Green Design » New Science

Joe Alcamo Appointed UNEP Chief Scientist

Alex Steffen — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:11:56 +0000

Joe Alcamo, who was the first person to introduce me to the concept of virtual water (and who is a very smart thinker about water, climate and sustainability in general), has just been appointed the first Chief Scientist of the United Nations Environment Program.

Given the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to integrating innovation in development with a respect for planetary boundaries, having someone like Joe at UNEP can only be a very good thing for all of us. Congratulations, Joe!

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in New Science at 1:11 PM)

Joe Alcamo Appointed UNEP Chief Scientist

Alex Steffen — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:11:56 +0000

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in New Science at 1:11 PM)

Biofuel Startup Announces Huge Yields From Engineered Organism

Yale Environment 360 — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:27:58 +0000

A Massachusetts company, Joule Biotechnologies, has unveiled what it says is a technological breakthrough that uses genetically engineered organisms, sunlight, water, and concentrated carbon dioxide to produce up to 20,000 gallons of biofuel per acre. The much-watched startup claims that its secret organisms, coupled with photo bioreactors, not only directly produce an ethanol-like fuel but also secrete the fuel continuously. As a result, Joule officials say, its so-called “helioculture process” can produce up to 20,000 gallons of biofuel per acre — four to 10 times greater than algae-based biofuel experiments — and can do so at $50 per gallon, which is far cheaper than other algal biofuel processes. Independent observers said that while Joule’s technology looks promising, it still faces many hurdles as it attempts to take its breakthrough from the lab and mass-produce fuel. Joule says it will open a pilot plant in the Southwest early next year and commercially produce biofuels by the end of 2010. Joule’s project is one of several well-financed efforts to genetically engineer organisms to produce biofuels.

This piece originally appeared on Yale Environment 360
Copyright Joule Biotechnologies

Related posts:

Growing Sustainable Biofuels: Common Sense on Biofuels
Synthetic Microbes for Biofuel Production: Fuels Rush In

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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in New Science at 12:27 PM)

Australia’s Centre for Integrated Sustainability Analysis

Alex Steffen — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 03:09:24 +0000

Folks at the Centre for Integrated Sustainability Analysis in Sydney, Australia seem to be doing some pretty terrific work these days. I have noticed their involvement in several cool projects lately:

Researchers there worked with the Stockholm Environment Institute on the reassessment of the UK's carbon footprint which showed that counting offshored emissions, the UK was producing more, not fewer, greenhouse gasses.

Barney Foran put forward a nice summary of what factors might be essential to building a sustainable Australia:

The six principles are: stabilising human population number and age structure; reducing the use of the grand global elements; basing economy and society on flows rather than stocks; shortening the supply chain; engineering society for durability and resilience; and developing a new economics where taxes tell the truth.

And, perhaps most impressively, they had a hand in the research behind the Australian Conservation Foundation's Interactive Consumption Atlas, a really excellent example of making the ecologically invisible visible in a compelling way.

I'll have to keep an eye on these folks.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in New Science at 7:09 PM)

Australia’s Centre for Integrated Sustainability Analysis

Alex Steffen — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 03:09:24 +0000

Folks at the Centre for Integrated Sustainability Analysis in Sydney, Australia seem to be doing some pretty terrific work these days. I have noticed their involvement in several cool projects lately:

Researchers there worked with the Stockholm Environment Institute on the reassessment of the UK's carbon footprint which showed that counting offshored emissions, the UK was producing more, not fewer, greenhouse gasses.

Barney Foran put forward a nice summary of what factors might be essential to building a sustainable Australia:

The six principles are: stabilising human population number and age structure; reducing the use of the grand global elements; basing economy and society on flows rather than stocks; shortening the supply chain; engineering society for durability and resilience; and developing a new economics where taxes tell the truth.

And, perhaps most impressively, they had a hand in the research behind the Australian Conservation Foundation's Interactive Consumption Atlas, a really excellent example of making the ecologically invisible visible in a compelling way.

I'll have to keep an eye on these folks.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in New Science at 7:09 PM)

Mining the Moon?

Julia Levitt — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:27:12 +0000

Someone please tell me if I'm missing something.

