Tag: burned

Using Grass for Electricity

  • John Caveny operates a farm in central Illinois. He was one of the state's first cultivators of miscanthus gigantus, a type of grass that can be burned for heat or electicity generation. Caveny predicts biomass will start small but if properly managed and marketed, could become utility scale. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

Energy experts are thinking through
how to replace coal that’s burned
in American power stations. One
alternative is to burn plants,
because they can produce fewer
greenhouse gas emissions. This
is called biomass power. In the
Midwest, there’s talk of growing
millions of acres of grass for biomass.
Shawn Allee looks at whether
the region’s up to the challenge:

Transcript

Energy experts are thinking through
how to replace coal that’s burned
in American power stations. One
alternative is to burn plants,
because they can produce fewer
greenhouse gas emissions. This
is called biomass power. In the
Midwest, there’s talk of growing
millions of acres of grass for biomass.
Shawn Allee looks at whether
the region’s up to the challenge:

One Midwest farmer who grows biomass crops is John Caveny of Illinois. Caveny shows me some gigantic grass called miscanthus.

Caveny: ”You can get an idea of how big it is. It’d be eleven or twelve feet tall right now. and it’s still not done growing.”

Allee: ”It’s pretty sturdy stuff.”

(rustle)

Caveny: ”That’s the thing about it.”

(rustle)

Caveny says you can burn miscanthus and other energy grasses to make electricity. The idea’s to replace coal, which spews carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

”Unlike wind energy or solar that just dispalce fossil carbon use, these plants here, displace fossil carbon use, but in addition they take CO2 out of the air and store it in the soils.”

Energy experts say that’s true, at least for a while. But they say to do much good, lots of utilities need to burn energy grasses. Caveny would love that, but there’s a problem.

Caveny: ”There’s this whole concept of the valley of death.”

Allee: ”I haven’t heard this term. Valley of death?”

Caveny: ”Valley of death is you’ve got a user here and a producer here and you gotta get ’em to match up.”

This valley is a gap between supply and demand for energy grass. It exists because utilities won’t invest in biomass electrical equipment until farmers prove they can grow enough grass. Caveny says farmers will start small.

”You might want to heat a shopping mall or a small strip mall or something like that.”

Caveny says those kinds of projects will make utilities confident in the grass market – and then they’d cross that valley of death. They’ll invest, they’ll buy energy grass and they’ll power suburbs and cities with biomass. That’s his prediction, though.

At a Midwestern farm expo, I find people who say this valley of death is too wide.

Bryan Reggie is showing off equipment that squishes energy grass into briquettes.

Reggie: ”It’s roughly the size of a golf ball, but a cylinder in shape.”

Allee: ”Like a hockey puck almost.”

Reggie: ”Yeah.”

Reggie makes biomass equipment for farmers who want cheap heat, and these grass hockey pucks work.

Allee: ”What, you burn these?”

Reggie: ”Yeah, you burn these in biomass boilers.”

Allee: ”You’d want to heat a farm house or something?”

Reggie: ”Yeah, maybe a green house or larger space.”

Reggie says energy grass could be great for farms, but big-city electric utilities will not cross that “financial valley of death” Caveny talked about. They’d need too much biomass.

”When you get bigger scale, you have to start trucking in all your fuel from long distance. Biomass transportation costs are high, so you want to transport as little as possible. That’s a good reason to keep it small and keep everything local.”

After Reggie’s equipment demonstration, I bump into Steve Flick. He’s with Show Me Energy, a Missouri co-op. Flick is a kind of biomass celebrity because he actually got a coal-fired power plant to test-burn his energy grass. That test worked, but so far no utility has volunteered to give up coal. Flick predicts groups of Midwestern farmers will build tiny power plants.

Flick: ”We think these models would be every fifty to sixty miles apart and the producers that owned those organizations would benefit.”

Allee: ”You wouldn’t necessarily be lighting up St. Louis or lighting up Chicago, right?”

