Johnathan Goodwin can get 100 mpg out of a Lincoln Continental, cut emissions by 80%, and double the horsepower. Does the car business have the guts to follow him?
From: Issue 120 | November 2007 | Page 74 | By: Clive Thompson
“Check it out. It's actually a jet engine," says Johnathan Goodwin, with a low whistle. "This thing is gonna be even cooler than I thought." We're hunched on the floor of Goodwin's gleaming workshop in Wichita, Kansas, surrounded by the shards of a wooden packing crate. Inside the wreckage sits his latest toy--a 1985-issue turbine engine originally designed for the military. It can spin at a blistering 60,000 rpm and burn almost any fuel. And Goodwin has some startling plans for this esoteric piece of hardware: He's going to use it to create the most fuel-efficient Hummer in history.
Goodwin, a 37-year-old who looks like Kevin Costner with better hair, is a professional car hacker. The spic-and-span shop is filled with eight monstrous trucks and cars--Hummers, Yukon XLs, Jeeps--in various states of undress. His four tattooed, twentysomething grease monkeys crawl all over them with wrenches and welding torches.
Goodwin leads me over to a red 2005 H3 Hummer that's up on jacks, its mechanicals removed. He aims to use the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it'll have two engines, including an electric motor. But in this case, the second will be the turbine, Goodwin's secret ingredient. Whenever the truck's juice runs low, the turbine will roar into action for a few seconds, powering a generator with such gusto that it'll recharge a set of "supercapacitor" batteries in seconds. This means the H3's electric motor will be able to perform awesome feats of acceleration and power over and over again, like a Prius on steroids. What's more, the turbine will burn biodiesel, a renewable fuel with much lower emissions than normal diesel; a hydrogen-injection system will then cut those low emissions in half. And when it's time to fill the tank, he'll be able to just pull up to the back of a diner and dump in its excess french-fry grease--as he does with his many other Hummers. Oh, yeah, he adds, the horsepower will double--from 300 to 600.
"Conservatively," Goodwin muses, scratching his chin, "it'll get 60 miles to the gallon. With 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. You'll be able to smoke the tires. And it's going to be superefficient."
He laughs. "Think about it: a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!"
This is the sort of work that's making Goodwin famous in the world of underground car modders. He is a virtuoso of fuel economy. He takes the hugest American cars on the road and rejiggers them to get up to quadruple their normal mileage and burn low-emission renewable fuels grown on U.S. soil--all while doubling their horsepower. The result thrills eco-evangelists and red-meat Americans alike: a vehicle that's simultaneously green and mean. And word's getting out. In the corner of his office sits Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1987 Jeep Wagoneer, which Goodwin is converting to biodiesel; soon, Neil Young will be shipping him a 1960 Lincoln Continental to transform into a biodiesel--electric hybrid.
His target for Young's car? One hundred miles per gallon.
This is more than a mere American Chopper--style makeover. Goodwin's experiments point to a radically cleaner and cheaper future for the American car. The numbers are simple: With a $5,000 bolt-on kit he co-engineered--the poor man's version of a Goodwin conversion--he can immediately transform any diesel vehicle to burn 50% less fuel and produce 80% fewer emissions. On a full-size gas-guzzler, he figures the kit earns its money back in about a year--or, on a regular car, two--while hitting an emissions target from the outset that's more stringent than any regulation we're likely to see in our lifetime. "Johnathan's in a league of his own," says Martin Tobias, CEO of Imperium Renewables, the nation's largest producer of biodiesel. "Nobody out there is doing experiments like he is."
Nobody--particularly not Detroit. Indeed, Goodwin is doing precisely what the big American automakers have always insisted is impossible. They have long argued that fuel-efficient and alternative-fuel cars are a hard sell because they're too cramped and meek for our market. They've lobbied aggressively against raising fuel-efficiency and emissions standards, insisting that either would doom the domestic industry. Yet the truth is that Detroit is now getting squeezed from all sides. This fall, labor unrest is brewing, and after decades of inertia on fuel-economy standards, Congress is jockeying to boost the target for cars to 35 mpg, a 10 mpg jump (which is either ridiculously large or ridiculously small, depending on whom you ask). More than a dozen states are enacting laws requiring steep reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Meanwhile, gas prices have hovered around $3 per gallon for more than a year. And European and Japanese carmakers are flooding the market with diesel and hybrid machines that get up to 40% better mileage than the best American cars; some, such as Mercedes's new BlueTec diesel sedans, deliver that kind of efficiency and more horsepower.
