Category Archives: Vision & Planning

The Everglades and Sustainable Energy Development

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January 14, 2008

Last weekend I moderated a Breakout Session Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Development in the Everglades at the 2008 Everglades Coalition Annual Meeting on Captiva Island. While the panel addressed some key energy and climate change issues of interest to an Everglades audience I was personally surprised that the audience wanted to know more about renewable energy related to their homes rather than exploring further the relationship of sustainable energy development to the Greater Everglades Eco-System. Fortunately for me there were people at the main conference, including ‘Rock’ Salt, my friend and Energy Advisory Committee colleague from the Governor’s Commission for a Sustainable South Florida (1996-97), with whom to share my questions.

What of the relationship between long-term sea level rise, new power plant siting, and restoring water flow to the Everglades, the latter also functioning as a climate change adaptation measure to protect our drinking water from saltwater intrusion. Modeling even 6″ of sea level rise and setting up monitoring stations at the pressure points would help us understand the rate at which change is taking place. Monitoring sea level changes at this time would be analogous to a Hurricane watch, albeit over much longer times, as a precursor to going to a sea level warning. This information has to be invaluable to the Corps of Engineers. Given that over 30% of the Everglades are less than 1 foot above sea level even a 6″ increase would be calamitous. Who is the lead agency for this kind of measurement and monitoring? Is it NOAA, USGS, USACE, someone else? Continue reading →

New biofuels studies raise serious questions

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Originally published September 2007, in Third Planet’s newsletter.

As if long-term energy planning and climate change mitigation were not difficult enough, along come two startling biofuel research reports from Europe in the past two weeks that serve to remind us of the need for constant vigilance and rational decision-making by government, especially with regard to the scientific process, long-term energy planning, and capital investments in a very uncertain future.

Worse than CO2 emissions?

In the first study (PDF), a team of research scientists from Britain, the U.S. and Germany led by acclaimed atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen re-examined the amount of nitrous-oxide (N2O) emissions from biofuel production. They found that when the emissions are calculated in “CO2-equivalent” global warming terms, many biofuels contribute as much or more to global warming through N2O emissions than by using fossil fuels alone.

There can’t be that much N2O emissions compared to CO2, you say. But N2O is a greenhouse gas with a 100-year average global warming potential (GWP) 296 times larger than an equal mass of CO2. That reason alone validates the study.

The team has published its findings for open review in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and, just like the science of climate change, their findings promise to be a hotbed of scientific debate in the months to come.

What makes the study resonate in particular is that Prof. Crutzen is no stranger to success in environmental science. In 1995 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland “for their work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone”. It was their Nobel Prize work that became the underlying basis for the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer. Continue reading →

Third Planet moves to St. Augustine

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October 2006

This summer Third Planet left South Florida to take up our global climate change advocacy work on Florida’s First Coast. The direct impact of the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons on our lives was too much. The straw that broke the camel’s back. Not that we’re out of harm’s way, but my family feels safer. We’re out of the peninsula.

For many years I spoke to Southeast Florida and Bahamian audiences, organized workshops, worked in local and state policy circles, and generally got myself involved in “all things global climate change and energy”. Energy engineering, as people who know me will tell you, is my forté.

In the 1970s, when I was a power systems planning engineer, I first learned about the exponential growth of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere from the combustion of fossil fuels. My life as a fossil fuel power engineer changed. I became increasingly involved in building more efficient power systems, and fugitive gas/waste gas cogeneration became my area of specialization. As the years went by and evidence built for me that these so-called greenhouse gases were having a discernable effect on our atmosphere, I became more involved in advocacy. Continue reading →