Molecular fields forever

You may have heard that green is the new black, but did you know carbon as the new cash crop alongside corn or beans?
Maybe, if the farmers can get paid for burying — but not growing — greenhouse gas emissions.
Agricultural researchers see potential for sequestration in both soil and in waters of wetlands.
Even now, scientists are conducting experiments to find out if wetlands grown with cattails and other plants can provide the world some breathing room from global warming by capturing carbon dioxide under dirt and water.
U.S. Geological Survey have a lot of information posted about their efforts in California's Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to trap the gas, as well as stop land subsidence.
Robin Miller, who has the very cool title of biogeochemist with the geological survey, explains it pretty well at http://www.usgs.gov/corecast/details.asp?ep=68.
"A carbon-capture farm is a wetland built specifically to grow very productive emergent marsh vegetation, in our case, cattails and tules that use photosynthesis to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and put it into their plant tissue," he said.
Normal farming methods on the delta for the last 100 years has stripped the land of its soil, Miller added. Farmers drained the fields to grow corn and other row crops.
Exposure of the soil infused more oxygen into it and encouraged microbial growth.
These microbes ate the organic matter in the peat soils.
"And so under traditional farming practices, the islands lose up to an inch of surface elevation a year," Miller continued. "And now many of the islands are subsided more than 20 feet below sea level and the ground water has to be kept even lower than the land surface to grow crops."
In turn, the water tables have dropped substantially, creating pressure on the region's levees.
If the levees broke, the delta would see a salt water intrusion covering the land, creating 20-foot-deep lakes in their place.
This could cause a catastrophic loss in the fresh water supply to Los Angeles and California's important agricultural pursuits, Miller said.
Growing generation after generation of cattails in wetlands could build the land back up, after they die and turn to peat moss. It would take decades, however, to regenerate the soil.
Selling carbon capture credits to an emission intensive industry could provide revenue for the farmer, Miller said. "And although the carbon-credit market is not yet established in California, our hope is that carbon farms will be able to sell their credits and make money, essentially replacing conventional farming in the Delta with carbon-capture farming."
California Department of Water Resources has given a $12.3 million grant to fund the 400-acre wetlands plot, partnering with the USGS and the University of California at Davis.
The federal and state agencies had previously partnered on a pilot project at a place known as Twitchell Island in the same area. 
During these tests, scientists recorded "elevation gains" of more than 10 inches from 1997 to 2005 "as cattails, tules and other plants grew, died and decomposed.
"The process leaves behind roots and plant remnants that compact into a material similar to what formed the peat soils initially," a press release about the wetlands farming project says. 
These could be considered passive carbon farms — there are ideas out there for more aggressive pollution controls through wetlands.
Such "marsh farms" could address the problems caused by excess nitrates, which come from fertilizers used to grow grains, according to Science News Online. 
"Cities and farms throughout the upper Midwest provide a large share of the nitrate pollution responsible for the annual creation of a huge zone of oxygen-starved water—the so-called Gulf dead zone—1,000 miles downstream in the Gulf of Mexico," the article stated.
The problem causing nitrogen can be removed from the waters by bacterial found in wetlands, helping to prevent the dreaded dead in the oceans from growing larger.
Where carbon capture by wetlands could be a fairly low-tech business, nitrogen would require more intensive engineering and monitoring, Science News' information indicates.
But it's effective, at least for a time, as shown by the results of a test done by research Amy Poe at the University of North Carolina. A built-from-scratch 12-acre marsh handled about 50 percent of the nitrates washed off of a 2,200 acres of corn and beans for about three years.
Hopefully, a system of economic rewards can be developed to reward farmers for returning the land to this natural and important kind of productivity.
While the harvest might be more abstract, it's no less important than the air that we breathe.