General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, in short, have a choice: Cede still more ground--or mount a technological counterattack.
Goodwin's work proves that a counterattack is possible, and maybe easier than many of us imagined. If the dream is a big, badass ride that's also clean, well, he's there already. As he points out, his conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways. "They could do all this stuff if they wanted to," he tells me, slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder. "The technology has been there forever. They make 90% of the components I use." He doesn't have an engineering degree; he didn't even go to high school: "I've just been messing around and seeing what I can do."
All of which raises an interesting possibility. Has this guy in a far-off Kansas garage figured out the way to save Detroit?
America's most revolutionary innovations, it has long been said, sprang from the ramshackle dens of amateurs. Thomas Edison was a home-schooled dropout who got his start tinkering with battery parts; Chester Carlson invented the photocopier in his cramped Long Island kitchen. NASA, desperate for breakthroughs to help it return to the moon, has set up million-dollar prizes to encourage private citizens to come forward with any idea, no matter how crazy. As the theory goes, only those outside big industries can truly reinvent them.
Goodwin is certainly an outsider. He grew up in a dirt-poor Kansas family with six siblings and by age 13 began taking on piecework in local auto shops to help his mother pay the bills. He particularly enjoyed jamming oversized engines into places no one believed they'd fit. He put truck engines inside Camaros, Grand Nationals, and Super Bees; he even put a methanol-fueled turbocharger on a tiny Yamaha Banshee four-wheeler. "We took that thing from 35 horsepower to 208," he recalls. "It was crazy. We couldn't put enough fins on the back to keep it on the ground." After dropping out of school in the seventh grade, he made a living by buying up totaled cars and making them as good as new. "That," he says, "was my school."
Along the way, Goodwin also adopted two views common among Americans, but typically thought to be in conflict: a love of big cars and a concern about the environment. He is an avid, if somewhat nonideological, environmentalist. He believes global warming is a serious problem, that reliance on foreign oil is a mistake, and that butt-kicking fuel economy is just good for business. But Goodwin is also guiltlessly addicted to enormous, brawling rides, precisely the sort known to suck down Saudi gasoline. (I spied one lonely small sports car in the corner of his garage, but he confessed he has no plans to work on it right now.) When he picked me up from my hotel, he drove a four-door 2008 Cadillac Escalade XL that should have had its own tugboat. He parallel parked it in one try.
If Goodwin is an artist, though, his canvas has been the Hummer. His first impression of the thing was inauspicious. In 1990, he bought an H1 in Denver and began driving it back to Kansas. Within 50 miles, the bolts in the transmission shook loose, forcing him to stop to fix it. "By the time I made it home, after three roadside repairs, I pretty much knew that the Hummer was not all it should be," he told me. He didn't think much of the 200 horsepower engine, either, which did "zero to 60 in two days. It was a piece of junk."
So Goodwin decided to prove that environmentalism and power could go together--by making his new lemon into exhibit A. First, he pulled the gas engine so he could drop in a Duramax V8, GM's core diesel for large trucks. Diesel technology is crucial to all of Goodwin's innovations because it offers several advantages over traditional gasoline engines. Pound for pound, diesel offers more power and torque; it's also inherently more efficient, offering up to 40% better mileage and 20% lower emissions in engines of comparable size. What's more, many diesel engines can easily accept a wide range of biodiesel--from the high-quality stuff produced at refineries to the melted chicken grease siphoned off from the local KFC.
"Think about it," Goodwin laughs. "A 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and will do zero to 60 in five seconds!"
Putting a diesel engine in the Hummer, however, required Goodwin to crack GM's antitheft system, which makes it a pain to swap out the engine. In that system, the engine communicates electronically with the body, fuel supply, and ignition; if you don't have all the original components, the car won't start. Goodwin jerry-rigged a set of cables to trick the engine into believing the starter system had broken, sending it into "fail-safe mode"--a backdoor mechanism installed at the factory. (At one point in his story, Goodwin wanders over to a battered cardboard box in the corner of the garage and hauls out an octopuslike tangle of wires--"the MacGyver," his hacking device. "I could have sold this for a lot of money on eBay," he chuckles.)
