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Environment and Technology

I still remember when this photograph was taken, back in 1972. It was the first time that a clear picture like this of the whole Earth had been taken, and its impact at the time might not be fully appreciated now.

This is where we all live. The photograph brought this home to us as nothing else could. We are all sailing in one fragile, beautiful craft in an unimaginably vast ocean of space - if this craft sinks, there is a very long way to paddle in order to reach somewhere else.

It's a scary thought. This is where we all live. The oceans and the atmosphere join us all together, being no respecters of Homeland Security. What happens somewhere affects us all. It affects those of us who love the sea for recreation, and those of us whose lives will disappear completely if the sea level rises by the height of one human being. It affects countries that use energy more than they need to, and countries that need to use more energy if they are to develop.

Technology can - must - play a part in the way ahead. It isn't the whole story, though. The small things we do as individuals also matter enormously. Why? Because there are so many of us. Any contribution - positive or negative - that each of is makes is multiplied by how many of us there are on this planet.

  • So how many of us are there, according to the latest figures?
  • Click here to find out.
  • That's a big multiplier, yes?

Here's another view of the Earth:

Picture of Earth at night

This is one of NASA's Astronomy Pictures of the Day (posted 27 November 2000). It is a composite of hundreds of pictures of the earth's surface at night, taken by orbiting DMSP satellites, showing millions of glowing lights from human habitations. It is also an indication of the energy usage distribution at that time. Click the picture for more information.

For what it's worth, here are my thoughts on some of the issues, and some hopefully useful links to go with them:

Local energy harvesting
Dampers used to soak up vibration anywhere can be changed to generate electrical current rather than wasted heat, via small transducers.
For example, people walking across the concourse of a railway station can generate enough electrical energy to power the ticket hall.
Another example: the vibrations of trains, which have to be damped, can power the local railway signalling system.
A different method of local energy harvesting is to turn braking force into useful electricity rather than into wasted heat. Electric motors can act in two ways: either you pump electricity in, and get turning motion out, or else you turn the motor yourself (which resists you) and you get electricity out - the motor has become a dynamo. The Swiss have done this for years, for example in their buses and (more spectacularly) in the Jungfrau Railway, where the descending trains pump electricity back into the network, while using the resistance of the dynamo to brake (only one of several independent braking systems, I hasten to add).
More recently, the same principle is being used in hybrid petrol/electric (gas/electric) cars, where the energy generated from braking is stored in batteries to provide driving power later. New York's yellow taxicabs will convert to hybrid by 2012 - see this news item, and Google is also backing hybrid and fully electric vehicles - see this news item.
Picture of radio
Find out more about local energy harvesting here. This is a page from the web site of The Material World, a weekly half-hour on-line radio programme from the BBC. It is entertaining and intelligent - click the radio to check it out! You have until 25th May 2007 to listen to the Energy Harvesting programme, but there are plenty of others.
Of course, wind farms and tidal barriers are other examples of energy harvesting, but unlike the previous example they involve trade-offs to be made between the benefit of the energy generated and the environmental impact of the installations and power cables. Almost all environmental issues require trade-offs, which is why local energy harvesting (which has almost no trade-offs) is so interesting. Of course, it is only part of the solution.
Energy saving
As pointed out earlier, what we do as individuals counts most, since whatever we each do, good or bad, is multiplied by that huge number. The seemingly little things really count!
There are plenty of ideas out there! Here are some personal suggestions:
  • Don't pour heat (and money) down the drain. If your central heating is on, and it has a thermostat controlling room temperatures, then leave bath water to get cold before you pull out the plug. This reclaims the energy it took to heat that water from room temperature to bathwater temperature - that's quite a lot! You can do the same with a shower if it has a drain plug.
  • When making yourself a hot drink, pour only the number of cups of water you need into your kettle. Electric kettles with flat heating elements are good if you only need to boil one cup of water. If you have to use a saucepan, please use a lid!
  • In some parts of the world they have really efficient ways of boiling water by burning wood, which is even better (burning wood doesn't add to greenhouse gases, since the wood took carbon out of the atmosphere in the first place).
  • Talk your local shopping mall, or your local supermarket, into adjusting the thermostat on the air conditioning to make it less cold by a degree or two - especially if you live in Florida or some other place where they seem to want to refrigerate the shoppers as well as the food! Seriously, this makes a huge difference from an energy saving point of view, and almost no difference to people's comfort. (And, of course, do the same thing at home.)
  • Turn off your car engine if you are stopped at a long light, or any other time you are going to be stationary for more than a few minutes (unless you really, really need it for the AirCon). Drivers in some parts of the world, e.g. the Netherlands, do this much more than we do. It all adds up.
Cutting emissions of greenhouse gases
A good way to start, many people think, would be to wake up the President of the United States. Luckily this isn't necessary, as mayors of many US cities have effectively decided that they will take action without him. To catch up with this and related stories, click here.
Some other good things going on:
5 Ways To Save The World
This was the title of a recent BBC TV programme, reporting on ideas discussed at a recent NASA conference. Most of the scientists made the point that they hoped that their proposed use of technology could be made unnecessary by other measures - but if we need a life belt, maybe one or more of these ideas will do the job.
The first two options discussed (creating a sunshade in space using thousands of steerable glass deflectors, of soap-bubble thinness, and creating a very thin sunscreen of sulphur atoms in the stratosphere) are hugely expensive and somewhat risky, respectively, but are both from very respectable scientists (the second suggestion is from the guy who warned the world about the hole in the ozone layer, a problem that has substantially been fixed).
The last three options are really interesting, practical, and it seems not too risky:
  • Use a fleet of umanned wind-powered sailing craft to pump a fine mist of sea water into the air. The mist dries, leaving tiny salt crystals, which drift up into clouds and make them more reflective, so that the clouds bounce back more of the sun's radiation into space. The wind powers the pumps and everything, so these computer-controlled sailing craft are non-polluting. When the numbers are worked out, we would only need to build about 50 of these a year, and they would sail themselves only in certain parts of the ocean. The reduction in radiation is only small, but then it doesn't need to be big to be effective.
  • Set up artificial "trees" (they look more like large fan heaters) that blow air through a simple chemical solution, which captures carbon that can turned into an inert form that can be buried permanently under the sea bed. In a way this is similar to natural processes that result in vegetation capturing carbon and then rotting, and ultimately being buried in strata of rock. In this proposal, the weight of sea water in the ocean would be enough to ensure that the carbon stays permanently buried, for millions of years if necessary. And again, when the numbers are worked out, you need less of these trees than you expect, and it doesn't matter where on Earth you site them - they work for the benefit of all no matter where they are placed.
  • Feed plankton in "desert areas" of the sea with fertilizer - the most promising approach would use urea, a naturally occurring chemical (we all produce it) which in a pure form makes a somewhat bitter but drinkable solution. Plankton absorb carbon, eventually die, and drift to the sea bed, taking the carbon with them. This has been tested and produces startling results for extraordinarily small amounts of fertilizer.
All of the above three solutions have the great advantage that they don't produce irreversible effects, and can be simply turned off if no longer required.
Biofuels - two steps forward, one step back?
The good news is that biofuels are carbon neutral and offer freedom from dependency on oil. The bad news is that the extensive growing of biofuel crops has its own environmental and human impact, as described here.
Recently, however, the news seems better, as fructose (from fruit) appears to offer a more powerful and less damaging alternative to ethanol. This and other advances in biofuel technology are described here.
Limitless clean energy from lasers, sea water and magnets - coming closer?
The good news is that if we can compress atoms that are found in sea water hard enough, then we can convert a small amount of mass to an enormous amount of energy, while producing no more radio-activity than is found in hospital waste - harnessing the potential of nuclear fusion.
The bad news is that this trick requires the kinds of pressures and temperatures found in the core of the Sun. Up until recently, the solutions being developed have been highly impressive feats of engineering, but the achievement of the final goal has still seemed very far away.
Now, however, a new approach using lasers is emerging that requires less "brute force", as it were, to achieve the objective - you can read about it (and other alternatives) here.
Fusion power is not a solution for the near future - the most optimistic date for a real power reactor using the new approach is being quoted as 2030, and that date can probably be taken with a huge pinch of the salt found in the sea-water that it will use. If it ever comes to pass then it will only be part of the mix of available solutions - but an extraordinarily valuable part.
Diversity, Trade-offs and Real numbers
In some ways, this topic is the most important of all.
Diversity is important, for various reasons. A government that allowed itself to depend on a single source of energy would be foolish indeed.
Pretty much anything we do involves a trade-off. There are very few (if any) silver bullets. Yes, it would be very nice if wind farms or nuclear power stations (neither of which produce any greenhouse gases) could power everything, but they can't. Both of them have disadvantages: you need an awful lot of (sometimes unsightly) wind farms and power lines, and the wind doesn't always blow; and nuclear power stations require heavy-duty engineering, long term approaches to disposal of radio-actives, substantial long term investment, and the political will to counteract popular beliefs that turn out not to have a scientific basis. Does that mean we shouldn't use wind farms or nuclear power stations? Probably not! But the right answer in any given situation will depend on the next point.
All of the difficult trade-offs and decision making needs to be done on the basis of real facts and real numbers. If we want to do something, how much of it do we need? If it has a disadvantage, can we quantify that disadvantage so that we can compare it with the disadvantages of alternatives? This is particularly important where emotional issues such as nuclear energy (or local modern incinerators, come to that) are concerned.
  • How would you balance the UK's energy solutions?
  • Even if you don't come from the UK, why not try out the BBC's Electricity Generation Calculator? You can decide what mix of energy sources will meet current needs, determine the cost of your choices and (if necessary) specify a reduction in our overall demand for energy. The decisions (and trade-offs) are all yours! For more background on this calculator, see here.

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