Friday, January 4, 2019

The massive floating device created to clean up plastic in the ocean has broken

The massive floating device created to clean up plastic in the ocean has broken

By Gisela Crespo, David Williams and Amanda Jackson


(CNN)A 2,000-foot-long system created to clean up plastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean is broken and being towed back to port for repair.
The Ocean Cleanup System 001, a U-shaped floating barrier created by the organization The Ocean Cleanup, arrived in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in October.
Ocean garbage patches are formed by rotating ocean currents called "gyres" that pull marine debris (litter, fishing gear, and plastic) into one location, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The are several of these patches in the ocean, including two in the Pacific. The one known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is located between Hawaii and California, and it's about double the size of Texas, or three times the size of France.
After several months at sea, it was determined the system failed to retain plastic, the organization announced earlier in December.
Now, a 60-foot section of the device has broken free from the system, the organization announced December 29. The entire floating system, along with over 4,400 pounds of plastic it has recovered, is being brought back to shore.
"We are, of course, quite bummed about this as 1) we hoped to stay out for a bit longer to collect more data on plastic-system interaction, and 2) it introduces an additional challenge to be solved," Boyan Slat, Ocean Cleanup's CEO, said in a blog post. "At the same time, we also realize that setbacks like this are inevitable when pioneering new technology at a rapid pace."

The device is 2,000 feet long with a 10-foot skirt that hangs below it, under the water. It set sail from San Francisco in September, with the goal of cleaning half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years.


8 million tons of trash goes into ocean a year.
Slat told CNN earlier this year that the patch contained an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic, weighing 80,000 metric tons.

Joost Dubois, head of communications at The Ocean Cleanup, told CNN in September the system was expected to be able to recover 50 tons of plastic from the ocean each year.
During a regular inspection on December 29, an Ocean Cleanup team found that part of the system had detached.

"It's important to note that both the 580-meter main section and the 18-meter end section are both completely stable; all bulkheads are intact, and the end section has two stabilizers affixed to it, so rollover is not possible," Slat said in the blog post. "Also, because no material was lost, there have been no safety risks for the crew, environment or passing marine traffic."

The company is investigating the cause of the break and believes the system will be back in operation this year.

Issues with plastic collection

Earlier in December, the organization said the system is concentrating the plastic, but it's not able to hold on to it.

"Eventually, the only way to truly see how the system would perform was to put in the environment it has been designed for," the organization said.

Plastic waste harming world's oceans 05:01

The organization says it is working to identify the cause. One of the possible problems is that the system is not moving fast enough.

"It appears that the system occasionally travels slower than the plastic, which provides the caught plastic with the opportunity to leave the system again."
The organization also said the system, which they have named Wilson, is creating an effect on the current as it interacts with water, resulting in small patches of plastic moving and accumulating around the system.
The organization has also observed that the system creates waves, possibly preventing plastic from entering the mouth of the device.

"We will continue testing and monitoring the system until we feel confident to make any modifications, if necessary, which will then be applied in a later shift," the organization said. "We are confident these tests will teach us more about the current status of Wilson, which will hopefully allow us to soon make the cleanup system fully operational."

Some critics questioned the ambitious ocean cleanup system even before it reached the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Miriam Goldstein, the director of ocean policy at the Center for American Progress, said deploying a device of that size will create its own environment, and sea life will grow on it or underneath it.
Goldstein also questioned the efforts to collect plastic in the middle of the ocean instead of focusing on stopping waste from reaching the ocean in the first place.
Posted by The Business Side of Green at 5:36 AM 0 comments

Thursday, January 3, 2019

Emissions from New England power plants fall again/Mass Live

Such a positive trend.  This is a cornerstone of building a cleaner, brighter future.  Smartly powering our lives will lead to an amazing quality of life.

