I wrote a story about the future of crop science that's printed in the June issue of Popular Science. When I was doing the research, the big question I wanted to ask was this: "How can we take the most important agricultural crops and make them more sustainable and adapted to climate change?"

I suppose there are a lot of ways to define "most important", but I went with the crops that feed the most people. Wheat, rice, and corn account for more than 50% of all the calories consumed on Earth. So those are the plants I looked at. And that's where I ran into a surprise. Scientists had some really interesting, concrete suggestions for how to prepare wheat and rice for a changing world. But with corn, they took a different tack. Basically, the scientists said the best thing to do with corn was use less corn.

Large yields and high calorie content have made corn the most popular and most heavily subsidized crop in America. That’s an increasingly urgent problem. In 2010, corn production consumed nine million tons of fertilizer and led to greenhouse-gas emissions equivalent to 42 million tons of CO2—and corn isn’t even something we can easily eat. “The digestibility of unprocessed corn to humans isn’t very high,” says Jerry Hatfield, a plant physiologist with the USDA. “We have to put it through processing of some sort, whether that happens in a factory or an animal.” Set those problems aside, and a deal-breaker remains: modern corn is more sensitive to heat than any other major crop, and attempts to create drought- and heat-resistant corn through genetic modification are still unproven. A recent study found that a 3.6°F increase in global temperatures could make corn prices twice as volatile.

All of which is why many experts advocate replacing corn with a portfolio of hardier, more nutritious and more efficient food sources. Wheat production generates less than half the fossil-fuel emissions of corn and returns 63 percent more protein. Other crops actually give back to the land. Chickpeas and peanuts contain twice as much protein as corn, and they increase the nutrient content of soil.

Read about the other suggestions for adapting major food crops to climate change.

Think about economies of scale—the cost benefits you get for making and moving things in bulk. That works not only for cost (making non-local food often cheaper food), but it also works for energy use. It takes less energy for a factory to can green beans for half the country than it would take for us all to buy green beans and lovingly can them at home. When our energy comes from limited, polluting sources—that discrepancy matters. Plus, you have to think about places like Minnesota, where I live. In winter, local food here would require hothouse farming—something that is extremely unsustainable, as far as energy use is concerned.

Basically, I think there are benefits to local food. And I don't think the problems with local food mean we shouldn't change anything about our food system. But we have to acknowledge that the locavore thing isn't perfect, and maybe isn't as sustainable as we'd like it to be. That's why I like this Grist interview with Pierre Desrochers, a University of Toronto geography professor and author of The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-Mile Diet. Desrochers talks about some of the problems he sees with the sustainability of local eating and explains the nuance of his argument. It's not "local eating" vs. "change absolutely nothing, hooray for Monsanto!" And that's what makes it interesting, and important.

Q. Was there anything that surprised you as you got deeper into the issues?

A. I was surprised by the number of local food movements I discovered in the past, but I was not surprised to see that they all failed. There was a local food movement in the British empire in the 1920s. And it turns out that even the British empire was not big enough to have a successful local food movement. The first world war cut Germany off from the rest of the world, so they had to revert to local food. And of course people starved there, and they had a few bad crops, and all the problems that long-distance trade had solved came back with a vengeance.

Nobody would bother importing food from a distance if it did not have significant advantages over local food. [In the book] we talk about food miles, but I’m sure you’re familiar with the arguments — transportation is a tiny thing [in terms of climate impacts], and if you try to cut down on transportation, then you need to heat your greenhouse as opposed to having unheated greenhouses further south. Then your environmental footprint is actually more significant.

Read the rest of the interview on Grist

We review a lot of popular science books around here, but Sustainable Materials (like Sustainable Energy) is a popular engineering text, a rare and wonderful kind of book. Sustainable Materials is an engineer's audit of the materials that our world is made of, the processes by which those materials are extracted, refined, used, recycled and disposed of, and the theoretical and practical efficiencies that we could, as a society, realize.

