Poop is good for a lot of things: throwing at your sister, lighting your neighborhood park, and powering everything from your house and spaceship to your nearest sewage plant and margarita machine (how that last one is different from a blender, I don’t know). And now Southwest Spain town Chiclana de la Frontera is adding “fueling your car” to that list.
It’s not as simple or quaint as just cramming crap into your fuel tank. Essentially, poopy water plus sunlight equals algae, which is the basis of the biofuel that actually runs your car. According to Reuters:
The project in Chiclana, called All-gas to sound like “algas” or seaweed in Spanish, seeks to … [become] the first municipal wastewater plant using cultivated algae as a source for biofuel.
While industries such as breweries or paper mills have produced biogas from wastewater for their own energy needs, All-gas is the first to grow algae from sewage in a systematic way to produce a net export of bioenergy, including vehicle biofuel.
[O]nce out of the pilot phase, the plant should be able to produce enough fuel to run 200 cars annually. On top of creating clean fuel, the plant is also cheaper than a conventional sewage plant, making it doubly good for the town.
In order to create the fuel, the plant requires a lot of land — about 10 football fields when all is said and done — and a lot of sunshine. Chiclana de la Frontera fits the bill perfectly because of its sunny location and abundant land. Other cities in southern Spain have their eye on the project, and at least 300 other small towns have been identified that would also be ideal sites for a plant.
Does this mean even poop is a cleaner energy source than coal? Because that’s pretty awesome.
I’ve mostly been offering modest praise for Obama’s climate plan, but there are some notable oversights. While it addresses U.S. coal-fired plants through EPA regulations, it neglects another, equally large aspect of the coal problem. Specifically, I’m talking about coal mining, leasing, transport, and export in the U.S. Northwest. There’s a bad situation there and it’s getting worse.
The Powder River Basin stretches across southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming. It is rich with high-sulfur (dirty) coal. Most of that coal is on public land, owned by you and me. What you and I are doing at the moment, via the Bureau of Land Management in the Department of the Interior, is leasing the mineral rights on those public lands to coal companies for pennies on the dollar.
Domestic demand for coal is declining (and will decline further once EPA regulations are in place), so what these coal companies want to do is start shipping the coal by rail to the West Coast and from there exporting it to China and other coal-hungry developing countries, where it sells for prices up to seven times higher than in the U.S.
It’s a sweet deal for the coal companies: buy low, sell high. But it’s a raw deal for everyone else and a disaster for the climate.
Joe Smyth has a great post about the rotten coal-leasing program here, and I wrote about the push for coal-export terminals here. There’s lots of background in those posts if you want it. In this post, I’ll mostly focus on the topic at hand, which is what Obama can and should do about it.
First, the coal-leasing program. A recent report from the Inspector General at Interior revealed that the program is (or rather, remains, after decades of corruption [PDF]) terribly run, with spotty enforcement, very little competitive bidding, disregard of rising exports, and prices that fall well below going market rates. Overall, writes The New York Times, the program’s failures “deprived taxpayers of almost $30 billion over the previous 30 years.”
The BLM says it has a “task force” looking into it, for whatever that’s worth. Obama should make it a priority to finally clean up that cesspool.
But he should go farther than that. The problem is not just that the public is leasing coal at below-market rates, it’s that market rates are too low. Coal markets do not currently internalize the costs imposed by carbon pollution (the “social cost of carbon”). Obama should insist that the social cost of carbon be integrated into the leasing program. That would more fairly balance the public’s interest in revenue from leases with its interest in a livable climate. Such a move would substantially reduce the the amount of coal leased on public land — as it should.
Second, coal exports. “Turning Cascadia into a conveyor belt for coal,” as KC Golden puts it, flies in the face of the region’s character as a nature-rich tourist destination and as a high-skill, high-tech hub. Dozens of new coal trains a day would thunder through the region’s small towns (and my beloved Seattle as well), making noise, clogging traffic, and spewing toxic dust. The coal would then be loaded on to giant, polluting ships in giant, polluting ports, turning the bucolic coastal towns where they are located into loud, dirty industrial hubs. All to ship coal the American public got scammed out of to China, where it will be burned and accelerate climate change.
