I’m planning to build a small greenhouse with old windows. Is there anything I should be aware of? Do I need double glazed windows?

 John M. — San Jose, California

Safety is the main issue. If you build a greenhouse with old windows, never use them for the roof. A window can break if something falls on it, or from snow loading or wind shear or, in your area, because of an earthquake. Falling glass can be very dangerous, possibly blinding or even killing someone.

The same is true for glass doors. Make sure that any door and, ideally, any window that operates by swinging upward, has safety glass which will shatter into small, blunt pieces on impact, not into sharp wedges that can cut you. (Home safety glass is similar to windshield glass.) Use Lexan, windows with safety glass or code-approved skylights for the roof.

Also, building a greenhouse with old windows can be a lot of work. It’s often hard to find enough old windows of similar size and style to build with, and many old windows need to be scraped down and puttied and repainted.

Your windows do not have to be double-glazed. Double glazing gives you about three times as much resistance to heat loss (R-value) as single glazing. But that’s still not enough to make a significant difference in performance in most climates, because single-glazed windows have almost no resistance to heat loss. (Also, older, discarded double-glazed windows have often have broken seals which allow the insulating gas between the panes of glass to escape.)

To keep a greenhouse with single or double-glazed windows heated (which is probably not necessary in your climate), you would need to throw an insulated blanket over it at night and/or use a lot of energy running a space heater. Single glazed windows will work fine  for a small garden greenhouse.

Building a greenhouse with old windows can be very rewarding. For one thing, it will save you quite a bit of money, if you have the time and patience to fix up the windows. Done well, it will give you a charming result that you can’t duplicate with shiny new windows. And of course you’ll be reusing material, which is good for you and the planet.

~PSW

Gemasolar concentrated solar power plant near Seville, Spain (Image courtesy of Terresol Energy, reproduced by permission.)

The receiver sits atop a slender column, 40 stories above the desert floor. It glows like a giant, white-hot torch in the clear blue sky as it gathers limitless free energy from outer space. The energy is converted first into heat, and then into electricity which is transmitted hundreds of miles across the earth — almost at the speed of light.

At the base of the column a small team of earthlings performs low-cost, routine maintenance tasks. Occasionally they look up at the receiver and marvel at its simplicity, its efficiency, its beauty. They chat about how it will render obsolete polluting, fuel-based electricity production from coal, oil, gas and uranium.

This could be a scene from a futuristic science fiction movie, but it’s not. It’s a description of Gemasolar, the world’s first commercial electricty facility driven by concentrated solar power (CSP) and equipped with a central tower receiver and a molten-salt thermal storage system. The plant was completed and brought online in 2011.

Located in southern Spain’s “sun belt,” the Gemasolar plant generates 19.9 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 25,000 homes. But that’s not the big news, since other solar-power plants have similar capacities. What makes Gemasolar a game changer is that it continues to produce a steady stream of electricity after the sun goes down — and until the sun comes up the next morning, reenergizing the system.

Here’s how it works. Gemasolar’s central tower is surrounded by a circular array of 2,650 “heliostats” (mirrors) that focus the sun’s rays on the receiver. Pipes inside the receiver are filled with common salts which melt in the intense, 900-degree heat. The molten salts are circulated through a heat exchanger where some of the heat is used to boil water which in turn drives a steam turbine that generates electricity. The salts, in a closed loop, are then returned to the tower for reheating.

But more salt is heated than is needed to drive the steam turbine, and the excess hot salt is stored in tanks and used to generate steam for up to 15 hours after the sun wanes and sets.

Concentrated Solar Power Changes the Energy Game

That’s a game changer because the big drawback of solar electricity has been its inability to provide “baseload” power, keeping up with demand as the sun begins to set and people return home from work and turn on their air conditioners and TVs and cook dinner. That’s when conventional power, mostly provided by coal-fired or nuclear power plants, comes on — and stays on until the next day.

But with Gemasol leading the way, reliable baseload CSP plants are beginning to crop up all over: in the American Southwest, Israel and, most important from a worldwide energy perspective, in Morocco and Tunisia.

Enter Desertec, the non-profit foundation working toward developing “power tower” concentrated solar power plants in the world’s desert latitudes, and transmitting the electricity wherever it’s needed.

The brainchild of a German nuclear engineer who, after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, decided that we must find a clean source of energy, Desertec has assembled an international consortium of investors and developers using three selling points: (1) concentrated solar power with molten-salt storage works, (2) enough sunlight strikes the world’s deserts in six hours to power human civilization for one year, and (3) high-tension power lines can transmit electricity more than 1500 miles with minimal power loss (about 10 percent).

