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Association of Energy Engineers
New York Chapter
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July 2008 Newsletter Part 1
Andy Grove Offers an Energy Solution
By John Markoff, The New York Times, Jun 27 08
ANDREW S. GROVE, Intel’s former chairman and chief executive, is wading into the energy debate, arguing
that America’s national goal of energy independence is misguided. He reasons that a more sensible approach for
both environmental and political reasons would be shifting to a goal of “energy resilience.”
In the July/August issue of the The American, a business publication, Mr. Grove spells out his ideas for
creating an alternative energy policy focused on shifting away from petroleum and toward electricity, which he
argues has the advantage of being produced from many independent sources both renewable and nonrenewable.
Calling energy independence “the goal that failed,” Mr. Grove argues that transportation, which uses
more than half of the petroleum consumed in the United States, is the crucial energy consumer to focus on. He
believes that a significant impact could take place quickly by focusing on converting the more energyinefficient vehicles among the 250 million vehicles on the roads in the United States to a dual-fuel capability.
“Pickups, SUVs, vans, and the like represent about 80 million vehicles, with mileage of perhaps 13 to 16
miles per gallon,” he writes. “Converting those should be our first priority.”
A modest change in the worst offenders from an energy efficiency point of view, would have the biggest
impact: Converting the worst gas guzzlers to use electricity even for as little as 50 miles of driving range on a
daily basis could cut petroleum imports by 50 to 60 percent, Mr. Grove states.
Energy became of a passion for Mr. Grove in 2006 after he realized that the United States had failed to
meet presidential goals set toward energy independence going as far back as President Nixon. Shortly
afterwards he watched the “Who Killed the Electric Car?” documentary which fueled his interest even though
he felt the film was “ridiculously conspiratorial.” He has devoted the past nine months to intensely studying the
energy issues, leading up to his current article titled, “An Energy Policy We Can Stick To.”
There are parallels between the challenge faced by the automotive industry and lessons Mr. Grove
learned in the PC industry: “As with PCs, the work of advocates and hobbyists shows the way out of this
dilemma.” He points to alternative vehicle hobbyists who are now experimenting with replacing gasoline
engines in cars with electric engines.
In addition to making it easier to control carbon emissions by centralizing the source of the pollution,
Intel’s former chairman wrote that the political stakes are crucial. He points to a statement made by Henry
Kissinger drawing an analogy between today’s relationship between China and the United States and that of
Germany and England during the 1930s. The conflict over resources eventually led to war, he quotes Kissinger
as stating.
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Big Coal Fires Back Over James Hansen’s Criminal Complaint
By Andrew C. Revkin, The New York Times, Jun 25 08
An 80-foot wall of coal at Peabody Energy’s North Antelope Rochelle mine in the
Powder River Basin of Wyoming. (Credit: Peabody Energy)
BIG COAL is firing back at James Hansen, NASA’s top climate expert, who on Monday told a House
committee on energy and climate that he thought top executives of coal and oil companies should be tried for
“crimes against humanity and nature.”
Below is a note sent to me by Vic Svec, who you heard from here earlier in the year in relation to efforts
by Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, a rising star in the Democratic Party, to deny permits for two proposed
coal-burning power plants because of their potential contribution to global warming. Mr. Svec is a senior vice
president for Peabody, which is the largest private coal producer in the world (to get an idea of their volume,
and mission, visit peabodyenergy.com and watch the amazing coal-sales “ticker” at the bottom reel off tons of
coal sold per second.
Here’s what Mr. Svec said about Dr. Hansen’s assertions:
1. His use of Holocaust analogies is outrageous and demeaning. It cheapens the dialogue and invites ridicule.
2. The suggestion that a dissemination of ideas be criminalized –- coming from a government employee no less
–- does hearken back to World War II. It is stunning and should be pounced upon by everyone who advocates
free speech, from the ACLU and talk radio complex to yourself.
3. Blaming big oil and big coal for the broad array of opinions about climate change is disingenuous. If he
would imprison those who don’t march in lockstep with his views, the jails would be very, very big. It would
include thousands of scientists and university professors and the likes of the president of the Czech Republic, a
former founder of Greenpeace and the former founder of The Weather Channel.
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4. Speaking for Peabody, our time and energy are being devoted to satisfying an energy-hungry world’s need
for coal and advancing the commercialization of carbon capture and storage technology. Among other
initiatives, we’re proud to have reduced our greenhouse gas emissions intensity by more than 30% since 1990;
to be the initial developer of a supercritical coal plant that will emit 15% lower carbon dioxide than existing
plants; to be a founding member of the FutureGen Alliance; to be a part of Australia’s low-carbon Coal 21
program; and to be the only non-Chinese partner in China’s zero-emissions GreenGen project.
In short, while some are interested in sound bites, we’ll keep going about the serious work of providing clean
coal, energy solutions and environmental improvement.
Best Regards,
Vic Svec
Can Weeds Help Solve the Climate Crisis?
By Tom Christopher, The New York Times, Jun 29 08
LEWIS ZISKA, a lanky, sandy-haired weed ecologist with the Agriculture Research Service of the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, matches a dry sense of humor with tired eyes. The humor is essential to Ziska’s
exploration of what global climate change could do to mankind’s relationship with weeds; there are many days,
he confesses, when his goal becomes nothing more than not ending up in a fetal position beneath his battleship
gray, government-issue desk. Yet he speaks of weeds with admiration as well as apprehension, and even with
hope.