It’s insane. And it’s running into resistance that may prove fatal. Three of the six proposed coal export terminals have been scrapped and the others face serious problems. Delay alone could kill the remaining ports, as there are signs that China’s demand for coal may fall short of expectations. News of slowing Chinese growth is part of what sent coal stocks tumbling the other day.
What’s needed is a comprehensive environmental assessment of the whole network of coal leases, trains, and ports, an assessment that includes the effects on carbon emissions. (Preliminary analysis shows that — shocker — exporting the coal would raise carbon emissions [PDF].) Only the feds can do that kind of analysis. The governors of both Washington and Oregon have asked the feds for one, as have mayors, members of Congress, and activists. But just the other day, the Army Corps of Engineers refused (again). That’s Obama’s corps. He should kick their asses into gear and get a comprehensive assessment underway.
Remember what Obama said about Keystone: “Our national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” How does turning over one of the world’s biggest dirty coal fields to private companies for cheap not exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution?
Of course it does. Digging up and burning that Powder River Basin coal will put enough carbon in the atmosphere to undo all of Obama’s other climate work.
If Obama really believes, as he proclaimed on Tuesday, that increasing climate pollution is not in the nation’s interests, then he needs to get serious about stopping coal leasing and coal exports in the Northwest.
At last, President Obama has tackled climate change and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a major speech. Recognizing that power plants are a huge source of unchecked CO2, the President is directing EPA to complete CO2 emission standards for new and existing power plants. Given that reducing emissions will require replacing a significant amount of fossil-fueled power generation with carbon neutral renewable power, clean energy advocates wonder what the Administration’s plans mean for biomass energy, the combustion of biological materials in power plants, instead of fossil fuels.
We already know what EPA is considering as a standard for new fossil fueled power plants – 1,000 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour (MWh), a standard that is difficult if not impossible for a coal plant to meet. What about biomass energy? Start with the simple fact that a biomass power plant emits about 3,000 lb of CO2 per MWh, far more than even a coal plant. Beyond that, the biomass power plants being built in the US are primarily wood-burners, with a typical 50 MW facility (tiny by coal plant standards) burning the equivalent of millions of trees per year. Cutting forests for fuel degrades forest carbon uptake, and transporting wood fuel takes hundreds of trucks per week, driven thousands of miles, belching more CO2 and pollution. Claims that stack emissions from burning biomass don’t matter – that the CO2 is eventually neutralized by forest regrowth, or that “waste” wood burned as fuel would have eventually decomposed and emitted the CO2 anyway – are nothing more than assumptions, and unrealistic ones at that, considering that last summer the US got a taste of the climate-to-come, experiencing record-breaking temperatures, extreme weather events and massive forest fires.
Even under the best case scenario, where forests are left alone to regrow for decades after being cut for biomass fuel, current modeling and science shows that it takes several decades to neutralize the extra CO2 emitted a biomass power plant. No serious climate scientist believes we can afford to wait decades to reduce emissions, and no serious policy-maker should promote investing billions of dollars into biomass energy infrastructure, with its deferred and hypothetical benefits of carbon reductions that are decades off, alongside wind and solar, where the reduction in CO2 emissions occurs right away.
Massachusetts recognized that biomass power plants increase emissions instead of reducing them, and took low-efficiency biomass energy out of the State’s renewable portfolio. The fact that wood-burning power plants are still considered “renewable” energy sources in the rest of the country is a testimony to the biomass industry’s lobbying clout. With CO2 emissions standards for power plants finally on the Administration’s radar, however, claims that biomass energy benefits the climate may finally bump up against reality.
Maia Bellon, director of the Washington State Department of Ecology, addresses the Tribal Habitat Conference in Port Angeles, discussing the state’s role in toxic cleanups, water quality and human health indicators among other issues.