Based on studies by the German Aerospace Center — and backed by investments from heavy hitters such as Deutsche Bank and Siemens and the governments of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Morocco and Tunisia — Desertec’s pilot project involves building concentrated solar power plants in North Africa. The electricity will energize the host countries and transmit a portion of the power to Europe where it will enter a developing European super-smartgrid providing baseload backup for local wind and solar installations.

One plant is already under construction in Morocco and, in 2014, a larger plant that will produce as much electricity as two average-sized nuclear power plants will be built in Tunisia. Among the byproducts of the development: creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and cutting million of tons or CO₂ emissions.

CSP is already coming to America and, who knows? The day may soon come when you can turn on the lights without causing global warming at your ecological house.

~PSW

Note: A version of this article originally appeared in the syndicated newspaper column Your Ecological House, by Philip S. Wenz, in March, 2012.

RELATED READING:

Buy books and help Ecotecture! If you liked this article and want to learn more, we invite you to buy books through the links below — we earn a small commission on each purchase you make, but our commission does not raise your price by one cent. We’ll use that commission to expand our efforts to empower you to solve environmental problems.

Editor’s Note:

Ecotecture normally recommends books or other reading materials so supplement its articles. However, we could find no reliable references on the subject of concentrated solar power, perhaps because the field is so new or is a sub-field of general solar engineering. Available books with the words “concentrated solar power” in their title ranged from collections of wikipedia articles to surveys by authors with no apparent qualifications.

The exception is an engineering textbook which is highly recommend by a number of reviewers and is described as a good introduction to solar technology in general (see below).  If you find a good book for the general reader on the concentrated solar power, please let us know so we can bring it to the attention of our readers.

Solar Engineering of Thermal Processes, Duffle and Beckman

Book Review by Aran Baker

(click on cover image to purchase book)

Integral Sustainable Design: Transformative Perspectives, by Mark DeKay applies the lens of Integral Theory to sustainable design, shaking up current definitions and inviting us to re-imagine the power of design in affecting global change. Until now, sustainable design has focused mainly on technological innovations and systems thinking—green building materials, energy efficiency, and performance—and has left out the realm of culture and human experience. DeKay gives us the tools to move beyond the current thinking and embrace a much needed multidisciplinary and human-scale approach.

Throughout the book, he references the work of Sim Van der Ryn, Fritjov Capra, Christopher Alexander, and others. In formulating an integral approach to design, DeKay breaks new ground, arguing we cannot continue to leave out the important discussion of culture and how people experience these new green buildings. In short, Integral Theory, posited by Ken Wilber, is a comprehensive framework for understanding multiple, competing theories and ideas. An integrally informed approach to any discipline invites us to simultaneously understand different perspectives and solutions, weaving together pre-modern, modern, and post-modern thinking. Wilber adds a future, “integral” age to the widely used classifications of traditional, modern, postmodern, etc. DeKay beautifully reinforces the potential for an integral level of design to transcend deconstruction and move into reconstruction.

DeKay is chair of the graduate program in Architecture at the College of Architecture and Design at the University of Tennessee, in Knoxville, and has spent the past twenty-five years researching solutions to energy-efficiency and ecological approaches to architectural and urban design. He also coauthored a book called Sun Wind & Light: Architectural Design Strategies with G.Z Brown. Over the years he noticed his students seemed more motivated by aesthetics and experience than technological aspects, while another group of designers seemed much more interested in design-as-storytelling, rather than how it looks or functions. He began to reflect on his own work, realizing he needed a way to address these varied perspectives, and discovered he could apply principles of Integral Theory to design. A registered architect and honorary fellow of the Institute of Green Professionals, his future goals include working to develop an integral design school paradigm. This book will be of interest to anyone involved in the theory and practice of sustainability, architecture/design, planning, and Integral Theory.

Holistic Sustainable Design

Performance is the criterion for success in much of sustainable design today. The field has been dominated by empirically-based perspectives, and limited, like many areas of our society, by dualistic thinking; we tend to think of art versus science, design vs. technology, etc. As DeKay points out, we have no collective framework for navigating and moving past this fragmentation in the theory and practice of sustainable design. This book offers a hopeful beginning. Integral Sustainable Design offers exciting possibilities for a more holistic approach, placing technological sustainable design into its larger context of ecological sustainability, experiential sustainability and cultural sustainability.

