Current Savers Blog

Scientists in Scotland have unveiled a new biofuel made from whisky byproducts that they say can power ordinary cars more efficiently than ethanol.

A research team from Edinburgh’s Napier University spent two years creating the biofuel butanol that can be used in gas tanks either as a stand-alone fuel or blended with petrol or diesel, they announced Tuesday. It is derived from distillation byproducts pot ale (liquid from copper stills) and draff (the spent grains).

Is this the answer for critics of corn-based, energy-intensive ethanol?

“While some energy companies are growing crops specifically to generate biofuel, we are investigating excess materials such as whisky by-products to develop them,” Professor Martin Tangey, director of Napier’s Biofuel Research Center told the Financial Times.

“This is a more environmentally sustainable option and potentially offers new revenue on the back of one of Scotland’s biggest industries.”

Global exports of Scotch whisky rose to a record $4.85 billion last year, and accounts for about a quarter of all food and drink exports from the UK.

The biofuel project cost about $400,000 and was funded by the Scottish Enterprise Proof of Concept Programme. It is no joke, although the blogosphere runneth over with the punny descriptors such as: “Whisky to go?” and “One for the road?”

The group has filed for a patent and plans to open a commercial venture to market the product.

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Photo shows Professor Martin Tangey, Director of Edinburgh Napier University Biofuel Research Centre, holding a glass of whisky during a media viewing in Edinburgh, Scotland August 17, 2010.  REUTERS/David Moir

The Sierra Club has a new ranking of U.S. colleges and universities, and the greenest of them all is Vermont’s little Green Mountain College, which uses lots of cow-supplied biogas. The environmental group, which does an annual review, put more focus on energy sources this year, although it also gives points for water use, carpooling and more.

Big, deep-pocketed names like Stanford and Harvard are in the top 10, but many of the top-ranked are smaller colleges, like Dickinson in Pennsylvania. Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, ranked third – maybe the name helped?

The full list is here.

(Reuters picture of biomass waiting to be burned to generate electricity/Brian Snyder)

– This story by Theodore May originally appeared in Global Post. –

In the small central Gaza town of Deir el Belah, one family has made a cottage industry out of green innovation.

“There was a period in Gaza when there was no gas or you had to wait for hours in line to get gas. So we made the oven according to our needs,” said Maher Youssef Abou Tawahina, who, along with his father, runs a hardware shop in town.

Abou Tawahina is referring to a solar-powered oven that he and his family invented two years ago. The oven, which sits in the family’s backyard, takes five minutes to heat up using electricity. Then, its glass ceiling uses the sun to continue the heating process. The oven is not quite hot enough for baking bread, he said, but it’s perfect for roasting chicken.

The idea of the solar-powered oven was so well received around Deir El Belah that orders poured in from around the neighborhood. Abou Tawahina said that he and his father built over 30 of them until the insulating glass became unavailable on the market.

A dozen miles up the road, in northern Gaza City, high energy costs also drove Waseem El Khazendar to innovate for his own survival.

When gasoline in Gaza reached $4 per liter, El Khazendar said, he could hardly afford to drive his car, even within the tight confines of Gaza.

As a result, El Khazendar, who was trained as an engineer in Cairo, created Gaza’s first-ever electric car.

His innovation made waves throughout Gaza. Palestinians flocked to his office to see the car. Local news outlets, too, were fascinated.

El Khazendar, however, eventually parked his little electric Peugeot in the wrong place — a factory his family owned in north Gaza, when the war between Hamas and Israel began. The Israeli air force bombed the factory, destroying the car.

These are Gaza’s green entrepreneurs.

In this isolated and war-torn territory, however, they are few and far between. Hamas, which effectively runs Gaza, is crushing green initiatives that might contradict the group’s message that Palestinians here are suffering because of an Israeli blockade of goods along its border.

“The policy of Hamas is to show we are not developing,” said Fouad El-Harazin, a Palestinian-American who founded the National Research Center, an organization in Gaza that is trying to find the funding and supplies to kick start a solar energy project here.

