March Newsletter

Dow Chemical to Invest $100m in Energy Efficiency

Why isn’t every Company doing this?

Dow Chemical will invest $100 million in energy efficiency and conservation improvements through an internal competition, the company announced yesterday.

The company will award the capital to its business units and manufacturing sites that present projects with the greatest impact in several key performance areas, including reductions in energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, and associated cost savings.

So far, Dow business units have submitted about 60 projects, with a value of over $500 million, which the company estimates would save 8 trillion BTUs of energy and prevent 400,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions.

Cargill Buys Giant Kites to Cut Carbon

Shipping company Cargill plans to use giant sails to reduce its fuel consumption.

Cargill signed an agreement with Hamburg-based SkySails GmbH & Co. to use its 320 sq m kites, which fly ahead of vessels at a height of 100 to 420 meters. The kites generate propulsion which can reduce the consumption of bunker fuel by up to 35 percent. This December, Cargill will install a kite on a handy-size vessel, which weighs between 25,000 and 30,000 deadweight tons. It will be the world’s largest vessel propelled by a kite, Cargill said. The two companies hope to have the system fully operational by the first quarter of 2012.

Digging a Hole for China

http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/201103/china.aspx

On this rainy night, the front line in the fight against climate catastrophe is a meeting room in Longview, Washington, an industrial town on the Columbia River. Seven people are sitting around trying to figure out how to prevent millions of tons of U.S. coal from being shipped from the strip mines of the Powder River Basin, in southeast Montana and northwest Wyoming, across the Pacific to feed the insatiable coal plants of China.

Despite all its wind turbines and solar panels, China is building new coal plants like there’s no tomorrow. China now burns more than 3 billion tons of coal a year, half the total consumed worldwide. U.S. coal honchos are saying that if no one wants it here, they’ll be happy to lug this black rock halfway around the world and sell it in Asia.

Doing so, however, would largely undermine the gains the U.S. environmental community has achieved thus far. After all, coal releases the same amount of greenhouse gas whether it’s burned in Asia or Illinois. That’s why this small group of activists is scheming to keep it buried beneath the Powder River Basin.

 

Acceleration of the Melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to sea level rise… GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 38, 2011 .  So when the deniers say that Greenland and Antarctic are NOT losing ice; you can tell them this is the latest study from top notch scientists  in the field.

 

Ice sheet mass balance estimates have improved substantially in recent years using a variety of techniques, over different time periods, and at various levels of spatial detail. Here, we present a consistent record of mass balance for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets over the past two decades, validated by the comparison of two independent techniques over the last 8 years. We find excellent agreement between the two techniques for absolute mass loss and acceleration of mass loss.

 

In 2006, (NOTE- we are now 5 yrs later & still warming! )  the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets experienced a combined mass loss of 475 ± 158 Gt/yr, equivalent to 1.3 ± 0.4 mm/yr sea level rise. Notably, the acceleration in ice sheet loss over the last 18 years was 21.9 ± 1 Gt/yr2 for Greenland and 14.5 ± 2 Gt/yr2 for Antarctica, for a combined total of 36.3 ± 2 Gt/yr2. This acceleration is 3 times larger than for mountain glaciers and ice caps (12 ± 6 Gt/yr2). If this trend continues, ice sheets will be the dominant contributor to sea level rise in the 21st century.

 

Crops have Temperature Thresholds (Who knew?)

One witness, Christopher B. Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science, piqued the interest of members on both sides of the aisle by detailing new research on the adverse effects of rising temperatures on agriculture. Dr. Field said crops had certain temperature thresholds above which yields dropped sharply. For corn, he said, that temperature is 84 degrees, and a single day of 104 degrees causes a 7 percent drop in yield.

Dr. Field said that extreme warming could reduce crop yields by more than 60 percent. “This new information is quite striking,” he said. “Major food crops and cotton show little sensitivity to rising temperatures until you reach a threshold. That’s why people are generally not aware of these sensitivities.  ( Climate change = Famine? )..

 

3M has won $4.4 million over three years for the development of solar films, as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SunShot Initiative.

SunShot  aims to reduce the total costs of photovoltaic solar energy systems by about 75 percent by the end of the decade, so solar power is cost-competitive with other forms of energy without subsidies.

3M said that its Ultra Barrier Solar Film acts as a replacement for glass with high light transmission, superb moisture barrier performance, and excellent weatherability. Compared with glass-glass modules, solar films can achieve lower balance of systems (BOS) costs by requiring less installation time, removing the need for metal racking.

 

MISC NEAT STUFF:

  • Quakers Get Tough – Really! Earth Quaker Action Team. eqat.wordpress.com

PNC Bank, the fifth largest bank in America, is a descendant of the local Quaker Provident Bank. It markets itself as a “Green Bank”, but it is a major investor in one of the worst environmental practices in the world: mountain-top removal (MTR) coal mining.  PNC has already made some policy changes in response to our action, but  we are demanding that PNC withdraw ALL investments from companies that profit from MTR at the expense of the people in Appalachia.

Finally:  We did Not make these Up !

  • Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) said Tuesday that the science of manmade climate change is “unequivocally true.” Rockefeller, a strong defender of his state’s coal industry, spoke out on the Senate floor against an amendment submitted to a small business bill by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that would strip the Environmental Protection Agency of the ability to regulate greenhouse pollution.  McConnell introduced the amendment, drafted by global warming denier Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), as Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) passed companion legislation out of the House energy committee with unanimous Republican support. After stating that the EPA is “created to regulate carbon dioxide emissions,” as the U.S. Supreme Court found.  Rockefeller described his arguments with coal-industry climate deniers: I have been saying to the West Virginia Coal Association — which for the most part doesn’t believe in climate science, they don’t believe there’s a climate problem — I have been saying to them for a number of years that that’s wrong, in my judgment. The science is true. The science is unequivocally true. (But he still wants EPA to back off CO2.)
  • Last year, U.S. consumers spent $7.1 billion on potato chips — $2 billion more than the federal government’s total 2009 investment on energy research and development. (At least we can live off body fat when the climate gets very, very hot).
  • Representative Morgan Griffith of Virginia, a freshman Republican and an avowed skeptic on climate change wanted to know why the ice caps on Mars were melting (Maybe  the Mars Rover overheating?) and why he had been taught 40 years ago in middle school that Earth was entering a cooling period.  (Bad Teacher ?).

o       “What is the optimum temperature for man?” he asked. “Have we looked at that? These are questions that, believe it or not, I lay awake at night trying to figure out.” 

  • With sardonic humor, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) mocked yesterday’s markup of legislation to overturn the scientific finding that fossil fuel pollution is causing dangerous climate change.   Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to a bill that overturns the scientific finding that pollution is harming our people and our planet. However, I won’t physically rise, because I’m worried that Republicans will overturn the law of gravity, sending us floating about the room.  I won’t call for the sunlight of additional hearings, for fear that Republicans might excommunicate the finding that the Earth revolves around the sun. Instead, I’ll embody Newton’s third law of motion and be an equal and opposing force against this attack on science and on laws that will reduce America’s importation of foreign oil.  Arbitrary rejection of scientific fact will not cause us to rise from our seats today. But with this bill, pollution levels will rise. Oil imports will rise. Temperatures will rise.
  • Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) accused the EPA of trying to regulate spilled milk, even though the agency has consistently said it has no intentions of doing so.  “How can the EPA promulgate new rules like this?” Flake said. “What’s next — sippy cups in the House cafeteria?”  Jackson said Flake’s statements are “not accurate.” She said the agency  exempted milk storage from proposed regulations on inland oil containment facilities.

 

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