It is easy to share the admiration and apprehension when you consider the site that Ziska planted with
weeds in downtown Baltimore in the spring of 2002. Tucked in next to the city’s inner harbor, the site is part of
a barren expanse of turf rolled out over a reclaimed industrial landscape. This unfertile scrap seems an unlikely
choice for growing anything, but Ziska saw in it, ominously perhaps, a model of where the global habitat as a
whole is headed.
“Ingenuity,” Ziska says, “may be the mother of invention, but poverty is definitely the father.” For some
time, he had wanted to create in a laboratory setting the elevated temperatures and increased concentrations of
atmospheric CO2 predicted for the mid-21st century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the
leading international scientific authority on the subject. Carbon dioxide has received a lot of attention as a
greenhouse gas, a major cause of global warming. But it is also, along with water, light and nutrients, one of the
four essential resources for plant growth. The effect that boosting this gas’s concentration in the atmosphere
will have on plants is very poorly understood.
The facilities for testing the effects of CO2 enrichment in Ziska’s lab on the U.S.D.A. research campus
in Beltsville, Md., were limited. His best option there was a growth chamber, essentially an airtight, climatecontrolled, artificially lighted aluminum box about as spacious as a walk-in closet. Ziska had something more
ambitious in mind, but his budget, which has been cut repeatedly by an administration seemingly intent on
minimizing attention to global climate change (his lab has been reduced to 3 researchers who study climate
change and agriculture, from 10 in 1999), wouldn’t support the construction of special facilities. Then it
occurred to Ziska that the complaints made by residents of nearby Baltimore about summer in their city — the
exhaust-laden air and the way in which buildings and pavement soak up solar energy to create an abnormally
warm “heat island” — could be put to good use. When he checked, he found that in fact the temperatures in
Baltimore run 3 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average than those of the surrounding countryside, and the
concentration of CO2 in the local atmosphere (440 to 450 p.p.m., or parts per million by volume) is well above
the current global average. This, coincidentally, matched almost exactly what the panel on climate change
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predicted for the planet as a whole 30 to 50 years in the future in its “B2 scenario,” a middle-of-the-road
projection that envisions continuing greenhouse gas increases but also some success in abatement programs.
By comparing three sites — an organic farm in western Maryland, a park in a Baltimore suburb and the
one by the inner harbor — Ziska planned to study three circumstances: the present (on the organic farm), the
mid-century future as predicted by the climate-change panel (in Baltimore) and something in between (the
suburban site). He took soil from the organic farm, which already contained seeds of 35 common weeds, and
with it created uniform beds at each of the sites, urban, suburban and rural, so that the growing medium and
weed population would be the same throughout. What happened over the next five growing seasons surprised
even him.
Not only did the weeds grow much larger in hotter, CO2-enriched plots — a weed called lambs-quarters,
or Chenopodium album, grew to an impressive 6 to 8 feet on the farm but to a frightening 10 to 12 feet in the
city — but the urban, futuristic weeds also produced more pollen. Even more alarming was the way that the
increased heat and CO2 accelerated and perverted the succession of species within the plots. Typically, a
cleared area in the Eastern United States, if left to itself, returns to native woodland. This process varies with the
site and circumstances, but in its archetypical form fast-growing annual weeds cover the soil first, playing the
role of what ecologists classify as “pioneer plants.” These gradually give way to longer-lived perennial weeds,
which are in turn replaced by shrubs and trees.
In the natural version of this process, the pioneers and their successors are species indigenous to the
area, and the woodland’s restoration takes decades. But what Ziska observed in his urban plots was ecology on
amphetamines, a nearly completed succession to trees by the end of five years, with a domination by invasive
weed trees of the most troublesome sort: ailanthus, Norway maples and mulberries. Five years after the creation
of the plots, the biggest ailanthus in the rural test site measured about five feet tall. The city site boasted a 20footer. The suburban plot was following the city’s lead, though it lagged a couple of years behind.
As a scientist, Ziska was excited by his experiment’s striking outcome. As someone who has spent his
career battling weeds, though, he was frightened by the implications. Weeds already cost U.S. farmers about 12
percent of their harvest, exacting an estimated annual loss of $33 billion. What would be the additional cost in
the future, not only to farmers but also to foresters, land managers and gardeners, of beating back supercharged
weeds? Still, even as he contemplated this, Ziska says he couldn’t repress a certain admiration. He traces his
interest in weeds to an epiphany during his undergraduate years at the University of California at Riverside:
noticing a weed springing up through a crack in the Southern California pavement, he was suddenly struck with
wonder at any organism that could flourish in such a hot, dry, hostile environment. That may become an
essential talent, it occurred to Ziska, given the way our planet is going.
Taking the long view, it becomes apparent that the events in Ziska’s plots were just another twist in the more
than 10,000 years of joint history, ours and the weeds’. We have been intimately linked since Neolithic times,
for in a fundamental sense weeds are a human creation. “Weed” is a subjective label applied as a matter of
personal judgment, a point that becomes obvious when you consider how many “noxious weeds” — plants now
marked for destruction by federal, state or county authorities — were deliberately introduced into North
America by individuals convinced of their beauty or utility. The ailanthus tree, for example, currently regarded
as one of the most troublesome weeds of our urban habitats, was brought from China to eastern North America
in the 19th century for use as a fast-growing shade tree and is said to have been introduced into California by
Chinese immigrants who valued its medicinal properties.
