-considerations based on ‘what the market will bear’.

This last idea is often used to justify the notion that a commonly talked-about direction is the inevitable direction: not for reasons of a grand conspiracy nor because one company will profit from its point of view taking hold, but because if the known ideas dovetail with real economic momentum, then investors find some measure of stability. Instead of blaming the ‘perfect storm’ of unforeseen events for a given failure, they believe they’ll be able to cite something like a ‘perfect groupthink’, with a delightfully positive outcome.

The problem is: groupthink as is well known is not a grand scheme brought into being by the best and brightest minds to achieve the most good for the largest number of people or interests; it is a way in which deferring to incomplete ideas bandied about in an echo-chamber leads to poor decision-making, hands bound, intellectual traps and the failure of policy to meet the moment.

So, how do we meet the moment? What tools can we apply to the problem in order to bang out a solution? Obviously, we are talking about a complex array of problems, with an even more complex array of causes, and we need to adjust to a new cosmology in which we think openly about the possibility that this ‘complex array’ will not only condition us, but is also what will be required of us, going forward.

We need to integrate into daily activities a complex array of daring attempts at streamlining and building efficiency; we need to develop new information systems that give us not only access to new and evolving knowledge about our environment, but also a means of reacting at the right time to the right signs of trouble; we need to make sense of what seems to have no bearing on our personal experience, so that we don’t take the ill-fated route of so much of human history, and decide we can build a good history on the frail foundations of our own personal experience.

It may take a village, it may take a movement, it may take sudden bursts of popular awareness, or it may simply be a question of letting people —who are already very much concerned that we handle our ecological responsibilities with care— be heard.

On 30 November, the AP and the Washington Post reported that officials from 150 global corporations, worth more than $4 trillion in market capital, have signed a petition urging strong action to mandate emissions cuts and reduce global carbon emissions by at least 50% by 2050. Change is coming to our economic structures, likely through the evolution of techniques, and not ideology; our best hope is to take the change seriously, early, and to act to be in the best possible position by 2020.

Any suggestions?