The Oyster’s Garter

There is no place on earth, no matter how remote, untouched by humans. We are mighty: we can trawl the deep, explore the South Pole, and fish every single island in the South Pacific. But as every young nerdling knows, with great power comes great responsibility. “The Managed World” series in the Oyster’s Garter explores the hard choices that come from a human-dominated world.

Science Magazine reports that the UK is pondering the world’s biggest tidal power generator. The Severn estuary, which separates southwest England from south Wales, has the second-biggest tidal flux in the world - the water rises and falls 45 feet (15 meters) between high tide and low tide. That’s a huge amount of power, and Britain wants to builf a tidal dam, or “barrage”,  to capture it.

A barrage is a huge dam, similar to a hydroelectric dam, built across an estuary. The Severn barrage is designed to let water freely flow into the estuary through sluice gates, which would then close to impound water in the estuary. The water would then slowly be let out through turbines.  Locks can be built to let ships through, but there’s no channel for water critters except through the turbines.

The ecological impacts could be vast and devastating. Over 68,000 birds overwinter in the Severn estuary, feeding from mudflats at low tide and sheltering in marshes. The barrage would essentially eliminate low tide, flooding these habitats and making them unavailable to birds. Also, many species of fish and invertebrates migrate into estuaries to breed, and the barrage could either prevent adults from migrating in or trap the larvae inside. Because of these vast negative impacts, it’s not surprising that Britain’s largest environmental groups have rejected the Severn barrage plan.

However, there’s no way the UK will be able to meet the EU’s goal of 15% renewable energy by 2020 without some drastic changes. Currently, only 5% of the UK’s current power is renewable. The Severn barrage alone would provide another 5% of the UK’s total energy, in reliable, carbon-free, and low-maintenance form. The only comparable barrage, the La Rance Tidal Power Plant in France, has been in operation for 40 years without a breakdown. This type of cheap, reliable, carbon-free power is pretty tantalizing, even at a hefty construction cost of £15 billion and the abovementioned environmental costs.

So again, well-intentioned people have to choose - carbon-free energy, or giant critical habitat estuary? This is the that we must reduce emissions - we are already surpassing the IPCC worst case scenario. But estuaries are critical habitat for hundreds of thousands of species and provide important ecosystem services such as flood control and pollution filtration.

One potential angle that I did not see discussed in my uncomprehensive readup on the Severn barrage is the potential for estuaries to act as carbon sinks. Because estuaries (and mud flats) have little oxygen in their soil, plant matter gets buried and doesn’t decompose for a long, long time. How much carbon is buried in the Severn estuary, and would the barrage release it? This might be one way to decide whether the energy generated by the Severn barrage would be worth the ecological damage.

Imagine it: Paintable solar panels! Not yet, of course, but scientists at several universities have discovered ways to put chemicals into paint that would generate electricity. The theory is simple: paint fades with sunlight, right? Therefore, the paint is already reacting to the sunlight in some way. The trick then is to use the energy getting dumped into the paint and convert it into electricity.

Here are a couple of companies and scientists with more specific applications:

* Nanosolar, in sunny California, has devised a kind of film that can be applied directly to steel. They’re not profitable yet, but they began commercial production in November.

• Scientists at the University of Swansea, in jolly old England, have invented a kind of paste that can be rolled onto steel panels of the sort that’s often used for bridges, and similar to aluminum siding. They think they’re 2.5 years away from mass production.

• Our friends to the north, or in my case to the north east, at the University of Toronto, has devised a way to capture specific wavelengths of light using “quantum dots”. I’m not certain of the technology here, but Ted Sargent, the primary investigator, thinks he can tune his dots so they capture specific wavelengths of light, including the infrared spectrum, a part of the suns energy that no solar cells currently capture. He thinks he can put the dots into paint that we could spray on to any surface. He’s a good decade away from production, but I can already envision great, electricity generating murals painted onto the sides of buildings.