The New York Times reported last week that on October 22, India launched its first unmanned spacecraft to orbit the moon.

The craft is expected to remain in space for two years. During that time, it will do something undeniably cool:

prepare a 3-D atlas of the moon.

The other part of its mission, however, is something I find pretty unsettling:

and prospect the lunar surface for natural resources, including uranium, a coveted fuel for nuclear power plants, according to the Indian Space Research Organization.

Because the Times piece focuses so much on the accelerating competition between India and China for their shares of space race-related prestige and economic opportunity, that surreal sentence seems to fade into the background, in terms of importance. But the idea has been lingering in my mind since I first read this story, six days ago.

It seems like the statement raised questions with others, also. For example, Jacob Leibenluft at Slate discussed the legal question of whether India would have rights to any uranium it found up there.

Could the resulting electricity, no matter what its purposes, ever possibly justify the resources required -- in fuel, material and development time alone -- to mine the moon for uranium?

I wonder where the question of mining other celestial bodies to serve the 20th-century energy needs of the human population falls in the debate around understanding and protecting our home planet. It seems that a switch to renewables here on Earth is the much safer, more stable option.

Photo credit: flickr/Fingerz, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in New Science at 1:27 PM)

Dennis Meadows and Computer Modeling

Alex Steffen — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 04:49:28 +0000

Dennis Meadows, in an email discussing computer models, suggested that beyond their obvious functions, computer models often have one or more of the following purposes:

#1: Provide useful information about the future behavior or the future coefficient values of some system. #2: Attract money that is mainly going to be used for purposes other than building a model - overhead, salaries, proposal writing. #3: Cause the model builder to become respected as an expert by others, so they will ask his or her advice. This often involves publishing the model in some respected journal. #4: Provide a disciplined learning environment within which the model builder actually does become an expert. #5: Generate results and computer output that can be used to justify or illustrate ideas and recommendations that were already existing. #6: Help a group of people learn to work together more effectively - trust, respect, and related variables. #7: Help a group of people learn a vocabulary or paradigm they can use in dealing with some shared problem. ... Note that #3 and #4 are quite independent of each other. People can gain expertise without respect and respect without expertise.

I found it worth pondering for a while.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in New Science at 8:49 PM)

DNA Forensics May Prevent Elephant Poaching

Ben Block — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:42:24 +0000

A shipment of forest timber traveled around the southern tip of Africa and across the Indian Ocean before it arrived at the Hong Kong dockyards two years ago. During a routine X-ray examination, customs officials discovered an even more lucrative cargo hidden behind a false wall: 605 elephant tusks.

The $8 million seizure was the largest ivory catch in Hong Kong since a 1989 agreement banned the international ivory trade. Ivory seizures are on the rise , particularly in Southeast Asia; the Hong Kong catch was only about half the size of the largest in recent years. At least 68 tons of ivory have been confiscated over the past decade. The cause: illegal ivory has quadrupled in value since 2004, and anti-poaching resources are typically stretched thin.

Law enforcement officials investigating the source of the Hong Kong ivory had no clue where the stash originated before leaving Douala, a port city in the west African nation of Cameroon. DNA technology, however, was able to verify that many of the tusks once belonged to forest elephants that lived in southern Gabon, near the Republic of Congo border.

Extracting elephant DNA from confiscated ivory could be an important tool to take wildlife investigations a step farther and to stop poaching at its source. Such expensive forensic work may become necessary to protect dwindling elephant populations and curb the illegal ivory market before it grows completely out of control.

"In big seizures, there's a very strong tendency to ship ivory out of a different country than where it's poached... It's a bit of a red herring," said Samuel Wasser, director of the University of Washington's Center for Conservation Biology and the lead author of the study, published in this month's issue of Conservation Biology. "The methods we developed are very important in that regard because it focuses where the poaching is ongoing."

Wasser's team tested ivory from the Hong Kong sting and from a 6.5 ton ivory seizure in Singapore in 2002. After analyzing the samples' genes and comparing them against a complex elephant DNA map that covers much of Africa, the researchers were able to trace the Hong Kong samples to elephant populations in Gabon. The Singapore samples were linked to populations in southern Africa, mostly in Zambia.