Once he'd picked the car's lock, Goodwin installed the Duramax and a five-speed Allison--the required transmission for a Duramax, which also helps give it race-car-like control and a rapid take off. After five days' worth of work, the Hummer was getting about 18 mpg--double the factory 9 mpg--and twice the original horsepower. He drove it over to a local restaurant and mooched some discarded oil from its deep fryer, strained the oil through a pair of jeans, and poured it into the engine. It ran perfectly.
But Goodwin wanted more. While researching alternative fuels, he learned about the work of Uli Kruger, a German who has spent decades in Australia exploring techniques for blending fuels that normally don't mix. One of Kruger's systems induces hydrogen into the air intake of a diesel engine, producing a cascade of emissions-reducing and mileage-boosting effects. The hydrogen, ignited by the diesel combustion, burns extremely clean, producing only water as a by-product. It also displaces up to 50% of the diesel needed to fuel the car, effectively doubling the diesel's mileage and cutting emissions by at least half. Better yet, the water produced from the hydrogen combustion cools down the engine, so the diesel combustion generates fewer particulates--and thus fewer nitrogen-oxide emissions.
"You can feed it hydrogen, diesel, biodiesel, corn oil--pretty much anything but water."
"It's really a fantastic chain reaction, all these good things happening at once," Kruger tells me. He has also successfully introduced natural gas--a ubiquitous and generally cheap fuel--into a diesel-burning engine, which likewise doubles the mileage while slashing emissions. In another system, he uses heat from the diesel engine to vaporize ethanol to the point where it can be injected into the diesel combustion chambers as a booster, with similar emissions-cutting effects.
Goodwin began building on Kruger's model. In 2005, he set to work adapting his own H1 Hummer to burn a combination of hydrogen and biodiesel. He installed a Duramax in the Hummer and plopped a carbon-fiber tank of supercompressed hydrogen into the bed. The results were impressive: A single tank of hydrogen lasted for 700 miles and cut the diesel consumption in half. It also doubled the horsepower. "It reduces your carbon footprint by a huge, huge amount, but you still get all the power of the Duramax," he says, slapping the H1 on the quarter panel. "And you can feed it hydrogen, diesel, biodiesel, corn oil--pretty much anything but water."
Two years ago, Goodwin got a rare chance to show off his tricks to some of the car industry's most prominent engineers. He tells me the story: He was driving a converted H2 to the SEMA show, the nation's biggest annual specialty automotive confab, and stopped en route at a Denver hotel. When he woke up in the morning, there were 20 people standing around his Hummer. Did I run over somebody? he wondered. As it turned out, they were engineers for GM, the Hummer's manufacturer. They noticed that Goodwin's H2 looked modified. "Does it have a diesel engine in it?"
"Yeah," he said.
"No way," they replied.
He opened the hood, "and they're just all in and out and around the valves and checking it out," he says. They asked to hear it run, sending a stab of fear through Goodwin. He'd filled it up with grease from a Chinese restaurant the day before and was worried that the cold morning might have solidified the fuel. But it started up on the first try and ran so quietly that at first they didn't believe it was really on. "When you start a diesel engine up on vegetable oil," Goodwin says, "you turn the key, and you hear nothing. Because of the lubricating power of the oil, it's just so smooth. Whisper quiet. And they're like, 'Is it running? Yeah, you can hear the fan going.'"
One engineer turned and said, "GM said this wouldn't work."
"Well," Goodwin replied, "here it is."
Goodwin's feats of engineering have become gradually more visible over the past year. Last summer, Imperium Renewables contacted MTV's show Pimp My Ride about creating an Earth Day special in which Goodwin would convert a muscle car to run on biodiesel. The show chose a '65 Chevy Impala, and when the conversion was done, he'd doubled its mileage to 25 mpg and increased its pull from 250 to 800 horsepower. As a stunt, MTV drag-raced the Impala against a Lamborghini on California's Pomona Raceway. "The Impala blew the Lamborghini away," says Kevin Kluemper, the lead calibration engineer for GM's Allison transmission unit, who'd flown down to help with the conversion. Schwarzenegger, who was on the set that day, asked Goodwin on the spot to convert his Wagoneer to biodiesel.
Observers of Goodwin's work say his skill lies in an uncanny ability to visualize a mechanical system in precise detail, long before he picks up a wrench. (Goodwin says he does much of his mental work during long drives.) "He has talent unknown to any mortal," says Mad Mike, Pimp My Ride's host. "He has this ability to see things so exactly, and I still don't know how he does it."