My question that remains unanswered for all of these, though, is I’m not clear how the engineers actually extract the charged up electrons from the paint. Do you just attach some copper wire to it or something? Any engineers out there have a guess?

[Via Treehugger, and thanks to inhabitat for the picture.]

In the future, your plastic drink bottles and plastic computer cases could be made out of smokestack emissions. At least, that’s what Science Daily says about news from the American Chemical Society meeting. Chemists are very excited about using carbon dioxide emissions as a raw material for making polycarbonate plastic. One of the authors of the report, Thomas Muller, said, “Using CO₂ to create polycarbonates might not solve the total carbon dioxide problem, but it could be a significant contribution.”

It’s tempting to snort “Oh, great, MORE cheap plastic crap.” In fact, as I was writing this, there was significant cynical snortage. But a solution that a) makes it economically desirable to reduce the amount of emissions going into the atmosphere; and b) turns something harmful into something useful is a good solution in my book. It’s not the Magical Fix-Everything Plan that puts a unicorn in every pot - obviously, as the state of the North Pacific Gyre demonstrates, we’ve got to get a lot better about reusing and recycling the plastic that we’ve already got. But wouldn’t it be neat to have a DVD made out of smoke?

In so much as biofuels are a good idea, they’re a really good idea for jets. Jet engines produce vast amounts of carbon (A gallon of jet fuel gives off 21 lbs of Co2) but there’s no alternative when you want to visit your dear old grammy who lives on the opposite coast. So the headlines about Virgin Atlantic running an actual test flight powered by coconut- and palm oil-based fuel had me gleefully reaching for the “O frabjous day!” category for this post. Alas. The 747 Virgin used to fly from London to Amsterdam has four tanks, three of which were nothing but regular jet fuel, and the fourth of which was 80% jet fuel and 20% coconut biofuel. So really the flight was 5% biofuel, which means that proportionally it flew 11 miles on coconuts, roughly from London to, err …London.

Even Virgin Atlantic owner Richard Branson himself admits that coconut-based biofuels won’t power the future air fleet. The world couldn’t possibly produce enough coconuts to fly the Monty Python troop to Camelot, let alone the entire world fleet, and the movers and shakers are starting to realize it’s probably not a great idea to use food for fuel anyway. Branson wants to extract energy from the thorny jatropha plant, which grows on non-arable land in South America., and I found a goofy company that thinks they can filter oxygen out of the air, while flying, and burn it as fuel immediately. But we all know the better answer: Poop fuel!

The Beagle Project reports that a French wine exporter will begin to transport goods by tall ship - a three-masted barque, to be exact. The Belem, was originally launched in 1896, and was the last French merchant sailing vessel to be built. (Here’s the ship’s official webpage- beware silly music.) Now the Belem has a new life transporting French wine to Ireland, at a carbon savings of 4.9 oz per bottle, or 18,375 lb per 60,000 bottle cargo. To make the operation even more sustainable, ships will return with a cargo of crushed glass for recycling into new wine bottles.

Tall ships are so beautiful that it warms my crusty cynical heart to see them making a comeback, no matter how small. Tacking a sail onto a container ship, though useful, just isn’t the same. Maybe this is the beginning of a reversal of the Last Shanty?

If you’re concerned about climate change and into gardening, Project Budburst is for you. They are soliciting “citizen-scientists” to participate in a huge nationwide study on phenology, which is the timing of seasonal events, like the first bud or the first full leaf. (Not to be confused with phrenology, the study of bumpy heads.)

Phenology sounds obscure, but it’s absolutely critical to healthy ecosystems. For example, many insects are evolved to hatch at a certain time of year, just in time to eat freshly grown plants. If they hatch too early or too late, no food for them, and that year’s whole generation can be die of starvation. This also happens in the ocean, where seasonal plankton blooms feed tiny crustaceans which feed fish we like to eat, like pollock.