There are countless definitions of weeds, ranging from the hardheaded one necessarily observed by
farmers, that a weed is any plant that interferes with profit, to the aesthetic (a popular gardener’s definition of a
weed is “a plant out of place”), to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sanctimonious assertion that a weed is “a plant
whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” But all agree on the central criterion: to qualify as a weed, the
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plant in question must be viewed with disfavor by humanity. Simply put, any plant, if we dislike it, becomes an
intruder in our landscape and so a weed.
Arguably, then, there was no such thing as a weed until mankind developed the need to discriminate,
which came with the development of agriculture in the Neolithic era, around 9,000 B.C. In fact, many of the
wild grains like red rice or wild oats that are among our most troublesome agricultural weeds today were valued
food sources until we graduated from the hunter-gatherer stage of our existence.
Much has been made of our scientific triumph in breeding modern crop plants from those wild
ancestors. The transformation of an east Asian wild grass (red rice) into the crop that provides 20 percent of
humanity’s caloric intake is extraordinary. What generally goes unrecognized, though, except among weed
scientists, is the extent to which we also made weeds what they are.
Coexistence with mankind has given rise to the sort of tough plants that flourish despite the worst we
can do — hoeing, pulling, burning and, more recently, spraying the fields with herbicidal chemicals. Weeds
have adapted to every means we used to exterminate them, even turning the treatments to their own advantage.
Attacking a Canada thistle (actually of Eurasian origin and a regular entry in “worst weeds of North America”
lists) with hoe or plow, for example, may destroy the plant’s aboveground growth but leaves the soil full of
severed bits of fleshy root, each of which may sprout a new plant.
A result of this history is that crops and weeds embody diametrically opposed genetic strategies. Over
the centuries, we have deliberately bred the genetic diversity out of our crop plants. Creating crop populations
composed of clones or near clones was an essential step in achieving higher yields and the sort of uniform
growth that makes large-scale, mechanized cultivation and harvesting possible. Because weed populations live
as opportunists, however, they must include individuals with the ability to flourish in whatever type of habitat
we make available. They also need diversity to cope with the wide range of punishments we inflict. A patch of
Canada thistles, if it is to survive when the farmer switches from hoeing to herbicides, must include individuals
that develop a resistance to the chemicals over time. Weed populations that lacked the necessary genetic
diversity faded from our fields, lawns and waste places; historians of agriculture can cite many such casualties.
The survivors are an astonishingly plastic group of plants. James Bunce, a plant physiologist with an
office down the hall from Ziska’s, has been studying the effect on dandelions (that nemesis of the suburban
greenskeeper) of atmospheres artificially enriched with CO2. He found in a series of trials that populations of
the familiar weed evolve, changing physically to take advantage of this sort of resource enhancement, within the
space of one growing season.
“When you change a resource in the environment,” Ziska said recently, sitting in his compact office,
“you are going to, in effect, favor the weed over the crop. There is always going to be a weed poised genetically
to benefit from almost any change.”
Ziska, together with Bunce, has been testing the effects of changing CO2 concentrations on a range of
crop and weed species. Wending his way through a basement full of pumps, filters and boxlike aluminum
growth chambers, Ziska showed himself to be a connoisseur of atmospheres. Peering at the instrument panel
outside one growth chamber, he noted a CO2 concentration of 310 p.p.m. “That’s a 1957 atmosphere, the year
of my birth,” he said. What he and his colleagues have found, he said, is that weeds benefit far more than crop
plants from the changes in CO2 and that the implications of this for agriculture and public health are grave.
Tests with common agricultural weeds like Canada thistle and quack grass found them more resistant to
herbicides when grown in higher concentrations of CO2, making them harder to control. Ziska hypothesizes
that this may be a result of faster growth; the weeds mature more rapidly, leaving behind more quickly the
seedling stage during which they are most vulnerable. This promises to be an expensive problem for farmers,
who will have to spend more on chemicals and other anti-weed measures to protect their crops. (Herbicides
already cost farmers more than $10 billion annually worldwide.)
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But enhancing CO2 levels, Ziska has found, not only augments the growth rate of many common weeds,
increasing their size and bulk; it also changes their chemical composition. When he grew ragweed plants in an
atmosphere with 600 p.p.m. of CO2 (the level projected for the end of this century in that same climate-change
panel “B2 scenario”), they produced twice as much pollen as plants grown in an atmosphere with 370 p.p.m.
(the ambient level in the year 1998). This is bad news for allergy sufferers, especially since the pollen harvested
from the CO2-enriched chamber proved far richer in the protein that causes the allergic reaction. Poison ivy has
also demonstrated not only more vigorous growth at higher levels of CO2 but also a more virulent form of
urushiol, the oil in its tissue that provokes a rash.
According to Ziska, the steady increase in atmospheric CO2 since the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution may have already had a major impact on the growth of at least one supremely costly weed.
Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), a native of central Asia, is believed to have been introduced into the United
States accidentally, as seeds in soil used to ballast ships or as a contaminant in agricultural seed, in the mid1800s. Since then, its ability to flourish in dry habitats and its prolific seed production (a single plant can bear as
many as 5,000 seeds) has helped it to overrun 100 million acres of Western rangeland, an area larger than the
state of Wyoming. In doing so, cheatgrass has displaced more nutritious native grasses, reducing the quantity of
livestock a given acreage can support. Cheatgrass has also diminished the land’s value to wildlife, which also
finds the introduced plant unpalatable.
