Conference

BBC has good coverage of the UN meeting being held in wintry Montréal to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol for limiting national greenhouse gas emissions. It notes that Spain has, for some reason, been increasing its greenhouse gas emissions at a remarkable rate since 1990.

Groceries

The Boston Globe reports:

A sharp run-up in plastic costs is starting to have an impact on supermarket shelves, pushing up the price of products packaged in plastic and forcing some beverage companies to consider shifting to cardboard.

Citing the aftereffects of the Gulf Coast hurricanes, many milk producers have started passing along surcharges for raw materials and fuel costs. One food industry official, who asked not to be identified, said most milk producers added a surcharge of 9 cents a gallon last month and tacked on another 5-cent increase this month. The price increases by and large are being passed along to consumers.

Replacing plastic with cardboard will probably be a net health benefit, assuming that fewer chemicals leach out of cardboard than of plastic - if I remember, I'll check on this further sometime.

As the critical documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices opens, the New York Newsday has an inconvlusive article that summarizes studies on the short-term economic impact of Wal-Mart stores.

Bright ideas

Amid much fanfare, the MIT Media Lab officially announced their $100, garishly lime-green, laptop design, intended for distribution to children in poor countries (I imagine it would be popular in rich countries too - sounds like companies hate the idea of cutting into their profit margins though), at a UN conference. Extracts from the BBC story:

The laptops are powered with a wind-up crank, have very low power consumption and will let children interact with each other while learning.
...
The laptops will be encased in rubber to make them durable and their AC adaptors will act as carrying straps.
They have a 500MHz processor, with flash memory instead of a hard drive which has more delicate moving parts, and four USB ports. They link up and share a net connection through "mesh networking".
...
One computer with a wi-fi or 3G net modem, for example, would share the connection with others in a classroom.
[MIT person] explained that the display did not have a backlight or colour filters that more pricey LCD laptop displays used, so saved power. Instead, bright LEDs are used which reduced power consumption by a factor of 10.
The screens are dual-mode displays so that the laptop can still be used in varying light conditions.
Although children will be able to interact with each other through the machines, education was still the priority for the laptops.
But by using mesh networking, the vision is for children to interact while doing homework, and even share homework tips on a local community scale.
Collaboration will also be encouraged by using open-source software, which the children could develop themselves and use in local communities

For those of us with plans to benefit society in this country, the Service Employees International Union is sponsoring a "best idea since sliced bread" competition for really good economic ideas. The first prize is $100,000, and the deadline is December 5th.

Renewable investment

Newsweek profiles "ten eco-friendly companies", including several small solar-related firms, and of course Vestas and its wind turbines. It mentions silicon valley startup Miasolé's developing photovoltaic arrays that use metal (copper indium-gallium selenium alloy) instead of silicon, which may be in demand while the current shortage of crystalline silicon lasts.

More on biofuels

I went to a lecture by Lonnie Ingram, director of the University of Florida's Center for Renewable Chemicals and Fuels, a distinguished-looking fellow with a strong southern drawl. He discussed his group's efforts to genetically engineer bacteria - primarily the microbiologist's usual workhorse, Escherichia coli - to make grain alcohol (ethanol), acetate and pyruvate out of the sugars that compose wood and other plant fibers, providing a replacement for petroleum as a source of fuel, plastic, and so forth. He saw his mission as working to end the dependence on foreign oil, a cause of much war and pollution, and pointed to a recent report by the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy that argues that it would be feasible to replace most of the USA's oil imports with plant derivatives, and that plant debris that's now landfilled could by itself provide a substantial fraction (maybe a quarter) of the requirement. Growing dedicated energy crops under today's fuel-intensive agriculture has, as I've noted, definite drawbacks, but refining fibers that are thrown away sounds benign.

Also on the topic, the NY Times, in an article entitled "Mountains of Corn and a Sea of Farm Subsidies" discussed the ineconomy of the bumper corn harvest, the fruit of billions of dollars in government subsidies, while the closure of New Orleans makes it difficult to export, and cautioned:

While farmers and grain merchants like Mr. Fray expect even more corn to be planted next year, some traders believe that higher natural gas prices will cause farmers to grow less corn - natural gas is used to make fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides. "With higher energy costs you will see more wheat acres and soybean acres," Mr. Bruce said."

Something similar is happening in Germany. Reuters quotes the deputy Minister of Agriculture Alexander Mueller:

Asked if biofuel production could provide a new market for European Union farmers as the World Trade Organization reduces export subsidies used to remove Europe's huge overproduction of farm products, he said:

"We are standing before the next round of world trade talks in Hong Kong, market access for food will be one of the central points."

"Production of biofuels and renewable raw materials can become a second pillar for the agricultural economy along with production of food."

"We need a strategic decision for the next decade and the political side must provide the framework for expansion."

Deal

Jamais Cascio at WorldChanging blogs about the Serious Games Summit, held in DC last week. Basically these are simulations that are used as educational and training tools in various professions, not least the solidery - war games go back a long way, after all. Cascio takes the progress reported at the conference as a challenge for people to develop comparably sophisticated games that have environmental issues as themes. Compared with writing (not to mention testing) an atmospheric general circulation model, writing a good environmental interaction module for Civilization IV should be easy enough.

New England carbon trading

Nine northeastern states are finally getting ready to agree an accord that will establish mandatory caps on CO₂ emissions from power plants and a market to trade emissions permits, which BBC sees as a rebuke to Bush's devil-may-care attitude to global warming. At the conference I went to there was criticism of this accord because it supposedly doesn't restrict electricity imports from Pennsylvania, which is not a party - does anybody know if this is true?

In a development related to our name, Copernicus' bones have supposedly been found in a cathedral graveyard now part of northeast Germany.

Alternatives

On the topic of the last post, some people from the Rocky Mountain Institute heatedly defend biofuel production as "far more cost-effective and less energy-intensive than gasoline", at least with technologies that, while not commonly used anywhere, are "on the horizon". For the opposite view, see a paper by Berkeley petroleum engineer Tad Patzek, who argues that burning crop fractions is unsustainable almost by definition because it depletes topsoil, adds extensive thermodynamic discussion, and concludes "About 13% of the U.S. corn production is now diverted to produce ethanol. Hence ... the U.S. corn production should be reduced by at least 13% with significant benefits for taxpayers and the planet."

For an indubitably nifty renewable energy application, look at the German company SkySails, whose idea is to propel ships, at least partly, with giant kites a couple hundred meters above the ship (where the wind is stronger than at the surface). Sailing ships have a huge advantage now over the caravels of the age of exploration in the form of good weather forecasts that enable them to plot the route with the most favorable winds. (New Scientist article; via Peak Energy)