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One of the coolest visions for solar energy we’ve ever seen comes from the “Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation” website (http://www.trecers.net/). They want to build an ultra high-efficiency DC (direct current) power grid across the deserts of the middle east and africa upwards throughout Europe including offshore windfarms. Here’s the heart of their plan, taken from their concept page (http://www.trecers.net/concept.html):

Photo: Trans-Mediterranian Energy Cooperation U.K.

“Satellite-based studies by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) have shown that, using less than 0.3% of the entire desert areas of the MENA region, Solar Thermal Power Plants can generate enough electricity to supply current demands in EU-MENA, and anticipated increases in those demands in the future. In addition, it has potential to alleviate shortages of fresh water in the MENA regions. The trade winds of southern Morocco may be harnessed to generate additional supplies of electricity. Clean electricity can be transmitted via High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) transmission lines throughout EU-MENA with overall transmission losses that would be no more than 10-15%.”

What the TREC folks are referring to with the term “EU-MENA” is the regions of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. The idea that the Saharan sunlight can power all of Europe is only half the story. This power can also be used to pump water from the Ubangi river in the north of the Congo basin northwards over (or through) the hills into the Lake Chad basin. New forests can grow in lands watered by pumps powered by the sun. And Lake Chad, like the Aral Sea (also ref. “Artic to Aral”), will be refilled.

TREC advocates solar thermal power, quite rightly pointing out that thermal energy can be stored in fluids and released 24 hours per day, not just when the sun is shining. But advances in photovoltaic energy may yield arrays consuming about half the space of solar thermal installations with lower costs for installation and maintenance. There are hybrid designs using photovoltaic thermal collectors that can achieve even higher efficiencies of cost and output per square foot.

It is in their faith in the eventual abundance of clean electric power, combined with their call for a revolutionary high-power DC transmission line (read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC) that could use and reinforce existing grids, that makes the TREC folks inspiring visionaries. What a great project, and how else to power the world if you really want to lose the gas?

The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is due in complete form in a few months, but the “Summary for Policymakers” was released last week. The general consensus from environmental activists, along with the media and nearly all politicians can be summed up as this: “The ‘question mark’ has been removed; fossil fuels are causing global warming.”

Corn for Ethanol – uncritical support for biofuel may win the Iowa primary, but may also destroy the planet via deforestation

There are many questions raised by this report and the reactions to it. For example, why don’t any commentators note that the report has pretty much dismissed the danger of sea level rise – since the new projection is one foot per century?

The biggest question, however, is why has the IPCC 2007 summary minimized or ignored the impact other factors may have on global warming – factors that have nothing to do with burning of fossil fuel?

The IPCC report claims that up to 27.5 GtCO2 per year originate from burning of fossil fuel, and up to 9.9 GtCO2 per year originate from “land use change.” This suggests that up to 26% of anthropogenic CO2 comes from “land use change,” which one may assume is associated with deforestation. And it is fair to say that the primary driver of deforestation today is the mad rush to establish biofuel plantations where tropical rainforests currently stand.

What also isn’t mentioned in the IPCC summary is that deforestation not only releases of vast quantities of CO2 as trees are removed and burned, but also causes a permanent loss of CO2 uptake capacity. Tropical forests, which flourish year-round, are far more efficient at removing CO2 from the atmosphere than the more extensive forests in the northern latitudes. Also receiving scant mention in the IPCC summary is the “surface albedo” and “cloud albedo” effects, which cool the planet, and which are directly undermined by deforestation, especially in the tropics. Worldwide, tropical rainforest area has declined from over 7 million square miles to less than 3 million square miles – a decline equivalent to nearly 10% of the land surface of the planet.

Also given short shrift in the IPCC summary is the impact of volcanic aerosols on radiative forcing (initial cooling from particulates, long-term warming from gas emissions), which are not included “due to their episodic nature.” In general, the role of non-anthropogenic CO2 is not given much attention by the IPCC, in spite of the fact that the numbers are far, far greater.