Flick: ”Presently, we’re not trying to settle all the world’s problems, just our little piece of it right now.”

Flick says forget that financial valley of death idea – only energy pundits dream of powering a metropolis with biomass, at least while coal is so cheap.

He says biomass can power a good chunk of rural America, and for now that’s good enough.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Interview: Coal’s Future

  • A coal mine in West Virginia. (Photo by Erika Celeste)

The coal industry wants us to
believe in the idea of ‘clean coal.’
But burning coal emits a lot of
carbon dioxide, the greenhouse
gas contributing to climate change.
The coal-burning electric power
industry is just now testing technology
to capture CO2 and to permanently
store it. The second round of tests
is happening at American Electric
Power’s Mountaineer Power Plant
in New Haven, West Virginia. Hank
Courtright is monitoring those tests.
He’s with the non-profit Electric Power
Research Institute. Lester Graham
talked with him and asked how the
tests are going:

Transcript

The coal industry wants us to
believe in the idea of ‘clean coal.’
But burning coal emits a lot of
carbon dioxide, the greenhouse
gas contributing to climate change.
The coal-burning electric power
industry is just now testing technology
to capture CO2 and to permanently
store it. The second round of tests
is happening at American Electric
Power’s Mountaineer Power Plant
in New Haven, West Virginia. Hank
Courtright is monitoring those tests.
He’s with the non-profit Electric Power
Research Institute. Lester Graham
talked with him and asked how the
tests are going:

Hank Courtright: We think it has great progress, it’s really the second step of a multi-step process that we’re doing. We had just concluded a project up in Wisconsin on a smaller scale, the same type of technology, and it was very successful. It capture 90-plus percent of the CO2 that passed through it and saw some great promises as far as reducing the cost of doing it. The idea here is that we’re scaling it up ten times larger at the mountaineer plant and so far the early results seem very good and we’ll continue to test that over a year plus to see how it does produce.

Lester Graham: I understand it takes a lot more energy to run this extra CO2 capture equipment, as much as 30% more coal has to be burned to generate the same amount of electricity, what’s being called a parasitic load. What’s this going to mean for our power bills?

Hank: Well, what we’re trying to Lester is that the parasitic load gets down into the, let’s say, the 10 to 15% range. If you get to that level, it means that the electricity out of a coal plant might be about 25% higher than it is. But right now coal is basically the cheapest form of producing electricity, so it still ends as being an economical option even if you might be increasing the cost of that coal plant by about 25%.

Lester: If they can accomplish that with this experiment, how long will it take to get this technology built into the bulk of coal burning power plants?

Hank: Well, you’re going to be working over this for several decades, really. If this plant at Mountaineer works well, our thinking is around 2020 you’re going to be able to have most new coal power plants use the carbon capture and storage. And you might be able to retrofit about 20%, 25% of the existing plants in the United States with this type of technology.

Lester: If all of these methods fizzle, we can’t capture carbon economically, or at the other end, we can’t find a way to sequester this carbon underground, or whatever type of method they can come up with, what’s next?

Hank: Well, that causes some difficulties because right here in the United States coal is used to produce about half our electricity. And if it doesn’t work on coal, it’s also the issue that it won’t work on any other fossil fuels such as natural gas, which produces about 20% of our electricity. So you’re into a difficult situation that if you’d wanted to significantly reduce the CO2 emissions to improve the climate change issue, then you’d have to be looking at a combination of probably nuclear power and a very large roll out of renewable energy. Both of those would have to take the lion share of electricity production. But our hope is that we can get this working because it is not only here in the US that you need it on fossil fuels of coal and gas, but also in places like China, Russia, India, Australia, country’s that very large reserves of coal and hope to use those natural resources.

