carbon - The Environment Report

Slash-And-Burn in Indonesia

Indonesia's peat forests are home to Sumatran tigers, Asian elephants and orangutans. (Photo by Ann Dornfeld)
When the peat is burned, it releases tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. (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

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.

Forests, Carbon, and Critters

Some suspect that in Copenhagen, rich countries might agree to pay poor countries to stop cutting forests. (Photo by John J. Mosesso, courtesy of the National Biological Information Infrastructure)

World leaders are meeting in Copenhagen,
Denmark next month to begin dealing with
global climate change. A firm treaty is
off the table for now, but one idea they’re
thinking through is to preserve forests
and have them absorb heat-trapping carbon
dioxide. Shawn Allee reports,
some scientists want all this forest talk
to include animals, not just trees:

Transcript

Stuart Pimm is a biologist at Duke University. He says in Copenhagen, rich countries might agree to pay poor countries to stop cutting forests. Pimm says that’s great but not all forests are equal.

“Some forests have more carbon in them than others, and some forests have more species in them than others.”

Pimm and other biologists say carbon pricing alone might mean carbon-poor forests get cut – even if they’re home to lots of animal species. They want negotiators to somehow tweak any climate agreement.

“So we should be encouraging countries not to burn their forests, but we should encourage them not to burn the forests that are so biologically rich.”

Climate negotiators could take up Pimm’s idea next month in Copenhagen.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

CO2 Helps Trees Grow Faster

This photo, taken in August 1947, shows a load of white pine logs being hauled in Idaho. (Photo courtesy of the US Forest Service)

Climate change means faster growing
trees. Kyle Norris looks at ongoing
research that’s looking at how that
plays out:

Transcript

Climate change means faster growing
trees. Kyle Norris looks at ongoing
research that’s looking at how that
plays out:

Maybe you remember this from grade-school science: trees take in carbon
dioxide—that’s a gas emitted from burning fossil fuels. Then trees convert that
CO2 into oxygen. So with more carbon dioxide, trees are really taking off.

Wendy Jones is a research associate. She’s with Michigan Technological
University and she’s been studying young trees for the past eleven years.

Not only does carbon dioxide make trees grow faster, but warmer temperatures
help prolong the growing season. Jones says that could be good for the timber
industry.

“We could cut the trees sooner because they’re growing faster.”

For example, fast-growing aspen trees are used in everything from paper to
matchsticks. Jones says climate change could mean aspens could be harvested in
25 years instead of 35 years.

For The Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

Green Roofs Greener Than Thought

The rock, soil and tiny plants in a green roof help insulate a building. That can cut heating and cooling costs. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

Green roofs are a popular, but
expensive, way for building owners
to prove their green credentials.
Shawn Allee reports some
researchers feel they might do even
more environmental good than they
thought:

Transcript

The rock, soil and tiny plants in a green roof help insulate a building.
That can cut heating and cooling costs.

Researchers at Michigan State University think they’ve found another
benefit, too.

Brad Rowe says the tiny plants absorb carbon from the air. Rowe says the
plants are small, so this carbon sequestration effect is small, too. But
he says green roofs are still better than plain-jane roofs.

“You have all these roofs everywhere and basically, they’re doing nothing
– they’re essentially dead. So, putting plants on them is one way to
sequester carbon above ground, in the leaves and stems, the roots, and even
in the soil that’s on top of the roof.”

Rowe says if Congress ever puts a price on carbon emissions, green roof
owners might get credit for sequestering carbon – and that could cut a
green roof’s high price tag.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

The Summer BBQ: Gas or Charcoal?

Neal Fisher only uses charcoal for his summer grilling (Photo by Jennifer Guerra)

Summertime and the grilling is easy… but how environmentally friendly is it? We sent reporter Jennifer Guerra to find out which type of grill is greener: gas or charcoal:

Transcript

Summertime and the grilling is easy… but how environmentally friendly is it? We sent reporter Jennifer Guerra to find out which type of grill is greener: gas or charcoal:

Neal Fisher thinks he’s an environmentally friendly kind of guy. He and his wife recycle, they use compact fluorescent light bulbs in the house, they walk most places and hardly ever use their car.

But when it comes to outdoor grilling… it’s charcoal all the way.