If you doubt the role non-anthropogenic CO2 emissions have on atmospheric CO2 levels, there is an interesting study entitled “Why Does Atmospheric CO2 Rise,” authored by Jan Schloerer at the University of Ulm. It remains the best source we can find to reveal global estimates of CO2 emissions, uptake, and reservoirs. In this study, Schloerer states “Natural CO2 fluxes into and out of the atmosphere exceed the human contribution by more than an order of magnitude.”

If you go to section 3.2 of Schloerer’s study, you will see that there are 38,000 gigatons of CO2 sequestered in the deep ocean. As the earth warms, this CO2 is released. The magnitude of this release, impossible to monitor, easily dwarfs whatever quantity of CO2 we can emit using fossil fuel.

The momentum building to do whatever it takes to curtail fossil fuel emissions is ludicrous for a variety of reasons – that deforestation (now in full swing again in order to grow “carbon neutral biofuel) may be the actual cause of any alleged global warming is only one of them. Another is the futility of quickly ending our dependence on fossil fuel. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, human civilization currently consumes just about 500 quadrillion BTUs of energy each year – and 78% of that energy comes from coal, oil, and natural gas.

Even with greatly improved “energy intensity,” the growth of the world economy absolutely requires total energy production to rise over the coming decades. If per capita energy consumption on the entire planet were only half what the most energy efficient developed nations currently consume, i.e., if energy intensity on the planet were to improve to twice where it now stands in the best cases, for everyone on earth to have a standard of living equivalent to the average represented by the 30 wealthiest nations, energy production on earth would still have to double (ref. “The Good, the Bad, & the BTU’s”).

While non-fossil fuel energy production worldwide stands at about 100 quadrillion BTU’s per year, or 22% of total production, this is almost exclusively comprised of hydroelectric power, nuclear power, and biofuel. Not only are these power sources problematic to many environmentalists, there are upper bounds to how much more of the world’s energy production they can represent. The remaining renewables, primarily geothermal, photovoltaic and wind power, currently constitute well less than 1% of global energy production.

Fossil fuel is here to stay. And the enemies of fossil fuel, the global warming alarmists, are acquiring power in politics and media that any student of history should find frightening. Their prescriptions so far – banning various forms of energy consumption and condoning massive new rounds of deforestation – may very well do more harm than good. Combatting global warming, should it really be a problem, might begin through initiatives to immediately double the tropical rainforest canopy on earth.

Biofuel today is produced, overwhelmingly, from oil palms and sugar cane, and overwhelmingly, these plantations stand where tropical rainforest recently stood. Over a year ago, a well-documented essay entitled “Worse Than Fossil Fuel,” was published in the London Guardian by George Monbiot, an environmental activist and professor at Oxford-Brookes University in the U.K. In this article, Monbiot states “Between 1985 and 2000 the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia. In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest has been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares is scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5m in Indonesia.”

One square mile is equivalent to 250 hectares. So using these figures, in just two countries, deforestation for biofuel will result in the loss of at least 100,000 square miles of rainforest. Along the West African coast and in the Congo basin, similar rates of deforestation are occuring in a mad rush to grow Cassava and Oil Palm. In Brazil, deforestation for sugar cane continues to accelerate.

According to a study entitled “Biodiversity and Conservation” published by Peter J. Bryant, a professor at U.C. Irvine, by 1979, tropical rainforests had shrunk from 6.2 million square miles to 3.6 million square miles. And about that time, beginning in the Amazon, deforestation for production of biofuel began to compete with deforestation for purposes of logging and ranching. Today, tropical rainforests are reduced to 2.5 million square miles, and thanks to the biofuel bonanza, there is no end in sight. Here’s another excerpt from Monbiot’s essay:

“Before oil palms, which are small and scrubby, are planted, vast forest trees, containing a much greater store of carbon, must be felled and burnt. Having used up the drier lands, the plantations are now moving into the swamp forests, which grow on peat. When they’ve cut the trees, the planters drain the ground. As the peat dries it oxidises, releasing even more carbon dioxide than the trees. In terms of its impact on both the local and global environments, palm biodiesel is more destructive than crude oil from Nigeria.”