Allwood and Cullen write about engineering with the elegance of the best pop-science writers -- say, James Gleick or Rebecca Skloot -- but while science is never far from their work, their focus is on engineering. They render lucid and comprehensible the processes and calculations needed to make things and improve things, touching on chemistry, physics, materials science, economics and logistics without slowing down or losing the reader.

The authors quickly demonstrate that any effort to improve the sustainability of our materials usage must focus on steel and aluminum, first because of the prominence of these materials in our construction and fabrication, and second because they are characteristic microcosms of our other material usage, and what works for them will be generalizable to other materials.

From there, the book progresses to a fascinating primer on the processes associated with these metals, from ore to finished product and back through recycling, and the history of efficiency gains in these processes, and the theoretical limits on efficiency at each stage. Lavishly illustrated and superbly organized, this section and the ones that follow it are a crash course in the invisible energy embodied in the bones of our built up world.

But the primary work of the book is to look at how small (and large) changes in our society and business could make important gains in the sustainability of our material use, an important subject as developing nations start to copy the rich world's insatiable appetite for material goods and titanic cities.

Sustainable Materials - with Both Eyes Open: Future Buildings, Vehicles, Products and Equipment - Made Efficiently and Made with Less New Material ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/04/10/brilliant-pop-engineering-boo.html/feed 2 http://boingboing.net/2012/02/16/putting-the-fun-back-in-infr.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/16/putting-the-fun-back-in-infr.html#comments Fri, 17 Feb 2012 01:54:59 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=144417 British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association, starting at 7:00 pm. My presentation will focus on the North American electric grid—where it came from, how it works today, and how it affects what we can and can't do in the future. I'll be talking about a lot of the big themes that I cover in my upcoming book, Before the Lights Go Out.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/02/16/putting-the-fun-back-in-infr.html/feed 1 http://boingboing.net/2012/02/06/new-life-for-old-malls.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/06/new-life-for-old-malls.html#comments Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:46:25 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=142481 The New York Times has a neat story about some of the different ways derelict shopping malls are being repurposed: As deconstructed residential/retail centers catering to desires for a more "Main Street" environment; as churches and city government offices; and even as community gardens. (Via Dennis Dimick)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/02/06/new-life-for-old-malls.html/feed 28 http://boingboing.net/2011/12/02/a-hole-in-the-ground.html http://boingboing.net/2011/12/02/a-hole-in-the-ground.html#comments Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:00:05 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=132333 One blazing hot afternoon in August of 2010, I stood on a mountain top in Alabama, staring at a styrofoam beer cooler upended over the top of a metal pole. Alongside me were a couple dozen sweaty engineers and geologists. That beer cooler was one of the few visible signs of the research project happening far below our feet.

Over the course of two months, scientists from the University of Alabama had injected 278 tons of carbon dioxide into the Earth. The goal was to keep it there forever, locked in geologic formations. The beer cooler was a key part of that plan. Beneath it sat the delicate electronic components of the monitoring system the scientists were using to make sure none of the captured carbon dioxide found its way out of the mountain. Beer coolers, it turns out, make great low-cost heat protection.

Carbon capture and storage—the process of removing carbon dioxide from factory and power plant emissions and trapping it where it can't reach the atmosphere—is an interesting idea. It has the potential to help us make our current energy systems cleaner as we work on building more sustainable systems for the future. With that in mind, the Department of Energy has seven regional research teams testing carbon capture and storage at sites around the United States.

So far, nobody in the United States has put this full process to the test at the scale that would be necessary in the real world. But, in the past couple of weeks, scientists at the Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium began pumping carbon dioxide at a new site, one that is going to give us our best picture yet of what full-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) will be like.

Two hundred and seventy-eight tons might sound like a lot of carbon dioxide. It's not. An average-sized coal power plant will produce 3 million metric tons of CO2 in a year. The infrastructure used at the Alabama site I visited can't be easily scaled up to meet a need like that.