 Twin cooling towers at the Brayton Point coal plant, which closed for good in 2017. Demolition of the towers is now underway.
Twin cooling towers at the Brayton Point coal plant, which closed for good in 2017. Demolition of the towers is now underway.  (Mary Serreze)
Air pollution from the region's power plants continued to decline in 2017, continuing a long-term trend, according to a new draft reportfrom ISO New England.
Across six states, nitrogen oxide emissions decreased by 6 percent, sulfur dioxide by 11 percent and carbon dioxide by 7 percent over 2016 levels, according to the entity's annual electric generator air emissions report.
Total generation was down by 3 percent, reflecting an overall drop in demand for electricity. A smaller portion of the power was generated by fossil fuels, and more by renewables. ISO New England is the "independent system operator" that runs the region's wholesale power markets.
The emissions report, released earlier this month, comes as New England continues to see rapid change in its power mix.
For instance, in 2017, Brayton Point, the massive 1,500-megawatt coal plant in Somerset, closed for good. Two remaining coal plants in New Hampshire face an uncertain future.
Pilgrim Nuclear Station in Plymouth is due to shut down in 2019, removing 680 megawatts of capability -- enough to power 600,000 homes. Two other nuclear plants remain -- Millstone in Connecticut and Seabrook in New Hampshire. The two atomic energy plants recently won "zero-carbon" energy contracts with Connecticut utilities.
Separately, Massachusetts plans to procure 3,200 megawatts of offshore wind by 2035, which could provide a fifth of the state's energy. One project, the 800-megawatt Vineyard Wind, hopes to start construction in 2019.
Massachusetts also has launched incentives for 1,600 megawatts of new solar capacity across the state.
The new ISO New England report contains some interesting data. While coal generation fell by 870 gigawatt hours in 2017, utility-scale solar and wind increased by 995 gigawatt hours, more than making up for the loss.
Still, 48 percent of the region's electricity was generated by natural gas, and 31 percent by nuclear power. Coal and oil each represented only 1 percent. Wind, solar, hydro, and other renewables made up the difference.
In fact, power sourced hydro generation grew 15 percent over the year in New England, with solar and wind up 31 percent.
The numbers showed a spike in petroleum oil use for power generation during December 2017, when a deep cold snap caused wholesale natural gas prices to soar.
ISO New England has been tracking the power sector emissions numbers since 2001. Since that year, the sector has seen a near-eradication of sulfur dioxide emissions, a three-quarters drop in nitrogen dioxide and a one-third cut in carbon dioxide emissions.
The fact that the power sector has grown cleaner now leaves transportation as the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in Massachusetts.

Posted by The Business Side of Green at 11:12 AM 0 comments

Saturday, December 29, 2018

Organic Food Hurting the Climate?/RNN

Not quite the question we expected to be posing today.  But one that needs exploring.  At the end of the day we want to use practices that preserve, not use up, our natural capitol.

 This should spur an interesting debate and counter-research.