It is well and good to consider biofuel farmed from algae grown in ponds in the desert, or within enclosed “bioreactors,” or, perhaps, from cellusosic fibers found in agricultural waste. But none of these methods are yet financially viable, or even technically feasible. Meanwhile, the burning season has begun again, this time fueled by biofuel mania, with results that spell tragedy not only for the biota in these precious places, but also in terms of intensified droughts and less CO2 uptake. As we have argued before and will again, tropical deforestation may have more to do with whatever global warming we may be experiencing than burning of fossil fuel. So where are the environmentalists and the skeptics when you need them?

Here is how Monbiot put it, when describing the reaction to his concerns about biofuel: “The biodiesel missionaries, I discovered, are as vociferous in their denial as the executives of Exxon.”

To our knowledge the biggest operator in the USA of commercial scale plants that create fuel from animal waste is Changing World Technologies, headquartered in West Hempstead, New York. This company has a plant in Carthage, Missouri, that in April 2006 produced 6,000 barrels of diesel fuel. The plant uses turkey offal as the feedstock, in a joint venture with Conagra’s massive Butterball turkey processing plant.

Today I had the opportunity to talk with Brian Appel, Chairman of Changing World Technologies, and I asked him whether or not this plant was continuing to produce at that volume. Appel declined to provide recent production figures but confirmed that the plant was operating normally and that 6,000 barrels per month was less than full capacity. The Carthage facility is a commercial scale pilot plant producing fuel from waste, and it is the largest of its kind currently in the United States.

Changing World Technologies also has a pilot plant getting started in Philadelphia, processing shredder residue from recycled automobiles. In this case, the plant is recovering the metals from the cars, as well as recovering oil from the plastics that were in the car. This plant is also the first of its kind in the U.S.

Thermal depolymerization is a method used to separate long molecular chains into shorter ones, using water and heat inputs. It is a fairly complex process that has only recently evolved to the point where it can become commercially viable, and only within the last 20 years had the technology evolved to the point where it is an energy-positive process. For much more on thermal depolymerization, go to the “what” page on Changing World Tech’s website, or go to the “thermal depolymerization” entry in Wikipedia.

There are several ways to analyse the potential of thermal depolymerization. First of all, how much feedstock is there? There are approximately 12 billion tons of solid waste produced in the USA each year, about 50% of that is agriculture, and most of the rest is municipal (land fill). Claims that 100% of this waste can be converted to fuel are open to debate, to say the least, but the point is that this material is waste – if any of this waste can be converted to fuel at a price competitive to petroleum, it should be.

Another interesting point relating to thermal depolymerization is the potential this technology may have towards helping advance the refining of cellulose to produce fuel. While the primary extraction of ethanol and diesel from food (sugar cane, corn) is a fairly well understood process, already commercially competitive in many countries, the process to convert the waste material – sawdust, crop residue, grass – is not there yet. Currently there is not a single commercial scale cellulosic ethanol refinery in the world, yet cellulose, the waste from plants, is far more abundant and would not undermine or compete with crop production for food.

What is the best case scenario possible, if all the nations of the world unite to assess CO2 consumption taxes in order to curtail CO2 emissions? Bear in mind that eliminating pollution is a reason for global warming, and if we suddenly turn clean all the coal plants of the world, circa 2006, we’re likely to ignite increasing warming by curtailing the remaining “parasol” of industrial soot that cools the world. So how will we clean our air and curtail CO2 emissions, and how will we apply a CO2 tax?

Don’t Ban Incandescents, Tax Them

The worst thing governments can do is instead of simply placing a fair tax on CO2 consumption, they ration or restrict consumption. A carbon tax only means one must pay a tax on their carbon footprint, not how they create their footprint. Instead of banning Hummers, or outlawing incandescent lights, we tax them. In any case, profligate resource use doesn’t necessarily have to have a big carbon footprint. If Hummers are made in a green-certified plant using recycled materials, and running on electricity harvested from a home photovoltaic array, they might even have a negative footprint! Don’t ban or ration anything simply based on alleged energy inefficiency, just require it is clean and price it via equitable application of carbon taxes.