The spread of cheatgrass has been widely attributed to the degradation of native grasslands by
overgrazing — cattle prefer and selectively eat the native grasses — and more especially to its exceptional
combustibility. Periodic fires are an integral part of the rangeland ecology, but when the rangeland is still
dominated by native grasses, fires occur in some areas at average intervals of every 60 to 110 years. In areas
overrun by cheatgrass, however, fire sweeps through every three to five years. While cheatgrass can tolerate
such frequent burns, the native flora cannot.
Cheatgrass’s combustibility is inherent in the plant’s pattern of growth. Sprouting in the fall, it resumes
growth at winter’s end to mature and set seed in early summer, whereupon the plant dies, leaving a tuft of dry,
highly flammable leaves through the following dry season. Ziska and his colleagues discovered, though, that the
weed’s flammability seems to have been greatly augmented by the increases in atmospheric CO2 that occurred
during the period of cheatgrass’s spread through the West.
The scientists grew the plant at four concentrations of CO2: at 270 p.p.m. (the ambient level at the
beginning of the 19th century, before the Industrial Revolution), at 320 p.p.m. (a 1960s level), 370 p.p.m. (a
1990s level) and 420 p.p.m. (the approximate level predicted for 2020 in all the climate-change panel’s
estimates). What they found was that an increase of CO2 equivalent to that occurring from 1800 until today
raised the total mass of material (the biomass) each cheatgrass plant produced by almost 70 percent. In addition,
the composition of the cheatgrass changed as the CO2 level increased, the tissues becoming more carbon-rich
so that the plant leaves and stems are less susceptible to decay. In a natural setting, this would mean that the
dead material would persist longer, adding yet more fuel for wildfire.
More fuel, with a longer life — Ziska says that the rise in greenhouse gases we have already achieved
may have played a decisive role in the spread of a weed that has already transformed the ecology of the Western
United States. The situation seems likely to worsen too. The cheatgrass that Ziska grew at the CO2 level equal
to that projected for 2020 increased the plant’s biomass by another 18 percent above current levels. Global
climate change, it seems, will further stoke the rangeland wildfires.
“There’s no such thing as natural selection,” Ziska confides. He is not, he hastens to explain, a creationist. He is
merely pointing out that the original 19th-century view of evolution, the one presented by Charles Darwin and
Alfred Wallace, is obsolete. Their model presented evolution as a process taking place in a nature independent
of human interference. That is almost never the situation today — even at sea, where less than 4 percent of the
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oceans remain unaffected by human activity, according to a recent article in the journal Science. This
interference with nature has set the stage for the success of a growing category of weeds, one exemplified by
cheatgrass: invasive plant species.
These are plants that evolved outside a local or regional ecosystem but were at some point released into
it, typically by human action. Some invasives, like cheatgrass, arrived as hitchhikers and stowaways; others,
like kudzu, were introduced deliberately. (A Japanese species, kudzu was planted by state and federal agencies
to control soil erosion throughout the Southern states in the 1930s and ’40s.) In any case, the invasive plant
species share a quality of aggressive, explosive growth in their new homes and the ability to outcompete the
native vegetation of forests, grasslands and wetlands — areas that we are accustomed to think of as outside the
sphere of human influence.
Popular opinion has treated the invasive plants as botanical illegal aliens. The Environmental Protection
Agency has labeled them as the second-greatest threat to the continent’s biodiversity, exceeded in their impact
only by outright destruction of habitat. Major resources have been devoted to the spraying and rooting-out of
invasive plants in the belief that their removal would enable an ecological revival. Roughly $45 million, for
example, is spent every year in the unsuccessful attempt to stop the spread of a single European wetland weed,
purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria).
New research, however, suggests that invasive species, at least in some instances, aren’t so much the
causes of environmental degradation as eco-opportunists taking advantage of disturbed habitats. Or, as the
biologist Andrew MacDougall of the University of Guelph, Ontario, puts it, the invasives may behave more as
“passengers” than as “drivers.” This is the conclusion he reached in a pair of studies, one of an oak savanna in
British Columbia and the other of degraded prairie in southwestern Saskatchewan.
MacDougall had not intended to focus on invasive plants when he began studying a Nature Conservancy
Canada property on Vancouver Island. An 86 acre remnant of oak-studded grassland, this sanctuary exemplified
a type of open savanna habitat that was once common in the area but that was nearly eliminated by agriculture
and sprawl. MacDougall’s original interest was in the native flora; this Nature Conservancy sanctuary is a
biodiversity hot spot, hosting more than 100 species of plants and animals at risk in British Columbia or
nationally.
Despite this land’s protected status, MacDougall found that the native plant community was failing, the
rarities becoming rarer. The young ecologist blamed an invasion by several foreign grasses for this decline.
Initially, he supposed that simply removing the foreigners would prompt a renaissance of the native grasses and
wildflowers.
The actual response was quite different. For three years MacDougall removed the invasive grasses from
plots he outlined within the reserve. In some plots, he did this by mowing or burning; in others, he removed the
weeds entirely. Yet the native flora didn’t rebound significantly. In some cases, the decline of the native plant
species instead accelerated, and the fundamental character of the flora within the plots began to change, with
woody plants encroaching on the formerly open, grassy areas.
