Seven Environmental Media Stories That Are Full Of Hope

We all hear about the daunting challenges and dire consequences of failing to address global warming or make the planet more sustained. Here is an exciting summary of some of the many good developments that guide us toward a hopeful vision of the future.

Ken Edelstein for Mother Nature News reports:

"[it’s easy to lose sight of hopeful news that’s lurking just outside the media’s spotlight. Often, it’s those hopeful stories -- the ones that are about steady, quiet progress rather than political conflict -- that make the larger difference in our lives." See full article:

Space Mirrors to Block the Sun and Cool the Planet?

Even the idea that Planet Earth could be shielded from the sun and global warming by a cloud of mirrors has been floated by some scientists.

The Engineer Online reports:

"A concept, championed by astronomer Roger Angel of the University of Arizona, is positively James Bond-like in scale. He has proposed creating a 100,000-square-mile 'sunshade' in space, orbiting the Sun at the inner Lagrange Point (L1), 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth in a direct line between star and planet, where it will keep station and reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth.The sunshade would be made up of hundreds of millions of small solar deflectors, about 60cm in diameter and made from a transparent film, formed into a cylindrical 'cloud' 60,000 miles long and about half the diameter of the Earth. Around 10 per cent of the sunlight travelling through the cloud would be deflected to a path where it misses the planet, reducing the amount of incident solar radiation by about two per cent. This, Angel calculates, is enough to offset the consequences of the greenhouse effect." See full article.

Energy From Ocean Waves

The action of waves in the ocean can help drive sea-going turbines. Very preliminary indications are this method can be more efficient than wind energy.

Discovery Magazine reports:

"A new prototype of a wave power generator has been unveiled in England, and its inventors followed the creed espoused by Leonardo da Vinci: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” The new wave power device, known as Anaconda, is a basic tube made from rubber and fabric and filled with water. It is still in trial phase, but its creators, optimistic about its potential as a source of mass power, are confident it will be cheaper than a wind farm generating the equivalent amount of power and less controversial in terms of public protest since the devices will be below the sea [Telegraph].

The Anaconda rides waves in the ocean, which create bulges along the tubing that travel along its length gathering energy. At the end of the tube, the surge of energy drives a turbine and generates electricity." See full article:

The "Heat Pump and Gravel" Answer to Energy Storage

Storing energy is a huge challenge in the fight to reverse global warming. A couple of UK engineers are working on part of the solution using gravel.

Reuters Reports:

"Some energy storage technologies for the power grid are expensive but can be deployed anywhere, like advanced batteries, while others are cheap but can only be built in certain locations, like pumping water up and down hilly terrain (known as “pumped hydro”). But a group of English engineers have built an advanced heat pump and connected it to an energy storage system using two silos full of plain old gravel that they say is as cheap as pumped hydro, as location-agnostic as a battery — and is super efficient. The startup they founded two years ago called Isentropic, named after a reversible process in thermodynamics, is now looking for a Series B round of $5 million and will be showing off its technology at the Energy Storage Association conference." See full article.

Smart Chips vs. Coal-Powered Plants

There is major worry these days about all the energy-sucking devices we use in our daily lives. The semiconductor industry is starting to have a few answers that could add up to a lot fewer coal-powered power plants pouring greenhouse gases into the air.

Reuters Reports:

"According to the report, Semiconductor Technology: The Potential to Revolutionize U.S. Energy Productivity, electronics built with semiconductors are proving energy efficient. Well known for powering cell phones, global positioning devices, and display screens, semiconductors have been used to pack a lot of power into a tiny device transforming the electronics industry into millions of products with sleek and slim designs.

And now, these tiny powerhouses are helping to conserve energy and reduce the overall power load of electronics "the entire family of semiconductor-enabled technologies generated a net savings of about 775 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity in the year 2006 alone" (when compared to those technologies available in 1976. To put this into perspective, those savings prevent the need for more than 100 coal powered plants." In contrast, the International Energy Agency announced yesterday their work has found that cell phones, iPods, computers, and other electronics are negating the energy efficiency of other household and office electricity conserving devices. Apparently, these devices are not made using semiconductors." See full article.

Wind Power: The Emerging "Smart" Turbine Blade

Some existng technologies will need to get better and better to make a large enough dent in the vast challnge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years. Wind energy shows great promise.

Physorg.com reports on a smarter mousetrap .. err .. windmill blade:

This research is to improve the efficiency of turbines and prevent damage to blades from high winds. The researchers, from Purdue and Sandia National Laboratories, have developed a technique that uses sensors and computational software to constantly monitor forces exerted on wind turbine blades. Such sensors could be instrumental in future turbine blades that have control surfaces and flaps like those on an airplane's wings to change the aerodynamic characteristics of the blades for better control.

"The ultimate goal is to feed information from sensors into an active control system that precisely adjusts components to optimize efficiency," said Purdue doctoral student Jonathan White, who is leading the research with Douglas Adams, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of Purdue's Center for Systems Integrity. See full article

Converting Carbon Dioxide to Solid Rock

As we continue to work to cut back on the burning of greenhouse gas-producing fuels, some are also looking for ways to pull carbon dioxide from the air and store it.

The Guardian.UK reports:

"Engineers in Iceland are set to convert carbon dioxide to solid rock as a way to tackle global warming.

The experts want to exploit the country's volcanic origins to dispose of up to 30,000 tonnes of the greenhouse gas each year. They expect the gas to react with layers of volcanic rocks deep beneath the surface to form minerals that will lock the carbon pollution away for millions of years.

"This is a well-known natural process," said Holmfridur Sigurdardottir, project manager. "We are just trying to imitate what nature is doing."

The project will take CO2 produced by an Icelandic geothermal energy plant and dissolve it in water under high pressures. It will then pump the solution into layers of basalt about 400-700m underground, and watch what happens. Laboratory experiments suggest the dissolved CO2 will react with calcium in the basalt to form solid calcium carbonate. See full article.

Climate-saving Bacteria

Sometimes a look at "technology" means a closer looks at biology. In this case it means the properties of bacteria.

Science Daily reports:

"An international team of scientists has determined the structure of the chlorophyll molecules in green bacteria that are responsible for harvesting light energy"

"We found that the orientation of the chlorophyll molecules make green bacteria extremely efficient at harvesting light," said Donald Bryant, Ernest C. Pollard Professor of Biotechnology at Penn State and one of the team's leaders. According to Bryant, green bacteria are a group of organisms that generally live in extremely low-light environments, such as in light-deprived regions of hot springs and at depths of 100 meters in the Black Sea. The bacteria contain structures called chlorosomes, which contain up to 250,000 chlorophylls. "The ability to capture light energy and rapidly deliver it to where it needs to go is essential to these bacteria, some of which see only a few photons of light per chlorophyll per day." See full article

What Role Climate Technology?

Many people hope there might be a quick cure for the global warming problem. Not likely or even possible. No matter what, solving the global climate crisis will require a combination of measures starting with using less energy and changing many long-held, wasteful habits.

But keeping tabs on those climate techno-dreams out there can be fun. There are some wild ideas being tossed around such as putting mirrors into orbit around the planet, floating windmills out at sea, vacuuming CO2 from the air and more.

Here we will report on some of the most sensible global warming techno-fixes being developed (and someof the wackiest) and discuss their pros and cons.

Stay tuned.