Although some DNA source locations were scattered, the findings point to much more specific origins of illegal poaching than were previously available. The findings also contradict previous assumptions that ivory dealers would purchase tusks from throughout Africa as they become available. Instead, Wasser's paper suggests that "crime syndicates were targeting specific populations for intense exploitation, hitting them hard and fast to satisfy the demands of a particular consignment."

After it was revealed that most of the ivory seized in Singapore came from elephants in Zambia, that country's director of wildlife was replaced and its courts began to impose harsher sentences for ivory smugglers. "At the time of the analyses, authorities thought the ivory came from Tanzania and/or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Our analyses refocused the investigation, allowed authorities to point the finger at Zambia and get them to do something," Wasser said.

Despite the benefits of forensic testing for future investigations, funding for wildlife enforcement is limited. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the international body that oversees the ivory ban, received $7.5 million in support this year. This is about $2.5 million more than a decade ago, but it is not enough to support DNA investigations in developing nations.

The international police organization INTERPOL has developed an agency to facilitate global wildlife crime investigations, but it too lacks sufficient funding. "We're not in a position, given we have 186 countries [to oversee], to start to pay for their evidence handling on a case-by-case basis. We're certainly not a bank," said Peter Younger, the INTERPOL wildlife crime program manager.

A few laboratories across the world - the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's forensic lab in Oregon and Wasser's Center for Conservation Biology, for instance - have agreed to pay for DNA testing of stolen ivory and other wildlife evidence, such as illegally shipped old-growth trees. Wasser's lab paid $300 per sample to analyze the seized African ivory and construct its DNA map. In the 10 years it took to create the map, the lab processed more than 1,000 samples.

The limited funding for enforcement is costing elephants their lives. Before the ivory trade ban, poachers were killing about 7.4 percent of the global elephant population each year for tusks and other body parts. Now the rate is 8 percent, and populations are only getting smaller. Wasser's team estimates that elephants in sub-Saharan Africa could be "virtually extinct" across their range by 2020.

"Even though the number of elephants left is a third of what it was prior to the ban, and a higher proportion are being killed than before, you'd think the alarm bell should be going off," Wasser said. "As long as the public is so clueless about the situation, there is no incentive for governments with money to pay for it."

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

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(Posted by Ben Block in New Science at 11:42 AM)

Bonobos, Berkeley and Mars

Alex Steffen — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 19:10:19 +0000

Several things I've meant to blog on and haven't:

The Bonobo Conservation Initiative, which is not only saving our awesome laid-back, sexed-up little cousins, but is being smart about it, by building a network of local bonobo-supported villages, with outreach, jobs, microenterprise programs, a local technical college, cultural preservation help and a free clinic. And it's working: they've been instrumental in the designation of the Reserve Naturelle du Sankuru, a new 11,803 square mile reserve in the Tshuapa and Lomami river basins of the Democratic Republic of Congo. These folks deserve your money.

Wind-fueled supergrid could cut Europe's CO2 emissions by a quarter: "The supergrid would draw power from massed turbines in a band of countries to Europe's south and east that have above average wind potential, feeding it to the industrialised centres of Europe. The scale would overcome the biggest obstacle to wind power – its unreliability... the supergrid would cover a region so large that the wind would always be blowing somewhere."

Warren says, screw limits and logic, we're going to Mars!

The chances are good that in fact there is no life on Mars beyond the odd super-tough bacterium. And while I did indeed just say that no kind of extinction is good, it should also be pointed out that giving up a bolthole for human breeding pairs — which are, make no mistake, the stakes on a Martian colonisation drive — on the basis that we might kill something less substantial and self-aware than a cough is no way to run a railroad.... Let’s cover the bastard in GM lichen and bugs, thicken up the atmosphere, drop a few nukes on Tharsis, do everything we can think of, fast and dirty, because the universe is hiding the stopwatch from us and we don’t know how much time we’ve got left.

Berkeley First, the City of Berkeley's solar initiative, will pay for residents' solar panel installations. Residents then pay the city back over 20 years with slightly higher taxes -- taxes which in some cases are more than covered by energy savings.

