CO2 is removed in the plant's two tall silvery columns (top).
Today, as part of the Society of Environmental Journalists annual meeting, I hopped a bus and toured three of Wisconsin’s leading renewable-energy projects. Heartened as I was to see innovation in action, I could also tell we’re still in Mile One of a long marathon away from fossil fuels.
Just one percent of the plant
First we visited a Wisconsin Energy coal-fired power plant outside of Milwaukee called Pleasant Prairie. There, engineers built a four-story plant that diverts a slice of the coal’s smoke and vapor and extracts the CO2 by sprinkling it with chilled ammonia.This is one approach to “carbon capture,” as its known. On one hand, scrubbers like this could help erase coal’s giant black mark as an agent of global warming. On the other, the very notion of “clean coal” was viewed with suspicion by the well-informed journalists on the bus, who have seen lies billow from the energy industry much like the smoke billowed from Pleasant Prairie’s stack.
At a press conference, the bigwigs at Wisconsin Energy and its affiliates boasted that their new annex pulled two tons of CO2 an hour from the plant’s waste stream. That’s not much really, considering the project treated just one percent of the exhaust gas, and then re-emitted what it captured. But it’s only a pilot project. One of Pleasant Prairie’s sponsors is Alstom, the global power-generation and rail giant. Alstom has now built another and much larger test plant in West Virginia that might remove 110,000 tons of CO2 each year and pump it into the ground. By 2015, Alstom hopes to be selling carbon-capture facilities to coal plants around the world.
When asked whether energy producers will be able to afford the technology or fit a scrubber the size of an apartment building onto their existing facilities, the executiveshad no ready answer.
The prototype of the all-electric Ford Escape sat in Johnson Control's plug-in bay.
Next we visited SC Johnson, the manufacturer of such home-care items as Windex and Ziploc bags. All of the plant’s electricity comes from a generator powered by methane from a local landfill. Laudable as the project is, there wasn’t much to see; we put on safety glasses and earplugs and toured the (very hot) generator room, where the methane-powered beast hummed and rattled behind steel plates.
Finally, our bus pulled up to the gleaming headquarters of Johnson Controls (no relationship to SC Johnson), one of the world’s top producers of car batteries, includingthose for hybrid cars. Nothing loud or dirty here. We toured the manufacturing rooms and saw a prototype of one of Johnson’s most high-profile projects, the battery for the 2012 plug-in electric Ford Escape. I saw the room where the innards of a nickel-metalhydride battery are pressed together and spun in a spool. The Ford Escape, however, uses the even newer lithium-ion battery.
Watching these projects I got the sense of being on the cusp, of technologies ready to spring out of the test lab and into every coal plant and automobile trunk across the land. If Congress gets climate legislation right, that leap might help trim a few degrees Fahrenheit off the Earth’s rising temperatures, and create a safer world.
A few days ago Anjali and I trekked into the Canadian Rockies to a campsite on the Athabasca River. The water ran swift and silent and a strange chalky blue color. Dust suspended in water, made from glacier grinding against rock miles upstream.
We found our assigned campsite on a patch of riverbank so pristine that we could make out the prints a cougar had left the night before. Our tent stakes entered the silty soil without resistance. Steep ridges rose up on all sides. Millennia ago this valley had been hacked out by the Athabasca Glacier, so immense and muscular that it literally moved mountains. This humble river trickled down the mighty canyon it had created.
I looked around for the source of all that ice. To the southwest I could just make out the Columbia Icefields, where the Athabasca began, and saw isolated patches of ice that had retreated to the tops of the highest peaks. Global warming at work.
One doesn’t require a degree in glaciology to know that when this ice disappears, so will the river, and with it the freshwater that has supplied the towns and farms of central Alberta since…well, since there were towns and farms.
This glacier melt is the freshest, cleanest water on the planet. When it’s gone, what will we drink? Reclaimed ocean water? I felt brine in my throat.
Then I looked down at our bank, covered several feet deep with river sediment, the richest, most fertile soil you can imagine. The river has been dropping so fast that plants haven’t even had time to grow here.
It appears that only a few years ago, our campsite would have been underwater. That’s how fast the river is disappearing. Looking up at the dots of ice, I thought, just a few years left.
I looked around at our placid, majestic scene and had to fight back a sense of alarm. When I return to this campsite in a few years, will there still be a river? Will there be water for us to drink?
Skeeter enjoys the mood lighting in her blinged-out terrarium.
A few years ago, my friend Simon mail-ordered a Mexican fire leg tarantula. She arrived in a vial as a wee spiderling, but after several molts and a steady diet of crickets, she measures five and a half inches across. “Skeeter” lives in a terrarium in the middle of Simon’s coffee table.