For his part, Goodwin argues he's merely "a problem solver. Most people try to make things more complicated than they are." He speaks of the major carmakers with a sort of mild disdain: If he can piece together cleaner vehicles out of existing GM parts and a bit of hot-rod elbow grease, why can't they bake that kind of ingenuity into their production lines? Prod him enough on the subject and his mellowness peels away, revealing a guy fired by an almost manic frustration. "Everybody should be driving a plug-in vehicle right now," he complains, in one of his laconic engineering lectures, as we wander through the blistering Kansas heat to a nearby Mexican restaurant. "I can go next door to Ace Hardware and buy a DC electric motor, go out to my four-wheel-drive truck, remove the transmission and engine, bolt the electric motor onto the back of the transfer case, put a series of lead-acid batteries up to 240 volts in the back of the bed, and we're good to go. I guarantee you I could drive all around town and do whatever I need, go home at night, and hook up a couple of battery chargers, plug one into an outlet, and be good to go the next day.
"Detroit could do all this stuff overnight if it wanted to," he adds.
In reality, Goodwin's work has begun to influence some of Detroit's top auto designers, but through curious and circuitous routes. In 2005, Tom Holm, the founder of EcoTrek, a nonprofit that promotes the use of alternative fuels, heard about Goodwin through the Hummer-junkie grapevine and hired him. When Holm showed GM the vehicles Goodwin converted, the company was duly impressed. Internally, Hummer executives had long been looking for a way to blunt criticism of the H2's gas-guzzling tendencies and saw Goodwin's vehicles as an object lesson in what was possible. So GM decided to flip the switch: It announced the same year that, beginning in 2008, it would convert its gasoline Hummers to run on ethanol; by 2010, it said, Hummers would be biodiesel-compatible.
"It was an influence," concedes Hummer general manager Martin Walsh, of the EcoTrek vehicles. "We wanted to be environmentally responsible by having engines in Hummers that run on renewable fuels." But until I contacted Hummer for this story, GM didn't know that the man behind those machines was none other than Goodwin.
GM's commitment is a start, however halting. Overall, though, Detroit still seems to be all but paralyzed by the challenges of fuel economy, emissions, and alternative fuels. And it's not just about greed or laziness: Talk to car-industry experts, and they'll point out a number of serious barriers to introducing radically new alternative-fuel vehicles on a scale that will make a difference. One of the highest is that low-emission fuels--biodiesel, ethanol, electricity, hydrogen, all of which account for less than 3% of the nation's fuel supply--just aren't widely available on American highways. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem. People won't buy alternative-fuel cars until it's easy to fill them up, but alternative fuel makers won't ramp up production until there's a viable market.
Goodwin admits all these things are true but believes the country could be weaned off gasoline in a three-step process. The first would be for Detroit to aggressively roll out diesel engines, much as Europe has already begun to do (some 50% of all European cars run diesel). In a single stroke, that would improve the nation's mileage by as much as 40%, and, because diesel fuel is already widely available, drivers could take that step with a minimum of disruption. What's more, given that many diesel engines can also run homegrown biodiesel, a mass conversion to diesel would help kick-start that market. (This could have geopolitical implications as well as environmental and economic ones: The Department of Transportation estimated in 2004 that if we converted merely one-third of America's passenger cars and light trucks to diesel, we'd reduce our oil consumption by up to 1.4 million barrels of oil per day--precisely the amount we import from Saudi Arabia.)
The second step in Goodwin's scheme would be to produce diesel-electric hybrid cars. This would double the mileage on even the biggest diesel vehicles. The third phase would be to produce electric hybrids that run in "dual fuel" mode, burning biodiesel along with hydrogen, ethanol, natural gas, or propane. This is the concept Goodwin is proving out in his turbine-enhanced H3 Hummer and in Neil Young's Lincoln: "At that point, your mileage just goes really, really high, and your emissions are incredibly low," he says. Since those vehicles can run on regular diesel or biodiesel--and without any alternative fuel at all, if need be--drivers wouldn't have to worry about getting stranded on the interstate. At the same time, as more and more dual-fuel cars hit the road, they would goose demand for genuinely national ethanol, hydrogen, and biodiesel grids.
For Goodwin, navigating this process is all about imagination and adaptability. "The point is to design cars that are flexible," he says. "You'll see a change in how vehicles are fueled in the future. Which fuel source will be the exclusive one or the one that'll take over the petroleum base is, you know, anybody's guess, so it's like the wild, wild West of fuel technology right now. I think it'll be a combination between a few different fuels. I know hydrogen will definitely come around."