Use the money collected from taxes on CO2 footprints for planting forests. Make sure biofuel crops don’t crowd out the world’s forest lungs. For every one square mile (a “section”) of certified biofuel plantation, plant two acres of forest. In the tropics, where every square mile of forest creates perennial cooling, for every one square mile of certified biofuel plantation, plant ten square miles of forest. Reforesting, especially in the tropics, will improve balanced atmospheric circulation, reducing extreme weather, and decrease the atmospheric CO2 content. The correlation between deforesting and global warming is very clear; the steady rise of CO2 levels is due to decreasing landbased (and year-round) CO2 intake due to deforestation of the tropics. This can be mitigated, using CO2 taxes as the financing mechanism.

Photovoltaic panels now have energy paybacks of over 20-1, and are cheaper than ever. Photovoltaics are carbon tax-credit machines!

Use the money collected from taxes on CO2 footprints to pay for photovoltaic desalinization plants, and build them all over the world. Two kilowatt-hours of electricity will produce a cubic meter of desalinated seawater. Amortized over 30 years, construction costs for these plants only add costs amounting to one more kilowatt-hour of electricity per cubic meter of water – these plants are cheap and they should be built on every arid coast.

Use the money collected from taxes on CO2 footprints for massive water distribution projects. We don’t need dams, we need green dams, and the capacity to move water across continental distances. Dig tunnels for pipes, build aquaducts and pumping stations. Use water diversions and desalinated water pumped upstream to reforest areas requiring irrigation and acquifer recharge – reforest and refill and restore the Sahel and Lake Chad, the Aral Sea, the Dead Sea, Brazil, West Africa, East Africa, Indonesia, India, everywhere. Pursue reforestation/biofuel infrastructure projects on a continental scale, all over the world. As forests are restored, rainfall increases, which accelerates and compounds progress finding water sources for further reforesting. Use abundant water to reverse desertification and grow biofuel into the deserts.

By revegetating the entire planet – upgrading and increasing the level of vegetation on 10+ million square miles of the earth’s surface – we may stop global warming. We will most certainly reduce droughts. And if there is warming, more plants and forests will help alleviate earth damage from the alleged super storms that are coming.

House with straw bale walls and a metal roof Photo: BuildingGreenTV.com

Use the money collected from taxes on CO2 footprints to build green cities, that have distributed cisterns and interlinked water utilities, virtual electric power companies, and virtually no heat signature.

In the green cities of the future, there will be room for great canopy trees within suburbs, new and old, and in the urban core our new mid-rises would be terraced concrete and steel megaliths covered in verdant turf. Within green cities, build green buildings, with photovoltaic sunshades and windows, and plants covering 90% of the roof, with runoff collectors and water cisterns and batteries/diesel storage. Use CO2 tax money to build freeways for cars and smart busses to eliminate inefficient traffic congestion. Recycle water and generate distributed energy to transform each one of the world’s million-plus miles of mega-cities from heat islands into a cool, green oasis.

To cool the northern icecap, mandate extended jet flight paths to distribute aerosols over the arctic, and use CO2 tax money to figure out what sort of benign aerosol to put into commercial jet fuel (or jet afterburners). After all, if the collapse of Eastern European industry is the reason for the earth’s most immediate warming, why not reverse this by increasing aerosol emissions? Even if the oceans are warming, shouldn’t we cool and expand the northern icecap if we can?

The Global Cooling Effects of Benign Soot

Maybe with commercial air traffic there is a way to distribute global-cooling aerosols over the northern icecap.

For that matter, if it would help, maybe we could light some artificial volcano with relatively benign but highly cooling aerosols, and let it burn for a few months in just the right spot on the tradewinds. To discuss intentionally increasing aerosol deposition is not madness nor a reckless compromise, rather it is to believe in the need to solve global warming, not just do anything for the cause.

CO2 taxes will fund watering the world, reforesting the world, greening the cities of the world, and indeed they may reverse or help manage global warming. Hopefully CO2 taxes will be fairly applied, not punitively. Hopefully they will be invested wisely. The nations of the world can unite to cool and green the planet without rationing Hummers, or banning incandescent lights – profligate resource use can still be clean and green and carbon negative and profitable and should not be discouraged.

About the Author: Edward “Redwood” Ring is the Editor of EcoWorld (www.ecoworld.com). In his spare time he grows redwood trees.