“We depend on Israel with everything,” he added. “We want to depend on ourselves.”

El-Harazin, among others, said that a green Gaza could mean an independent Gaza. But while Israeli border restrictions make importing solar energy equipment difficult, it is Hamas that is actively working against green energy projects here.

“Hamas will say, ‘Why did you do that? Do you want to show we have good development? Take it down!’” El-Harazin said.

Israel enacted its blockade on Gaza in 2007 after Hamas took control of the area in what amounted to a military coup. With Gaza’s other neighbor, Egypt, also participating in the blockade, few goods make it across the border, meaning that many products — including construction materials like cement — have become scarce here.

Much of the international community has condemned the blockade, saying it creates a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Israel says the blockade is necessary to keep political pressure on Hamas, which lists the destruction of the Jewish state among its chief priorities.

Switching to green energy and building techniques, analysts said, could help Gaza thwart Israel’s obstruction.

A recent project by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza aimed to build houses using mud instead of cement and steel, which are on the list of items Israel prohibits from entering Gaza.

New houses are essential for Palestinians to keep up with their booming population. Palestinians have also, for the most part, been unable to rebuild houses damaged or destroyed in last January’s war with Israel.

So with a local company providing the design work, the United Nations’ relief agency began its project to build mud houses.

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I joined a Greenpeace tour flying over Sumatra Island to take pictures of their protest over forest destruction.

Five photographers and a TV cameraman set off early in the morning, while it was still dark, in a new, single-propeller aircraft. No one told me it would be nearly three hours to get to Jambi on a small plane with no toilet. Luckily for me I had an empty bottle as an emergency measure.

This was the first time I’ve taken aerial shots, so I took so many types of pictures. I took every single detail that caught my eye — forest, reflected light from the sun during sunrise, palm oil plantations, river, sea,  houses, everything.  When we started to take pictures, all five photographers jostled around one opened window. The wind blew very hard, pushing the glass against my face. After one hour, one of the other photographers gave up, and had to take a rest after throwing up all his breakfast. That made me happy – more room for me to take pictures.

In the afternoon when we flew back to Jakarta, I checked my pictures and the dominant images I had were of deforestation, palm oil plantation and acacia forest for paper.  One image stands out to me, a  clearing in the tropical rain forest in a heart shape, my heart is broken for the loss of the tropical rain forest.

Acacia forest and palm oil plantations dominated my pictures. So that’s how it remained in my mind: Sumatra had recently become just palm oil plantations and acacia forest.

I’ve covered Sumatra forests when they were on fire and that’s routine for me.  Since 2000, any time Singapore or Malaysia are covered in a haze of smoke, I set off to photograph the fires. At that time, the fire was always in two places, peat land or common land bordering the acacia forest. Who burns the forest?  I don’t know.

During my trips to Riau and Jambi province on Sumatra island in 2006 and 2007, I got  many pictures of burning forest, burning land, but there was no-one I could ask and certainly no-one was telling who was to blame for starting the fires.  So my picture caption just said “A man stands in front of a forest fire.”

In 2000:

In 2006:

Mid 2010:

I still don’t know who set those fires. But from the air, what I see today is vast acacia forests and palm oil plantations spreading across Sumatra. The tropical rain forest is no longer dominant, while acacia forest and palm oil plantations have replaced it. Does anyone care?

So as I sit in our luxurious aircraft heading back to Jakarta, I think about Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Papua. These three places that were covered by tropical rain forest in 2000. And now I wonder what they will look like 20 years from now?  Or even in 2020?  And that’s when it really hits me, a father of three, that my kids, and their kids in turn may never see our tropical forest.

From time to time we are reminded there is a floating pool of plastic bottles, caps, and broken down debris roughly the size of Texas swirling in the Pacific Ocean.

There’s a collective disgust when it bobs back into view, like it did this week after the Guardian profiled a group of Dutch eco-architects and their ambitious design of a so-called Recycled Island made entirely of the trash now floating in the North Pacific, between Hawaii and San Francisco.