“It may be a little decadent when you’re taking the environment into consideration, but I do it.”

(sound of grilling)

On tonight’s menu, it’s burgers, Jamaican jerk chicken, onions, and asparagus. Everything is grilled on basic, 22 ½ inch Weber kettle.

“Nothing fancy, no frills.”

To get the fire started, Fisher throws about 7 or 8 pounds of hardwood lump charcoal into a chimney starter.

“I don’t use the lighter fluid, I just use the charcoal chimney. I figure if I’m going to be cooking wood, I don’t want to cook a lot of chemicals too. So that’s something. I don’t kid myself that this is at all healthy for the world. I sometimes joke about it, too, well there goes my carbon footprint. Suddenly I’m carbon Sasquatch.”

To find out if Fisher really is a carbon Sasquatch, I called up Eric Johnson in Switzerland.

“Basically the footprint of using charcoal is about 3 times higher than the footprint of gas.”

Johnson just published a study in the journal Environmental Impact Assessment Review. In it, he compared the carbon dioxide emissions – or carbon footprint – of the two most popular types of grills: charcoal and propane gas.

When it comes to straight up carbon emissions – gas grills win hands down. Run your gas grill for an hour; emit 5.6 pounds of carbon dioxide into the air. Use charcoal briquettes for an hour of grilling; emit a whopping 11 pounds of CO2.

Fair enough.

But what if we look at the total carbon cycle of propane gas, a fossil fuel and charcoal, which is a bio fuel?

For that answer, we’ll turn to Bill Currie. He’s a professor in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan.

“You have to think about, can we replace the carbon back in the pool that charcoal came from? Can we replace it biologically over a reasonable period of time? And with charcoal, the answer is yes, we can re-grow those trees.”

That’s because charcoal is made out of wood, which is a renewable energy source. So if charcoal is harvested locally in a sustainable way, the re-grown trees can absorb the CO2 – which makes charcoal essentially carbon neutral. So charcoal made out of wood which is renewable. Propane gas on the other hand is made from oil. Not renewable.

“Fuels that are based on coal, oil, petroleum based fuel, it’s not possible to put that CO2 back where it was biologically in a reasonable amount of time. And that’s the big difference.”

But does any of this really matter? I mean, how important is grilling in the overall environmental scheme of things. Well Currie says it’s definitely not a big-ticket item like, say, the size of your house or the number of cars you have.

“It’s probably a small factor in the whole analysis. But at the same time, we make dozens or hundreds of these choices a day. And if we know that one alternative is better than another, these little things do matter because they add up.”

Especially when you consider that Americans are expected to use more than 60 million grills – both charcoal and gas – on July 4th. That’s the carbon equivalent of 900,000 trees. Now that’s a Carbon Sasquatch.

For The Environment Report, I’m Jennifer Guerra.

Laying Off the Lighter Fluid

There are alternative methods to starting your grill, other than lighter fluid (Source: Frettie at Wikimedia Commons)

Backyard grilling is a great American summertime tradition. But, there’s some concern about grilling contributing to air pollution. Lester Graham reports you can reduce the pollution… it all depends on what you use:

Transcript

So, let’s say you’ve got your charcoal. And now you’re squirting it with lighter fluid to get the fire going.

“Oooo. (laugh) Well, lighter fluid contains something called volatile organic compounds and helps to form a pollutant called ground level ozone.”

Beth Gorman is with the the Pima County Department of Environmental Quality in Tuscon. She says that ozone contributes to smog.

“This is a bad thing that we don’t want to breathe.”

And, lighter fluid residue can end up getting on your grilled veggies or burgers.

Gorman suggests a charcoal chimney which can get your charcoal lighted in no time, or an electric charcoal starter.

If you’re thinking a gas grill pollutes less, experts say when you consider the total carbon footprint, charcoal wins because it comes from a renewable resource: trees.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Thawing Tundra Speeds Up Warming

University of Florida biologist Ted Schuur does field work in the Alaska tundra every summer (Photo courtesy of Ted Schuur)
To protect the tundra, scientists at Eight Mile Lake put down boardwalks in the places they most frequently walk (Photo by Amy Mayer)
Graduate student Hanna Lee balances on the boardwalk as she moves equipment at the research site (Photo by Amy Mayer)

A report in this week’s journal Nature looks at how thawing ground up North might
impact global warming. Amy Mayer spent some time in Interior Alaska with
scientists at Eight Mile Lake:

Transcript

A report in this week’s journal Nature looks at how thawing ground up North might
impact global warming. Amy Mayer spent some time in Interior Alaska with
scientists at Eight Mile Lake:

Permafrost is ground that’s supposed to be frozen all the time. But for decades it’s been
thawing in places.