Lummi Natural Resources staffers Tony George, left, and Ralph Phair collect a hatchery chinook salmon from a tangle net in the Nooksack River.
Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission
The Lummi Nation Natural Resources Department is conducting a pilot tangle net fishery for hatchery chinook salmon that allows natural origin fish to be released without harm.
Nooksack River early chinook are part of a major population group that must be recovering before the Puget Sound chinook listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) can be delisted.
“We’re trying to conserve all the natural origin fish by using a smaller mesh net,” said Alan Chapman, ESA coordinator for the tribe. “The fish tangle by the snout, rather than the gills or body, so they can be safely released.”
Fish from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife’s North Fork Nooksack early chinook hatchery program are marked with a clipped adipose fin and/or coded-wire tag. When a tangle net is used, tribal fishermen can harvest those fish, while releasing the wild ones.
The Lummi Nation contracted with tribal fishermen Rab Washington and Johnny Olsen to fish the small mesh net, with the assistance of natural resources staff who sort the fish, take tissue and scale samples from natural origin fish before releasing them, and take scale samples and coded-wire tag information from the retained hatchery salmon.
“We hope this pilot program will lead to a closely supervised tribal fishery so we can get back to the days our elder fishers reminisce about,” said Merle Jefferson, director of Lummi Natural Resources. “Eventually, we could use the tangle net to harvest pink salmon that haven’t been available to tribal fishermen because of chinook bycatch concerns. This will also increase fishing opportunities during the spring and summer months, and help protect the fall chinook fishery from bycatch concerns.”
The decline in salmon runs has come at a great cost to Lummi fishermen, who make up one of the largest tribal fishing fleets in the country. Increasing fishing opportunities is crucial to supporting their Schelangen, or way of life, and retaining their tribal identity.
“We need to get our kids out fishing so they can understand the way it used to be and why we do what we do,” said Randy Kinley, fisherman and Lummi policy representative. “Future leaders need to remember where we came from, as it was taught to us.”
The tangle net fishery helped the tribe get one step closer to that goal by providing all of the salmon served at the Lummi Nation’s First Salmon Ceremony in May.
“Everyone in our community had an opportunity to feast on the salmon and celebrate our culture and connection to our fishing heritage at our First Salmon Ceremony,” Jefferson said.
Nonee White, 10, shows off the treehouse behind her family’s home on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, in Montana. (Stephanie Woodard)
Stephanie Woodard, Indian Country Today Media Network
“Trees offer food, shelter, shade and privacy; they control erosion and air pollution, and they’re beautiful,” said Ryhal Rowland, extension agent for the Northern Cheyenne Extension Service, in Lame Deer, Montana. The service was finishing up its annual spring tree and shrub extravaganza, during which it sold 2,700 plants for copy each.
“Most people bought 10 to 20 seedlings, and we provided them with planting and care instructions—siting, spacing, soil preparation, watering and so on,” said the service’s administrative assistant Pamela Dahl. Lilacs have always been a favorite with the older generation, Dahl said. “They’re still top sellers, along with crabapple trees and chokecherry and juneberry bushes.”
Hunkpati gardens coordinator Billy Joe Sazue and director Corrie Ann Campbell in Crow Creek Sioux Tribe’s new orchard, planted this past April on land in Fort Thompson, South Dakota, provided by Christ Episcopal Church, seen at rear. (Stephanie Woodard)
After years of intensive planting of flowering and fruiting plants, the Northern Cheyenne homeland is covered in spring and summer with clouds of fragrant lavender, purple, pink and white blossoms. Several miles from Lame Deer, an ornamental cherry tree presided over Patricia and Richard Rowland’s yard, which was bounded by hedges of mature lilacs and a grove of crabapple trees. Similar uplifting sights abounded— lyrical embellishments of the dramatic landscape of craggy mountains and broad green valleys.
