Is Algae the New Oil?

By Craig Cox
From Ode Magazine
2006

Marlborough is a picturesque coastal city on New Zealand’s South Island known for wineries and whale-watching. But oddly enough it’s the town’s sewage ponds that are getting the most attention these days, as a company tests the energy-producing power of algae.

The company, Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation, announced last May it had produced the world’s first biodiesel fuel made from algae outside the controlled conditions of a laboratory. The algae were extracted from Marlborough’s municipal sewage-treatment system.

Using algae for rather than soybeans or other crops means that millions of acres of farmland will not be taken out of production for food and fibre. According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, enough algae-based biodiesel can be produced each year to power the current U.S. fleet of vehicles (140 billion gallons or 550 billion litres) using a mere 9.5 million acres [3.8 million hectares] of cultivation space. That may sound like a lot of real estate, but it’s a tiny fraction of the 3 billion acres of farmland needed to produce the same amount of oil from soybeans.

Algae contains lipid oil, which can be extracted and combined with ethanol or methanol to produce biodiesel fuel to power diesel engines in cars, trucks, buses and other vehicles.And Aquaflow’s tests show that algae not only create sustainable energy but, in the case of the Marlborough sewage ponds, help to clean the water. This system could be used to clean waste water at dairy farms, food processors and other sources of pollution.

“Although algae are good at taking most of the nutrients and chemicals out of sewage, too much algae can taint the water and make it smell,” Aquaflow spokesperson Barrie Leay said in Scoop Independent News (May 11, 2006). So local governments “have to find a way of cleaning up the excess algae in their outflow and recycling the water product. And that’s where Aquaflow comes in.”
The company is preparing to test its biodiesel in a range of engines and has already begun small-scale production. It expects to produce 1 million litres [250,000 gallons] of biodiesel a year at its first plant in Blenheim, New Zealand, and hopes to expand to several other facilities around the country.

The U.S. Department of Energy has been studying high-oil algae species since 1978 as part of its biodiesel fuels research. Those studies have concluded that large-scale algae farms could produce enough oil for a biodiesel supply that would replace petroleum as a transportation fuel. But, as physicist Michael Briggs of the University of New Hampshire notes, several obstacles stand in the way.

Federal research has focused on growing algae in large, shallow saltwater ponds located in desert regions, such as the Sonora Desert in Arizona. The sunny weather there would accelerate algae growth, but the arid climate would increase evaporation rates and necessitate regular water replacement in the ponds. Briggs estimates that 9.5 million acres of ponds (about 12.5 percent of Arizona’s Sonora Desert, as an example) could supply all of America’s fuel needs at half the current petroleum costs.

But this so-called “open pond” approach, however, has some limitations. While cheaper to maintain than enclosed “photobioreactors” that produce algae, these ponds have been troubled by temperature fluctuations, high evaporation rates and takeover by less effective strains of algae—all of which reduce yields. So researchers like Briggs are looking for ways to make the closed systems more cost-effective.
That’s precisely what a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company is hoping to prove with an algae bioreactor system that since August 2004 has been growing algae with the emissions from a pair of cogeneration power plants and harvesting it daily for the production of biodiesel.

As reported in the Toronto Star (Feb. 6, 2006), GreenFuel Technologies has a bioreactor system that removes nitrogen oxide and carbon dioxide from the power plant’s emissions and feeds it to the algae. Theoretically, the algae could then be used to power the facility—thus creating a sustainable energy system that could “enable a power plant to meet emerging state regulations for both CO2 reduction and renewable power generation.”

Small-scale field trials are already underway, according to GreenFuel founder Julianne Zimmerman, and the company plans to announce its first full-scale installations in 2008.

All this activity heralds a rather high profile for the lowly green organism most people associate with late-summer scum in ponds and lakes. But given the increasing promise of biodiesel, we might do well to abandon our aesthetic biases and embrace the modest algae. It may not be pretty, but it’s got power to spare.




Citizens Urged to Leave Their Cars at Home More Often

By Heidi Ulrichsen
From Laurentian.ca
2006

People need to start walking and biking more and not depend on their cars, according to the co-ordinator of a workshop intended to promote active transportation among Greater Sudbury residents.

Active transportation is any method of travel that is human powered, such as walking, biking, skateboarding, inline skating, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing or wheeling yourself down the street in a wheelchair.

"People really overuse their cars," said Marc Plante, the active transportation co-ordinator for Go for Green, a charitable organization that encourages Canadians to pursue healthy, outdoor physical activities that protect the environment.

"A lot of people drive to the corner store, the video store, work or a friend’s house. What we’re trying to do is to get them to think twice about grabbing the car keys and grab their sneakers." By walking to the store, you’re making both your body and the environment healthier, he says.