When that happens, carbon gets released—potentially contributing to the greenhouse
effect.

Ted Schuur’s a biologist at the University of Florida but he spends his summers doing
experiments near Healy, Alaska.

I tagged along during some field visits.

I met Schuur when we were both living in Fairbanks. He lives far away now, but loves
Alaska. You only work here year after year if you do. Summer field work is brutal – tons
of mosquitoes and you work all the time because the sun doesn’t set.

Pretty soon, we’re there.

“This has to be one of my more photogenic field sites that I ever worked at.”

Tundra surrounds us. We’re just north of the Alaska Range. I can see the snow-capped
peaks. We change into rubber boots, pick up our packs, and, after a few steps, we’re on
the tussocks.

Alaskans often say walking on tussocks is like balancing on basketballs. It’s not easy. If
your feet slip off, they get wet. Schuur’s tall and used to this, so he goes faster than me,
and with less bumbling.

Soon, we’re balancing on lumber instead. Schuur and his group try to protect the areas
where they work with narrow boardwalks.

“When we first came out here, we put these boardwalks that we’re walking on now, big
10 feet pieces of lumber – they’re like 2x6s or 2x8s. But we don’t really want to walk on
the tundra because we come here a lot and you’d end up with a trail in no time and
destroy vegetation.”

Schuur knows trudging across the tundra damages it and he tries to minimize that harm.
But in order to answer his questions about the potential greenhouse effect from thawing
permafrost, he has to dig in.

Schuur saws into the tundra with a bread knife.

“It’s very satisfying. It’s like cutting a big cake – though this is a cake with lots of roots in it.”

He cuts up the plants and packs the roots and the tops into jars.

“We’re going to measure respiration of plants.”

Schuur uses a machine to scrub out the carbon from the air that’s in the jars. The plant
tops and roots will continue to respire carbon dioxide until they die. Later, he’ll use fancy
equipment to “date” the carbon that’s left.

He needs the age of the carbon because when he finds older carbon he knows it’s only
recently escaped the frozen ground. That makes it extra in the system.

At first, Schuur learned, new carbon coincides with more plant growth that uses up the
addition. That means no greenhouse effect.

But, later, the permafrost keeps thawing, more old carbon becomes available, and plant
growth just can’t keep up. That means, carbon dioxide ends up in the atmosphere from
the thawing permafrost – just like it does from burning coal or gasoline.

The thawing may ultimately be a bad thing, but to understand and explain it further,
Schuur wants to document it – or even cause some. Next, he says…

“As strange as it seems, I would love to thaw permafrost on a large scale,
experimentally.”

The dilemma, of course, is that causing a thaw means contributing to – in a small way –
a process that might damage or destroy the ecosystem. But we all emit carbon dioxide,
just by driving.

“Even as I do that and I do an experiment where I melt out a little bit of the permafrost, I
think we’re generating this information that’s helping society answer these huge
questions.”

Schuur says the amount of tundra he’d sacrifice is tiny relative to the whole circumpolar
region, where tons of carbon waits in ground that is frozen now but could eventually
thaw.

For The Environment Report, I’m Amy Mayer.

Congress Takes on Climate Change Bill

Henry A. Waxman is the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has just started debating a carbon cap-and-trade program. (Photo courtesy of energycommerce.house.gov)

The debate on what to do about climate change has begun in Congress. Lester Graham reports the House Energy and Commerce committee is discussing an energy bill that includes a plan to reduce the greenhouse gases that cause global warming:

Transcript

In opening comments, members of the House committee had very different views of what the plan –called carbon cap-and-trade might do.

“A cap-and-trade energy tax will cost this country millions of good jobs and will force the average American family to pay thousands of dollars in increased energy costs.”

That’s Steve Scalise, a Republican from Louisiana. No one actually knows the cost yet, because there’s not a final plan. But several studies estimate it would be a few hundred dollars a year not thousands.