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Hanukkah’s Green Messages

  • President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama watch as a child lights the Hanukkah candles at a reception in the White House on December 16th, 2009. (Photo by Samantha Appleton, courtesy of the White House)

A lot of people worry that we make
too much waste during the holidays.
But some religious leaders are trying
to change that. Julie Grant reports
on one rabbi who wants people to see
Hanukkah as a holiday about sustainability:

Transcript

A lot of people worry that we make
too much waste during the holidays.
But some religious leaders are trying
to change that. Julie Grant reports
on one rabbi who wants people to see
Hanukkah as a holiday about sustainability:

Jewish people light candles each of the eight nights of Hanukkah – a tradition dates back 2200 hundred years – when the Jews reclaimed the Holy Temple in Jerusalem from the Greeks.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow says they needed oil to light the temple.

“They lit the menorah with just one day’s worth of oil, and, according to the legend, it lasted for eight days, until the new oil was ready.”

A few years ago, Rabbi Waskow realized this is an environmental message for people today.

“This could be seen as the conservation of oil.”

So Waskow wants people to see Hanukkah as a time to conserve natural resources in their own lives – and in public policy.

He’s encouraging people to drive less,
to support biking, railways and walking paths, and
to rest more, so we emit less carbon.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Slash-And-Burn in Indonesia

  • Indonesia's peat forests are home to Sumatran tigers, Asian elephants and orangutans. (Photo by Ann Dornfeld)

Officials from every country in the
world have gathered in Copenhagen
this week to build the
framework for a global climate treaty.
One of the goals is to slow the
destruction of forests in developing
countries. Those forests process and
store massive amounts of carbon dioxide.
Ann Dornfeld reports:

Transcript

Officials from every country in the
world have gathered in Copenhagen
this week to build the
framework for a global climate treaty.
One of the goals is to slow the
destruction of forests in developing
countries. Those forests process and
store massive amounts of carbon dioxide.
Ann Dornfeld reports:

Preserving forests will be a huge debate in Copenhagen. Poor countries want wealthier countries to compensate them for not cutting the forests for lumber and to convert it to farmland. To find out why that might be important, you have to visit a place like this peat forest on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

(sound of the forest)

Forests like this one are home to orangutans, Sumatran tigers and Asian elephants. But these forests may be more important for what lies beneath their marshy floors. The peat is composed of thousands of years’ worth of organic material. Indonesia’s peat forests are storage units for much of the world’s carbon. And they’re being destroyed at an alarming rate.

Not far down the road, Greenpeace Indonesia campaigner Bustar Maitar looks out on a charred landscape. You’d never know a forest stood here just a few months ago.

“Is the no more ecosystem here. No more forest here.”

Only a few burnt tree trunks are standing. Sour smoke curls up from the blackened ground. Maitar says this fire has been burning for a month.

“Fire is coming from not from in the top of the ground, but the haze is coming from inside. It means it’s the underground fire, especially in peatland. And underground fire is very difficult to handle.”

Indonesia’s peat forests are rapidly being logged, drained and burned in order to clear the land for tree farms and palm oil plantations.

The peat can be dozens of feet deep. When it’s burned, the carbon it’s been storing is released as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. All of that burning peat has made Indonesia the world’s third largest emitter of CO2.

Until recently, industrialized nations topped the list of greenhouse gas emitters. Now the United States shares that shortlist with developing nations like China, India and Brazil. As these countries industrialize, demand for timber and open space has stripped many of their forests bare. But leaders of developing countries insist their nations should be allowed to do what it takes to build their economies – even if that leads to climate change.

Paul Winn works on forest and climate issues for Greenpeace. He says the only alternative is for wealthy countries to pay developing countries to slow their emissions.

“If the industrialized world is serious about climate change, it’s essential. It just has to be.”

Winn says wealthy countries have pledged 45 billion dollars so far to help poor countries reduce emissions. But he says that’s just a start.

“If you compare that to what the industrialized world spent on protecting its banks and its financial institutions during the financial crisis, it’s a pittance. And it’s far more essential that they do it now. Because these forests are threatened, and the emissions that go up into the atmosphere are going to come back and bite the industrialized world if they don’t fund its protection.”