Coke to go water-neutral and, rumors say, to begin testing ways to include estimates of embedded water and carbon footprints on the labels of its sodas. If true, very cool.

Your singularity who's-who, in convenient chart form (though the don't include Jamais, so the whole exercise is a bit dubious).

Nature Conservancy magazine: “Achieving the goal of liberating half the world’s poor from their poverty by 2015 will either mark the true beginning of sustainability or the end of biodiversity at the hands of best-intentioned policies.”

Publisher's Weekly: Green Titles 2008. If you want evidence that lifestyle environmentalism has become a zombie trend - dead inside yet staggering on -- you need read no farther than this list of books coming out this year (which is only partial, yet includes books on green dogs, green babies, green travel, green bibles, green beauty, green chic, green living and so on. There's even a book simply called Green, and another called Green, Greener, Greenest. Of course, you could do everything in every one of these lifestyle guides and still be part of destroying the planet with haste.

Finally, what Google News might look like in a bright green future. My favorite is "Recovery efforts in New Orleans have finally hit their stride, as the hurricane-battered city takes shape as a dynamic showcase for innovative civil engineering and alternative fuels. "

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in New Science at 11:10 AM)

Bonobos, Berkeley and Mars

Alex Steffen — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 19:10:19 +0000

Several things I've meant to blog on and haven't:

The Bonobo Conservation Initiative, which is not only saving our awesome laid-back, sexed-up little cousins, but is being smart about it, by building a network of local bonobo-supported villages, with outreach, jobs, microenterprise programs, a local technical college, cultural preservation help and a free clinic. And it's working: they've been instrumental in the designation of the Reserve Naturelle du Sankuru, a new 11,803 square mile reserve in the Tshuapa and Lomami river basins of the Democratic Republic of Congo. These folks deserve your money.

Wind-fueled supergrid could cut Europe's CO2 emissions by a quarter: "The supergrid would draw power from massed turbines in a band of countries to Europe's south and east that have above average wind potential, feeding it to the industrialised centres of Europe. The scale would overcome the biggest obstacle to wind power – its unreliability... the supergrid would cover a region so large that the wind would always be blowing somewhere."

Warren says, screw limits and logic, we're going to Mars!

The chances are good that in fact there is no life on Mars beyond the odd super-tough bacterium. And while I did indeed just say that no kind of extinction is good, it should also be pointed out that giving up a bolthole for human breeding pairs — which are, make no mistake, the stakes on a Martian colonisation drive — on the basis that we might kill something less substantial and self-aware than a cough is no way to run a railroad.... Let’s cover the bastard in GM lichen and bugs, thicken up the atmosphere, drop a few nukes on Tharsis, do everything we can think of, fast and dirty, because the universe is hiding the stopwatch from us and we don’t know how much time we’ve got left.

Berkeley First, the City of Berkeley's solar initiative, will pay for residents' solar panel installations. Residents then pay the city back over 20 years with slightly higher taxes -- taxes which in some cases are more than covered by energy savings.

Coke to go water-neutral and, rumors say, to begin testing ways to include estimates of embedded water and carbon footprints on the labels of its sodas. If true, very cool.

Your singularity who's-who, in convenient chart form (though the don't include Jamais, so the whole exercise is a bit dubious).

Nature Conservancy magazine: “Achieving the goal of liberating half the world’s poor from their poverty by 2015 will either mark the true beginning of sustainability or the end of biodiversity at the hands of best-intentioned policies.”

Publisher's Weekly: Green Titles 2008. If you want evidence that lifestyle environmentalism has become a zombie trend - dead inside yet staggering on -- you need read no farther than this list of books coming out this year (which is only partial, yet includes books on green dogs, green babies, green travel, green bibles, green beauty, green chic, green living and so on. There's even a book simply called Green, and another called Green, Greener, Greenest. Of course, you could do everything in every one of these lifestyle guides and still be part of destroying the planet with haste.

