Climate and Environment Tradeoffs, Etc.
Published by Greg October 13th, 2007There is no free lunch. So, if you want to make lots of nice, “green” biofuels, go for it, but you will likely be stressing availability of some other resource.
Boosting ethanol production by growing more corn in the United States without considering the quality and availability of water by region could put a significant strain on water resources in some parts of the country, a committee of the National Research Council said in a report released this week.
More carbon (as CO2) in the atmosphere (released from fossil fuels by humans) has a downside (global warming) but won’t it also increase the total amount of vegetation we have, and thus, overall productivity, which would be good thing? You may ask? Yes, of course, more CO2 increased plant activity, but only a little bit. Today’s plants did not evolve in a more carbon-rich atmosphere, so it would actually be surprising to find that their grown increases in a linear relationship to total carbon in the atmosphere. So no, more CO2 does not have this benefit.
But it does have a cost. It turns out that to the degree that differential CO2 in the atmosphere affects plant growth, it does do differently for different species (which should not be a surprise). As a result, according to recent work done in Michigan, is that birch trees will edge out aspen trees in norther forests, because the birch trees manage to make better use of this increased availability of atmospheric carbon. Source.
Another Carbon Conundrum:
As part of the world carbon cycle, bacterial communities in freshwater lakes break down carbon in decaying organic matter, converting it into carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere.
However, in humic lakes — darkly stained, bog-rimmed bodies of water that contain high levels of decaying organic matter — this process creates even higher carbon-dioxide emission levels. “There’s a lot of concern that, as the climate changes, more carbon will be turned into carbon dioxide in these kinds of lakes,” says Katherine McMahon, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering.
3 Responses to “Climate and Environment Tradeoffs, Etc.”
- 1 Pingback on Oct 17th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
Scientists in the Chesapeake Bay region are hoping ethanol production methods can be developed for other materials, such as switchgrass. Switchgrass can sop up nitrogen from the over-fertilized soil of the area, reducing the amount of this nutrient from entering Bay waters, where it currently creates a huge problem.
I don’t know where the sopped-up nitrogen is supposed to go–up in smoke, I guess. (About 25% of the nitrogen load in the Bay is from deposition of airborne N.) Maybe it can blow away.
Right… it seems to me that the N is energy that is going to be used to un-burn the carbon. So the N is going from, essentially, “unfixed” to “fixed” …
So you put the N back in the ground and sunlight energizes the process of re-fixing the N (using plants as solar collectors) … that stored energy is then used to “unburn” more carbon.
Eventually you get a big pile of carbon in roughly solid form.