Some of the funding plans on the table at Copenhagen would still involve drastic changes to the world’s forest ecosystems. The UN’s current plan would give pulp and paper corporations in Indonesia carbon credits to convert peat forests into acacia plantations.

Winn says that’s the opposite of what needs to happen. Greenpeace and other environmental groups want industrialized countries to fund a moratorium on logging.

One complicating factor is the rampant corruption in many developing countries.

“It is a concern. And I would imagine that’s why many of the industrialized countries haven’t committed to funding.”

Winn says a thorough verification process would ensure that if countries allowed logging, they’d have to repay donor nations.

Winn is in Copenhagen to promote forest protection in the developing world. He says he doesn’t expect anything major to come out of this conference – but hopefully it will lay some groundwork.

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

Related Links

Sending a City’s Garbage Up in Flames

  • Michigan Waste Energy Chief Engineer Brad Laesser checks the cameras and emissions data at Detroit's incinerator. (Photo by Sarah Hulett)

Back in the 1980s and 90s,
dozens of communities across
the US built incinerators to
get rid of their trash. Many
of them financed the massive
furnaces with bonds they’re just
now paying off. And now that
those debts are off their books,
some cities are re-thinking whether
burning trash makes environmental
and economic sense. Sarah Hulett reports:

Transcript

Back in the 1980s and 90s,
dozens of communities across
the US built incinerators to
get rid of their trash. Many
of them financed the massive
furnaces with bonds they’re just
now paying off. And now that
those debts are off their books,
some cities are re-thinking whether
burning trash makes environmental
and economic sense. Sarah Hulett reports:

About 300 garbage trucks dump their loads each day at the nation’s biggest
municipal incinerator.

“You see the conveyor house going across, that’s conveying the fuel to the
boilers.”

That’s Brad Laesser. He’s the chief engineer at the Michigan Waste Energy
facility in Detroit.

The “fuel” he’s talking about is shredded-up trash.

And he says that’s the beauty of facilities like this. They produce electricity.

“So right now we’re putting out about 50 megawatts. But we can go to
here.”

Laesser points to 70 on the output gauge. That’s enough electricity to power
about half the homes in Detroit. And the leftover steam is used to heat and
cool more than 200 buildings downtown.

Sounds great, right?

Well, Brad Van Guilder of the Ecology Center says not so much.

“Be wary of people coming and talking to you about large, expensive magic
machines that are going to dispose of your waste for you.”

Van Guilder says municipal waste incinerators are major contributors to
smog, and spew dangerous pollutants like dioxin, lead and mercury.

And he says huge furnaces like Detroit’s make it nearly impossible to get
viable recycling efforts off the ground.

“Think about what’s in the trash that you throw out every day. One of the
most important components is paper and plastic.”

Both can be recycled. But Detroit has not had a curbside recycling program
for the past 20 years. That’s because the contract with the incinerator
required that all trash picked up at the curb be used to keep the furnaces
burning.

That changed this summer, though – when the contract expired. Now about
30,000 households are part of a curbside recycling pilot project. And there
are drop-off sites where people can take their recyclables.

(sound of recycling center)

Matthew Naimi heads an organization that runs several drop-off sites, and –
maybe surprisingly – he’s okay with the incinerator. Naimi says he sees
trash disposal and recycling as two separate industries.

“I realized that if we shut the incinerator down before we got a good
established recycling program running, we’d be burying our recyclables
instead of burning them.”

And officials with Covanta – which runs the Detroit incinerator – agree that
recycling and incineration can work together.

Paul Gilman is the chief sustainability officer for Covanta. He says landfills
are the problem – not recycling.

“Landfills and energy-from-waste facilities, that’s where the competition is.
It isn’t at the upper step of recycling.”

He says cheap landfill space makes the economics of incineration difficult.

