climate change

- by Julia Schmale, November 19, 2014, Nature

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"361","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"223","style":"width: 226px; height: 223px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"226"}}]]In December, the world's attention will fall on climate-change negotiations at the 20th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties in Lima, Peru. The emphasis will be on reducing emissions of long-term atmospheric drivers such as carbon dioxide, the effects of which will be felt for centuries. At the same time, the mitigation of short-lived climate-forcing pollutants (SLCPs) such as methane, black carbon and ozone — which are active for days or decades — must be addressed (see 'Compounds of concern').

SLCPs cause poor air quality and are responsible for respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. Particulate matter in the atmosphere is the leading environmental cause of ill health, and air pollution is causing about 7 million premature deaths annually. Interactions between warming, air pollution and the urban heat-island effect (which causes cities to be markedly warmer than their surrounding rural areas) will raise health burdens for cities worldwide by mid-century. Air pollution also damages ecosystems and agriculture.

Current air-quality legislation falls short. Existing measures would prevent just 2 million premature deaths by 2040. We estimate that around 40 million more such deaths would be avoided if concentrations of methane, black carbon and other air pollutants were halved worldwide by 2030.

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"360","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"480","style":"width: 222px; height: 318px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"335"}}]]Energy Justice Network is one of the few national nonprofits in the U.S. organizing with grassroots communities to say NO! to all forms of dirty energy, from fracked gas, to coal plants, to biomass and waste incineration, to nuclear power.

Over 2014, we have raised $89,700 from individual donors, only $10,300 away from our goal of $100,000! Will you contribute $15-$150 for 2015 so we can keep helping communities like yours chase corporate polluters out of town?

We know there are a lot of organizations out there clamoring for your financial support, but here's what's different about Energy Justice Network:

1)   Grassroots- We offer our organizing expertise to communities fighting dirty energy proposals, empowering their advocacy, not taking it over. We provide the know-how gleaned from decades of experience pushing back against predatory polluters, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel in your advocacy.

2)   Bang For Your Buck- Our lean and mean staff of sixmeans the vast majority of your tax-deductible donation directly funds grassroots community support work, instead of wasteful organizational overhead. Your money funds the organizing, networking, and informational resources needed to protect communities like yours from corporate polluters. 

3)   Taking the Hard Line- We believe that any energy source requiring a smokestack or cooling tower does more harm than good to the community that hosts it. We work to develop national solidarity to support only genuinely clean energy projects that don’t pollute the air or depend on finite and unsustainable resources.

Since 1999, Energy Justice Network has been there for you to provide community organizing support, networking, research, trainings, legal and technical support, policy analysis, and so much more! Will you help ensure we can build on this support in 2015 by donating today?

You can scour the nation and not find as focused, effective, and efficient organization as Energy Justice Network to support with your tax-deductible donation. We hope we can count on your help this year by making a $15-$150 donation for 2015!

In Solidarity,

Mike, Traci, Aaron, Alex, Josh, and Samantha

- by Bob Cleaves, November 23, 2014, Biomass Magazine

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"343","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 198px; height: 198px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]On Nov. 4, Americans voted. This election was a decisive victory for Republicans. Senate, House, gubernatorial and even state legislature races across the country saw conservatives prevail. These results were expected, surprising to political types only in the thoroughness of the wins across the board.

What does this mean for biomass? It’s clear that this election signals the need to adjust our interactions with elected officials, but it’s not yet clear what shape that change will take. We will have a better sense of the new Congress’s direction after it is sworn in. The initial signs, however, indicate that there will be a lot we can work with, beginning with an emphasis on the economic benefits of biomass.

We expect that renewable energy, which had been gaining momentum as a key issue among Democratic leadership, will not be as high a priority for this Congress. Rather than focusing on the environmental benefits of biomass, there will likely be a renewed interest in biomass as an energy source that employs tens of thousands of Americans in rural areas.

 - by Nicole Mulvaney, December 10, 2014, Times of Trenton

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"342","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 222px; height: 167px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]An Israeli water recycling company is proposing a hazardous waste treatment facility about 6 miles southwest of Trenton across the Delaware River in the Keystone Industrial Port Complex.

Elcon Recycling Center, which has an office in West Windsor, went before representatives of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection Wednesday night detailing plans to construct the facility on 22 acres at 100 Dean Sievers Place.

Rengarajan Ramesh of Elcon said the facility will use environmentally sustainable technology to transform industrial liquid waste into clean water, cutting down more on solid waste and lowering air emissions compared to other industry practices.

“It will be a completely sealed system to the point there are no odors coming out,” Ramesh said.

Elcon’s proposal is unrelated to the hazardous waste incinerator proposed earlier this year in Bristol, Pa. and later put on hold.

About 90 to 95 percent of waste Elcon treats is water that has not been used in the fracking process and can be reused, Ramesh said. The existing site is considered a brownfield and Elcon plans to improve conditions there, he said.

But members of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network and Pennsylvania League of Women Voters said Elcon would annually treat 210,000 tons of raw hazardous waste, including mercury, lead and cadmium.

Red papers reading “hazardous waste” with a circle and line through the middle were handed out by group members present at the meeting.

Incineration would produce 39 tons of air emissions containing pollutants such as hydrochloric acid and nitrous oxide that could make their way to areas of Mercer County and Bordentown, environmentalists said.

- by Erin Voegele, December 3, 2014, Biomass Magazine  

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"327","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 300px; height: 178px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: US Census Bureau"}}]]The U.S. Census Bureau recently released new economic census statistics on renewable energy, reporting that revenues for electric power generation industries that use renewable energy resources increased 49 percent from 2007 to 2012, reaching $9.8 billion. In 2007, revenue was only $6.6 billion. Biomass is among the four newly delineated industries addressed by the Census Bureau.

