Gloom and Doom from the happiest country on Earth

I will say first that I find it difficult to imagine any rich modern country taking climate change more seriously, or being more eager to take concrete actions to oppose it, than does Denmark. Danish individuals, society and government, including every political party, acknowledge the reality of anthropogentic climate change and the very real dangers it poses to (very flat) Denmark and the world. Danes know that Denmark is too small for a drop in its emissions to make much of a difference, but they seem more than willing to do their part by reducing energy use, subsidizing alternative power sources (etc.) and applying what limited diplomatic influence they have. Denmark is economically comfortable enough to really invest in these things and has both a highly functional government and a populace willing to implement the policies that their leaders decide upon. I am sure there are people in Denmark who disagree, but I haven't met (or even heard of) them. Unlike most countries, they have made their emission reduction targets law (although how such a law is enforced is unclear to me).

Because of the above, not despite it, Denmark convinces me that humanity will rush headlong into global ecological disaster. I say this because if any country has the willingness and ability to implement the policies needed to avoid disaster, it is Denmark, and they are not there. For while Denmark invests in weaning itself off fossil fuels, it also invests very heavily in the fossil fuel industry, notably North Sea oil and gas exploration. The Danish government surely believes, probably correctly, that the will does not exist in the populace to give up on the profits of involvement in the scramble for hydrocarbons. So while Denmark is trying hard not to burn those fuels here in Denmark, it is trying hard to sell them to someone else who will burn them, doing every bit as much to submerge the Danish lowlands (aka Denmark). Danes know this, but like the rest of the world (I'm looking at you Canadian Tar Sands) they seem to feel  (again probably correctly) that if they don't do it someone else (Norway, UK, etc.) will.

So I can imagine a possible future in which all countries have become as convinced as Denmark is that humans are hurtling into climate disaster and need to hit the breaks, and that would be great, but I have trouble imagining that even in such a world this peculiar form of the tragedy of the commons would be escapable. As long as there is demand for fossil fuels, there will always be others who will extract and sell them because if they don't do it someone else will. And there will always be countries who, even if they fully understand the global situation, need inexpensive fuel and will burn those hydrocarbons. And as long as that is the case, no amount of individual turning down of heat and biking to work is going to make a big enough difference to matter. The problem is structural and that structure is disastrously profitable.

Unless, of course, and this is me looking for that ray of hope, other sources of energy rapidly become so much cheaper than fossil fuels that there is just not much profit to be made in extracting oil, coal or gas. In which case, we will be able to say that all those solar panels installed in the gloom of Denmark were not in vain, but were a vote of confidence and a wise subsidy for the development of alternative energy

Kudzu Power

For several years I've mused that if only we could find some efficient way to make ethanol from Kudzu (the incredibly fast growing invasive weed that has taken over much of the southeastern US), we could stop importing petroleum, vastly improve many ecosystems and tremendously improve the US economy, all in one swell foop. I didn't take this idea very seriously. It appears that somebody else has. Consider the following abstract from a recent volume of the journal Biomass and Bioenergy:

We determined the amount of standing biomass of kudzu (Pueraria montana var lobata) in naturally infested fields in Maryland and Alabama, USA. At each site, we evaluated the carbohydrate content of roots, stems, and leaves. For a third site from Georgia, we evaluated the carbohydrate content of kudzu roots of varying diameters. Belowground biomass in Alabama exceeded 13 t ha⁻¹, and contained an average of 37% fermentable carbohydrates (sucrose, glucose, and starch). Roots from Georgia of all size classes contained over 60% fermentable carbohydrates. Biomass and carbohydrate levels in roots from Maryland were low compared to plants growing in Alabama and Georgia, producing 5 t ha⁻¹ of roots with 20% non-structural carbohydrate. Stems from Alabama and Maryland contained 1–3% carbohydrates. Based on the yield and carbohydrate content, we estimate wild kudzu stands in Alabama and Georgia could produce 5–10 t ha⁻¹ of carbohydrate, which would rival carbohydrate production from maize and sugar cane fields. If economical harvesting and processing techniques could be developed, the kudzu infesting North America has the potential to supplement existing bioethanol feedstocks, which could be of significance to the rural economy of the southeastern USA.

Further consider this economical processing technique, from next month's PNAS:

Abundant plant biomass has the potential to become a sustainable source of fuels and chemicals. Realizing this potential requires the economical conversion of recalcitrant lignocellulose into useful intermediates, such as sugars. We report a high-yielding chemical process for the hydrolysis of biomass into monosaccharides. Adding water gradually to a chloride ionic liquid-containing catalytic acid leads to a nearly 90% yield of glucose from cellulose and 70–80% yield of sugars from untreated corn stover. Ion-exclusion chromatography allows recovery of the ionic liquid and delivers sugar feedstocks that support the vigorous growth of ethanologenic microbes. This simple chemical process, which requires neither an edible plant nor a cellulase, could enable crude biomass to be the sole source of carbon for a scalable biorefinery.

This will, of course, take longer and be more complicated than anyone currently expects, but I'd be surprised if we don't eventually have industrial scale application of this technology, using many sources, including kudzu.

Just like old times, only with more world-savingness

My freshman year in college, my neighbor down the hall, the fellow in the picture above, was building a contraption that looked very much like this one, only much more home-made looking with various colors of extension cords, duct tape and PVC pipe. One end face the door of his room. The other pointed out his window, like a cannon out the gun port of a ship. I asked him if he was a pirate. We became friends anyway. He eventually explained that it was a sort of cannon, a "linear inductance accelerator." It used electrical current to induce electrical fields that accelerated little aluminum rings down the length of the gun and shot them out the window. They didn't shoot very fast or very far, but Stephen built the thing while he was in high school, mostly from stuff he scavenged from his parents' basement. When the campus security guards would do their once a semester safety checks of the dorm rooms, Stephen would put Christmas lights and stuffed animals all over it and tell them it was a sculpture project.

Stephen is one of those people who is instantly recognizable as brilliant. Walk into a room where Stephen is and try not to get knocked over by the slightest meanderings of his enormous brain. But in addition to intellectual brilliance, Stephen is incredibly tireless, multi-talented and helpful. He was known as the "campus super hero."

It was therefore with very little surprise then that I watched as Stephen got degrees in mathematics, physics, electrical engineering, plasma physics, then went to work for a company whose goal is to save the world by producing cheap clean electricity from hydrogen fusion. And the company Stephen went to work for is of course going to do it much sooner, cleaner and at 1/100th the cost of anything any government or university could think to try. The picture above is of Stephen working on a piston he designed for that fusion reactor, and is from an article in this month's Popular Science. The similarity to the linear inductance accelerator is mostly in my mind. I can tell the photo is posed, though, because Stephen is not grinning, which he normally would be when fine-tuning one of his machines.

Stephen, by the way is Stephen Howard, who has occasionally posted to this blog. These days he is too busy saving the world.