The book begins with an introduction to Integral Theory, and is further divided into four parts. Part one introduces the Four Perspectives (or quadrants) of integral sustainable design: Behaviors, Systems, Cultures, and Experiences. So far sustainable design has concentrated heavily on “objective” Behaviors and Systems, leaving out the “subjective” dimensions of Experience and Culture. In the chapter on the Cultures Perspective, DeKay asks questions such as, how can design better fit its cultural context? How can design convey symbolic meaning and embody cultural values? The final quadrant, the Experiences Perspective, investigates the often-overlooked areas of emotional response to building and aesthetics. In this chapter, he asks, how do important ecological relationships and patterns translate into felt experiences? 

Part two situates sustainable design within the context of human developmental levels: traditional, modern, post-modern, and integral. DeKay also looks at the history of design and examines how each perspective unfolds in waves of increasing complexity through a spiral, transcending and including its predecessor. Part three explores new ways of perceiving and thinking ecologically which emerge at the integral level. In this section, he provides tools to help us shift our perception into ecological thinking. He asks questions such as, can designers expand their awareness fast enough to solve the imminent ecological crisis? And most notably, can design itself become an integral method for embedding ecological consciousness into our built environment?

In Part four, DeKay asks how buildings can best connect people to nature. He offers ten methods (which he calls injunctions) and a set of strategies for each. For example, he asks, can buildings be embedded in nature yet distinctly human? He points to Condominium One at Sea Ranch in California as a successful example.

Overall, I enjoyed this ambitious book and recommend it for many reasons, but I do have a few criticisms. In the conclusion, DeKay includes an excerpt from an essay he wrote while visiting Gandhi’s home in India. This excerpt is a welcome poetic pause, from which the book (at times, quite dense with information, charts, etc.) could have benefited more. He also admits it focuses only on two main aspects of Integral Theory, perspectives (quadrants) and levels (of developmental structure). He sees this book as a beginning, a simple framework and he invites us to expand up on it.

DeKay concludes with a passionate call to action as he invites us to light the fire of life through our designs. At this point in time, we desperately need a more human-centered approach to sustainable design. While essentially holistic, Integral Theory offers a powerful, analytical tool for design educators and practitioners to articulate current challenges and transform the scope of sustainable design for the future. DeKay argues convincingly that through weaving the technological with the cultural, the scientific with the aesthetic, design has the power to actually regenerate life and help transform society.

Aran Baker is a P.hD. candidate at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. 

Related Titles:

Buy books and help Ecotecture! If you liked this article and want to learn more, we invite you to buy books through the links below — we earn a small commission on each purchase you make, but our commission does not raise your price by one cent. We’ll use that commission to expand our efforts to empower you to solve environmental problems.

Integral Sustainable Design: Transformative Perspectives,  Mark DeKay (Featured in this Review)
Design With Nature, Ian McHarg
Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development, John Lyle
Ecological Design, Van der Ryn and Cowan

Part of Ecotecture’s eco-nomics discussion is a series of reports on the ongoing meetings and activities of the Sustainable Economy Discussion Group (SEDG) of Corvallis, Oregon. The group began meeting in the fall of 2011, and Ecotecture’s first SEDG article covers the December, 2011 meeting. 

Although the purpose of SEDG is to explore issues in sustainable economics, SEDG’s members are not professional economists. They are ordinary citizens who bring a variety of perspectives to economic issues. SEDG is thus a “peer learning group” focused on macroeconomics and local economic vitality and sustainability.

Learn more about SEDG and  join our conversations by posting comments on our articles or sending us guest blogs about your community’s economic discussions or initiatives.

~PSW

Notes: Corvallis, Oregon is a college town (home to Oregon State University [OSU]) with a population of about 55,000, including 22,000 students and 33,000 townsfolk. Corvallis’s economy, like that of most American towns, has declined since its peak in the pre-2008 era.

Corvallis is situated in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, an agricultural area similar to California’s highly productive Central Valley. Yet for various reasons — lack of sufficient population to consume the local agricultural products, the relative price paid for products on the international market and so on — much of the valley’s products are sold outside of the area or abroad.

For example, many local farms produce grass seed (for lawns and golf courses) which is sold worldwide. Meanwhile, much of the food consumed in Corvallis, like that most of the rest of the country, is shipped in from other states and countries. That said, Corvallis does have a thriving, year-round farmer’s market and several restaurants that feature locally-supplied, organic food to the extent possible.

Strengthening and closing local food loops is just one aspect of creating a viable local economy discussed in the SEDG meetings.