As warm weather arrives across the country, extension services, tribal forestry departments and funders such as First Nations Development Institute and the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation are helping tribal members put in trees of all types. According to First Nations senior program officer Raymond Foxworth, the group has assisted new or established orchards for the Oneidas of Wisconsin, the Hopi and Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College. “Our grantees distribute fruit and information about healthy eating within their communities, as well as bring produce to market,” Foxworth said.
Through its Trees for Tribes program, the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation has installed orchards on dozens of tribal homelands and even used helicopters to airlift plants into the Havasupai Tribe’s remote village at the base of the Grand Canyon. The foundation collaborates with local groups and individuals, according to director Cem Akin. “That way, advocates for the orchards remain as the trees mature,” said Akin.
On the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, Akin’s foundation recently established five orchards. Under the direction of arborist Rico Montenegro, tribal members planted phalanxes of young trees at schools and community organizations. The lead local partner was Earth Tipi—a sustainable-living nonprofit in Manderson and the site of the fruit-tree foundation’s first Pine Ridge project, in 2011.
Ryhal Rowland, director of the Northern Cheyenne Extension Service, lends a hand, as Rhonda Sankey plants blue spruce near her home on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, in Montana. (Stephanie Woodard)
Robert Brave Heart, an official at Red Cloud Indian School, one of the five new sites, called Pine Ridge a “food desert” and said the trees would become a critical community resource. “None of us will sell the fruit,” explained Earth Tipi director Shannon Freed, but rather will manage pick-your-own operations, a requirement of the foundation.
In Lame Deer, Rowland, who is Northern Cheyenne, checked in with Rhonda Sankey, as she mixed peat moss and soil and got ready to plant 10 newly purchased blue spruces. Sankey eyed a row of holes in her lawn: “My kids helped dig the row. I guess it’s straight!”
While individuals like Sankey were enhancing their homesites, the tribal forestry department was replanting ponderosa pines on the thousands of reservation acres burnt by last year’s forest fires, said Rowland. “The fires were horrendous, terrifying, the worst in living memory. It’ll take years to replant.” At 30 cents per tree, the springtime reforestation job is a good gig for tribal members, who can typically plant 1,000 trees a day, earning $300, she said: “For some, it’s the only income they’ll have all year.”
Looking at the hills surrounding her yard, Sankey, who is Blackfeet, recalled the damage. “The fire came just to the top of them. This side looks normal, but the other side is completely charred.”
A 20-year-old crabapple grove graces a yard on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, in southeastern Montana. (Stephanie Woodard)
Sankey lifted the bare-root spruces from a basket of peat moss, tucked them into their new homes and surrounded each with a wire cage to protect it from marauding animals. She and Rowland shared gardeners’ war stories of cats and dogs gnawing on small trees, goats making a meal of them and horses simply yanking them out of the ground. “My goats ate the lilacs I put in last year,” Sankey recalled ruefully.
The spruces will do well, not least because the area’s soil is so good. “A river once ran through here, so the soil is very rich,” explained Sankey. “These seedlings will grow nearly a foot a year and within five years will screen the house from the road.”
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a fruit tree! Fruit Tree Planting Foundation used a helicopter to airlift trees to the Havasupai tribe, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, in Arizona. (Courtesy Fruit Tree Planting Foundation)
On the Crow Creek Indian Reservation, in South Dakota, a brand-new orchard is taking root with support from First Nations Development Initiative. In April, a hardy group gathered in Fort Thompson just after the season’s last big snowstorm to plant 200 trees and 70-plus shrubs, including traditional favorites such as wild plums, chokecherries and buffalo berries. They went in on land provided by nearby Christ Episcopal Church.
The tree enthusiasts donned parkas and boots to dig and plant, with tribal chairman Brandon Sazue leading the way. “Putting in the first tree was an honor for me,” said Sazue. “It was a cold, foggy day, but everyone was out there. It showed lots of dedication, and I thanked them for the job they were doing.”
