urban agriculture and carbon emissions

Here’s an article from Landscape and Urban Planning making a connection between urban agriculture and greenhouse gas emission reductions. It makes sense – any food that comes from nearby will reduce transportation energy use, air pollution, and carbon emissions. We could either decide to do this for ethical reasons, or we could build more of those external costs in the price. It probably makes sense to do some of each.

The expansion of urban agriculture assists in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions not only by producing food but also by reducing the amount of food transported from farming areas and therefore reducing the food mileage. This study seeks to estimate “the expected GHG reduction effect” in the case of a revitalization of urban agriculture. For this purpose, this study first calculated the area available for urban farming by targeting the metropolitan area of Seoul and then calculated the production per unit area by focusing on “the crops suitable for urban agriculture”. Using this estimated value, the study estimated crop production, the resultant food mileage decrement, and the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that could be obtained if the Seoul metropolis introduced urban agriculture. The results estimated that if the Seoul metropolis implemented urban agriculture in a 51.15 km2 area, it would be possible to reduce CO2 emissions by 11.67 million kg annually. This numerical value is the same amount of CO2 absorbed annually by 20.0 km2 of pine forests and 10.2 km2 of oak tree forests that are 20 years old. From the perspective of GHG reduction effects in the transportation sector, urban agriculture is expected to produce a considerable effect in diverse aspects such as the habituation of green growth, self-sufficiency, and food security.

drought, drought, and more drought

NPR has yet another story on how bad the drought is getting in the western U.S.

The historic four-year drought in California has been grabbing the headlines lately, but there’s a much bigger problem facing the West: the now 14-year drought gripping the Colorado River basin…

The snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, where the Colorado and much of the Southwest gets most of its water, is again at less than half of normal this year…

Some of the West’s biggest metropolises — Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, San Diego — all grew up during what scientists now believe was a wet period, a relative anomaly in the West.

 

Slate’s top-notch oceanography coverage

Slate manages to make oceanography and climate change interesting. I think they sensationalize a bit, which is unnecessary because the story is compelling on its own merits. But I don’t see this kind of coverage anywhere else and I enjoy it. You could spend a month drilling down to all the links they provide. An excerpt:

The news comes amid increasingly confident forecasts that there will be a strengthening El Niño for the remainder of 2015, which could spark a litany of impacts worldwide, not the least of which is the more efficient transport of heat from the oceans to the atmosphere. That liberated heat from the Pacific Ocean should boost global temperatures to never-before-recorded levels, making 2015 the warmest year ever measured…

Besides El Niño, a more worrying, longer-term trend is also taking shape. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is a decades-long periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean that tends to favor bursts of accelerated global warming. As I wrote last October, the Pacific appears to be in the midst of a shift into a new warm phase that could last 20 years or so.

The PDO—or, “the blob” as it’s been referred to recently—is starting to freak out some scientists. There are emerging signs of a major shift in the Pacific Ocean’s food chain, including a dearth of plankton, tropical fish sightings near Alaska, and thousands of starving sea lion pups stranded on the California coast. As Earth’s largest ocean, what happens in the Pacific affects the weather virtually planet-wide, and that means an “imminent” jump in global warming may have already begun—spurred on by the PDO.

Peter Thiel and immortality

Logic and history suggest that getting your hopes up about immortality is a path to disappointment. Nonetheless, here is a fun Washington Post article about Peter Thiel and friends who believe otherwise.

“If you think you can only do very little and be very incremental, then you’ll work only on very incremental things. It’s self-fulfilling,” Thiel, who is 47 and estimated to be worth $2.2 billion, said in an interview. “It’s those who have an optimism about what can be done that will shape the future.”

He and the tech titans who founded Google, Facebook, eBay, Napster and Netscape are using their billions to rewrite the nation’s science agenda and transform biomedical research. Their objective is to use the tools of technology — the chips, software programs, algorithms and big data they used in creating an information revolution — to understand and upgrade what they consider to be the most complicated piece of machinery in existence: the human body.