Meanwhile supporters say carbon cap-and-trade will create millions of jobs in a new green economy. Betty Sutton is a Democrat from Ohio.

“It will be a challenge for our country to transform the way we operate and transition to a green economy. But, the costs of not addressing climate change far outweigh the challenges.”

And members of President Obama’s cabinet all told the House committee pretty much the same thing.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Interview: Carbon Cap and Trade

If proposed energy legislation passes in Congress, renewable energy sources like wind an solar will become more competitive with fossil fuels. (Photo by Erin Toner)

Congress is considering a carbon cap-and-trade program that would make fossil fuels more expensive and give renewable energy an advantage. The U.S. is in the middle of a huge transition in where we get energy and how we use it. Some businesses leaders predict these changes will be disastrous for the economy killing jobs and making energy expensive. Lester Graham discussed some of those concerns with Tom Lyon, the Director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise.

Transcript

“I think it’s important to think about who you’re hearing these things from. Because there are certain industries who are really opposed and scared and they’re making a lot of noise. And it’s essentially the fossil fuel people; it’s the coal industry and then after that, the oil industry. And they have a very special-interest stake in this. So you gotta take what they say with a big grain of salt. Probably electricity prices will increase: not by a lot, not by fifty percent. They’ll go up slightly—depends what kind of region of the country you are in. If you’re in an area dominated by coal-fired power, your costs will go up some because coal is dirty, coal’s been getting a free ride for a long time. The price of coal should go up. If you’re in an area that’s already shifted towards renewables, you’re costs won’t go up much.”

And you mean wind turbines and…

“Wind turbines, hydroelectric power, biomass, solar.”

And what about jobs? Are we going to see this being a job killer?

“It’s going to be a transition device; it’s going to allow us to move towards a 21st century economy. So it’s going to allow us to put people on the ground building wind turbines, installing and maintaining wind turbines, putting in solar cells, and I think there are going to be a lot of jobs in the energy efficiency sector. It’s going to transition our automobile sector towards plug-in electric vehicles and things that might sell in a future economy that’s going to be climate constrained and that’s going to face higher energy prices.”

So it sounds like coal miners should be thinking about job training or retraining.

“Coal miners should definitely be thinking about retraining! You know, that’s just, it’s just an inevitable thing—where the economy is going, retraining is an important thing but this puts us on the right path toward the future.”

Now the President, and some environmentalists, and some leading businesses say, “We’ll be more energy independent, we’ll have clean wind and solar power, we’ll be much more energy efficient because of retrofitting these buildings, we’ll lead the world in renewable, clean energy. How’s that benefit me, at home?

“I think the first thing is, it benefits you because you’re helping to move the planet in the right direction. You’re making the planet a better place for your kids, for your grandkids, and you’re averting the risk that we go over the climate cliff. Because that’s very much a real risk.”

So global warming really is going to be as disastrous as we hear some of the alarmists say.

“It could be. We don’t know for certain. There’s a whole lot of uncertainty around this. However, I think most people who’ve thought about this agree we need to move in the direction of solving the climate problem because the news is always bad. Every new report that comes out of modern science shows the planet’s warming faster than we thought, sea level is rising faster than we thought; the whole thing is moving much more quickly than people thought even five years ago. So there’s no news that’s pointing in the other direction. The urgency just keeps increasing.”

There’s likely to be a huge fight in Washington and Congress is going to be terribly divided on carbon cap-and-trade: what do you think the likely outcome is?

“I think we’re gonna pass something. The Obama folks are very committed; they’ve staffed up with very smart people who understand the issue, who’ve been working on it for years. There’s a lot of political commitment within the congress already and Obama has taken this on as a signature issue.”

Tom Lyon is the Director of the Erb Institute of Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan. He spoke with The Environment Report’s Lester Graham.

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 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.

Tag: carbon

Slash-And-Burn in Indonesia

Transcript

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Forests, Carbon, and Critters

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CO2 Helps Trees Grow Faster

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Green Roofs Greener Than Thought

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The Summer BBQ: Gas or Charcoal?

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Laying Off the Lighter Fluid

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Thawing Tundra Speeds Up Warming

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Congress Takes on Climate Change Bill

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Interview: Carbon Cap and Trade

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