This got me curious about people who choose to raise venomous bugs as pets. Why would someone rear a scorpion instead of a tabby cat or a Labrador retriever? In pursuit of a story on this topic for a magazine, I visited the offices of Tarantulas.com in Edmonds, Washington to see how these bugs are born and bred.
I took this video of my visit to the land of the creepy-crawlies. Enjoy the hair rising on the back of your neck!
Greg Monzel holds a handful of street-caught amaranth.
Yesterday, on a 106-degree afternoon in Portland, Oregon, I met two food enthusiasts and searched for something to eat among the sidewalk weeds.
Urban foraging, as it’s called, is the latest wave in the local food movement, where “local” can mean a crack in the asphalt, and one adopts a relaxed definition of “food.” My guides were Rebecca Lerner and Greg Monzel, who have a passion for nourishing themselves with plants that most people consider pests.
In the blazing heat on NE Alberta Street, Greg spotted a purslane plant in the dirt strip by a Quonset hut. We bent down to taste a leaf. The dirt was littered with cigarette butts and Wrigley gum wrappers, which made me less than hungry. On the other hand, Rebecca told me, purslane is known to be rich in omega-3 fatty acids. The leaves had a refreshing crunch that reminded me of Romaine lettuce.
Why bother eating weeds? One day it might be a matter of survival. As global warming disrupts our crops in the same manner that this scorching afternoon browned the lawns, humans may need to learn to seek food from the margins. But Greg and Rebecca are having more fun than that. They seek to overturn the notion that food is something that must be bought from a store, or even grown in a field.
“We have this weird mentality that we hate these certain plants, for some reason. It’s kind of silly.” Greg said.
They also say it’s fun, spotting edibles where others see only overgrowth. We found mallow, a flower that reveals a cheese-wheel-shaped morsel when the petals are stripped away. We found volunteer blackberry bushes in a vacant lot and gorged on the warm berries. In the alley next to Dixon’s Rib Pit, we found a yellow dock plant and stripped off handfuls of the amber-colored grains, which the two would later boil like rice.
Recently, Rebecca tried to go an entire week eating only what she was able to forage on in the streets and parks of Portland and wrote about the experience on her blog. It didn’t go so well. After five days of nearly starving on a diet of stinging-nettle broth, pineapple weed tea and ant eggs, she awoke weak and seeing spots, and surrendered to the grocery store. She learned that the success of foraging depends greatly on when you do it (few plants were in an edible state in late May), and that foraging as a modern-world practice works best when it supplements a more conventional diet.
We returned to Rebecca’s place, where she and Greg steeped a tea from St. John’s wort, blackberry and huckleberry leaves, and self-heal and red clover flowers they had gathered that week. The brew had a slightly spicy flavor, respectable as any store-bought tea grown on a plantation thousands of miles away.
I live across the street from one of the neighborhood’s grocery stores, a Food Emporium. Every midnight after the place closes, a pile of retired produce and collapsed cardboard boxes four feet tall is left at the curb. Garbage trucks come and take it away, and in the morning delivery trucks arrive with new produce and new boxes.
New York is just too crowded for trash to be hidden the way it is in other American cities. In the suburbs, the rejecta leaves the house in bins once a week; in less dense cities it might end up in a Dumpster; in New York the black Hefty bags wind up on the curb, three days each week and more often at grocery stores. There’s nowhere else to put it.
I haven’t been here for one of the dreaded garbage strikes and so haven’t smelled the garbage pickle to the point of offense (though one hot September day I saw a doorman wince as he sprayed his building’s pile with perfume.) Nonetheless, the connection between waste and the people who produce it is more visible in New York than anywhere I’ve lived.
Pass any apartment building and observe the mountain of trash. Look up at the building. The bigger the building, the larger the mountain. Building, trash mound, building, trash mound, up and down every street and avenue from Battery Park to Inwood Park, across five boroughs. What a load of stuff we throw away.
The chore I most enjoy in my New York apartment is carrying the trash across the hallway to the refuse room. I drop the bag down the trash chute, and instead of walking away, I hold the door open and listen.
The bag bangs and rattles down the chute in a loud and satisfying way. It is a journey of only five floors but seems to take forever, long enough for me to reflect what makes this chute so much better than the trash cans I have known.
With my chute, I don’t have to carry my waste out to the side yard, or haul the bin to the curb each week, or worry about the trash can overflowing. Instead, I simply enjoy the sound of the bag arriving in the basement Dumpster with a soggy, feathery crash. Gone!
The chute works because of invisible elves. Every trash system relies on elves, of course – the Garbage Truck Elves who whisk the garbage cans off the curb, and the Dump Elves that store our nasties someplace we can’t see them, and sometimes Recycling Elves, the most magical of all, who transform empty cans of Campbell’s soup into the chassis of a Ford Focus.