(These notes are an edited version of the SEDG monthly meeting minutes sent to the membership.  SEDG members quoted or mentioned in these notes are usually identified by initial only to protect their privacy. Some members prefer to have their full name published.)

This is the fourth in a series of articles outlining my proposed global warming solutions. The first, second and third articles discuss other aspects of the proposal.
~PSW 

I’m happy to report that, to my surprise, my recent newspaper columns on global warming have caused some consternation. I’m not surprised that the columns have upset some people who don’t believe in global warming, of course; I expected that.

But I was surprised that some people who take the threat of global warming very seriously were upset as well — because they thought that my proposed solutions were fanciful. In fact, one biophysicist wrote me an extensive email about a perceived flaw in my proposal, and one climate scientist drove from a nearby town to discuss my ideas over coffee.

I was honored that these gentlemen wanted to make sure my proposed global warming solutions are realistic and not misleading the public. However, their concerns were based on a misreading of my proposal, possibly because it was presented in abbreviated, newspaper column formats.

My proposal was that we take a three-step approach to solving global warming: (1) enact serious energy conservation measures, (2) reduce greenhouse gases that are already in the atmosphere by sequestering them in plant biomass (biosequetration) — mostly, initially, by planting millions of trees and, (3) speed up the transition to affordable, earth-friendly technologies (appropriate technology), especially in the energy sector.

Based on my discussion of biosequestration, both scientists thought I was claiming that we can solve global warming simply by planting trees. They both pointed out that trees grow too slowly to keep up with the pace of greenhouse gas emissions (especially CO2), and that all of the world’s trees combined sequester far too little CO₂ to adequately “scrub” the atmosphere of the excess gas. We need to stop emitting CO₂ (and other greenhouse gases), not clean up with trees after the fact.

I completely agree. But I want to be clear, as I explained to my scientist critics (much to their relief), that I never proposed that biosequestration by itself would adequately reduce greenhouse gases. To understand why, we have to look at some elementary numbers.

Humans are currently adding about 30 billions tons of CO₂ to the atmosphere each year. Roughly 80 percent of that comes from burning fossil fuels; most of the rest comes from burning forests and agricultural waste. So to simply stop overloading the atmosphere, we’d have to reduce emissions by 30 billion tons a year.

But we also need to remove some of the CO₂ that we’ve already added to the atmosphere to get us closer to pre-industrial levels. (Our current CO₂ level of 392 parts per million [ppm] is over 30 percent higher than the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm.)

I’ve recently revised my thinking on this matter, concluding that rather than allowing CO₂ to build up to 450 ppm, the maximum safe level suggested by many climate scientists, we need to revert to a level of 350 ppm or less, as environmentalist Bill McKibben and former NASA climatologist Jim Hansen state. (See McKibben’s web site and the book “Storms of My Grandchildren” by Jim Hansen.)

Why should we revert to 350 ppm?

Because we are already seeing damage from global warming. And because the amount of warming we can expect from current CO₂ levels is already sufficient to melt enough of Greenland and Antarctica’s ice to cause dangerous sea-level rises that can flood the world’s coastal cities in the near future. Since CO₂ doesn’t just “go away,” but persists in the atmosphere for at least several hundred years, we must remove some of the existing CO₂ to avoid the catastrophic — and largely irreversible — melting of ice.

That’s where the “trees” (biosequestration) come in. Plants sequester tens of  billion of tons of CO₂ annually in their biomass, and, if we plant enough of them and manage our forests and farms correctly, they can gradually reduce greenhouse gases to pre-industrial levels and, with luck, stabilize the climate.

But there’s a catch. Plants release most of their CO₂ back into the atmosphere when they decompose after dying, so to remove the gas we need to convert some of the plant biomass into a form that can be permanently sequestered. Fortunately, biomass is readily converted into “biochar” (charcoal) that is useful as a soil amendment and can be sequestered in soil for centuries.

Biochar potentially can sequester about 30 percent of plant biomass, roughly equivalent to five billion tons of atmospheric CO₂ annually. What about reducing the other 25 (plus) billion tons of annual CO₂ loading? Stay tuned for appropriate energy technology solutions.

~PSW

This post is a modified version of an article that was originally written as syndicated newspaper column, published in various locations around the U.S. in March, 2012. 

Relevant Reading:

Buy books and help Ecotecture! If you liked this article and want to learn more, we invite you to buy books through the links below — we earn a small commission on each purchase you make, without raising your cost one cent. We’ll use that commission to expand our efforts to empower you to solve environmental problems.