That spring day may have been surprisingly chilly and wet, but the snowfall got the reservation out of drought status—just barely, but a welcome change from the past several parched years, said Billy Joe Sazue, coordinator of the gardens program, part of local community development group Hunkpati Investments. According to Sazue, the trees will bear fruit in three to five years, with the berry bushes probably producing sooner than that. “It’s all about healthy food and eating,” he said.
Ryhal Rowland, director of the Northern Cheyenne Extension Service, checks lilac blooms in her grandparents’ yard for frost damage. (Stephanie Woodard)
Much planning—from researching suitable plant varieties to designing the irrigation system—preceded planting day, said Hunkpati’s new director, Corrie Ann Campbell. Joining Hunkpati and First Nations in the preparations were tribal members, the tribal council, Diamond Willow Ministries, additional churches, Boys and Girls Club of Three Districts, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Indian Health Service and nearby Lower Brule Sioux Tribe’s wildlife department. “We were blessed to have so many great partners,” said Krystal Langholz, former director of Hunkpati, on whose watch the orchard was conceived and planted.
Said Campbell: “The orchard is one of many positive changes in the way people at Crow Creek view nutrition, exercise and health.”
Trees provide everything from fruit to an opportunity to mobilize a community, according to Akin: “Their energy is healing. Trees do it all.”
Sigh. You think the world would have caught on by now that plastic is one of the most incidentally destructive inventions the human race has ever come up with. Sure, L.A. just banned plastic bags, which is great. But meanwhile those tiny microbeads — the little bits of plastics in body wash that cosmetics companies invented for no real reason except to have a new thing to sell their customers — are slowly accumulating in the Great Lakes, where fish eat them.
They are too tiny for water treatment plants to filter, so they wash down the drain and into the Great Lakes. The biggest worry: fish such as yellow perch or turtles and seagulls think of them as dinner. If fish or birds eat the inert beads, the material can deprive them of nutrients from real food or get lodged in their stomachs or intestines, blocking digestive systems.
I know, I know. But your skin feels so soft! (Does it? Does it reeeeallly?) Well, don’t worry: Soon you’ll probably be able to buy “natural” mud from the Great Lakes that’s full of the same exact exfoliants!
Sarah Laskow is a reporter based in New York City who covers environment, energy, and sustainability issues, among other things. Follow her on Twitter.
Shot-hole driller ablaze down the Bass River road. Photo: Miles Howe
Source: Earth First! Newswire
Halifax Media Co-op reports that a piece of drilling equipment was set ablaze on the 24th, by person or persons unknown. This comes amidst escalating resistance to hydraulic fracturing by indigenous peoples in Elsipogtog, “New Brunswick”.
The first small shoots of what will grow into a sprawling solar power plant have sprouted in Los Angeles.
L.A.’s Department of Water and Power is rolling out the country’s biggest urban rooftop program, which will pay residents for solar energy they produce in excess of their own needs. That will give residents a reason to install more solar capacity on their roofs than they can use in their homes.
On Wednesday, the first solar-generated watts produced under the Clean L.A. Solar program came from the rooftop of an apartment complex in North Hollywood. From the L.A. Times:
The goal of the effort, the brainchild of the Los Angeles Business Council, is to generate 150 megawatts of solar electricity, or enough to power about 30,000 homes. The council hopes to attract investments totaling $500 million from a growing list of companies that want to invest in L.A.’s push to go green by setting up large clusters of rooftop solar panels.
“It is really a no-brainer,” said Christian Wentzel, chief executive of Solar Provider Group, which installed the North Hollywood panels. Long-term contracts with the DWP cemented the Los Angeles company’s plans to invest $50 million in 17 projects to tap the region’s sun-drenched climate.
Four years in the making, Clean L.A. Solar serves as part of the city’s answer to the state mandate to generate 33% of electricity using renewable sources by 2020. DWP officials project the solar purchasing program will help L.A. reach 25% of the state mandated by 2016.
So if you start noticing Angelenos installing solar systems that are much bigger than they should need, don’t dismiss it as typical L.A. extravagance.