Most commentators acknowledge the award-winning architects‘ project, with costs still undetermined, is realistically never going to get off the drafting table.

But the project is winning accolades all over the blogosphere for its innovative infrastructure based on natural resources like solar and wave energy. The island even has its own agricultural region (See below).

The design is also winning points for resurrecting the issue of the garbage patch, an entirely preventable environmental disaster for birds and marine life who populate the same regions as our used water bottles, lighters, and plastic shopping bags, to name a few of the most commonly-found contents.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, first documented by Captain Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in 1997, is not the only vortex of trash. There are five gyres now swirling in the world’s oceans, including in the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific and Indian Ocean, as detailed by 5 gyres.org.

The exact scope of the phenomenon in the Pacific is unclear, but last year a research team said they found plastic debris strewn across a 1,700-mile (2,700-km) stretch of open sea off the coast of California.

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Images show an artist’s depiction of Recycled Island, courtesy of WHIM Architects. REUTERS/Handout

The oil is no longer gushing into the Gulf of Mexico from the broken BP well, and a final “bottom kill” is in prospect — though delayed by an iffy weather forecast. That means the environment’s on the mend along the Gulf Coast, right?

Not really. There’s the little problem of subsidence to deal with.

Because the Mississippi River has been channeled to control flooding, coastal wetlands have been starved of sediment. Without fresh sediment coming down the river, wetlands can’t keep up with erosion and protective marshes can turn into open water. Subsidence is what this phenomenon is called.

This sinking is already occurring near Venice, where marinas cluster around the toe of Louisiana’s boot shape. Take a look at a road that looks like a stream in a video clip I took in mid-July:

The rhythmic clicking sound is the hazard blinker on the car.

Photo credit:  REUTERS/Sean Gardner (Oiled crane on a tree limb on a small island in Bay Barataria near Grand Isle, Louisiana June 12, 2010)

– Valerie Volcovici is a Washington, DC-based journalist for Point Carbon, a Thomson Reuters company that provides news and intelligence on environmental and energy markets. Any views expressed here are her own. —

The architects of the Western Climate Initiative couldn’t have asked for better timing for the release of the blueprints for their planned cap-and-trade system on July 27.

With national headlines the week before calling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s legislation to set up a federal greenhouse gas emissions trading system “shelved”, “jettisoned” or even “dead”, the release of the highly technical details of the WCI’s cap-and-trade plans drew more attention than would have otherwise been expected.

The WCI’s market design proposal is not completely new – it had been nearly two years in the making.

The blueprint was crafted out of an initial set of recommendations published in 2008 and refined with the input of stakeholders, advisers and experts. Few people other than the usual mix of state air regulators, environmental markets brokers and climate policy geeks would have even bothered marking the date of the blueprint’s release in their calendars.

But with lawmakers and journalists writing obituaries for a national carbon trading system, the signs of life displayed by the partnership of western states and Canadian provinces served as a reminder that cap and trade isn’t dead for the U.S. — at least not yet.

Like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) in the northeastern U.S., the WCI was conceived by a handful of state governors to develop a common greenhouse gas reduction strategy in the absence of comprehensive federal legislation to address climate change. The WCI expanded from five members – Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington in 2007 – to 11, with the addition of Montana and Utah, as well as four Canadian provinces.

By joining the WCI, the states and provinces agreed to collectively reduce their greenhouse gas emissions 15 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020.

The central feature of the WCI is a cap-and-trade system, which would cover 90 per cent of the region’s economic sectors when fully implemented in 2015.

While all states and provinces participated in the market design process, not all are required to participate in emissions trading. So far only California, New Mexico, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec are expected to start trading in 2012, when the market begins. The market blueprint design allows for states to join in when they get the go-ahead of their state or provincial legislatures.

Back in 2003, when the earliest seeds of the WCI concept were sown, the governors thought by acting first on greenhouse gases, they could compel federal lawmakers to enact national carbon market that would preempt their own program. But Congress still hasn’t called their bluff. Despite a brief glimmer of hope last year for passage of a federal climate bill when Democrats had a filibuster-proof Congress, the regional programs remain the only cap-and-trade systems in the US.