The Ottawa resident worked with representatives of various community organizations at Bryston’s on the Park in Copper Cliff Wednesday to come up with an active transportation charter and plan for Greater Sudbury. He is holding similar workshops in 15 other communities across the province.

Part of the problem is some areas of the community don’t have sidewalks or trails that allow people to walk or bike to their destinations, he says. He’s hopeful the city will take the active transportation plan into consideration and build the infrastructure needed to get citizens moving.

"You can build all the active transportation infrastructure you want, but it’s ultimately up to the person to choose to walk or choose to cycle. I think if they realize what the benefits are, they will be active."

Adults aren’t the only people who need to think about active transportation, he says. Statistics show that 91 percent of Canadian children own bicycles, but only five percent ride them to school. Plante intends to teach his own three-year-old son the importance of active transportation.

"I have to lead by example. I’m his role model. I think everybody has to do that." Using Greater Sudbury’s trail system to get around is a great way to incorporate active transportation into your day-to-day life, says Deb McIntosh, the executive director of Rainbow Routes.

Her organization promotes the development, management, use and preservation of the Trans Canada Trail. She recommends people try out the path the leads from the corner of Elm and Paris St. to New Sudbury.

"On a bike, you can get there in no time at all, and you’re staying off the main roads and not taking your life into your hands." There will soon be a new bicycle path connecting Copper Cliff with Sudbury.

Active transportation can even reduce people’s risk of getting cancer, says Nicole Gauthier, the prevention co-ordinator at the Regional Cancer Program at Sudbury Regional Hospital. Lack of physical activity has been identified as one of the risk factors leading to cancer, she says.

"I think it’s a wonderful idea. There are many, many, many benefits. There are health benefits and benefits to the environment and I think those alone will make huge impacts in our lives."



Naked Bikers Protest Car Culture

By Ted Chamberlain
From National Geographic News
2005

Now, here's a cause some folks can really get behind: On Saturday hundreds of bicyclists in Madrid (pictured) and London staged a nude protest against oil dependency and the overuse of cars.

Pedaling in the World Naked Bike Ride 2005, dozens of Madrid cyclists streaked down main avenues. Pumping an additional agenda item, they appealed for more bike lanes in the Spanish capital—a move they said would reduce traffic accidents.

In London about a hundred activists rode past Big Ben, Piccadilly Circus, and Covent Garden. "Oil is not a bare necessity but a crude obsession," one banner read, according to press reports. Wearing little more than his opinions, one rider had had his back painted to read "NO FUMES"—just above an arrow pointed cheekily downward.




Shocked in Death, Shocked in Life: More than a Taser Story

By Naomi Klein
From Naomi Klein.org
2007

The world saw a video last week of Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers using a Taser against a Polish man in the Vancouver International Airport in October. The man, Robert Dziekanski, died soon after the attack. In recent days, more details have come out about him. It turns out that the 40-year-old didn't just die after being shocked -- his life was marked by shock as well.

Dziekanski was a young adult in 1989, when Poland began a grand experiment called "shock therapy" for the nation. The promise was that if the communist country accepted a series of brutal economic measures, the reward would be a "normal European country" like France or Germany. The pain would be short, the reward great.

So Poland's government eliminated price controls overnight, slashed subsidies, privatized industries. But for young workers such as Dziekanski, "normal" never arrived. Today, roughly 40% of young Polish workers are unemployed. Dziekanski was among them. He had worked as a typesetter and a miner, but for the last few years, he had been unemployed and had had run-ins with the law.

Like so many Poles of his generation, Dziekanski went looking for work in one of those "normal" countries that Poland was supposed to become but never did. Two million Poles have joined this mass exodus during the last three years alone. Dziekanski's cohorts have gone to work as bartenders in London, doormen in Dublin, plumbers in France. Last month, he chose to follow his mother to British Columbia, Canada, which is in a pre-Olympics construction boom. "After seven years of waiting, [Dziekanski] arrived to his utopia, Vancouver," said the Polish consul general, Maciej Krych. "Ten hours later, he was dead."

Much of the outrage sparked by the video, which was made by another passenger at the airport, has focused on the controversial use of Tasers, already implicated in 17 deaths in Canada and many more in the United States. But what happened in Vancouver was about more than a weapon. It was also about an increasingly brutal side of the global economy -- about the reality that many victims of various forms of economic "shock therapy" face at our borders.

Rapid economic transformations like Poland's have created enormous wealth -- in new investment opportunities; currency trading; in leaner, meaner companies able to comb the globe for the cheapest location to manufacture. But from Mexico to China to Poland, they also have created tens of millions of discarded people, the people who lose their jobs when factories close or lose their land when export zones open. Understandably, many of these people often choose to move: from countryside to city, from country to country. As Dziekanski appeared to be doing, they go in search of that elusive "normal."