The trash-chute system employs even more elves, including the Dumpster Removal Elf, the Refuse Room Cleaning Elf, and the occasional services of the Clogged Garbage Chute Elf. It’s like Santa’s Workshop around here.
Not to say that trash chutes are always problem-free. There are unspoken rules, rules so memorable when broken that one rarely makes the same mistake twice. Take the Bag Your Trash rule. I discovered it when I shook the contents of my vacuum-cleaner tube down the chute.Who knew there’s an updraft?
Handfuls of dust blew into my face, and suddenly the air of the refuse room was filled with lint. I beat a quick retreat and left one more chore for the Dustpan Elf.
In a few weeks I move out of this apartment building and return to the horizontal world of the trash can. I will miss the trash chute, its dramatic noises and the magical elves.
I will save my pennies for the day when, shopping at Target, I spy my first garbage robot.
My current reading is “Climate Change as a Security Risk,” a sort of threat dossier on a warming world. Amid mountains of dry data, the authors take a few imaginative leaps to picture how the world looks if we start preparing now, and what happens if we don’t.
Scenario: In 2038, a series of strong cyclones strike Bangladesh, permanently spoiling farmland and turning millions of farmers into refugees.
Worst case: Masses move to inland to live hopeless lives in refugee camps, while millions of others flock across the border to India. Hindu-Muslim tensions in India inflame anew, and the militaries of India and Bangladesh clash.
Best case: The world’s most-developed countries pay into a fund to help erect coastal defenses that blunt the worst effects of the storms. India’s and Bangladesh’s governments work together, reducing tensions and developing a strong working relationship.
Scenario: Rising oceans cause Alexandria and other cities of Egypt’s Nile Delta to collapse. At the same time, areas of sub-Saharan Africa suffer permanent drought, spurring a mass migration of refugees.
Worst case: Millions of unemployed, dispossessed young men from North Africa and the Sahel press toward Europe. Europe cracks down and ghettoizes North African migrants; Egypt and Ethiopia go to war over the Nile headwaters.
Best case: The international community helps Egypt and other African nations fend off the spread of deserts through water conservation and irrigation. Nations of the Sahel profit from mining and use the proceeds to support their people; Europe establishes migration quotas that everyone can live with.
Scenario:Rivers dwindle in Peru, the result of shrinking glaciers, and Peru’s hydroelectric power and water supply steadily decline.
Worst Case: The population suffers high electricity bills and blackouts, on one hand, and high water bills and shortages on the other. Corruption and crime are rife. The government buckles under the strain and Peru descends into civil war.
Best Case: The government sees what’s coming and does meticulous planning. With international help, it builds reservoirs, water-conservation systems and desalination plants. The ride is bumpy, but order is maintained and people mostly get what they need.
These scenarios address some of climate change’s worst conundrums: Poor, agricultural countries will most likely be hardest hit by climate change, but have the fewest resources to prepare. This is not a situation the neighbors can ignore: Chaos in one country can easily spill over a border. In other words, each country has a stake in solving the problem, even if is own citizens are unaffected.
Each of best-case results assume that governments of poor nations will plan years and decades ahead and keep in mind the welfare of all citizens. Furthermore, they bank on wealthy countries spending trillions of aid out of enlightened self-interest.
I am not optimistic things will work out so well.
On the other hand, do we have any other choice? Any general, president or congresswoman need only think through the consequences of shrinking glaciers, rising oceans, failing crops to realize no nation can go it alone.
This book impressed upon me is that if we are to survive climate change, we’ll need a level of cooperation an order of magnitude greater than any the world has ever seen. We either make it through together, or we all go down.
I just finished reading “The Long Summer,” a book by archaeology writer Brian Fagan about how climate change has affected the course of human history. With my home state of California heading into a serious summer drought, a long view of the weather seemed wise.
Fagan’s “long summer” is the Holocene Period, the almost 12,000 years of relatively warm, stable climate in which human civilization began, and that continues to this day. But even a stable climate has hiccups. It’s those odd events that Fagan digs from the records of prehistory.
Three things struck me most of all. The first is how a sudden event on one side of the planet can change weather patterns far away, sometimes for an awfully long time. Take Lake Agassiz, the biggest body of water I’d never heard of. In 11,500 B.C., this vast body of glacial meltwater spanned much of the center of North America, from Manitoba to South Dakota. At some point Agassiz topped its basin and carved a channel into the St. Lawrence River. Within a few months, the lake basin spilled most of its contents into Hudson Bay. This deluge of freshwater into the Atlantic started a chain reaction that led to a thousand-year drought in Mesopotamia and wrote a death sentence for some of the Fertile Crescent’s first cities.