Overhead savings

The solution to urban heat island effects may well be over peoples' heads, I would say.
That is to say, their roofs.
Good candidates for lowering temperatures and energy costs in the built environment of towns and cities come in the form of flat roof structures, such as schools, big box superstores and traditional urban buildings like those found in downtown Hillsville and Galax and the core of larger cities across the country and the world.
Black tar roofs — sealed to keep out water leaks — also absorb the heat from the sun's rays and can at times make the roof temperature almost boiling hot.
A cost effective solution, for both new construction and roof replacement, is to choose the "cool roof" option.
What it amounts to is creating a more reflective, i.e. white, roof surface with the goal of cutting down solar heat gain.
The Environmental Protection Agency says while the reflective roofing systems costs about the same, they can lower energy usage in a building by about 10 percent.
Right here in Virginia, an Energy Star roof replacement project at Jefferson Houston Elementary School in Alexandria showed the electricity saving possibilities.
When replacing the roof on the school built in 1970, administrators realized that a reflective roof could cut down on cooling costs, especially as the mercury in summer typically rises to 100 degrees in the eastern Virginia locality.
The old surface on the 83,000-square-foot facility was replaced in the 1990s with — to use the jargon — a white ethylene propylene single-ply membrane as part of a more insulated and reflective roofing system.
"The reflectivity of the new roof, compared with the old roof, increased from less than 20 percent to 78 percent," said the case study.
The insulation value of the roofing was doubled at the same time to stop the heat gathered at the surface from raising the temperature inside the school.
While the cost of the cool roof was "no higher," the school started seeing immediate savings after the installation was finished.
The total cost of the replacement came to $330,000, or about $3.87 per square foot, the EPA said. The electricity costs for the year fell by $31,000, or 37 cents per square foot.
Electricity savings totaled a whopping 514,000 kilowatts for that one elementary school for the year.
That's a reduction of more than 1.2 million tons in carbon dioxide emissions, equal to taking about 122 cars off the roads, according to the EPA information.
"These savings are due to both greatly reduced electric power demand and lower electric energy consumption," the case study said.
On top of that, the school saw these electricity use reductions despite adding to the square footage of the facility by enclosing an interior courtyard and turning it into classrooms.
"The white EP membrane accounted for approximately 30 percent of the realized savings," said the EPA. "Based on their energy-saving potential and ease of installation, white, reflective, single-ply membrane materials have become the roofing product of choice for Alexandria City Public Schools."
With that good introduction to energy efficiency as a starting point, the school also received further upgrades to lights and air conditioning and heating systems and a new energy management system, the EPA added. These improvements combined with the new roof cut the school's electricity usage by a total of half.
Sunny California has long known the benefits of reflective roofs, seeing the systems as not only relief from the heat but as a way to stretch the available power supply and prevent electricity shortages in the summertime, according to a California Energy Commission news release dating back to 2002.
Peak temperatures can range from 150 to 190 degrees at the surface of a traditional roof, but the temperature on a cool roof can be on average 50 to 60 degrees lower.
Other benefits touted by the CEC include: extended life of air conditioning units due to less cycling and operations; improved comfort for workers in buildings and on the roof; and reduced air temperatures surrounding the cool building, lessening the heat island effect.
So, it seems there are considerable opportunities to save on overhead electricity costs and some continuing maintenance simply by installing a white tinted roof.
As building continues and as rooftop surfaces in cities expand, the benefits to installing cool roofs should accrue.
The Heat Island Group, at http://eande.lbl.gov/HeatIsland/CoolRoofs/, conducted a study in 11 cities to estimate the net savings by using the reflective roofs, for example.
Considering both summer cooling savings and increasing needs for heating in winter, this study still found the Windy City of Chicago with its winter chill saw decreased power costs in the seven figure range.
Hot spots savings were considerably more, of course. The study calculated the impact of white roofs in Los Angeles to total $35 million a year, $37 million in Phoenix, $27 million in Houston and $20 million in Miami and Fort Lauderdale.
Heat Island Group took these findings and expanded them to forecast nationwide savings, which the researchers said came to $750 million worth of energy reductions a year.
All this means that there's abundant acreage overhead that could be tapped to lessen the impact of our buildings on the environment.