Each volunteer will select at least one plant to observe, and enter all the seasonal data online. Eventually, all the data from Project Budburst will be combined in a big map, and data will be free to download. Here’s a news release with more info.

Planktos, the science-deficient private company that wanted to fertilize the oceans with iron, has gone out of business. Plankos was notable for the inanity of its arguments and the belligerence of its CEO. In fact, they couldn’t resist one parting shot, blaming their bankruptcy on ” a highly effective disinformation campaign waged by anti-offset crusaders.” How very shocking!

Thanks to Rick for the heads-up and the high-five! Now let’s keep our beady little crusader eyeballs on Australia’s Ocean Nourishment Company, which is apparently still in the urea-dumping business.

When Miriam and I moved in 2006, we used over 100 cardboard boxes and some ungodly quantity of packing materials and duck tape (You know - it’s for ducks). In fact, combined with the fuel emissions produced by the truck hauling our belongings cross-country and the jet flight to San Diego, moving may have been the most environmentally harmful thing I’ve ever done.

Well, they can’t reduce the carbon emissions from jet fuel (yet), but the fellows at Earth Friendly Moving can at least save us the boxes problem. They make plastic moving boxes out materials they take out of the landfill, and they rent them out to customers for a buck a week a box, plus delivery fee. They also make a packing material composed mostly out of recycled paper pulp, and they drop off and pick up the boxes in their bio-diesel trucks. They even stack the boxes for delivery on a pallet made of recycled used diapers (They call it the Poopy Pallet. Yay Poop Power!). The founders, Spencer Brown and Brian Anton, claim that for ever 100 boxes they make, 256 pounds of landfill is removed, and it saves three trees.

The price is pretty reasonable, too. The cheapest deal I found with a quick Froogle search lead me to a supplier charging $1.58 per large box. On our last move we used over 100 boxes, but let’s call it 100 for the roundness of the number (nice, round zeros, like donuts, ahhhh…). So, at the high end delivery fee, we’re paying $2 a box, but we can feel good about ourselves. At the low end we’re paying $1.20 a box, so we get to feel good about ourselves AND save money. As good old Hannibal Smith said, I love it when a plan comes together.

(Thanks for the tip, Anna!)

I’ve often mentioned my love for apocalyptic fiction. Now I can get my fix from reality. The Center for Strategic and International Studies released a new report entitled “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change.” It envisions three scenarios: “expected,” “severe”, and “catastrophic.” I haven’t read the whole report yet, so here’s Real Climate’s summary with my comments:
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Unlike many scientists, I embrace doom & gloom. It probably has something to do with being a Jewish New Hampshirite - the combination of “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God” and “Jews in the Hands of an Angry Pogram” doesn’t make for the cheeriness. Maybe I’ll start a weekly Doom feature. In the meantime, have some more tasty doom!

• Estimates of sea level rise may be too low. A new study in Nature found that if global temperature rose 2 degrees C, sea level would rise 4-6 meters (12-18 feet). Eeep! That’s a up to a 1.5 meter (5 foot) rise per century! New York isn’t looking so healthy with just a 0.7 (2 foot) rise. Not my bagels! My precious bagels!
• Pacific salmon are swimming around Argentina and invading the southern Atlantic, probably aided by massive salmon farming operations in Chile. Since salmon are hungry mofos, they could starve out Magellanic penguins in Patagonia. This is somewhat ironic due to Atlantic salmon causing trouble in the North Pacific. Maybe they’ll make it home as the ice melts and the Northwest Passage grows.
• In preparation for the inevitable apocalypse (which may or may not be related to zombies), crop seeds from all around the world are being stored in Svalbard, off Norway. The Svalbard global seed vault is set to open in February 2008.
• And finally, is humanity doomed? A paper in Nature considers the probability of overpopulation, giant asteroids, and the extinction of the sun.

Er, Happy New Year!