Last month’s release of the WCI market design plans was a reminder of that. With new attention now focused on the regional programs, what could federal lawmakers learn from their collaborate approach?

The WCI and RGGI program designs reflect the inputs of a variety of different states and provinces with different emissions and energy consumption profiles. For example, the WCI’s biggest emitter, California, sees the majority of its greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector, while coal-dependent Arizona sees the majority of its emissions from electricity production.

The programs give states some flexibility to decide how they want to participate in the cap –and-trade system. It is up to them, for example, to decide how many emission allowances they want to give to emitters for free and how many they want to sell via auction. Such issues have been difficult to iron out on a federal level and proved to be a tricky issue for senators as they attempted to negotiate every detail of a cap-and-trade bill at the outset.

Back in the eastern states, the nascent RGGI market has been going through some growing pains midway into the second year of its operation.

The market is oversupplied with allowances because emissions limits were set too high when the program was designed over three years ago. The initial allocation of RGGI allowances far exceeded the actual emissions that state regulators had projected. This was partly due to the fact that the economic recession led to lower production, and subsequently lower emissions.

But in RGGI’s next trading phase, state regulators will be able to tighten the cap to more accurately reflect the state’s greenhouse gas output. The RGGI example illustrates the fact that a cap-and-trade program can start out flawed, but improved as time goes on by learning from early mistakes. Just look at the EU ETS.

The chances of getting a cap-and-trade bill passed are extremely challenging at best.

Trying to cram through the complex details of a national cap-and-trade scheme that can appeal to at least 60 senators in an election year requires the political will of more than just two politicians. (Sorry, Senators Kerry and Lieberman).

Now may be a good time to pay attention to the work that is being done from the ground up on the state level.

By the time the political stars align for Congress to pass a climate bill, at least half of the states in the U.S. will be years ahead.

Enbridge’s stain on the Kalamazoo River in central Michigan pushed this Calgary-based energy delivery company to the headlines as details emerged about 840,000 barrels of crude that spilled from one of their pipelines into a creek on July 26.

Enbridge leads this installment of The Green Gauge, a breakdown of companies that made headlines July 18 to August 9 for winning or losing credibility based on environment-related activity.

Selections of companies were made by Christopher Greenwald, director of data content at ASSET4, a Thomson Reuters business that provides investment research on the environmental, social and governance performance of major global corporations. These ratings are not recommendations to buy or sell.

Enbridge

Enbridge has come under significant criticism following a spill on July 26 of 840,000 barrels of oil along a creek that flows into the Kalamazoo River in Central Michigan.  The spill has led to class action law suits being filed against the company for negligence, as well as complaints by local Congressman Mark Schauer that the spill was not reported in a timely manner to federal authorities. In fact, the first reports of the accident were reported by another company, Consumers Energy.  The spill also prompted protests against the company’s proposed pipeline in British Columbia by Greenpeace, which argues that the pipeline will pose environmental risks to the Pacific Coast and would increase the availability of tar sands crude oil to export markets.  The environmental costs of oil derived from Canada’s tar sands oil industry was recently highlighted in a article by the Economist, which is available here:

BP

Since the Deepwater Horizon spill unfolded in the Gulf of Mexico starting in April, BP faced another significant pollution incident that has now resulted in a significant lawsuit against the company.  Last week, a $10 billion class action law suit was filed on behalf of 2,000 residents and workers as a result of toxic releases of nitrous oxide and benzene at the company’s large Texas City refinery, the same site of the explosion that killed 15 BP workers in 2005 and which faced $87 million in fines from the Occupational Health and Safety Administration last year.  The incident occurred between April 6 and May 16, and the law suit alleges that the toxic release poses significant long-term health effects on the workers and residents around the BP’s Texas City refinery.

A link to the Galveston Daily New which originally reported the story in early June is available here.