Softening the urban fabric

Cities are hard places.
While Destiny, Fla., Masdar City in Abu Dhabi and to an extent tornado ravaged Greensburg, Kan., are about designing green communities from scratch, the larger challenge for the globe is making the existing metropolises environmentally friendly.
After all, if we make every new development from now on greenhouse gas-neutral, the pollution causing and energy intensive urban jungles will still continue to generate their Industrial Age problems.
It's not enough to just build communities correctly from here out — the environmental degradation created by all those hard surfaces in cities will continue unabated unless people start addressing them right away.
As cities built up and suburbs annexed farms and forests, planners and developers merely repeated a pattern that worked.
But now the diminishing returns are becoming more and more apparent.
Look at the building blocks of development: Concrete, steel, glass, asphalt.
To make a city block, architects, engineers, planners, developers, investors and laborers collaborate to — with various degrees of exigency — slather the place with tons of these impervious materials.
And the result is heat islands, unclean waters, unproductive earth, tense people and a general hostility to the natural order of things.
The key to solving the environmental pressures of the world is not abandoning our existing cities, giving them up as lost, shaking our heads, bowing out, humiliated by the short-sightedness, moving out and never looking back.
The key is softening the concrete and glass landscape, reversing their detrimental effects, taking better advantage of the untapped possibilities.
Fortunately, that also gives humanity plenty of opportunities to improve our cities, because practically every factor of development has been used and abused.
So I, a thoroughly unqualified but enthusiastic and curious civilian, will state a number of simple ideas whenever they occur to me to try and reverse the trend and reclaim the cities in terms of sensible and sustainable development.

Rising to the top

If innovation is the key to correcting environmental wrongs, then maybe some scientists featured on Discovery's Project Earth have found the answers.
I only got to see one of the series that profiled eight different engineering and scientific experiments to address the planet's ailments, but the hour-long episode left an impression.
It was entitled "Hungry Ocean" and featured a 1,000-foot, wave-powered pump meant to encourage phytoplankton blooms, as the Discovery Channel's website explains.
This would help fight climate change, according to the scientists, including Brian von Herzen of the Climate Foundation, and oceanographers David Karl of the University of Hawaii and Ricardo Letelier of Oregon State University.
Blooms of the tiny living organism would absorb carbon as part of its life cycle, the show explained. When plankton died and sank, it would effectively trap the carbon at the bottom of the ocean.
The role of the pump was to bring up water near the ocean floor already chockfull of necessary nutrients to support plankton, to feed the living stuff and encourage its growth.
These methods were in contrast to other experiments that added iron to the oceans to spark those blooms.
The genius of the ocean pumps is that — as long as they remained intact — they would not require chemicals to go into the water that weren't there already.
They got their energy to pump from natural tides of the ocean, so there weren't any moving engine parts or necessary fuel consumption.
A buoy would float near the ocean surface and the tube would act like a drinking straw to pull up nutrient-rich waters from the depths.
Set up near Oahu, the pumps would take advantage of the abundant oceans to take carbon dioxide out of the global warming equation.
Oceans make up just about three-quarters of the earth’s surface, and Discovery called them “the most important carbon sink" around:
"They have the potential to lock away 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere. Every day, tiny microbes called phytoplankton convert millions of tons of carbon dioxide into living matter."
Though plankton makes up only about 1 percent of the planet's biomass, the living organisms take in "as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as trees, grass and all the land plants combined."
Carbon molecules absorbed by plankton could remain trapped for thousands of years after it falls to the ocean bottom, the experiment notes say.
But the experiment seems even more important with the consideration that plankton appears to be dying off. Researchers attributed that die-off to changes due to climate change, as well.
"Between 1999 and 2004, it killed off 30 percent of the phytoplankton in some parts of the world," according to Discovery. "One of the effects of the oceans warming up, is that they are mixing less and nutrients aren't always getting to the surface."
The pipes could not only increase plankton population, but many kinds of sea life could flourish from higher concentrations of the organism because it is one of the most important links in the food chain.
At the end of the show, scientists found that many kinds of life for which plankton was the main source of nourishment had returned to the area where sea pumps were installed.
While the tubes ultimately stopped functioning due to failed welds, scientists and the show proved the concept worked — that circulating the ocean water better encouraged plankton growth.
The possibilities in restoring life to dead waters alone seems to me enough benefit to continue the experiment, and it appears to open up a new front in the battle against climate change.
This is important because the scientific community has set off alarm bells, in that innovation will be an integral part of the solution, going hand in hand with a reduction in use of fossil fuels.
Maybe the invention that solves the climate crisis isn't ocean pumps, but it does make me wonder what will rise to the top, what will make the cut and become the must-have tool to fight pollution.
And, perhaps more important for us couch jockeys, will there be a television show to chronicle its development?
But it won't just take scientists to end the massive waste and bad practices that's caused pollution.
Even landlubbers can participate and become part of the solution through everyday activities. 
Government officials and researchers promote wetland farming as having multiple benefits in improving water quality, protecting habitat and removing carbon from the atmosphere.
For more information, see next week's column.