The entrepreneurs are driven by a certitude that rebuilding, regenerating and reprogramming patients’ organs, limbs, cells and DNA will enable people to live longer and better. The work they are funding includes hunting for the secrets of living organisms with insanely long lives, engineering microscopic nanobots that can fix your body from the inside out, figuring out how to reprogram the DNA you were born with, and exploring ways to digitize your brain based on the theory that your mind could live long after your body expires.

March 2015 in Review

Better late than never – here’s my month in review post.

Negative stories:

  • The drought in California and the U.S. Southwest is the worst ever, including one that wiped out an earlier civilization in the same spot. At least it is being taken seriously and some policies are being put in place. Meanwhile Sao Paulo, Brazil is emerging as a cautionary tale of what happens when the political and professional leadership in a major urban area fail to take drought seriously. Some people are predicting that water shortages could spark serious social unrest in developing countries.
  • More evidence is emerging that published science skeptical of the mainstream climate consensus may have been influenced by fossil fuel industry propaganda, reminiscent of tobacco industry propaganda of the past. (By the way, tobacco industry propaganda is not a thing of the past – the industry is still up to its old tricks in developing countries that don’t stop it.)
  • El Nino has returned. Some are suggesting this is one mechanism whereby heat that has been absorbed by the ocean in recent decades could be re-released to the atmosphere. I don’t know enough to say whether this is a mainstream opinion or not.
  • Homework appears to be useless.
  • A Wall Street Journal op-ed predicts the imminent collapse of the Chinese government.
  • Farm animals, particularly pigs, are being given huge doses of antibiotics in developing countries. Beyond the risk of antibiotic resistance, it is a sign of the increasing intensification and industrialization of agriculture that is necessary as demand continues to rise.

Positive stories:

  • The concept of critical natural capital bridges the gap between strong and weak sustainability.
  • If we want to design ecosystems or just do some wildlife-friendly gardening, there is plenty of information on plants, butterflies, and pollinators out there. There is also an emerging literature on spatial habitat fragmentation and how it can be purposely designed and controlled for maximum benefit.
  • Innovation in synthetic drugs is quickly outpacing the ability of regulatory agencies to adapt. (I struggled whether to put this in the negative or positive column. Drugs certainly cause suffering and social problems. But that is true of legal tobacco and alcohol, and prescription drugs, as well as illegal drugs. The policy frameworks countries have used to deal with illegal drugs in the past half century or so, most conspicuously the U.S. “war” on drugs, have led to more harm than good, and it is a good thing that governments are starting to acknowledge this and consider new policies for the changing times.)
  • Deutsche Bank has joined the chorus predicting the coming dominance of solar power over fossil fuels.
  • There are more Uber cars than traditional taxis operating in New York City.
  • Global maternal mortality is down 40% since 1995.
  • “Germ-line engineering is much further along than anyone imagined.” This means basically editing the DNA of egg and sperm cells at will. I put this in the positive column because it can mean huge health advances. Obviously there are risks and ethical concerns too.
  • Somebody has invented an automated indoor compost bin that finicky urbanites might actually consider using.

saving energy by saving water

An article in Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management quantifies the energy savings that result from water conservation.

Saving water saves energy. Consequently, implementing integrated water management (IWM) measures that reduce potable water consumption, stormwater runoff, and wastewater generation can potentially translate into significant energy savings. In this paper, the energy savings associated with IWM measures of rainwater harvesting and gray-water reuse are estimated, both at national and local utility scales using published data. At the national scale, it is estimated in this paper that up to 3.8  billion kWh and $270 million can potentially be saved annually by replacing landscape irrigation and other outdoor water uses through rainwater harvesting alone, and up to 14  billion kWh and $950 million in combination with gray-water reuse. Similarly, in Charlotte, North Carolina, the local water utility can potentially save up to 31  million kWh and $1.8 million annually. However, annual energy and associated cost savings per household are low at either scale, ranging between 1 and 120 kWh with associated cost savings of less than $10. These results are discussed in terms of energy savings’ role in IWM policy considerations and promotion of sustainable water use in urban areas.

Oregon drought update

The drought is worsening in Oregon.