Deforestation and Climate Change, Bosetti and Lubowski

Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, David Archer

(Note, David Archer, the teacher of a popular course on global warming for non-scientists at the University of Chicago, now offers a version, “Open Climate 101” — online and for free. If you complete the online course, he’ll send you a signed certificate. Read a good review of Online 101 on the NY Times Dot Earth environmental blog.)

Storms of My Grand Children, James C. Hansen
Hell and High Water, Joseph Romm
Forecast, Stephan Faris
Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, Mark Lynas

Related Links On Ecotecture:

Global Warming Solution? The Framework for a Plan (1st article in this series)

Global Warming Solution? Energy Conservation and Carbon Biostorage (2nd article in this series)

Global Warming Solutions? Artificial Trees versus Real Forests (3rd article in this series)

How Can We Stop Global Warming? Brains, Bodies or Biochar? 

Is It Too Late for Renewable Energy to Slow Global Warming? 

Man-Made Global Warming: It’s Real, Get Over It!

Comments are welcome and generally will be posted if they are on topic and inoffensive. However, Ecotecture does not post comments to the effect that global warming is a hoax. Read our position on global warming here.

I’m confused about the difference between passive solar heating and active solar heating. Don’t they both use fans, making them both “active?”  Which system is best? 

 Becky S. — Portland, Maine

Strictly speaking, passive solar heating systems are not supposed to have any working parts other than mechanical airway baffles that do not need external energy to operate — that’s why they are called “passive.” By contrast, most active solar heating systems use electric pumps (needing external energy) to move fluid that’s been heated by the sun through pipes in the building. However, many “mostly” passive solar heating systems incorporate electric fans which, of course, need external energy; thus the confusion between the two systems.

Learning how each system works will help you understand the difference between them, so let’s consider a some typical designs.

The simplest passive solar heating systems allow sunlight to pass through a building’s windows, glass doors or skylights during the day, warming a “thermal mass,” a heat-retaining material such as a masonry chimney or a concrete or tile floor. At night, the warmed thermal mass releases (radiates) its stored heat back into the room.

Variants on this design include “passive solar greenhouses” — with their own built-in thermal mass — attached to the outside of a building.

Heat that’s collected outside the building must be transferred inside. This is usually accomplished by passing air over the thermal mass to pick up its heat, then moving the warm air into the building. Since warm air rises, it can be moved by natural convection if the greenhouse is on the lower story of the building.

But natural convection is not always the most efficient means of moving air, so many passive solar heating systems incorporate small fans to push the warm air along and, sometimes, to return the cool air from the building back to the greenhouse for reheating.

 Active Solar Heating

Active systems are designed from the outset to capture heat in one place and move it to another. A typical design consists of panels on a roof through which a fluid circulates. The sun warms the fluid, which is then moved by an electric pump into the building where it can be used for direct space heating via radiators, or indirect heating through radiant floors or walls. (The warm fluid heats the floor or wall, which in turn radiates its heat into the living space.)

The fluid can be water, so long as antifreeze is added to keep it from freezing in the panels on cold nights or some winter days. Other fluids can store heat more efficiently than water, but can be more expensive and possibly release toxins if there is a spill.

Many factors determine which design will work best for a particular building. However, as a rule of thumb, choose the design with the fewest working parts to reduce maintenance costs and the chances of a breakdown. Also, avoid complex piping systems and toxic materials whenever possible. Finally, a multi-use design such as a passive solar greenhouse which helps heat your house and serves as a three-season room where you can grow plants, dry clothes in winter without a dryer and so on is desirable.

Generally, passive solar heating is the best choice for houses and small buildings.

~PSW

Relevant Reading:

Buy books and help Ecotecture! If you liked this article and want to learn more, we invite you to buy books through the links below — we earn a small commission on each purchase you make, without raising your cost one cent. We’ll use that commission to expand our efforts to empower you to solve environmental problems.

 The Passive Solar House (The complete guide), James Kachadorian
The Solar House: Passive Heating and Cooling, Dan Chiras
Passive Solar Architecture, David A. Bainbridge

Comments are welcome and generally will be posted if they are on topic and inoffensive. However, Ecotecture does not post comments to the effect that global warming is a hoax. Read our position on global warming here.

This is the third in a series of articles outlining my proposed global warming solutions. The first and second articles provide background material for the series. ~PSW

How about this for a design principle: Always choose the simplest, cheapest, low-tech solution over a more complicated, more expensive, high-tech solution. That might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised at some of the Rube Goldbergesque proposals I’ve come across while researching global warming solutions.