But he’s hoping that could change with the passage of a climate change bill
in Washington. Gilman says in Europe and Asia, trash incinerators like
Detroit’s don’t get treated the same way as power plants fueled with coal or
natural gas.

“So in Asia, under the Kyoto protocols, a facility like this actually generates
what are called greenhouse gas credits. They’re reducing greenhouse gasses
by the act of processing solid waste and keeping it from going to a landfill.”

Where trash produces methane – a potent greenhouse gas.

But the people who want the incinerator shut down say they don’t believe
burning trash is the greener way to go. They want the city to landfill its
waste while it builds an aggressive recycling program.

So far, they’re not getting what they want from city leaders.

The board that oversees how Detroit handles its trash recently voted to go
with incineration for at least the next year.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sarah Hulett.

Related Links

Predicting Wildfires in a Warmer World

  • This wildfire ignited along Idaho Highway 55 and was started by people. Scientists say as the climate warms, fires like this one will become common place in many parts of the world. (Photo by Sadie Babits)

Climate change has already brought
warmer temperatures, rising sea
levels and melting glaciers. Now,
researchers believe global warming
will cause major shifts in wildfire
patterns around the world. As Sadie
Babits reports, scientists hope to
predict where future wildfires will
light up:

Transcript

Climate change has already brought
warmer temperatures, rising sea
levels and melting glaciers. Now,
researchers believe global warming
will cause major shifts in wildfire
patterns around the world. As Sadie
Babits reports, scientists hope to
predict where future wildfires will
light up:

Trying to predict where wildfires are likely to start decades from now, is
kind of like getting a full body scan.

(sound of medical scanner)

Except instead of a medical scanner, scientists scanned the earth using
satellite data, climate models and the history of present day wildfires to
map out global wildfire patterns.

“The impacts of climate change on wildfires are expected to be widespread
around the world.”

Katherine Hayhoe is a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. She’s part
of a group of scientists that has for the first time, tried to project where fire
hotspots will crop up around the world. She says they found that climate
change will affect wildfire patterns.

Hotter temperatures and rain and snow coming at different times in the
year or perhaps not at all, will mean forests and grasslands will dry out
quicker – becoming tinder boxes for fire.

In the next 30 years, scientists believe that the Western U.S. will continue
to see catastrophic fires like the recent blaze in Santa Barbara, which
destroyed 80 homes.

In the next 60 years, they predict wildfires will increase in the Corn Belt and
spread into the East Coast.

Hayhoe says having an idea of how wildfire patterns will shift will help
communities better prepare.

“We can never eliminate the risk of climate change entirely but by making
wise choices and planning strategically we can minimize those risks.”

Some communities are already taking steps to prevent wildfire. The city of
Bend, Oregon was one of the first in the country to launch a public
education campaign to get homeowners to fire proof their homes. The
program, called FireFree, started more than a decade ago, after a massive
wildfire burned nineteen homes and scorched thousands of acres.

“It was something that scarred our community.”

Gary Marshall is the deputy chief of Bend’s Fire Department.

“We have this history of people wanting to live outside the urban area and
live out in rural areas, where they can see the deer and be out in the trees
and live that lifestyle that most Americans who move out to the West want
to be a part of that.”

Bend lies in what’s known as wildfire alley. Every year there are dozens of
fires that crop up either from lightning strikes or from people. The flames
are fed by dried out grasses and forests so dense you can’t see through
them. Add homes to the mix and you have a recipe for disaster not just
here but throughout the West.

But Marshall says the Fire Free program is working.

(sound of a truck driving on a dirt road)

County forester Joe Stutler and Gary Marshall drive me through
neighborhoods outside Bend. We stop first at an upscale suburb called
Coldera Springs. Everyone here has volunteered to fire proof their new
homes.

But just down the road, there’s a much older suburb and a lot of trees that
have been thinned out.

Sadie: “You can’t see through the trees it’s so dense.”

Joe: “You can’t walk through.”

Gary: “And a firefighter won’t go in there. You’d write that off. So if you
don’t take care of it, the fire will.”