Finally, what Google News might look like in a bright green future. My favorite is "Recovery efforts in New Orleans have finally hit their stride, as the hurricane-battered city takes shape as a dynamic showcase for innovative civil engineering and alternative fuels. "

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in New Science at 11:10 AM)

The Currency of Status

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 21 May 2008 11:12:18 +0000

by Clark Williams-Derry

Brain research suggests a link between money and social standing., from Sightline Daily

I've been trying to work this tidbit into a post for weeks, but I haven't found an opportune moment. So here's the news straight up: new studies suggest that a single part of the brain evaluates both money and social status.

Sadato and colleagues conducted fMRI scans of the brains of 19 subjects while they engaged in two different exercises. The first task was a simple game in which participants had to choose one of three cards in the hope of winning a cash prize. In the second game, fictional evaluators appraised volunteers' characters based on the results of personality trait questionnaires. The researchers found that the striatum activated in response to high and low appraisals (but did not perk up to more neutral comments); it also responded to monetary wins and losses but was quiet if a player broke even.

"The implication of our study is that the different types of the reward are coded by the same currency system,'' says Sadato, "enabling the comparison between them."

To me, this finding (if it's confirmed) raises all sorts of interesting questions about the relationship between wealth and social standing. Does society equate the two simply because we use the same part of the brain to process both? Or is it the reverse -- do our monkey brains map money to status simply because society does as well? Either way, this sheds some light on the all-too-human tendency to
equate wealth with worth: they're both minted coin of the same mental
currency.

In a more practical vein, these findings may also have some bearing on the fact that economic inequality makes people sick. The standard economist's view of the inequality-health connection is that economically unequal societies tend to have highly unequal distribution of health care, healthy food, and so forth. By this view, economic inequality denies some people the resources they need to stay healthy. But perhaps the connection is more direct: if the human brain simply perceives relative poverty in much the same way that monkeys perceive low social status, then poverty could breed ill health in humans in exactly the same way that low status breeds illness in our primate relatives. In both cases, it could be the physiological stress associated with low social status that's the real health risk, not privation per se. I'm sure that's too much to read from a single study; but still, it's broadly consistent with some academics' approach to the subject.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in New Science at 3:12 AM)

Mapping the Inheritance

Alex Steffen — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 05:39:38 +0000

One of the Worldchanging slogans is "We've inherited a broken future." That is to say, mainly, that the direction in which we're headed leads right over a cliff. But it might be read a different way: that many of the biggest legacies left humanity by our parents, grandparents and more distant ancestors are broken systems, ruined places, vanished species, antique climates. Much of our inheritance is destruction.

Perhaps the craziest part of this legacy is that we don't really have any idea what it is or where it is. Thousands of pieces of broken satellites streak by in orbit around our planet. It could be tens of thousands. Perhaps hundreds of thousands. We don't know.

Millions of species are on their way out, as we plow and log and mine and dump on the habitats on which they depend, and we don't even know what we're losing -- paging the yeti crab

Now ally Geoff Manaugh draws our attention to another item handed down from our forebearers: submerged chemical weapons.

It seems

The last thing you might expect to encounter exploring the ocean floor is a chemical weapon. But it seems hundreds of thousands of tonnes of them have been dumped into the sea, and no one knows exactly where the weapons are. Now, scientists are calling for weapons sites to be mapped for safety's sake.
Between 1946 and 1972, the US and other countries pitched 300,000 tonnes of chemical weapons over the sides of ships or scuttled them along with useless vessels, according to public reports by the Medea Committee, a group of scientists given access to intelligence data so they can advise the US government on environmental issues.

But the military have lost track of most of the weapons because of haphazard record keeping combined with imprecise navigation.

Of course, the problem's not limited to submerged chemical weapons -- literally thousands of tons of chemical and biological weapons and nuclear materials were simply dumped in holes in the ground during the Cold War -- especially in Russia.

Geoff asks "[W]hat future cartography might yet detect and publish these places – so that we can avoid them, or clean them, or entomb them there beneath the sea in glaciers of black concrete?"

And, indeed, mapping the chemical inheritance, as it were, seems like a damn good idea. Completely beyond their immediate utility, or the thrilling sense terriblisma we'd get from making them, maps of the major knowable problems, made today, might help our own descendants make good choices when historical evidence and observable data are even harder to find. Ironically, a map of the screwed-up legacy we've inherited today might actually be a really great legacy to leave behind.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in New Science at 9:39 PM)