Petrochina

A significant oil spill has impacted the fishing harbor near Dalian, China, following an explosion at an oil terminal controlled by Petrochina.  Although the Chinese government has estimated the size of the spill to be 1,500 tons of crude oil, an independent investigation of the spill by Greenpeace China has concluded that 60,000-90,000 tons of crude oil spilled into the Nantuo Fishing Harbor, which would make the incident larger than the Exxon Valdez spill.  In addition to disputing official estimations of the extent of the spill, Greenpeace China has also accused Petrochina of engaging local fisherman to clean-up the spill without proper training and equipment to protect them from potential health hazards.

Samsung Electronics

As part of its PlanetFirst™ initiative, by which the company hopes to become one of the world’s most eco-friendly companies by 2013, Samsung announced that it had spent $865 million dollars in 2009 investing in green product lines and reducing its impact on the environment.  The investments helped the company reduce its greenhouse gas intensity by 30 percent, and the company now claims to offer eco-labels for 2,134 different products.  These company-announced achievements contrast with complaints by Greenpeace earlier in the year in its guide to Green Electronics that Samsung had backtracked on its previous commitments to eliminate Brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and PVC vinyl plastic by 2010.

For the company’s press release click here.

For a link to Greenpeace’s guide to Green Electronics click here.

Xcel Energy

Midwestern power producer Xcel Energy last week announced plans to replace two coal-fired power plants in Minnesota with natural gas plants by 2016, which follows an announcement earlier in the year that Xcel will replace coal-fired plants with cleaner burning fuels throughout Colorado by 2017. The company also recently announced continued investments in wind energy, as part of its longer term strategy to generate 20 percent of its energy throughout the Midwest from wind.  With 3,000 Wegawatts of power already generated from wind, representing 8 percent of the company’s total capacity, Xcel Energy already is the largest producer of wind energy in the United States, a distinction which it has enjoyed for six years, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

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Photo shows Gretchen King holding a protest sign as she joins residents in downtown Marshall to protest the oil spill on the Kalamazoo River July 30, 2010. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook

Oil caused the mess in the Gulf of Mexico. Should U.S. oil royalties pay for scientists to study what happened, and what’s still happening, to this complex environment?

At least one scientist thinks so. Ed Overton of Louisiana State University figures the billions of dollars collected in royalties by the now-defunct and much-reviled Minerals Management Service — re-named and re-organized as the Bureau of Ocean Energy — must have enough money to pay for research into the environmental impact of the Deepwater Horizon blowout and spill.

Speaking at a Senate hearing last week on the effects of oil-dispersing chemicals, Overton and other experts called the BP spill an unintentional “grand experiment” into what deep water oil exploration can do to animals, plants, water and land in the Gulf. As Overton put it, the oil and dispersants are out there now. Best to study them over the months and years ahead to figure out what they’re doing to the environment.

“The Mineral Management Service has generated royalty income to the federal government of billions of dollars.  And virtually all of that money has been spent on not understanding the environment,” Overton said.

While it should be the oil industry’s obligation to know how to respond to an environmental disaster like this one, Overton said, “the government  ought to have some oversight in taking some of that royalty money, a significant amount of that royalty money, and understanding how, both from an engineering perspective as well as an ecological perspective, what to do about it.”

There’s plenty that the engineers and ecologists don’t know, Overton said, starting with how to collect oil samples in deep water (there are sampling techniques to collect plants and animals, but not crude). As he told it, when the samplers went down into the Gulf, they got coated with oil, so it was impossible to tell if the oil was just a layer they passed through or whether it was a true sample of what was there at the sea bed.

Now that the Macondo well has been capped and a final “bottom kill” is seemingly within reach, it’s probably natural for everyone to want to turn the page. But researchers want to actually know what happened. Should oil royalties help pay for that research?

Photo credit: REUTERS/Sean Gardner (two photos)(BP worker Randy Murry holds up a sample of water taken from the Gulf of Mexico to be tested, while working on the Swamp Queen III skimmer near Venice, Louisiana, August 1, 2010.; Oil clings to marsh grass in South Pass near Venice, Louisiana, August 1, 2010.)