That’s a picture that climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe hopes to avoid.
She says having a long term view of where wildfires might pop up could
help communities to start now and follow Bend’s lead.

It took Bend years to get most of the homeowners here to take
responsibility, and give their homes a fighting change to survive a
devastating blaze.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sadie Babits.

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Avoiding a Climate Tipping Point

  • If the global temperature goes past 2 degrees Celsius - the danger point - we might not be able to get the climate back to a more natural state (Photo courtesy of NASA)

Two new studies in the journal Nature are trying to answer: how much is too much when it comes to global warming? Rebecca Williams reports:

Transcript

Two new studies in the journal Nature are trying to answer: how much is too much when it comes to global warming? Rebecca Williams reports:

These studies look at what we’d have to do to keep global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius.

That’s considered the danger point for climate change.

Past that point we might not be able to get the climate back to a more natural state.

These papers suggest that we’ve got to cut back on burning fossil fuels a lot. They say by 2050, countries like the US need to cut emissions by more than 90% below what they were in 1990.

The White House and Democratic leaders in Congress have proposed cutting emissions by less than that – 80%.

The researchers make the point… of all the coal and oil and natural gas in the ground that we know about, we can only burn one fourth of that amount by 2050.

We’re burning it at a much faster rate.

The studies say, at the current rate, we could be past that tipping point in less than 15 years.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Coal: Dirty Past, Hazy Future (Part 2)

  • The coal industry hopes the federal government will help them find a way to catch and store the carbon coming from smokestacks.

The coal industry got hit with expensive
pollution restrictions almost two decades ago. Now, the government’s considering putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming. Coal companies think they have a technological solution in a test project called FutureGen. In the
second part of our series on the future of coal, Shawn Allee looks at why they
have such high hopes for it:

Transcript

The coal industry got hit with expensive
pollution restrictions almost two decades ago. Now, the government’s considering putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming. Coal companies think they have a technological solution in a test project called FutureGen. In the
second part of our series on the future of coal, Shawn Allee looks at why they
have such high hopes for it:

The last time the federal government put a price on coal pollution was in 1990.

Power plants had to start paying for sulphur dioxide that came out of smoke stacks and caused acid rain.

To clean up, many burned cleaner coal.

That was bad news for Illinois miner Chris Nielsen.

He happened to mine some of the dirtiest coal.

“A good portion of the economy around here was built on coal industry. And coal mining jobs not only paid a good wage, they had terrific benefits. And as the industry went soft, people lost the best jobs they ever had.”

Cleanup technology improved, but it took nearly two decades to make burning the highest-sulpher coal economical again.

Nielsen says today, coal executives worry they’ll lose profits if the government prices carbon dioxide.

And coal miners worry they’ll lose jobs again.

The industry wants new plants that do two things: first, they capture carbon dioxide while burning coal, and then bury, or sequester this carbon dioxide – so it stays out of the atmosphere.

Nielsen says there’s a plant like that in the works, it’s called FutureGen.

“We can burn the coal in a clean, environmentally friendly manner. The FutureGen project where they were going to sequester the carbon dioxide was a terrific opportunity to show that.”

Well, Nielsen’s jumping the gun.

FutureGen hasn’t proved anything; it’s not even built.

The coal industry and the government were supposed to design and fund FutureGen, then build it in Central Illinois.

The government and coal companies fought over how much the plant would cost but now, it’s likely to move forward.

Even with a sketchy history though, the industry’s got almost no choice but to be hopeful for FutureGen.

The industry wants carbon dioxide capture and sequestration to work – otherwise, it’s gonna pay big for carbon pollution.

Not everyone’s so confident in the technology.

“We can not depend on carbon capture and sequestration to achieve greenhouse gas emissions reductions because we don’t know whether it’s going to work.”

That’s Ron Burke, with the Union of Concerned Scientists.