MacDougall concluded that rather than serving as drivers of change, the foreign grasses were
functioning more in the role of passengers, merely filling in as the natives disappeared. In fact, the foreigners
seemed to be serving a stabilizing role. By blocking light from reaching the soil, they inhibited the germination
of tree and shrub seeds. Keeping the brush at bay in this fashion preserved the open character of the savanna
habitat so that the remnants of the original savanna wildflowers, grasses and wildlife could at least survive. In
light of these findings, MacDougall says, he came to believe that the primary cause of the native flora’s decline
was human intervention. Before European settlement, fire periodically cleansed the soil surface of dead plant
material. Suppression of fire since settlement had allowed a thick layer of litter to accumulate, and the foreign
grasses cope better with this than do the natives.
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The relevance of this discovery to an era of global climate change has become apparent in MacDougall’s
subsequent research in the Saskatchewan prairie. These grasslands were infiltrated with crested wheatgrass, a
species from the Eurasian steppe. Again, the foreign grass was blamed as the driver in the decline of the native
flora. MacDougall, however, says he believes the invader’s success is largely derived from climatic change over
the last half-century. Weather records reveal that spring warmth in this semiarid region is coming earlier than it
used to, and the season’s rain is more consistent. The wheatgrass, which awakens from winter dormancy earlier
than the native grass species, has gained a competitive advantage from this change.
MacDougall says he believes that a North American grass species could be found that could compete
successfully in the altered climate and would also (unlike the exotic) interact beneficially with native wildlife.
He admits, though, that replanting this prairie would be a big endeavor, that it would require as much effort as
the 19th-century pioneers gave to taming the prairie habitat. Whether the will and resources exist for this seems
questionable, especially as habitat disturbance spreads around the globe, creating many similar situations.
MacDougall says he is hopeful that the climatic changes projected for this century won’t exceed the
tolerance of most native plant species. He admits, though, that the spread of the exotics suggests that they are
more genetically diverse and thus better able to cope with environmental change. MacDougall clearly doesn’t
like the prospect, but he admits he can imagine a future so generally disturbed that we may well be grateful for
what he calls the “positive services” — the aggressive adaptability — of the botanical aliens.
It was a Tuesday in early January, but the temperature in center city Philadelphia had reached 65 degrees, and
rosettes of dandelion leaves were starting to sprout flower buds in the neat bed of mulch outside the Sheraton
Society Hill hotel. Inside, in a meeting room set up with chairs, screen and PowerPoint projector, the
membership of the Northeastern Weed Science Society was equally disturbed. These are, by necessity,
conservative people. A mixture of university researchers, county agents and representatives of the herbicide
industry, the attendees had the look of farmers or foresters temporarily off their land — clean-cut, tanned,
tending toward the wiry. Most looked distinctly uncomfortable in crisp sport jackets and polyester blazers that,
you suspected, had spent the 12 months since the last annual meeting in a closet. If the members looked like
farmers, that was because it is farmers they serve, and they had clearly absorbed the wary ethic of that
profession in which sudden change, whether of weather, markets or government policies, is almost always for
the worse.
The day’s news surely confirmed that prejudice. The second day of this year’s annual meeting was
devoted to a symposium on weeds and global climate change, and the speakers were outlining a future in which
many of the members’ current strategies will be irrelevant or ineffective.
The keynote speaker, Cameron Wake of the University of New Hampshire’s Climate Change Research
Center, did little to put the audience at ease. Wake is a charismatic man who has traveled the colder regions of
the world — the Canadian arctic, the Greenland ice sheet, Antarctica and the high mountains of Central Asia.
On these trips, he collects ice cores, whose analysis enables him to reconstruct histories of past atmospheric and
climatic changes. His soul patch, pink shirt and pink tie made him a minority of one in this room. He dealt
firmly with an audience member who asserted that the climatic warming is nothing new, that records from
imperial Rome indicate that citrus and other warm-weather crops were then far to the north of their current
ranges. Wake pointed out that local archaeology can’t change the global data set, which proves that the level of
CO2 in the atmosphere is at its highest point in more than 650,000 years and that the rate of increase is
accelerating.
Subsequent speakers got down to cases. Andrew McDonald, an agricultural scientist at Cornell
University, had used the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s high projections for CO2 levels at the
middle and end of the century to create an atlas of potential weed migrations in cornfields in the Eastern United
States. If these projections prove accurate, Kentucky, by the end of the next one to three decades, should have a
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climate (and weed flora) resembling that of present-day North Carolina; by century’s end, it will have shifted to
a regime more like that of Louisiana. Delaware, over the same period, will be transformed to something first
like North Carolina and then Georgia, while Pennsylvania will metamorphose into West Virginia and then
North Carolina. Florida will become something unprecedented in this country. Field observations indicate that
these transformations are already under way: another speaker pointed out that kudzu, “the weed that ate the
South,” has already migrated up to central Illinois and by 2015 could be extending its tendrils into Michigan’s
Upper Peninsula.
Even more sobering were the figures that the biologist Brent Helliker of the University of Pennsylvania
flashed on the screen. First, he used maps taken from an ecology textbook to show the way the last ice age
drove various forest types southward. Then came a map Helliker created, suggesting that the current warming
seems most likely to change the ranges to which forest trees are adapted — the areas where the black spruce, for
example, grows now, are likely to become better suited to broadleaf trees. He asked the question that was on the
lips of every one of his listeners: Can the forest adapt so drastically in a space of just decades? Helliker
announced that he had no answer to that question, and his talk was over.
During a break between talks, Lewis Ziska was surprisingly upbeat. With the challenges, he insisted, come
opportunities. Kudzu, for instance: Ziska has been seeking financing to study its potential as a source of biofuel.