But there isn't enough normal to go around, or so we are told. And so, as migrants move, they are often met with other shocks, like a treacherous razor fence or a Taser gun. Canada, which used to be known around the world for its openness to refugees, is militarizing its borders, with lines between immigrant and terrorist blurring fast.

Dziekanski's inhuman treatment at the hands of the Canadian police must be seen in this context. The police were called when Dziekanski, lost and disoriented, began shouting in Polish, at one point throwing a chair. Faced with a foreigner like Dziekanski, who spoke no English, why talk when you can shock? It strikes me that the same brutal, short-cut logic guided Poland's economic transition to capitalism: Why take the gradual route, which required debate and consent, when "shock therapy" promised an instant, if painful, cure?

I realize that I am talking about very different kinds of shocks here, but they do interconnect in a cycle I call "the shock doctrine." First comes the shock of a national crisis, making countries desperate for any cure and willing to sacrifice democracy in the process. In Poland in 1989, that first shock was the sudden end of communism and the economic meltdown. Then comes the economic shock therapy, the undemocratic process pushed through in the window of crisis that jolts an economy into growth but blasts so many people out of the picture.

Then, in far too many cases, there is the third shock, the one that disciplines and deals with the discarded people: the desperate, the migrants, those driven mad by the system. Each shock has the potential to kill, some more suddenly than others.



Meat is Methane

By Marco Visscher
From Ode Magazine
2007

What’s the biggest cause of climate change? Cars? Planes? Factories? No. The meat we eat. Producing chicken, lamb, pork and beef takes up one-quarter of the Earth’s surface. Nearly a third of the world’s fertile agricultural land is used to grow feed grains. And to serve the burgeoning meat industry, tropical forests—which are very useful in compensating for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions—are cut down to make room for vast grasslands.

But CO2 is not the main byproduct of livestock farming, though it is responsible for 9 percent of it. Nitrous oxide and methane respectively contribute 300 and 23 times more to the greenhouse effect than CO2—and livestock is responsible for 65 percent of nitrous oxide emissions and 37 percent of methane emissions. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) calculated these figures for a report published last year called Livestock’s Long Shadow. The FAO concluded that the livestock industry accounts for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. That’s more than is produced by every form of transportation combined. In addition, 1,000 litres (265 gallons) of fossil fuel is needed to produce the meat consumed annually by the average family of four. When this fuel is burned, according to Jeremy Rifkin, author of Beyond Beef, more than 2.5 tons of extra CO2 enters the atmosphere—as much as the average car emits in six months.

Consumers are told to conserve by switching to energy-efficient light bulbs, to take public transportation more often, to turn off the TV when they’re not watching. Why aren’t environmental organizations telling them to eat less meat?

It’s a sensitive issue, says Liz O’Neill, head of communications at the UK’s Vegetarian Society. “Environmental organizations do not want to scare off their meat-eating members and funders. The issue of vegetarianism makes them a little nervous. But these numbers are really shocking!”

The Vegetarian Society recently launched a campaign stressing the environmental reasons for adopting a vegetarian diet. It did this once before, in the 1990s, but now the time seems ripe. “You don’t have to explain climate change or deforestation anymore,” says O’Neill. “Perhaps people disagree with the data, but it would be hard to find a living person who’s never heard of global warming.”

In the United States this year, animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) put up billboards featuring a cartoon of former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore gnawing on a chicken leg, alongside the words: “Too Chicken to Go Vegetarian? Meat is the No. 1 Cause of Global Warming.” The Humane Society of the United States has also taken up the subject in an ad showing a car key and a fork. “Which one of these contributes more to global warming?” it reads. Down the page is a hint: “It’s not the one that starts a car.”

A plant-based diet does lead to enormous energy savings. An acre of grain yields five times as much protein as an acre used for meat production. Legumes provide 10 times as much; leafy vegetables, 15.

“Vegetarianism is the quiet issue in the environmental movement,” says O’Neill. “But now that the problem of global warming is high on everybody’s agenda, more attention will get drawn to an effective way to contribute to the solution.”

Is organic meat any better?
Liz O’Neill, Vegetarian Society: “There is no easy answer, but the animal feed, the water use, the fuel needed for transport: The impact of these factors will still exist for producing organic meat. In fact, when you focus on long-term environmental impacts, particularly climate change via greenhouse gasses, organic farming can actually be more damaging due to the diets of the animals and the less intensive rearing practises. However, we also know organic meat production has significant environmental advantages over conventional livestock farming when you are considering immediate impacts such as toxic pollution.”

Find out more: vegsoc.org/environment , soilassociation.org