According to information released by the Census Bureau, the 2007 Economic Census included wind, geothermal, biomass, and solar electric power under the broad “other electric power generation” industry, under NAICS code 221119. By the 2012 Economic Census, those industries had been broken out separately, with the “other electric power generation” industry limited to only tidal electric power generation and other electric power generation facilities not elsewhere classified.

- December 4, 2014, AltEnergyMag

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"326","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"360","style":"width: 333px; height: 250px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"480"}}]]Electricity generation from solid biomass continues to increase throughout the world. In late 2013, around 2,800 operational power plants worldwide were incinerating biomass only or very large shares of this fuel. These plants had an electricity generation capacity of about 42 GWel. Additionally, around 350 fossil power plants were co-incinerating biomass. In 10 years, there will be approximately 4,100 active plants with a capacity of around 67 GWel. In 2014 alone, approximately 170 new power plants with electricity generation capacities of around 3.6 GWel will be constructed.

The subsidisation of renewable energies will remain the most important market factor for the development of electricity generation from biomass. Until early 2014, around 140 countries had introduced policies for such a subsidisation. Most of them also had schemes for electricity generation from solid biomass at that time. Vietnam, for instance, introduced a feed-in tariff for biomass electricity some months ago. Around 40 countries throughout the world have such compensations. Other countries have different support schemes. Columbia, for instance, has recently reduced the turnover tax on biomass electricity and Mexico has facilitated the access to the grid for this type of electricity.

- by Richard Reese, December 1, 2014, Resilience

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"324","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"color: rgb(73, 73, 73); font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 20.671998977661133px; width: 333px; height: 151px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]Outside the entrance of the glorious Hall of Western History are the marble lions, colorful banners, and huge stone columns. Step inside, and the popular exhibits include ancient Egypt, classical Greece, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, Gutenberg, Magellan, Columbus, Galileo, and so on. If we cut a hole in the fence, and sneak around to the rear of the building, we find the dumpsters, derelicts, mangy dogs, and environmental history.

The Darwin of environmental history was George Perkins Marsh, who published Man and Nature in 1864 (free download). Few educated people today have ever heard of this visionary. Inspired by Marsh, Walter Lowdermilk, of the Soil Conservation Service, grabbed his camera and visited the sites of old civilizations in 1938 and 1939. He created a provocative 44-page report, Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years (free download). The government distributed over a million copies of it.

- by John Cramer, December 2, 2014, Dartmouth College

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"322","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 250px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]Logging doesn't immediately jettison carbon stored in a forest's mineral soils into the atmosphere but triggers a gradual release that may contribute to climate change over decades, a Dartmouth College study finds.

The results are the first evidence of a regional trend of lower carbon pools in soils of harvested hardwood forests compared to mature or pristine hardwood forests. The findings appear in the journal Global Change Biology Bioenergy. A PDF of the study is available on request.

Despite scientists' growing appreciation for soil's role in the global carbon cycle, mineral soil carbon pools are largely understudied and previous studies have produced differing results about logging's impact. For example, the U.S. Forest Service assumes that all soil carbon pools do not change after timber harvesting.

- by Shira Schoenberg, December 1, 2014, Mass Live

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"320","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 221px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: John Suchocki"}}]]A new law that goes into effect in January will make it cheaper to use renewable energy to heat a home – and could provide a boost to the wood industry in rural parts of Western Massachusetts.

"This is going to help (renewable) technologies compete with and replace oil-fired furnaces and other fossil fuels for use for heating ... and cooling," said David O'Connor, a former Massachusetts Commissioner of Energy Resources who is now senior vice president for energy and clean technology at ML Strategies and who lobbied for the law on behalf of the Massachusetts Forest Alliance.

The new law builds on an existing law that requires electricity suppliers to buy a certain amount of electricity from renewable energy sources. The electricity suppliers can fulfill this requirement by buying "renewable energy credits" from companies that produce electricity through renewable means. The new law creates renewable energy credits for the production of thermal energy – energy used for heating and cooling. This could include the use of solar panels, wood pellet stoves and boilers, geothermal heat pumps, and a range of technology that uses hot water, solar, biomass or other renewable energy forms to generate heat.

- by Michael Mccord, November 26, 2014, New Hampshire Business Review

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"318","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 320px; height: 480px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: New Hampshire Business Review"}}]]New Hampshire’s recently released 10-year energy strategy acknowledged an ongoing fact of life for the state’s commercial and residential sectors: New Hampshire imports 100 percent of its fossil fuels and natural gas. According to the NH Wood Energy Council, New Hampshire pays more than $1 billion annually to import heating oil, with a large chunk of that paid for by businesses, since the state’s commercial sector is the second most dependent on heating oil in the nation, just behind Maine.

As energy customers realized again last winter, this dependence makes the state vulnerable to wild market swings and, in the case of natural gas last winter, shortages due to limited pipeline infrastructure.

That’s why, among its many recommendations, the state’s energy strategy calls for a greater use of wood as a fuel source. Wood, the energy report says, “offers a promising alternative to home heating oil and other petroleum products, providing a much needed option to extend fuel choice to rural areas of the state. Since New Hampshire is one of the most forested states in the nation, wood also presents an opportunity to capitalize on locally‐produced resources, keeping money in state while promoting land conservation efforts.”

In fact, the growth of a wood/biomass heating alternative for commercial use has been an ongoing under-the-radar trend taking place in more rural areas of New Hampshire. Like the wood stove heating the general store a century ago, biomass heating in the forms of wood pellets and wood chips has become an economically viable option for larger-scale municipal, school and commercial operations.