AndyO’s Recent Comments

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  Sorry, but i'm not a fan of rooftop wind.

  Mick Sagrillo is a wind power expert of many decades:

  http://www.awea.org/smallwind/sagrillo/rooftop_wind_determining_your_resource.html

   

   

  On Portland's newest high-rise has wind turbines on the roof posted 3 months ago 1 Response

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  Thanks for covering this promising development. However, it does present an opportunity to flag a serious problem with the Indirect Land Use Costs theory that you support.

  Those who believe indirect land use from biofuels production is real, significant, measurable and a top problem in our climate debate make the claim, either overtly or by implication, that we must keep international commodity prices low to avoid deforestation.

  This policy advice, besides feeding agricultural opposition to climate action, is also directly at odds with international efforts to fight hunger. For years, dumping of cheap food commodities on world markets has been at odds with efforts to develop local food production in developing worlds and get away from the reliance on food imports.

  So, if most environmentailsts (count me out) want to keep commodity prices low, then you're working at odds with the goals of good hunger policy.

  This is just one of a long list of problems I see with ILUC theory. But it's one worth addressing. If low commodity prices are part of your global warming solution, then aren't you thereby supporting dumping policies with their impacts for local food production globally?

   

   

  On Worldwatch gets $1.3 million Gates grant to look at sustainable ag in Africa posted 4 months, 2 weeks ago 3 Responses

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  Re: No free lunch

  Someone said:
  Any biomass burned is biomass not returned to the soil, and that puts carbon back into the atmosphere that the plants removed.  You could only do this in a carbon neutral way if it were biomass that would otherwise burn, like forest fire feeding dead wood.  

  
  

  That doesn't quite follow. The benefit of energy crops is that fossil fuels are displaced. That means that ancient dinosaur carbon is kept in the ground. The biomass carbon is recently captured from the atmosphere and then returned. It's one carbon cycle. To plan on just amassing unburned biomass is, er, unpractical from a fire safety perspective.

  Now, there's also biochar, which does return carbon directly to the soil.

  We just can't concede this point to the cellulosic fuel proponents.

  Are there really camps? On Thoughts from a cellulosic ethanol agnostic posted 1 year, 8 months ago 35 Responses

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  Oil or coal?

  Responding to the James Hansen quote:
  Available oil reserves will be exploited eventually, regardless of efficiency standards on vehicles, and the CO2 will be emitted to the atmosphere.

  That may be, but need not be, so. It's not hard to imagine another scenario where a superior transportation method prevails over oil in the marketplace until the oil is left beneath. The longer we leave the oil in the ground, the longer we have to innovate new solutions that can win in the marketplace.

  
  The research community wants to get working but we lack the national leadership for a major research mobilization.

  I agree entirely on the need for efficiency and end use innovation. Especially for biofuels, we need to insist on getting the most "miles per acre."

  Why everyone thinks of transportation fuels when discussing energy crops is mystery to me. But there's been a lot of work done on energy crops for power, combined heat and power and plain old heat. We can use it in many boilers, especially if gasifying the biomass in combination with existing boilers to displace coal.

  In the Senate Farm Bill there are provisions for incentives for "Rural Repowering," which would aid boiler conversion from fossil fuels to energy crops or other biomass. This builds markets in the short term for energy crops. If efforts are targeted to smaller projects we can get a number of them going and get lots of experience.

  On Thoughts from a cellulosic ethanol agnostic posted 1 year, 8 months ago 35 Responses