More important, the Alabama project didn't test out the full CCS process. The carbon dioxide stored there didn't come from man-made sources. At least, not like we think of them. Instead, it's naturally occurring CO2, collected by breaking down carbonate rocks. This CO2 is sold for industrial purposes. It's used in some advanced oil and gas recovery techniques. It makes your soda fizzy. And, with exactly two exceptions, it's been the CO2 that's been stored at carbon capture and storage research sites. The Alabama scientists bought CO2, trucked it across the country, compressed it, and pumped it into a hole in the ground.

That sounds a little ridiculous. But there aren't a lot of other options. Big talk and PR aside, the vast majority of coal fired power plants in the United States don't remove carbon dioxide from their emissions. There's no financial incentive to make them want to take on the investment of installing the right equipment.

The new Midwestern carbon storage site, near Decatur, Illinois, is different. First, it's one of the biggest projects ever undertaken. Over the next three years, 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide will be pumped into rock formations underground. There's only one other site in the country operating at that scale.

Next, the Midwestern site will be the second project, ever, to store carbon dioxide drawn from an actual energy-producing factory. The first, in West Virginia, was much, much smaller. This makes a big difference in how the project operates. Instead of trucking CO2 in from out of state, the carbon dioxide buried beneath Decatur will arrive in a pipeline, sent from a nearby ethanol refinery.

It's not quite the scale of a real-world CCS system. But this is how a real-world system would work. For the first time, instead of just looking at individual parts, we're going to see the whole thing in action.

You take carbon dioxide and you pump it into a hole in the ground. That's the fast explanation. But, in reality, carbon capture and storage is really not that flippant.

For one thing, it's not just any old hole in the ground.

Robert Finley, director of the Advanced Energy Technology Initiative at the Illinois State Geological Survey and one of the scientists working on the Decatur project, says the process of choosing the site began in 2003 with a survey of the entire Illinois Basin. The final site was chosen because of specific geologic features that make it naturally conducive to storing compressed gas.

At Decatur, compressed CO2, in the form of a liquid-like supercritical fluid, is sent down a pipe 7000 feet below ground to a layer of porous sandstone called Mt. Simon Sandstone. The supercritical fluid flows into those pores mingling with and displacing the brine that exists there naturally. If there were nothing but sandstone, you could expect the CO2 to travel back up and out of the Earth. However, above the sandstone sits a caprock. Three caprocks, actually. They're all made from impermeable shale. The sandstone gives the CO2 a place to sit, the shale keeps it there. It's the same kind of features that hold natural gas deposits in place for millions of years.

The CO2 will sit there for somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand years, Finley says, until it mineralizes. Essentially, it will become the same kind of rock that's broken down today to make the CO2 stored beneath Alabama.

This is where carbon capture and storage gets complicated.

Physically, the risks are not massive, but they do exist. These storage systems are based on how nature stores gas and liquids. They use the same geologic rules. Finley says that you can almost think of it as drilling for oil and natural gas in reverse. Instead of pumping stuff out of these natural reservoirs, we're pumping stuff into them.

It is not common to find natural reservoirs in the United States that have failed, he says. Jed Clampett aside, oil and gas are normally discovered via lots of digging, not because somebody ran across a spot where the oil or gas was seeping out of the Earth. But while it might not be common, it does happen. Western New York state, for instance, is home to multiple "eternal flames," spots where natural gas has escaped its geologic prison and made it to the surface.

The Decatur site was chosen partly because it provides a good opportunity to catch a leak like that before it could do any damage. The carbon dioxide is being stored at 7000 feet underground. The useable groundwater sits at 150 feet down. In between are the caprocks and, at 5500 feet—just above the first caprock—there's a monitoring system, watching for signs of leaks.

So what happens if and when a carbon storage site springs a leak? The primary concerns are really A) groundwater quality and B) that you've just wasted a lot of money capturing and storing carbon dioxide that's now leaking back into the atmosphere.