He says FutureGen is worth testing but it shouldn’t distract us from technology we know is low-carbon.

“There are ways to meet the greenhouse gas reductions targets that we need to meet without carbon capture and sequestration. We can do it, it’s primarily through in investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency in the near term.”

There’re energy researchers who aren’t so sure enough renewable energy like wind and solar will be available soon enough.

One is of them is Ernest Moniz at MIT.

“We have a ways to go for let’s say, solar, to scale up. Right now, it’s less than point 1% of our electricity.”

Coal generates nearly half our electricity.

Moniz says it won’t be easy to replace, but it might be possible to improve it.

He says its likely carbon dioxide capture and sequestration can work technically.

But he says we need to build FutureGen to answer whether it works efficiently and economically.

“Well, if we are going to establish a new technology, like sequestration, and be able to have it not only demonstrated but then deployed and implemented, that means we would need to start, preferably yesterday, but at worst, today.”

For Moniz, FutureGen could be clean coal’s first major test – not just of whether it works – but whether it’s too expensive.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Getting People to Stop Burning Trash

  • Robert Olsen used to burn his trash. Now he drives his trash into town. (Photo by Todd Melby)

Getting rid of your trash in the city
is easy. Take it to the curb on pickup
day and the city does the rest. In rural
areas, many people don’t have garbage pickup.
So they burn their trash. And that causes
pollution. Todd Melby tells us about one
place that’s trying to change its burning
habits:

Transcript

Getting rid of your trash in the city is easy. Take it to the curb on pickup day and the city does the rest. In rural areas, many people don’t have garbage pickup. So they burn their trash. And that causes pollution. Todd Melby tells us about one place that’s trying to change its burning habits:


Robert Olsen lives out in the country. He used to burn his garbage. But not any more.


(Pickup hatch opens)


On this windy morning, Olsen has driven his pickup into town to dump his trash.


“I think this is probably a week’s worth for us.”


He grabs the blue plastic bin from the back of his pickup and dumps it into a green Dumpster.


“Not too difficult.”


Olsen runs the environmental office here in Lincoln County, Minnesota. It was his idea to set-up nine Dumpsters throughout this sparsely populated county. He did it because he knows that burning garbage pollutes.


“The issue is that when you burn garbage at home, in the country, the first people or persons who are going to experience any harmful effects from that garbage are going to be you.”


That’s because a lot of trash — including even plain old paper — contains chlorine that produce dioxins when burned at home. Plastic is even worse.


Mark Rust is a solid waste expert with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.


“If you’re using a burn barrel or fire pit or you’re burning garbage in any way on your own property, you’re creating a perfect factory for producing dioxins.”


Smoke from burn barrels and fire pits are now the leading source of dioxins in air pollution. Some studies have connected dioxins to cancer. Burning garbage is especially bad because there are no anti-pollution scrubbers on do-it-yourself burners.


“With a burn barrel, it’s all right there.”


Melby: “It all just goes right up into the air?”


“Into the air, into the soil. Ultimately, we’re going to be taking it in on the dinner table.”


Most states still allow people living in the country to burn their garbage. In Minnesota, only farmers and those without access to affordable garbage pickup can burn. A 2005 survey found that about half of the people living in rural Minnesota burn at least occasionally.


Which is why the state offered rural counties some start up money to get people to burn less.


Rural residents in Lincoln County, Minnesota have had access to drop-off sites for seven months now. When the program started, haulers took away about 8 tons of trash every month. Now it’s up to 15 tons.


Back at one of the county’s drop-off sites, Clarence Lietz is getting of his Buick and grabbing newspapers for the nearby recycling bin. What doesn’t get recycled, gets burned, he says.


“What garbage we have like small things for the yard we just burn right at home, you know. I’d say about a five-gallon pail full or something like that.”


Another elderly customer — she didn’t want her name used — says she burns junk mail and envelopes at home.


“Papers. That’s all you can burn. I don’t burn garbage.


Melby: “And why don’t ya?”