Kudzu roots, as much as 50 percent starch by weight, seem ideal for ethanol production, while the plant’s
supercharged vines, which can grow a foot a day, would be an abundant source of alternative energy. This
would be win-win: we develop an alternative to fossil fuels and, at the same time, create a financial incentive to
root out a particularly troublesome weed.
Developing techniques for managing weeds in a time of global climate change will be essential to the
world’s agricultural future, and the U.S.D.A. researchers, though they have been starved of essential financing,
lead the world in this field. (There is one exception, Ziska admits; his Web searches have revealed that
marijuana growers have an amazingly detailed knowledge of how CO2 enrichment affects their crop. But as
Ziska points out, they don’t publish in scientific journals.) Possession of this expertise could be a great
economic asset to the United States, both for the protection it could provide to our own harvests and as an
intellectual export that is sure to be much in demand in other countries.
Ziska says that he worries about mankind’s ability to feed itself in a fast-changing future. Paradoxically,
it is weeds, he says, that can provide solutions. They have helped us deal with lesser crises in the past. When
diseases and pests overwhelmed our domesticated food crops, it was to their wild relatives — plants that
mankind has been battling for millennia — that plant breeders turned. Because weeds have more diverse
genomes, it is easier to find one with the proper genetic resistance to a given threat — and then to create a new
hybrid by breeding it with existing crops. An answer to the Irish potato blight of 1845-6 was eventually found
among the potato’s wild and weedy relatives; a wild oat found in Israel in the 1960s helped spawn a more
robust, disease-resistant strain of domesticated oats.
Weedy ancestors of our food crops, Ziska predicts, will cope far better with coming climatic changes
than their domesticated descendants. Coping, after all, is what weeds have always done best. As last year’s
climate- change panel report, Climate Change 2007, made clear, we have already set in motion far-reaching and
unstoppable changes in regional temperatures and precipitation and in the composition of our atmosphere. No
matter what actions we take, these changes will continue for decades. If we are to avoid disaster, experts agree,
we will need to be tenacious but flexible, ready to identify and exploit any opportunity in what will be a
challenging, even hostile situation. In this new world that we have made, weeds, our old adversaries, could be
not only tools but mentors. At which point, if Ralph Waldo Emerson is to be believed, weeds by definition will
cease to exist.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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Cities Push Consumer Climate Fight
By Timothy Gardner, Jun 5 08
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A campaign founded in Europe to help consumers fight climate change will be
launched in the United States on Thursday by cities including New York, leading American companies and
non-profit groups.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and U.N. SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-moon, along with companies from JP Morgan Chase & Co. to Target Corp., are involved in the
Together campaign.
The initiative plans to steer people toward the most environmentally friendly products and encourage
green practices, such as consumers' opting out of receiving paper catalogues.
"Everyone has been talking about big government fighting climate change but more and more
consumers are looking for brands to play a role in helping to solve the problem," Callum Grieve, North
American external affairs director of The Climate Group, a non-profit initiating Together, told Reuters.
The Climate Group launched Europe's Together program last year with the help of then-Prime Minister
Tony Blair. Since then, it has helped consumers cut 522,000 tons of carbon dioxide and saved them over $200
million on household energy bills, the group said.
Bloomberg and Ban are set to help launch Together on Thursday, with mayors from cities including
Seattle, Miami and Boston taking part.
As the governments of the world's top greenhouse gas emitters, including the United States, China, India
and the European Union, struggle to form a global alliance to cut emissions, The Climate Group says Together
can help individuals make small carbon output cuts that combined can make big dents in energy use and
emissions.
Set to Go Global
Cities and companies will help guide consumers to products like shower heads that cut water flow and
energy efficient appliances through a website, www.together.com.
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Some so-called "green" goods are more environmentally friendly than others, so The Climate Group will
determine which goods are best with a third party group called Environmental Resources Management, it said.
U.S. companies plan to offer green solutions through Together such as paperless check deposits and
paperless banking.
Nonprofit groups including Mercy Corps, which works with victims of disasters, conflicts and chronic
poverty, and the National Wildlife Federation, a conservation group, are also joining Together.
NWF, for instance, hopes to use Together's Web site to draw more people to its Catalog Choice program
in which consumers can tell companies not to send product catalogs in the mail, saving transport costs.
"What we really haven't had is the wherewithal to fully get the word out on some of our programs,"
NWF education expert Kevin Coyle said.
After launching Together in America, The Climate Group plans to expand the campaign to China, India
and Australia.
(Editing by Michelle Nichols and Cynthia Osterman)
© Thomson Reuters 2008.
Edison, Make Way for the L.E.D.’s
By Eric A. Taub, The New York Times, Jun 6 08
IF YOU’RE LOOKING for the latest advancements in incandescent light bulb technology, one place you don’t
want to go is to a lighting trade show. I learned that in about five minutes last week, while touring the aisles of
Lightfair, the lighting industry’s big convention, held this year in Las Vegas.
In case you didn’t know it, Thomas Edison’s invention, in use for more than 100 years to illuminate
virtually everything, is quickly heading for the exits. What will eventually take its place is the light-emitting
diode (L.E.D.) bulb, made up of tiny light sources the size of a head of a pin that use a fraction of a regular light
bulb’s electricity, produce little heat, and last for tens of thousands of hours of use.
This is not some comic book dream. The exhibits at Lightfair were filled with new L.E.D. products,
many shipping now: standard-type room lights, under-counter lights, commercial spotlights, garden lights and
huge L.E.D. displays designed to light the Empire State Building.