The second was the unpredictable consequences that even semi-regular events, like an El Nino, can have on civilizations. I was a cub reporter in California during the El Nino event of 1998, writing about hillsides that collapsed due to rain. This seemed catastrophic at the time, but it was chump change compared to the havoc that El Ninos once wreaked in ancient Egypt. As surface temperatures shift in the Pacific Ocean, the monsoon can fail over East Africa, drying up the Nile. Fagan described how between 3,000 and 1,200 B.C., El Ninos caused Egyptian grain crops to fail and empires to crumble, not once but several times.
The third is how similar our similar our situation today is to those of villagers in Mesopotamia or the Nile farmers of Egypt. Even with our digital thermometers, ice-core samples from Greenland and weather satellites, we have no idea how much rain will fall in Iowa next year. Yes, we can make a better guess, but trend reports can’t subdue the spirits of a farmer who gazes at the sky and hopes that next year will be better. We’re hard-wired to look toward a brighter future, whether that optimism is warranted or not.
The battle for New York City’s green future arrived in my mailbox last week. It took the form of a fundraising appeal from MillionTreesNYC, a campaign to plant 100,000 trees every year for a decade. It bore the signature of that eminent environmentalist, Bette Midler.
Which immediately brought questions to mind. Who made the star of “Kiss My Brass” the voice of the city’s greenery? And since when do trees need a publicist?
I grew up in the California suburbs, where the trees grew thick and strong without the application of a single press release. No one needed to explain that the mulberry in the front yard was better than pavement, and this held true everywhere I looked: Trees were beloved, from the stoutest Sierra conifer to the most down-and-out palm in Beverly Hills.
In New York, however, MillionTreesNYC has declared trees as the biggest new sensation since Hannah Montana. Banners on the subway inform riders that trees provide shade, filter stormwater, clean pollution, and are quite nice to look at, too. Are New Yorkers such a bunch of Gollums that they need this spin?
Apparently they do. I did some research and found that if you’re a young tree, you might be better off in a logging camp. A 2004 study in Baltimore discovered that 325,000 of the city’s 2.5 million trees died each year, especially the saplings near big apartment buildings. Who could have guessed that a diet of urine, spilled Pepsi, and the occasional bodycheck by a car bumper isn’t the most nurturing environment?
Now I began to understand the logic behind the Million-Tree March. Flood the streets with a 100,000 saplings. Shake head regretfully as reports arrive of mysterious deaths near neighborhood taverns – somehow right around 2 a.m. – and knife attacks by deranged initial-carving lovers. The next year, send out 100,000 more.
One could draw a comparison between the MillionTreesNYC campaign and the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy: In the role of the slavering orc hordes, eight million New Yorkers; as the hapless, wide-eyed hobbits, a million tender saplings.
This puts Bette Midler in the awkward role of Gandalf, which might best be achieved by transferring that helmet of curls to her chin. We can at least be thankful these trees are deaf.
The battle will last a decade or longer, and the bodycount will be high. The gutters will run with fertilizer. If enough greenhorns are thrown in the trenches, a battalion of gnarled veterans will achieve the thick bark of maturity. The Big Apple might emerge a cooler, shadier Eden, where the maples stand tall and New Yorkers are saved from themselves.
Truly, those million trees are the seed that with the sun’s love, in the spring, becomes the rose – uh, I mean the redbud.
A closeup of Stuart Haygarth's "Spectacle" chandelier, made entirely from used eyeglasses. Photo credit: Jeff J. Mitchell / Getty Images.
Last year New York’s Museum of Arts and Design moved into a gleaming white cube on Columbus Circle, giving no hint of its former identity as the American Craft Museum. But this popsicle-stick-and-glitter past helped me make sense of the current exhibit called “Second Lives.”
It demonstrates new uses for everyday things, and had me look at the rummage pile anew. (The exhibit continues through April 19. No photos were allowed; to see the best images, see the site here.)
The delight at MAD was in sighting an item that looked like your typical modern-art installation and, upon a closer look, finding it composed of things that might reside in my apartment: a tapestry made from high-end clothing labels, miniature trees cut from paper shopping bags, a chaise lounge soldered from quarters, a portrait assembled from standard black hair combs.
Many of these projects were so attractive and easily reproduced that they could easily be commercialized. Why couldn’t IKEA sell chandeliers made from old eyeglasses? Or Target sell Buddha statuettes sculpted from phone books?
The exhibit asks, Why dig up new stuff from the ground? The material you need is right here!
As I left I brainstormed what art I could make out of the items that collect in the apartment no matter what I do. Light covers from plastic Food Emporium bags? Light fixtures from 7-Up cans? What could I confect from all my old MetroCards?
Next we visited SC Johnson, the manufacturer of such home-care items as Windex and Ziploc bags. All of the plant’s electricity comes from a generator powered by methane from a local landfill. Laudable as the project is, there wasn’t much to see; we put on safety glasses and earplugs and toured the (very hot) generator room, where the methane-powered beast hummed and rattled behind steel plates.