Organically farmed food has a bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed food, due to the greater areas of land required. This is the finding of a new international study involving Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.
The researchers developed a new method for assessing the climate impact from land-use, and used this, along with other methods, to compare organic and conventional food production. The results show that organic food can result in much greater emissions.
“Our study shows that organic peas, farmed in Sweden, have around a 50 percent bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed peas. For some foodstuffs, there is an even bigger difference — for example, with organic Swedish winter wheat the difference is closer to 70 percent,” says Stefan Wirsenius, an associate professor from Chalmers, and one of those responsible for the study.
The reason why organic food is so much worse for the climate is that the yields per hectare are much lower, primarily because fertilisers are not used. To produce the same amount of organic food, you therefore need a much bigger area of land.
The ground-breaking aspect of the new study is the conclusion that this difference in land usage results in organic food causing a much larger climate impact.
“The greater land-use in organic farming leads indirectly to higher carbon dioxide emissions, thanks to deforestation,” explains Stefan Wirsenius. “The world’s food production is governed by international trade, so how we farm in Sweden influences deforestation in the tropics. If we use more land for the same amount of food, we contribute indirectly to bigger deforestation elsewhere in the world.”
Even organic meat and dairy products are — from a climate point of view — worse than their conventionally produced equivalents, claims Stefan Wirsenius.
“Because organic meat and milk production uses organic feed-stock, it also requires more land than conventional production. This means that the findings on organic wheat and peas in principle also apply to meat and milk products. We have not done any specific calculations on meat and milk, however, and have no concrete examples of this in the article,” he explains.
A new metric: Carbon Opportunity Cost
The researchers used a new metric, which they call “Carbon Opportunity Cost,” to evaluate the effect of greater land-use contributing to higher carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation. This metric takes into account the amount of carbon that is stored in forests, and thus released as carbon dioxide as an effect of deforestation. The study is among the first in the world to make use of this metric.
“The fact that more land use leads to greater climate impact has not often been taken into account in earlier comparisons between organic and conventional food,” says Stefan Wirsenius. “This is a big oversight, because, as our study shows, this effect can be many times bigger than the greenhouse gas effects, which are normally included. It is also serious because today in Sweden, we have politicians whose goal is to increase production of organic food. If that goal is implemented, the climate influence from Swedish food production will probably increase a lot.”
So why have earlier studies not taken into account land-use and its relationship to carbon dioxide emissions?
“There are surely many reasons. An important explanation, I think, is simply an earlier lack of good, easily applicable methods for measuring the effect. Our new method of measurement allows us to make broad environmental comparisons, with relative ease,” says Stefan Wirsenius.
The results of the study are published in the article “Assessing the efficiency of changes in land use for mitigating climate change” in the journal Nature. The article is written by Timothy Searchinger, Princeton University, Stefan Wirsenius, Chalmers University of Technology, Tim Beringer, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and Patrice Dumas, Cired.
More on: The consumer perspective
Stefan Wirsenius notes that the findings do not mean that conscientious consumers should simply switch to buying non-organic food. “The type of food is often much more important. For example, eating organic beans or organic chicken is much better for the climate than to eat conventionally produced beef,” he says. “Organic food does have several advantages compared with food produced by conventional methods,” he continues. “For example, it is better for farm animal welfare. But when it comes to the climate impact, our study shows that organic food is a much worse alternative, in general.”
For consumers who want to contribute to the positive aspects of organic food production, without increasing their climate impact, an effective way is to focus instead on the different impacts of different types of meat and vegetables in our diet. Replacing beef and lamb, as well as hard cheeses, with vegetable proteins such as beans, has the biggest effect. Pork, chicken, fish, and eggs also have a substantially lower climate impact than beef and lamb.
More on: The conflict between different environmental goals
In organic farming, no fertilizers are used. The goal is to use resources like energy, land, and water in a long-term, sustainable way. Crops are primarily nurtured through nutrients present in the soil. The main aims are greater biological diversity and a balance between animal and plant sustainability. Only naturally derived pesticides are used.
The arguments for organic food focus on consumers’ health, animal welfare, and different aspects of environmental policy. There is good justification for these arguments, but at the same time, there is a lack of scientific evidence to show that organic food is in general healthier and more environmentally friendly than conventionally farmed food, according to the National Food Administration of Sweden and others. The variation between farms is big, with the interpretation differing depending on what environmental goals one prioritises. At the same time, current analysis methods are unable to fully capture all aspects.
The authors of the study now claim that organically farmed food is worse for the climate, due to bigger land use. For this argument they use statistics from the Swedish Board of Agriculture on the total production in Sweden, and the yields per hectare for organic versus conventional farming for the years 2013-2015.
More on biofuels: “The investment in biofuels increases carbon dioxide emissions”
Today’s major investments in biofuels are also harmful to the climate because they require large areas of land suitable for crop cultivation, and thus — according to the same logic — increase deforestation globally, the researchers in the same study argue.
For all common biofuels (ethanol from wheat, sugar cane and corn, as well as biodiesel from palm oil, rapeseed and soya), the carbon dioxide cost is greater than the emissions from fossil fuel and diesel, the study shows. Biofuels from waste and by-products do not have this effect, but their potential is small, the researchers say.
All biofuels made from arable crops have such high emissions that they cannot be called climate-smart, according to the researchers, who present the results on biofuels in an op-ed in the Swedish Newspaper Dagens Nyheter: “The investment in biofuels increases carbon dioxide emissions.”
Posted by The Business Side of Green at 7:58 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Rising Waters Are Drowning Amtrak's Northeast Corridor/Bloomberg

The logistics of our daily life is extremely complicated and, if we think about it, daunting.  Moving people, freight, coordinating millions of miles of transportation is embedded into daily life?

 What if, then, comes along rising tides that start to disrupt our infrastructure?  There are major cities sitting in the Northeast Corridor serviced by Amtrak.  Hubs for commerce, sports, arts.  Home to millions.  What if their ride home gets washed away?  Will life change?  What fails next?