Because they’re electronic, L.E.D.’s can be controlled by a cell phone. Forgot to turn on your porch
light? Just dial in a command.
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L.E.D.’s are not widely used today because of their high cost: An L.E.D. bulb can run as high as $90.
Even if they would save money in the long run, few people are willing to spend that much up front. But costs
will come down, and when they do, expect to see the end of what is in essence an interim technology: the
compact fluorescent bulb. Fluorescents, while using much less power than incandescent light bulbs, are
sometimes too bulky, often can’t be dimmed and produce light that is less pleasing than incandescents.
L.E.D.’s, on the other hand, can produce literally millions of colors, which you will be able to witness
yourself at the end of this year, when Philips, the Dutch electronics giant, introduces its $199 Living Colors
product into the U.S. market. Living Colors is Philips’ L.E.D. Trojan horse, an electronic lava lamp that uses
L.E.D.’s to project a palette of 16 million colors against a wall. Operated with a remote control, you change the
projected color by touching a point on the iPod-like color wheel, then push other buttons to decrease the
brightness or alter the color’s saturation.
The company has already sold 250,000 Living Color products in Europe; in the U.S., it will offer the
regular model plus a $79 mini version that offers a limited palette and no remote.
I’ve been playing with one for several weeks, and after some initial resistance to its corniness, I’ve taken
a liking to it. Every night, I set the color of one wall of our bedroom to a different hue, hopefully matching our
moods. It’s a nice change from standard yellow light and gives some added dimension to the space.
Philips points out that you can set up a chain of Living Color units around a room and control them all
with a single remote. For me, that’s just a bit over the top. I don’t fancy turning my house into a Las Vegas
facade.
Energy Thirst Still Topping Climate Risks
By Andrew C. Revkin, The New York Times, Jun 25 08
TWO STUDIES OUT TODAY — one on energy trends, one on climate as a security issue — bode
poorly for those seeking to prevent global warming from passing dangerous thresholds. Coal and oil
use climb relentlessly, at a rate similar to that for growth in wind, solar, and nuclear power, but in
vastly larger quantities.
The report on global warming as a source of conflict sees climate change amplifying discord in
parts of Africa and Asia, but not enough to destabilize governments — and even as its impacts
through 2020 in rich countries remain small. The “ climate divide” we explored last year is alive and
well.
As I wrote the other day, it looks like countries are going to remain focused on addressing realtime problems related to energy security (most notably high oil prices) for the time being, even as
evidence builds that global warming could fuel turmoil, particularly in already-troubled places like subSaharan Africa, in the long run. I ran a panel at a meeting on China, energy, and climate at the
Council on Foreign Relations on Tuesday, and in the preceding session, Zhou Dadi, one of the
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leading figures shaping China’ s energy and climate policies said energy security will remain
China’ s top priority for a long while to come. He restated the longstanding mantra from China on
climate, saying the responsibility for blunting emissions curves for greenhouse gases will remain with
industrialized powers for a long time to come.
Here’ s are the take-home points from two assessments, one from the Energy Information
Administration and the other provided to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence by
the National Intelligence Council:
Energy and CO2 Trends
The energy forecast - (Keep in mind such forecasts are often way off, but at least the sign, plus
or minus, has tended to be right) - highlights:
World marketed energy consumption is projected to grow by 50 percent between 2005 and
2030, driven by robust economic growth and expanding populations in the world’ s developing
countries…
Coal’ s share of world energy use has increased sharply over the past few years, and without
significant changes in existing laws and policies, particularly those related to greenhouse gas
emissions, robust growth is likely to continue. Coal accounted for 24 percent of total world energy use
in 2002 and 27 percent in 2005, largely as a result of rapid increases in coal use in China. China’ s
coal consumption has nearly doubled since 2000, and given the country’ s rapidly expanding
economy and large domestic coal deposits, its demand for coal is projected to remain strong…
Concerns about rising fossil fuel prices, energy security, and greenhouse gas emissions
support the development of new nuclear generating capacity. World nuclear capacity is projected to
rise from 374 gigawatts in 2005 to 498 gigawatts in 2030. Declines in nuclear capacity are projected
only in OECD Europe, where several countries (including Germany and Belgium) have either plans or
mandates to phase out nuclear power, and where some old reactors are expected to be retired and
not replaced. China is projected to add 45 gigawatts of net nuclear capacity over the projection
period, India 17 gigawatts, Russia 18 gigawatts, and the United States 15 gigawatts.
…In the IEO2008 reference case, which does not include specific policies to limit greenhouse
gas emissions, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions are projected to rise from 28.1 billion metric
tons in 2005 to 42.3 billion metric tons in 2030 - an increase of 51 percent. With strong economic
14
growth and continued heavy reliance on fossil fuels expected, much of the increase in carbon dioxide
emissions is projected to occur among the developing nations of the world, especially in Asia…
Climate and Conflict
Thomas Fingar, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, provided an unclassified
statement to the select intelligence committee. Some of the background analysis was done by
researchers in a branch of the Earth Institute of Columbia University. Mr. Fingar’ s statement
concluded:
We judge global climate change will have wide-ranging implications for US national security
interests over the next 20 years. Although the United States will be less affected and is better
equipped than most nations to deal with climate change, and may even see a benefit owing to
increases in agriculture productivity, infrastructure repair and replacement will be costly. We judge
that the most significant impact for the United States will be indirect and result from climate-driven
effects on many other countries and their potential to seriously affect US national security interests.