Artificial trees — the designs for which come with pedigrees from Columbia University and England’s prestigious Institution for Mechanical Engineers (IME) — are one of my favorite overdesigned boondoggles. IME’s design, one of several versions of artificial trees that have been proposed, are tall metal towers topped with large, specialized air filters. They would be “planted” along Britain’s highways and byways where they would suck up auto emissions and store greenhouse gases in the filters.

Maintenance crews would stop by periodically and replace the filters, then sequester the used, gas-saturated filters in abandoned coal mines. Naturally a great deal of energy will be needed to manufacture, install and operate the trees and handle and transport the filters, negating some of the positive effects of the atmospheric scrubbing.

But at least this should provide quite a few jobs since we have to sequester about seven billion tons of CO₂ annually just to keep the atmosphere at its current saturation level. Why, in just a few years we’ll need to employ thousands of miners to dig new coal mines, so we can abandon them to provide more storage for the filters!

To be fair, IMI’s designers claim that each tree can capture up to 10 tons of CO₂  per day — thousands of times more than the capacity of a real tree. They assert that with an investment of around five billion dollars (not counting operating costs), Britain could build a “forest” of 100,000 trees that could remove 60 percent of its CO₂ emissions. Ostensibly, investing in 5 to 10 million trees could absorb all the world’s CO₂ from all sources other than power plants.

Are Real Forests Better Global Warming Solutions?

But what if those same billions of dollars were spent on programs to preserve and expand existing forests which already sequester carbon and perform many other ecosystem services? Rather than investing in unproven high-tech systems (what are the artificial tree filters made from? will that material become scarce? what happens when the trees break down? who will pay for the ongoing expense of maintaining the “forest?”), why not invest in the proven “technology” of highly evolved, sustainable living systems?

Largely self-regulating and self-maintaining, and “running” on free solar energy, established forests sequester vast quantities of CO_2, nourish biodiversity, retain and condition soil, help regulate the water cycle and, if sustainably harvested, can yield quality building materials and other valuable products for generations to come.

But rapid worldwide deforestation, mostly in developing nations, is responsible for 20 to 25 percent of all greenhouse gas releases (mostly CO₂ and methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas). So, globally, humanity is making the problem worse while desperately trying to build machinery to fix it. It’s like pouring water into a bucket while drilling bigger and bigger holes in the bottom.

Granted, the politics of developed nations investing in forest conservation in developing nations is tricky and demanding. But no more so than the politics of trying to get, say, massive polluters like India and China to install artificial trees in their cities. Why not begin by preserving and expanding existing forests, rather than reinventing nature’s wheel and building fake forests from scratch?

~PSW

This post is a modified version of an article that was originally written as syndicated newspaper column, published in various locations around the U.S. in March, 2012. 

Relevant Reading:

Buy books and help Ecotecture! If you liked this article and want to learn more, we invite you to buy books through the links below — we earn a small commission on each purchase you make, without raising your cost one cent. We’ll use that commission to expand our efforts to empower you to solve environmental problems.

Deforestation and Climate Change, Bosetti and Lubowski

Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, David Archer

(Note, David Archer, the teacher of a popular course on global warming for non-scientists at the University of Chicago, now offers a version, “Open Climate 101” — online and for free. If you complete the online course, he’ll send you a signed certificate. Read a good review of Online 101 on the NY Times Dot Earth environmental blog.)

Storms of My Grand Children, James C. Hansen
Hell and High Water, Joseph Romm
Forecast, Stephan Faris
Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, Mark Lynas

Related Links On Ecotecture:

Global Warming Solution? The Framework for a Plan (1st article in this series)

Global Warming Solution? Energy Conservation and Carbon Biostorage (2nd article in this series)

How Can We Stop Global Warming? Brains, Bodies or Biochar? 

Is It Too Late for Renewable Energy to Slow Global Warming? 

Man-Made Global Warming: It’s Real, Get Over It!

Comments are welcome and generally will be posted if they are on topic and inoffensive. However, Ecotecture does not post comments to the effect that global warming is a hoax. Read our position on global warming here.

On Feb. 21, 2012, the NY Times invited readers to respond via email to an article called Using Nuclear Energy by retired nuclear scientist Zvi Doran. The article began by citing the recent approval of licensing for two new nuclear power plants by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and then asked and answered two questions:

“Do we need nuclear power? Can we build safe nuclear plants? The answer to both is yes!”