Jousting at wind turbines

The fear about birds deaths being generated by wind turbines with their huge blades spinning to create clean energy for the nation is just a lot of empty air.
As the push for safe, clean, non-terror supporting emergent energy sources grows so does apprehension among bird lovers.
I respect the sentiment of wanting to protect winged creatures, and not just birds but also butterflies.
It appears there will be some wildlife conflicts with the admittedly imposing towers. I acknowledge that there will be some bird kills.
And it seems the effect of the vibrations caused by the turbines is even more serious for bats — researchers have noted die-offs in the mammals that never came into contact with the generators. The vibrations were fatal to bats by the animals just flying into the vicinity of the tower.
But to talk about wind turbines as if they will be the main threat to life for birds, a kind of plague on winged wildlife, makes it seem like the worriers are missing some obvious truths.
Probably ever major human undertaking has a negative impact on birds and other kinds of wildlife — impacts that most people are quite willing to turn a blind eye on.
There are reasons in today's society to want to push the panic button in terms of protecting wildlife. Look at the recent report from the Audubon Society that said steep declines have been seen in even the most common birds.
A survey of birds by the nature-watchers had found a "nosedive" in their populations over the last 40 years, as much as 80 percent for some species.
Audubon complied a list of 20 common birds in decline, each of which have seen a 54 percent or greater population loss.
Virginia birds listed as in decline were the Northern Bobwhite, the Loggerhead Shrike, Eastern Meadowlark, the Field Sparrow, the Rusty Blackbird and the American Black Duck.
Audubon laid the blame for these plummeting numbers at the feet of habitat destruction perpetrated by people. There was no mention of wind turbines as being the problem.
And looking at the matter objectively as possible, it's hard to believe even with a proliferation of wind turbines that death-by-blade would even approach the other ways we kill off birds.
Don't believe it? Do what I did and Google the phrase "what kills birds?" 
As reliable at the Internet is, the results varied wildly on some numbers of bird fatalities and their causes.
Several results, though, cited a study by Daniel Klem of Muhlenberg College that found windows in our homes, commercial buildings and skyscrapers are much riskier for birds than anything else we do.
Birds flying into the glass die by the hundreds of millions a year, the much-cited study found. The actual number could be from 100 million to close to a billion bird deaths a year.
"Millions of houses and buildings, with their billions of windows, pose a significant threat to birds," as information posted by avian enthusiast David Sibley at http://www.sibleyguides.com/mortality.htm put it. "Birds see the natural habitat mirrored in the glass and fly directly into the window, causing injury and, in 50 percent or more of the cases, death."
But we have created many other ways to kill birds, and while no single cause approaches the number of window strikes, there are hundreds of millions more bird deaths caused by our technology a year, according to figures bandied about the Internet.
Just house cats unleashed on the wild might cause 100 million birds to die a year, though some estimates put it at closer to 500 million.
Collisions with cars and trucks cause an estimated 50 to 100 million bird deaths; pesticides could kill another 67 million; collisions with communication towers could take out four to 10 million a year and collisions with electric lines 174 million.
Nobody knows how many birds deaths that habitat clearing may be responsible for.
In stark contrast, Sibley quotes statistics that wind turbines only kill 33,000 a year. That's less than 100 a day.
Compared to other bird kills, that of wind turbines seems almost statistically insignificant.
True, planners should take precautions to keep the technology from increasing those numbers by carefully considering where they place the turbines.
But I take a dim view of the idea that more wind turbines is Armageddon for birds.
There are plenty of other human behaviors that need correcting with the idea of sparing birds before wind turbines.
Those people objecting to clean energy and trying to stop wind turbine projects for the sake of birds are jousting at windmills. 
They could stop every turbine in existence and humans would still be killing birds in the billions.