We assess that climate change alone is unlikely to trigger state failure in any state out to 2030, but
the impacts will worsen existing problems—such as poverty, social tensions, environmental
degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions. Climate change could threaten
domestic stability in some states, potentially contributing to intra- or, less likely, interstate conflict,
particularly over access to increasingly scarce water resources. We judge that economic migrants will
perceive additional reasons to migrate because of harsh climates, both within nations and from
disadvantaged to richer countries.
The findings largely reflect those of other recent reports, including the section on climate
impacts in last year’ s assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And while
it’ s certainly not good news, it’ s clear that climate impacts remain one of many elements in the mix
driving tensions in poor places — ranging from bad governance to high food prices to, yes, high
energy costs.
Greening the Desktop PC?
15
By Steve Lohr, NY Times Blog, Jun 17 08
THE NATION’S 6,000 football field-sized computer data centers have been recognized as remarkably wasteful
power hogs, and the industry is mobilizing people and investment to address the problem — and also cash in on
that new market for energy efficiency. (It has, for instance, triggered a strong demand for mechanical engineers
who can make data centers more efficient.)
But Verdiem, a Seattle start-up, is betting that there is a big energy-saving market in the estimated 250
million personal computers in the United States. Begun in 2001, by a husband-and-wife team in Oregon,
Verdiem has been transformed in the last couple of years, attracting venture investors, led by Kleiner Perkins
Caufield & Byers, who have installed new management with ambitious growth plans.
The potential market, to be sure, is sizable. Up to two-thirds of the electricity consumed by a PC is
wasted, meaning the machine is on but not in use, according to the Department of Energy. The research firm
Gartner estimates that 40 percent of the all carbon dioxide emissions resulting from information technology and
telecommunications is attributable to PCs. Data center servers, by contrast, represent 23 percent, though
growing rapidly. (The rest is attributable to telecoms and printers.)
“Because PCs are dispersed, people tend to think it’s not a big problem,” Verdiem’s chief executive,
Kevin Klustner, said. “But it is a big problem, and a big opportunity.”
How To Attract Young People To Engineering:
Make a Difference Message Is Key
SCIENCE DAILY (June 25, 2008) — Encouraging young people to make a difference in the world through an
engineering career is more likely to attract them than emphasizing the challenge of math and science skills, says
a new report from the National Academy of Engineering that identifies messages for improving public
understanding of engineering.
The report, Changing the Conversation: Messages for Improving Public Understanding of Engineering,
recommends that the engineering community begin using tested messages in a coordinated communications
strategy.
The four messages that tested best are:
Engineers make a world of difference.
Engineers are creative problem-solvers.
Engineers help shape the future.
Engineering is essential to our health, happiness, and safety.
"Improving public understanding of engineering will enable people to make more informed decisions
about technology, encourage students to consider engineering careers, and ultimately sustain the U.S. capacity
for technological innovation," said Don Giddens, dean of engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology
and chair of the committee that wrote the report.
Each year, the engineering community spends hundreds of millions of dollars to increase public
understanding of engineering. However, most of these outreach efforts are ad hoc, local in scope, poorly
coordinated, and not evaluated for effectiveness. The NAE project represents the first-ever effort to use market
research techniques to improve the public image of the engineering profession.
The report presents and discusses findings from qualitative and quantitative research, including an
online survey of 3,600 people. In addition to testing the appeal, believability, and relevance of a handful of
16
different messages, the project also collected data on a set of taglines, or slogans. Because African Americans
and Hispanics are underrepresented in engineering schools and careers, the survey included large numbers of
both groups.
"There are concerns about a possible shortage of engineers in the United States," said Giddens, "and it is
clear that the engineering profession needs to attract a more diverse mix of the most capable students."
While less than 15 percent of adults or teens described engineers using the common stereotypes, such as
"boring" or "nerdy," the research showed that many students don't enjoy math and science enough to become
engineers.
Using the committee's research and expertise in engineering education and communications, the report
offers tested messages that reposition engineering as a satisfying profession that involves creative ideas and
teamwork -- not just personal benefits and technical skills. It also recommends strategies and tools that the
engineering community may use to conduct more effective outreach.
The study was sponsored by the National Science Foundation with additional support from the Georgia
Institute of Technology. The National Academy of Engineering is an independent, nonprofit institution that
serves as an adviser to government and the public on issues in engineering and technology. Its members consist
of the nation's premier engineers, who are elected by their peers for their distinguished achievements.
Established in 1964, NAE operates under the congressional charter granted to the National Academy of
Sciences in 1863.
The report is available at: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12187
Adapted from materials provided by The National Academies.
NY Chapter AEE Board Members
David Ahrens
[email protected]
Michael Bobker
[email protected]
Timothy Daniels
[email protected]
Jack Davidoff
[email protected]
Fredric Goldner
[email protected]
Placido Impollonia [email protected]
Dick Koral
[email protected]
John Leffler
[email protected]
Robert Meier
[email protected]
Jeremy Metz
[email protected]
John Nettleton
[email protected]
Chris Young
[email protected]
Asit Patel
[email protected]
Board Members Emeritus
Paul Rivet
[email protected]
George Kritzler
[email protected]
Alfred Greenberg
[email protected]
George Birman
Past Presidents
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Mike Bobker (2003-05), Asit Patel (2000-03), Thomas Matonti (1998-99), Jack Davidoff (1997-98), Fred
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