I submitted the following response to the article:

 No Nuclear Power!

The quick response is that we’ve heard it all before. As a young boy in late 1950s, I watched one television show after another that told us how nuclear energy was the key to a glorious future for mankind, and it was perfectly safe because scientists had thought of every possible contingency. Nuclear energy would be “too cheap to meter,” and nothing could go wrong.

We’ve seen how that turned out.

Today, nuclear proponents are fond of saying that there have been “only” three major nuclear accidents in the past 43 years (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima), so nuclear power has a great safety record. However, there are only 400 nuclear power plants worldwide, so, statistically, major nuclear accidents are quite frequent — without even counting the many recorded near misses that could have turned into meltdowns.

If we compare nuclear power to another high-tech industry, commercial air service, we see that between 2000 and 2011 there were over 18 million flights per year, but an average of just 18 serious accidents per year. No nuclear power companies have a comparable record.

Of course Mr. Doran’s article now tells us that “…nuclear plants must be built with the highest regard to safety.” And that, “Fukushima could not happen in these [newly designed nuclear] plants.” Nor, according to the experts, could Fukushima have happened at Fukushima — until it happened. What will be the next series of events that “could not happen?”

The boilerplate argument from the nuclear industry that future demands for clean energy cannot be met by renewables is simply untrue. Enough sunlight strikes the earth in one hour to power all of human civilization for more than a year, and the sun’s energy can be captured, stored and distributed economically with existing technology. It is special-interest politics, not technology, that prevents us from making the transition to renewable energy.

Also, the projected need for growth in the energy sector assumes a business-as-usual scenario, and generally ignores the value of energy conservation. But the 2009 McKinsey Report and similar studies of energy efficiency establish that, in the U.S. alone, public and private investments of $520 billion in efficiency measures can, by 2025, reduce our energy use by 23 percent, save $1.2 trillion and create tens of thousands of jobs. Let’s make that investment before investing in more energy to be squandered by our profligate lifestyles.

Last but far, far from least is the inherently unsolvable problem of nuclear waste. As things stand now, most of the nuclear waste that’s strewn around the country in pools of water and old barrels will be hot and dangerous for at least a couple of thousand years. In the best case scenario, every ounce of that spent fuel will be reprocessed so it is dangerous for “only” 300-500 years.

Isn’t it presumptuous of us to assume that against all odds society will have the means and knowledge to protect itself from the ticking time bombs of nuclear waste repositories for three, or perhaps thirty centuries? Talk about kicking the (nuclear waste) can down the road.

But there is nothing new in this nuclear hubris. We’ve heard it it all before.

~PSW

Relevant Reading:

Buy books and help Ecotecture! If you liked this article and want to learn more, we invite you to buy books through the links below — we earn a small commission on each purchase you make, without raising your cost one cent. We’ll use that commission to expand our efforts to empower you to solve environmental problems.

Nuclear Energy: What Everyone Needs to Know, Charles Ferguson  0199759464
Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, Helen Caldicott
The Road to Yucca Mountain, J. Samuel Walker
Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste, Allison MacFarlane
Yucca Mountain Dirty Bomb (Fiction), Wendell Duffield
Atomic Harvest: Hanford, and the Lethal Toll of America’s Nuclear Arsenal, Michael D’antonio
Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, Jacob Hamblin

Comments are welcome and generally will be posted if they are on topic and inoffensive. However, Ecotecture does not post comments to the effect that global warming is a hoax. Read our position on global warming here.

Ecotecture is pleased to announce that our editor, Philip S. Wenz, has been invited to participate in the 2012 US Biochar Conference as a journalist and a pre-conference publicist. The Conference, sponsored by the Sonoma Biochar Initiative, will be held from July 29 through August 1, on the campus of Sonoma State University, located one hour north of San Francisco in California’s wine country.

Ecotecture supports the use of biochar for sequestering atmospheric CO₂, and as a means of closing production/waste loops in the agricultural and forest-product industries. Biochar’s multiple uses and adaptability as appropriate technology for both developed and developing nations make it an important tool for the regeneration of the ecosphere.

The 2012 US Biochar Conference will emphasize practical applications of this rapidly emerging technology and will bring together specialists in forestry and agroecology, garden and industrial-scale biochar production, biofuels, biochar policy and entrepreneurial opportunities.

The conference will be an excellent venue for environmental problem solvers who want to learn more about biochar and network with others who are working in the field. Ecotecture will keep its readers informed of developments as the Conference’s speakers and topics lists take shape.