A view of a traditional gold mine, near the eastern Congolese town of Kamituga, a mining town.

The following is a guest host by Dunstan Allison Hope, managing director of BSR’s Information, Communications, and Technology Practice. He is also co-author of “Big Business, Big Responsibilities.” The opinions expressed are his own.

Buried in the 2,300-page U.S. financial reform bill that President Obama signed on July 21 is a little-noticed provision taking aim at a very different type of market: the international trade in so-called “conflict minerals” from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

These minerals — tantalum, tin, and tungsten — are found in everyday products from cell phones and computers to aircraft engines and cutting tools, and this first-of-its-kind legislation will require publicly traded companies using the minerals to file an annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission to declare if they, or companies in their supply chain, are sourcing from the DRC or an adjoining country.

With so many industries and high-profile brands using these minerals, it’s not surprising that the U.S. government is targeting global business and their supply chains to address the challenge of conflict minerals. No one likes the idea of using products containing conflict minerals — especially if you remember similar issues with “blood diamonds.” Given the choice, we would buy elsewhere.

But for those of us who are working with corporations to tackle big global problems, the financial reform bill’s provisions raise three important questions:

1.     What change are we seeking to achieve?
2.     How can we achieve that change?
3.     What is the responsible role of the private sector?

First, and importantly, the end goal is not to eliminate minerals sourced from the DRC. It is to end the conflict, eliminate suffering in the region, and create a sustainable economy. For many companies, the instinctively attractive position is one of avoidance: Screen out minerals originating from the DRC and source from somewhere else.

But a ban would not end the conflict, nor would it create a sustainable regional economy. More likely, it would deprive the local miners and traders who do not contribute to the violence of an important income source.

So, if banning DRC minerals isn’t going to solve the problem, what will?

One approach is to find a way for companies to verify that the minerals they are sourcing from the region are conflict-free, and there are a number of programs being created to help companies do so. The problem is that auditing these programs can be resource intensive and suppliers learn how to cheat the system. These “top down” certification programs need to be complemented by “bottom up” efforts that bring minerals to market from locations where the benefits of mining are shared with the local community.

But let’s not kid ourselves: These initiatives may help us buy with a cleaner conscience, but they’re not going to bring peace to the region. It is only through government-led diplomacy and collaborative strategies that seek to create a sustainable economy in the region that we will collectively achieve the change we want to see.

Which takes us to our last question: What, then, is the role of the private sector? Is a “clean” supply chain the limit of corporate responsibility, or can big businesses make a broader contribution?

A number of important private-sector efforts, especially by the electronics industry — which has taken a lead in developing new assurance mechanisms — have emerged in recent years to address the issue of conflict minerals. However, these efforts are mainly driven by purchasing departments seeking supply chain solutions.

That’s necessary but it’s not sufficient. Companies should collaborate to explore more holistic strategies: supporting stronger international diplomatic efforts to broker a peace deal involving all regional players; calling for increased aid budgets in the region; redirecting a portion of their philanthropy budgets to community-based efforts focused on local development; and finding ways to provide the basic governance infrastructure, such as IT systems, that are the pre-requisites of sustainable trade.

The role of the private sector in helping bring peace to the DRC illustrates some broader themes about the role of business in society. Big companies rely on the DRC for key product inputs and clearly have an interest in the sustainable supply of these minerals from the region.

Just as companies share in the risk inherent in the conflict, so, too, must they share in the responsibility to address that risk. But we must also remember what we are seeking to achieve — peace in the region, not the disassociation of specific companies and brands from the conflict — and work together as companies, civil society, and governments to achieve that goal.

Photo caption: A miner with body scars works at Gecamines concession near the centre of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in this recent file photo. Thousands of artisanal miners feed off the mine, selling copper and cobalt compounds to local and foreign owners of furnaces, earning less than a dollar per 50 kg (110 lb) sack of copper compounds.