Man bites bird

Walking on the New River Trail one day, my family and I saw something of an exotic visitor standing in the water.
As a heron stood still in the water of Chestnut Creek, my father, a frequent visitor to Virginia himself, remarked that he believed that this sighting says something about the loss of wetland habitat, the bird's preferred hunting lands.
Since then, the Twin Counties has been visited by a rufous hummingbird and an eastern towhee. Both caused great stirs among the local birdwatching community.
Folks indicated to me that these birds being spotted here is even more extraordinary because the rufous normally lives in the Pacific Northwest and the towhee in the West and Mexico.
It's reasonable to wonder why these creatures would be flying so far out of their normal range to perch, at least for a while, on the boughs and branches of the Twin Counties.
And the Audubon Society offered a possible explanation in an alarming news release on June 14.
A survey of common birds by the nature-watchers found a "nosedive" in their populations over the last 40 years, as much as 80 percent for some species.
Audubon complied a list of 20 common birds in decline, each of which have seen a 54 percent or greater population loss.
"These are not rare or exotic birds we're talking about — these are the birds that visit our feeders and congregate at nearby lakes and seashores and yet they are disappearing day by day," Audubon Chairperson and former EPA Administrator, Carol Browner is quoted in the news release. "Their decline tells us we have serious work to do, from protecting local habitats to addressing the huge threats from global warming."
Included on the list are the Northern Bobwhite, the Evening Grosbeaks, Eastern Meadowlarks, Whip-poor-wills, Little Blue Herons and Rufous hummingbirds.
"Rufous Hummingbird populations have declined 58 percent as a result of the loss of forest habitat to logging and development, in both their breeding range in the Pacific Northwest and their wintering sites in Mexico," Audubon officials said.
"Little Blue Herons now number 150,000 in the U.S. and 110,000 in Mexico, down 54 percent in the U.S.," the release said.  "Their decline is driven by wetland loss from development and degradation of water quality, which limits their food supply. "
Listed as Virginia birds in decline are the Northern Bobwhite, the Loggerhead Shrike, Eastern Meadowlark, the Field Sparrow, the Rusty Blackbird and the American Black Duck.
Each species is beset by development pressures that destroy the necessary habitat for the bird's survival and compounded by worldwide environmental threats like global warming.
Audubon officials point out that these common birds are not in immediate danger of extinction, but they hoped that public awareness would lead people to stem the tide of population loss and its causation.
"Audubon leaders hope the multiple threats to the birds people know will prompt individuals to take multiple actions, both locally and directed toward state and national policies," the news release said.
"Fortunately, people¹s actions can still make a difference," Audubon's Greg Butcher is quoted. "Average citizens can change the fate of these birds just as average citizens helped us confirm the trouble they face."
More information is available at the organization's Web site, www.audubon.org, on how to help keep common birds common and the environment healthy.

• First published March 2008.