Most researchers don't think a leak from a reservoir is likely to cause any loss of life. There's a reason for that. When you think, "Carbon dioxide disaster," you probably think about Lake Nyos. In 1986, this volcanic lake essentially burped, releasing a huge bubble of carbon dioxide from the lake bottom that asphyxiated humans and animals for miles around. That's not the kind of leak you get from underground reservoirs. Think of it as the difference between a balloon popping and a balloon slowly deflating over the course of a week. Those natural gas seeps in New York aren't killing people.

When scientists worry about dangerous carbon dioxide leaks from CCS sites, they worry about the piping. If the pipeline going down a well were to catastrophically fail, and if the flow of gas wasn't turned off, and if the prevailing winds and local surface geography were just right, you could, conceivably, end up with a potentially deadly cloud of CO2. This is the point where reasonable people have room to disagree. Some, including Robert Finley, look at all those "ifs" and see an extremely unlikely scenario that can be avoided by good planning and site selection. But not everybody is going to be comforted by that.

Honestly, though, I think the biggest problem with CCS isn't so much physical as it is ideological. The risk is that carbon capture and storage could be pushed as THE solution to our energy problems. And it really, really isn't.

There are a lot of reasons for that, but chief among them is the fact that there is not an unlimited supply of good sites for storing captured CO2. The Decatur site could take a lot more than 1 million metric tons. Finley says there's room for 10s of millions of tons down there. And there are lots of potential sites scattered across the United States. But there are more than 400 coal-fired power plants in the country, as well, each producing several million tons of CO2 per year. Carbon capture and storage is not a license to go on using coal indefinitely. Likewise, there are some parts of the country where finding a good site is going to be difficult. New England, for instance, is sitting on top of a lot of non-porous granite, Finley says.

Think of CCS like a Prius hybrid. It's a cleaner car to drive than, say, a 1978 Impala. Back in 2000, it was really your only choice if you wanted a car and you wanted it to be cleaner. Hybrid cars are a nice way to bridge the gap between all-gas and all-electric. But they aren't the endgame. If we want a more sustainable future, we eventually have to replace the hybrids completely. Same thing here.

Meanwhile, while we're controlling that risk, there's also a risk that you could have a perfectly workable CCS system that never gets used at a commercial scale, leaving dirty coal plants that dirty when they could be a lot cleaner. Why hasn't this technology been used at full-scale yet? It's complicated, but the biggest reason is that there haven't been a lot of companies interested in doing that.

It's telling that Finley gives props to Archer Daniels Midland, the company that owns the ethanol plant, for being interested in working on this project at all and for providing CO2 free of charge. In the past, they've sold that CO2 to make soda and dry ice. Clean coal is an industry buzzword, but it's rare to find coal plants that want to make that happen immediately. About the only place is in Texas' Permian Basin, where some soon-to-be-built power plants have been sited near oil and gas drilling operations, with the goal of selling CO2 to the fossil fuel industry for advance recovery operations.

Industry doesn't have much interest in CCS. And it won't, Finley says, until there's a price on carbon dioxide emissions. That's the thing that will incentivize companies into capturing their carbon. Until then, carbon capture and storage is likely to remain the domain of scientists, something that happens in demonstration projects, but not in the real world.

Image: A flexible tube for carrying CO2 at Germany's "Schwarze Pumpe" power plant. This small demonstration project, which came online in 2008, is the first power plant in the world to remove carbon emissions from its exhaust and bury them in the ground. REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

You are invited to participate in a design competition for development of sustainable technologies and their components for printing on open source 3-D printers!

The goal of the contest (organized by Queen's University Applied Sustainability Lab and Michigan Technological University) is to facilitate an open exchange of 3-D sustainable technology designs that can be printed to meet various needs in the context of sustainable and self directed development.

3-D printers such as RepRap and open sourced innovation hold great promise for development of technologies to help millions of world's poorest communities reach a better standard of living. Designs will be judged on the technical printing viability, feasibility and functionality of the innovation, as well as ecological, economic and social sustainability.