“It’s not right to burn garbage. It don’t burn any good anyway.”


Melby: “Why isn’t it right to burn it?”


“You know why, don’t cha?”


I do now.


For The Environment Report, I’m Todd Melby.

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Climate Change and Wildfires

  • Jennifer Pierce and David Wilkins stand in front of a ponderosa pine forest just outside the city of Boise. They hope to study the relationship between fire and climate here and recreate a snapshot of ancient climate. They are both teach at Boise State University's Geosciences Department. (Photo by Sadie Babits)

Twenty years ago this year, the
country watched its oldest national park
go up in flames. Looking back, scientists
believe the 1988 fires of Yellowstone
National Park were the signal fire of
climate change. Researchers have been
working ever since to understand this
relationship between climate and wildfire.
Sadie Babits reports on two scientists
searching for clues to ancient climates,
using trees as their guide:

Transcript

Twenty years ago this year, the
country watched its oldest national park
go up in flames. Looking back, scientists
believe the 1988 fires of Yellowstone
National Park were the signal fire of
climate change. Researchers have been
working ever since to understand this
relationship between climate and wildfire.
Sadie Babits reports on two scientists
searching for clues to ancient climates,
using trees as their guide:

Jennifer Pierce wears work boots as she plows down a steep slope in a
ponderosa pine forest.

(sound of walking, twigs breaking)

Her blonde hair is tucked up under her Boise State bronco cap, but it keeps
sneaking out. She has to keep brushing it back under. She and her
colleague David Wilkins are professors who work for Boise State
University’s Geosciences Department. They’re in the middle of tall pines in
a forest just outside of Boise, Idaho. Suddenly she’s crashing across the
brambles and heads for this tree.

“Oh that’s a great one! Wow! Sweet!”

She drops to her knees and shows me how this tree has been scarred by
fire.

“You see this little V shaped cat face here at the bottom of the tree that’s
blackened? So during a fire when the bark of the tree gets damaged that
preserves a record of the fire as a scar on the tree.”

Pierce says since the tree has annual growth rings, she can tell when the
tree got burned.

It’s one way Pierce and Wilkins reconstruct the fire history of this forest.
It’s a key to understanding how climate has affected forest fires in the past.

“I think as we move into a likely warmer and drier future, it’s going to be
increasingly important to understand the relationship between climate and
fire.”

She says climate is the primary control for wildfires. As the West warms,
there’s less control. Recently, that’s meant a lot more wildfires.

(popping sound) “There you go!” (sound of a drill bit going through the tree
with sound of birds and forest)

David Wilkins is twisting an auger into the tree.

“It’s a good upper body workout!” (laughs)

It’s a way to take a sample of the rings of this tree. Within a half-minute,
Wilkins’ auger is stuck. The tree is rotten inside. An eight-inch core is all he
gets.

(sound of drill bit coming out of the tree)

Jennifer Pierce takes a look at this sample Wilkins twisted out. The rings –
some light, some dark – reveal just how the tree has responded to moisture
and temperature.

“If you have a tree that kind of is at the edge of its comfort zone so to
speak, it will be more of a sensitive recorder of those environmental
stresses. See this one looks pretty good.”

Tree rings aren’t the only clue these scientists use to reconstruct historic
climates.

(scraping sound)

“I didn’t bring my big shovel. I kind of feel naked without it.”

Pierce scrapes away dirt and she finds bits of charcoal. She can sometimes
use charcoal for radio carbon dating. But these won’t do.

“But, um, I wouldn’t use them for dating because you want to make sure
that the charcoal is stratographicly in place and that you haven’t had
critters burrowing and mixing things up.”

Charcoal can be dated much further back than the tree rings. It helps
Pierce and Wilkins understand what happened here thousands of years
ago. With samples from other scientists, they’ll get a snapshot of ancient
climate and how it affects wildfire.

And possibly determine what climate change will mean for forests in the
future.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sadie Babits.

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