Young people in the Valle de Sibundoy, Colombia, are campaigning against a road to Brazil that cuts through their territory, including an ancient pathway used by their ancestors.“Our worry as indigenous people is that this project was not agreed with the people. There was no prior consultation, they don’t have our permission. This is our ancestral territory and they are bringing disequilibrium,” said Carlos Jamioy, of the Camentsa people of the Valle de Sibundoy, Putumayo.The valley in southern Colombia is home to two closely allied indigenous groups, the Inga and Camentsa, and in addition to being their traditional territory was granted to them in an old colonial title no longer recognized by the government. Now the Colombian government is building a road through their territory, from San Francisco to Mocoa, as part of a transport route to Brazil.
“They are making the road in a place where our ancestors walked, in a sacred path. It was a path we used to exchange goods with other peoples. We would share thought, identity, work, education,” said Carlos.
Carlos Jamioy is part of a group of young people in an organization called Colectivo de Trabajo Territorio Tamoabioy. The group is involved in bilingual education, teaching traditional crafts, and other cultural activities to help maintain the traditional culture of the indigenous people in the face of numerous modern challenges.
“The threats to our territory are firstly mining – there are companies in the exploration phase at the moment. Secondly, the megaproject of the road from San Francisco to Mocoa. This brings a disequilibrium, cultural, economic, political, educational. It brings the loss of identity among the Inga-Kamentsa people here in the Valle de Sibundoy. A different culture comes that we are not able to resist and we are going to lose our own thought, the spirit of our thought and our link to Madre Tierra.”
Some indigenous campaigners in the valley have begun to try to assert their right to be consulted. However, they say that when they wrote to the government about it, they received a reply that their community did not exist, perhaps a reference to their not holding a communal title in the relevant land.
Pablo Tisioy, another member of the group, says that the potential problems of the new road to Brazil affects everyone.
“Colombia tries to hide what happens here. When people don’t know the natural riches of the Valle de Sibundoy they don’t care about it. So we are trying to explain the problems happening here to other people and trying to prevent the environmental massacre the multinationals would bring. They are trying to exploit the Amazon and this is a global problem, not just regional.”
Jamioy agrees. “They are building the road over sources of water, where there are springs, where the rivers are born. They are breaking up virgin mountain, causing erosion and other environmental problems. They are extracting material to make the road too. They also haven’t asked for permission for this, they don’t have the consent of the people. We care for and protect our rivers”
Jamioy says the Putumayo River is already flooding more easily since the works began and they are concerned that this is just the beginning. “We say no to mining, not exploration, nothing,” said Jamioy. “We think the road is to help with the extraction of natural resources.”
Their territory also has mining concessions on it, including some held by multinationals AngloGold Ashanti and AngloAmerican. They fear the mining will bring not only environmental destruction but social disruption and even violence.
“We know that militarisation has happened in other areas when mining arrives. People aren’t allowed into the areas of exploration and exploitation. So this is one of the problems that could happen here, and we could see, for example, forced disappearances,” said Jamioy.
The mining has galvanized some of the community into action says Tisioy. “For the last four or five years we have been confronting the problem of mining here. We have mobilized and are searching for alternatives to this type of development.”
But confronting big mining companies is not easy. “Some indigenous leaders sell themselves, they sign to allow multinationals to work here. But there are also leaders who support the mobilisations. But we have a problem that our governors change every year, so one will oppose mining and the next won’t follow him.[…] The multinationals also arrive with armed groups and force people to sign papers.”
“We invite everyone, the whole planet, to see that it is not just us affected,” says Carlos Jamioy. “It is also in the city. The whole planet is being put out of equilibrium. The mission that we all have as a planet is to care for Madre Tierra. The multinationals looking for natural resources are destroying it.
“Our invitation is that everyone, all organizations, including capitalist countries, hold the Madre Tierra in their hearts.”
The Colectivo de Trabajo Territorio Tamoabioy (see their blog) are looking for people to help them in their campaigns, both with resources and publicity.