Anyone can enter the competition however the contestants must post their digital designs on Thingiverse under an open license (e.g. CC-BY-SA). The contest is funded by the Queen's Applied Sustainability Group and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Competition closes February 1st 2012.

Top prize is CAD1,000, second is CAD500, and there will be three runners up who get a satisfied glow. All winners also get a copy of my novel Makers, which is pretty flattering, if I do say so myself!

Open source sustainability 3-D printing design competition (Thanks, Ivana!) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/11/18/contest-open-3d-print-designs.html/feed 1 http://boingboing.net/2011/11/17/sustainable-materials.html http://boingboing.net/2011/11/17/sustainable-materials.html#comments Thu, 17 Nov 2011 15:06:12 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=129898 Julian Allwood and Jonathan Cullen's Sustainable Materials - with Both Eyes Open: Future Buildings, Vehicles, Products and Equipment - Made Efficiently and Made with Less New Material is a companion volume to Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, one of the best books on science, technology and the environment I've ever read.

We review a lot of popular science books around here, but Sustainable Materials (like Sustainable Energy) is a popular engineering text, a rare and wonderful kind of book. Sustainable Materials is an engineer's audit of the materials that our world is made of, the processes by which those materials are extracted, refined, used, recycled and disposed of, and the theoretical and practical efficiencies that we could, as a society, realize.

Allwood and Cullen write about engineering with the elegance of the best pop-science writers -- say, James Gleick or Rebecca Skloot -- but while science is never far from their work, their focus is on engineering. They render lucid and comprehensible the processes and calculations needed to make things and improve things, touching on chemistry, physics, materials science, economics and logistics without slowing down or losing the reader.

The authors quickly demonstrate that any effort to improve the sustainability of our materials usage must focus on steel and aluminum, first because of the prominence of these materials in our construction and fabrication, and second because they are characteristic microcosms of our other material usage, and what works for them will be generalizable to other materials.

From there, the book progresses to a fascinating primer on the processes associated with these metals, from ore to finished product and back through recycling, and the history of efficiency gains in these processes, and the theoretical limits on efficiency at each stage. Lavishly illustrated and superbly organized, this section and the ones that follow it are a crash course in the invisible energy embodied in the bones of our built up world.

But the primary work of the book is to look at how small (and large) changes in our society and business could make important gains in the sustainability of our material use, an important subject as developing nations start to copy the rich world's insatiable appetite for material goods and titanic cities.

As with Sustainable Energy, Sustainable Materials is a valuable, impartial expert source in an important debate. While it explains the measures that can improve our materials usage, it also lays out the tradeoffs that these measures entails, the the relative benefits to be gained by each trade -- but it doesn't lecture or demand, merely invites the reader to consider the engineering facts and decide for herself what to do about them.

The publisher has put up a great website for the book, with free, downloadable text, and some good supplementary materials.

Sustainable Materials - with Both Eyes Open: Future Buildings, Vehicles, Products and Equipment - Made Efficiently and Made with Less New Material ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/11/17/sustainable-materials.html/feed 3 http://boingboing.net/2011/11/09/call-me-hope.html http://boingboing.net/2011/11/09/call-me-hope.html#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:42:14 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=128180

[Video Link]

Genius work from Joe Sabia, for the nonprofit Mama Hope.

This is the second video in Mama Hope's "Stop the Pity. Unlock the Potential" campaign. This video campaign is about telling the story of connection instead of contrast and potential instead of poverty. Directed by Joe Sabia and Bryce Yukio Adolphson. Shot and Edited by Bryce Yukio Adolphson. Sound Mix by Matt McCorkle. Produced by Nyla Rodgers.

The video is something of an homage and re-singing of Paul Simon's "Call Me Al," off the album Graceland.

Frequent fliers on Virgin America who watch our in-flight Boing Boing television channel on the airline, and regular readers of this blog, will also recall another great video Joe Sabia did with Mama Hope: "Alex Teaches Commando." If you missed it before, you need to watch it now. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/11/09/call-me-hope.html/feed 13