Look anywhere East of the Cascades, and the story is the same: No snow anywhere but the highest peaks, streamflows far below normal in a time of year when rivers should be rushing at peak strength, reservoirs nowhere near full and little hope for a rainy spring.

Nearly all of the state east of the Willamette Valley is already facing certain or likely drought this summer, and the valley is inching toward similar status. Southeastern Oregon is experiencing the worst effects, while higher snowpack levels have created slightly better conditions in parts of Northeastern Oregon.

urban tree canopy targets

This open article in PLOS ONE mentions tree canopy targets in several cities.

Increasing UTC [urban tree canopy] has become a widespread goal, often incorporated into municipal sustainability plans. It has been proposed as a way to mitigate impacts from human-dominated systems on the immediate (e.g. shade and cooling) and global (e.g. carbon capture) environment. Sacramento Tree Foundation has pledged to plant five million trees by the year 2025, an effort that would double the region’s tree canopy cover. Philadelphia has established a goal of increasing tree canopy cover to 30% by the year 2025 (www.phila.gov/green/trees). New York City, Baltimore, and Los Angeles have also announced extensive tree planting initiatives (www.milliontreesnyc.org, www.baltimorecity.gov, www.milliontreesla.org). In addition to regional efforts, there are national and global efforts to bring more awareness to the benefits of UTC cover (Urban Environmental Accord 2005, www.sfenvironment.org/downloads/library/​accords.pdf; http://www.plant-for-the-planet-billiont​reecampaign.org/Partners/VariousPartners​/TreePlanting.aspx). One of the implications of embedding tree canopy goals in sustainability plans is that environmental justice is frequently included as an objective of the plans, and sometimes explicitly linked to UTC. For example, Philadelphia’s 2009 GreenWorks Plan includes goals of increasing tree canopy cover in all neighborhoods highlighting the desire for the equitable distribution of UTC cover (www.phila.gov/green/greenworks/2009-gree​nworks-report.html).

Incidentally, I lived on a beautiful tree-lined block in Philadelphia until a year ago, when the city cut them all down to replace a major sewer line. I suppose it couldn’t be helped, and they are promising to replant.

Here are a bunch of other articles I’ve stumbled across lately on urban tree benefits:

The last is slightly negative. There are people who don’t like trees. Most of their beliefs are erroneous, but some are based on nuggets of fact. Some species of trees will invade sewer lines, particularly if they are starved of water and nutrients because they are under sealed pavement. And trees do kill a small, but nonzero, number of people each year. I believe the tree haters are a tiny but highly vocal minority. It’s not worth spending any effort trying to reason with them. The best thing to do is put a tree everywhere but in front of their house. Maybe they will see how nice it is and eventually come around. If they don’t, well, you still have more trees than you had before.

The Onion on driverless cars

The Onion has an important article on driverless cars and hit and run:

According to engineers, the driverless car features an advanced Culpability-Evasion System, which rapidly utilizes front, side, and rear-mounted cameras to determine whether the other vehicle involved in the collision sustained any visible scrapes or dents and survey the area for eyewitnesses. Technicians confirmed that the self-driving vehicle’s onboard computer calculates within several microseconds of the crash if its own actions are to blame, and if it finds it is at fault, it then initiates a strategy to floor it and speed onto a major roadway before the police arrive.

Saying the vehicle’s automated hit-and-run ability represented the culmination of years of effort, Toyota sources explained that the car had experienced a number of setbacks in early development, including its repeated failure to desert the scene of even small dings, scratches, and rear-end impacts…

“Now, it has the ability to put some distance between itself and the crash site by driving for 25 straight miles in any direction before it finally pulls over into a fast food place parking spot to gather its composure,” continued Durmont.

I have a couple additional technologies that would add even more value to this system. First, a string that I could tie around my middle finger, which would lift it automatically at any careless pedestrians who stray into my path if my car needs to make an aggressive turn while the “walk” signal is out. And in the occasional situations where that is not 100% effective, a small tank of water to wash the pedestrian blood and brains off my car before they have a chance to corrode my paint job. Studies have shown that the blood of children walking to and from school, in particular, can be quite acidic.