~PSW

Relevant Reading:

Buy books and help Ecotecture! If you liked this article and want to learn more, we invite you to buy books through the links below — we earn a small commission on each purchase you make, without raising your cost one cent. We’ll use that commission to expand our efforts to empower you to solve environmental problems.

The Biochar Solution, Albert Bates
Biochar  for Environmental Management, Lehmann and Joseph
The Biochar Debate, James Bruges
The Biochar Revolution, Transforming Agriculture and the Environment, Paul Taylor

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How do you like the idea of fighting global warming by pumping millions of tons of artificial volcanic ash into the atmosphere to cool the planet? Alternatively, would you support a plan to suspend giant “mirrors” made of fine wire mesh or shiny aluminum nanoparticles in the lower stratosphere to reflect sunlight away from the earth?

If you think these sound like expensive, harebrained schemes rife with the potential for serious unintended consequences, you’re probably right. Yet these and other planet-scaled “geoengineering” programs not only are being proposed, but some are actually being financed and experimented with in England and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, energy companies are continuing to extract fossil fuels from every last crevice of the earth, and conspiring economic and political forces make it unlikely that there will be any serious attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for another generation — by which time it could be too late to prevent the catastrophic overheating of the earth. It increasingly looks like our technocracy will destroy itself, and us in the process.

Or will it?

Biochar Rediscovered

What if the world’s farmers introduced a simple, inexpensive and earth-friendly agricultural practice that could significantly reduce atmospheric carbon and slow the emissions of the more potent greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide? What if that practice produced enough energy to fuel itself, and as an added bonus produced a significant amount or carbon-negative energy in the form of biofuels?

What if it also increased soil fertility by retaining nutrients (while decreasing nutrient runoff, which pollutes natural waterways), built habitat for helpful soil microorganisms, and improved soil stability and tilth — even in some of the world’s poorest soils?

Finally, what if this practice were readily scalable and could be implemented by home gardeners and commercial farmers everywhere — spreading quickly to much of the earth’s arable land to form a giant atmospheric CO₂   sequestering system?

In fact, this agricultural practice was introduced over 2,500 years ago by Amazonian peoples who created charcoal from vegetation by “burning” it in an oxygen-restricted environment (pyrolysis) — probably in pits covered with a thin layer of dirt that caused the vegetation to smolder rather than burn outright.

The prehistoric Amazonians then worked that charcoal into the famously poor local soil and added plant nutrients to it, creating arable plots of land called terra preta (black earth). In the 1960s, archeologists working in the Amazon Basin rediscovered these terra preta plots and slowly realized that their original purpose was to make agriculture possible in a region where crops could not grow without soil amendments.

Some terra preta fields that were abandoned at least 500 years ago (with the arrival Europeans in the Amazon basin) remain fertile to this day, proving that buried carbon persists in the soil. (Just as CO₂ persists in the atmosphere, which must be “scrubbed” of excess CO₂ if we are to slow or reverse global warming. Charcoal, which is close to pure carbon, is essentially inert, and won’t nourish plants, but it helps retain nutrients and supports microbial organisms.)

Research into the properties of terra preta and the benefits of using vegetation-based charcoal — now dubbed “biochar” — along with the pressing need to find solutions to the greenhouse gas problem, have spawned an international movement to promote the use of  biochar in agriculture. The excellent web site of the International Biochar Initiative (IBI) serves as a primer in biochar applications and reports on home and industrial-scale biochar production facilities, agricultural research projects and conferences and events worldwide.

The carbon biostorage potential of biochar agricultural practice is the main reason for all the excitement. It works like this: Best practice requires biochar to be made from agricultural and forest waste only, not from plants grown for biochar production. Typically, thirty percent or more of the biomass can be converted to biochar. (The exact figures depend on the nature of the feedstock and the pyrolytic process, the desired ratio of biochar to biofuel in the end product and other factors.)

Once the waste biomass is converted to biochar it’s buried, sequestering its carbon for hundreds or thousands of years. As new plants are grown in the biochar-amended fields, they absorb more CO₂, some of which is in turn converted to biochar and buried.

Conservative predictions on the IBI web site establish that biochar agricultural practices can sequester or offset a minimum of one billion tons of carbon per year by 2050 — about 15 percent of our current CO₂ output — making it a major tool for controlling climate change.

~PSW

A slightly different version of this article was published in the nationally syndicated newspaper column “Your Ecological House” (by Philip S. Wenz) in September, 2011.