 By the middle of this century, climate change is likely to punch a hole through the busiest stretch of rail in North America. Parts of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor route, which carries 12 million people each year between Boston and Washington, face “continual inundation.” Flooding, rising seas, and storm surge threaten to erode the track bed and knock out the signals that direct train traffic. The poles that provide electricity for trains are at risk of collapse, even as power substations succumb to floodwaters. “If one of the segments of track shuts down, it will shut down this segment of the NEC,” warned members of Amtrak’s planning staff. “There is not an alternate route that can be used as a detour.”
That was the conclusion of a three-volume, multi-year climate study undertaken with first Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. and then Stantec Inc. Although the report was completed in April 2017, its conclusions were kept private until this November, when a partially redacted version was obtained by Bloomberg through a public records request. Titled “Amtrak NEC Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment,” the document outlines the severe threat facing one 10-mile section of the 457 miles of track, much of which runs perilously close to water.

 Image result for pictures of amtrak train

On a recent afternoon near Wilmington, Del., the danger already seemed imminent. North of the city, the distance between the tracks and the Delaware River was alarmingly narrow, even at low tide. Closer to downtown, puddles dotted the West Yard Substation, which powers this section of rail, as well as the Wilmington maintenance yard, one of the few in the country that can repair electric locomotives. Only a slender cobblestone footpath separated Amtrak’s Consolidated National Operations Center, which monitors and controls traffic along the corridor, from the edge of the Christina River. The single access road leading to Amtrak’s only training center for engineers was underwater on a day with no rain.

 The climate threat certainly isn’t limited to Delaware. Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, has projected which portions of the corridor will experience what she calls “chronic inundation,” defined as flooding an average of at least twice a month. Dahl provided Bloomberg with data showing when chronic inundation is expected to reach portions of the Northeast Corridor.

 The authors of the climate risk report wrote that they chose to focus on the section of track in Delaware because of its low elevation, its proximity to the two rivers, and its concentration of critical facilities. They called moving or elevating the track “extreme.” Instead, they recommended building temporary flood barriers that can be installed along the river before a storm, and then removed “to maintain aesthetics and passenger views.” Those walls would require 12 to 30 days to put up, and would cost $24 million per mile of track.

 Most important, the authors of the climate report recommended that the same detailed calculations be performed on the rest of the Northeast Corridor, and that the company begin working with state and local governments to prepare for the risks they described. More than a year and a half later, Amtrak, a private company whose stock is primarily owned by the federal government and which depends on congressional funding to operate, has yet to repeat its analysis for the network as a whole.

 Amtrak has since de-emphasized the threat of climate change in its public documents, even scrubbing the phrase entirely from its most recent five-year strategic plan. “We don’t see any fundamental risks to the integrity of the corridor,” Stephen Gardner, Amtrak executive vice president and chief commercial officer, said in an interview in November.
Christina Leeds, an Amtrak spokeswoman, said in an email: “Elevation or relocation of the infrastructure is likely to be expensive, disruptive, or impractical, and given the current levels of federal and state funding for Amtrak and the Northeast Corridor, well beyond our means.” She added that the company already faces “$40 billion worth of pressing—largely still unfunded—basic state-of-good-repair risks.”

 The report’s authors estimated the initial cost of protecting the study area to be $78 million, based on the premise that water levels around Wilmington would rise 2 feet by 2050. That reflects the median of possible warming scenarios, according to Climate Central, a research group in Princeton, N.J. Other estimates are almost twice as high.

 One of the redacted portions of the report is an analysis of the full costs and benefits of protecting the corridor against climate change, making it impossible to know if the company has determined it would save more money by keeping the corridor open than it would have to spend to save it. The disclosure of that information “could possibly cause public confusion,” the company said in a statement explaining its redactions. And anyway, says Allan Zarembski, director of the railway engineering and safety program at the University of Delaware, built-out urban environments leave little land available. “The cost of relocating the track is not the big issue,” he says. “The big issue is, where do you relocate it?”
Amtrak kept the report from Wilmington Mayor Mike Purzycki, Delaware Governor John Carney, and the Northeast Corridor Commission, whose role, according to its website, is “facilitating collaborative planning” among Amtrak, the federal government, and states along the corridor. After inquiries from Bloomberg about whether Amtrak had distributed the report, Amtrak sent a copy to the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, which received it earlier this month, according to spokesman Michael Globetti.

 Talking about climate doesn’t work with Congress, says Sarah Feinberg, former administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, which has oversight of Amtrak. “There are enough problems in the Northeast Corridor that you do not need to lead with climate change,” she says.

 Not long after it received the results of the climate report last year, Amtrak released its five-year strategic plan; the first item, under “threats,” was “environment/climate change.” This year’s edition made no mention of climate change. Amtrak also submits annual reports to the Carbon Disclosure Project, a nonprofit clearinghouse for the risks climate change poses to companies. Its latest report, dated this May, cited half as many risks as it had in the three previous years. Gone were the threat hurricanes would pose to demand for train service, the effect extreme temperatures would have on operating costs, and the expectation that sea level rise would require increased capital.

 Leeds attributed the removal of climate change from the five-year plan to an “editing error,” (Following Bloomberg’s inquiry, Amtrak added “environment/climate change” to that plan’s list of threats.) She also said Amtrak’s decision to identify fewer climate impacts in its carbon disclosure “was based on how resource-intensive the CDP reporting process is and does not represent a decrease in potential impacts.”
Gardner, the Amtrak executive, says the company is taking a piecemeal approach to managing climate risk. “This is about, as we recapitalize those assets, how do we put them in a resilient position for the future,” he said. But if the Northeast Corridor starts to go underwater, Gardner added, Amtrak won’t be the only entity with an issue. “We’re in the heart of all our cities,” Gardner said. “If there’s a risk, there’s a risk to much more than us.”
Posted by The Business Side of Green at 4:14 AM 0 comments

Thursday, December 20, 2018

Nine states and DC agree to create cap-and-trade program for transportation/Washington Examiner

This is great news and another very good example of states taking the lead in the "business side of green"  For too long we've been limited on an important tool to use in economic development (at least here in the US)...cap-and-trade.  The Northeast once again takes the lead.
Nine Northeastern states and Washington, D.C., announced Tuesday that they will attempt to create a regional cap-and-trade program to limit emissions from transportation, the nation’s largest source of carbon pollution.
The partners agreed to create a system within a year that caps the region’s transportation emissions and sets up a market of pollution permits so entities can trade in auctions for the right to emit carbon.
The agreement contains little detail, such as which types of entities would be regulated and have to trade in pollution permits.
The revenue from putting a price on transportation fuels would go to investments in “low-carbon and more resilient transportation infrastructure” such as mass transit, electric buses, and electric vehicle charging stations.
The states participating in the initiative with D.C. are Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia.
“Emissions from transportation account for the largest portion of the region’s carbon pollution and ambitious reductions are needed within the next decade to avoid dangerous impacts to public health, infrastructure, and the environment,” the states said in a statement. “Advancing low-carbon transportation solutions presents an opportunity for our region to improve the way people and goods move from place to place while addressing the threats posed by carbon and other pollution.”
About 28 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation, recently passing the power sector as the most polluting. Reducing emissions from transportation is considered more difficult because it would require consumers to shift away from gasoline-powered vehicles to electric ones.
The Trump administration has also proposed relaxing stringent fuel efficiency standards for vehicles set by the Obama administration, which, if finalized, is expected to further discourage cleaner vehicles.
In the power sector, emissions have decreased significantly in the U.S. because cleaner energy sources such as natural gas and renewables have replaced coal due to falling costs.
“We don't have the same degree of cost-effective alternatives for transportation as we do in the power sector,” Noah Kaufman, an economist at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy who studies carbon pricing, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s not as simple as switching from coal to natural gas and renewables. We still need the cost of alternatives to fall to compete with internal combustion vehicles. It’s about changing consumer behavior, which is more difficult.”
The new transportation partnership is modeled after a similar cap-and-trade programestablished by Northeastern states in 2009 targeting carbon emissions in the power sector.
That pact, called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, includes six of the nine states that signed the transportation agreement: Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Under that plan, regional emissions are to be capped at about 78.2 million tons of carbon dioxide per year in 2020 and reduced to roughly 55.7 million tons in 2030. That 2030 goal represents a 65 percent drop from 2009 levels.
Posted by The Business Side of Green at 4:21 AM 0 comments
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