Imagination and vision, of course, are often rewarded. As global pressure increases on the United States to reduce our carbon emissions, those rewards are likely to get juicier. Under some versions of legislation being considered in Congress, for example, companies voluntarily deploying superefficient vehicles in large fleets could be awarded substantial offsets. Take DHL, the FedEx rival: Goodwin says his company, SAE Energy, is negotiating with the shipper to convert 800 of its vehicles to dual fuel. "We could get them an offset of something like 70 cents a gallon," Goodwin says, "and reduce their cost of fuel by 50%."
Industry insiders and observers agree with many of Goodwin's prescriptions, particularly his concept of fuel flexibility. "We have to have alternatives," says Beau Boeckmann, vice president of California's Galpin Motors, the largest Ford dealership in the country, who recently partnered with Goodwin to convert a 2008 F450 truck to hydrogen and biodiesel. "Only with a combination of things can we get alternative fuels off the ground." Boeckmann believes hydrogen is the true "silver bullet" for ending greenhouse gases but thinks it'll take more than a decade to figure out how to create and distribute it cheaply. Mary Beth Stanek, GM's director of environment, energy, and safety policy, also agrees with the multifuel approach--and points out that this is precisely how Brazil weaned itself from regular gasoline. "They pull up to the pump, and they've got a whole bunch of different choices," she notes. She, too, predicts diesel will make a comeback because of its inherent fuel efficiency: "You will see more vehicles going back to diesel over a lot of different lines."
Yet in reality, American carmakers seem conspicuously slow on the uptake. Stanek is about as ardent a fan of alternative fuels as you're likely to find inside GM, but even she admits no one there is seriously thinking of abandoning the gasoline engine anytime soon. The 300-million-gallon U.S. biodiesel business is a fraction of the 12-billion-gallon ethanol one. And Detroit is extremely cautious about what the market can bear.
A Detroit carmaker does, of course, have to worry about selling millions of cars at reasonable prices. But we've been hearing this refrain for a long, long time. And with European and Japanese carmakers driving ever harder into our market--and with Chrysler having become just another meal for Cerberus Capital--this hardly seems like the time to be overly cautious. (Those ultralow-emission Mercedes BlueTec diesels, for example, include a four-wheel-drive sedan that gets 37 mpg and goes from zero to 60 in 6.6 seconds.) Moreover, after decades of consumer apathy, improving fuel economy and reducing carbon output are becoming urgent national priorities. The green groundswell has arrived, and, given the stakes, anyone who ignores it does so at his peril. If Detroit can't sell diesel now--especially a clean, high-performance, money-saving diesel--it never will.
With U.S. carmakers being stripped for parts, now is hardly the time for them to play it safe.
Goodwin, perhaps, can afford to be a visionary. He has the luxury of converting cars for fancy clients who'll pay handsomely to drive on higher moral ground. (He charges $28,000 for a "basic H2 conversion to diesel--custom concept cars cost far more.") The future of the American car will likely be won by an automaker that can split the difference--one that may innovate more slowly than Goodwin would like, but a hell of a lot faster than the Big Three.
Goodwin himself seems more oracle than implementer, slightly unsure of how his ideas could be brought to the masses. He's working on patenting aspects of his and Kruger's dual-fuel work and would love to license it to the big carmakers. But the truth is, he's a mechanic's mechanic--happiest when he's solving some technical puzzle. He loves getting his hands dirty, "throwing wrenches around" in his shop, pioneering some weird new way to fuel a car. Today, he's thinking about taking his wife's Infiniti, outfitting it with a tank of ether, and powering the engine via blasts of compressed air in the cylinders. "Zero emissions!" he crows. It's the visionary inventor's curse: constantly distracted by shiny objects.
Goodwin eyes the turbine, which he has dragged out to the center of the floor. Just for kicks, he says, he's thinking of mounting it on a wheelie board and firing it up. "I'd love to see how fast that goes," he says. "I'm just not sure how I'm going to steer it."
Feedback: thompson@fastcompany.com
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Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Friday, October 26, 2007
Sob pressão, governo deve legalizar plantio do pinhão-manso
QUINTA, 25 OUTUBRO 2007 . VALOR ECONÔMICO
A explosão do plantio de soja transgênica no fim dos anos 90 forçou o governo legalizar o seu plantio. Agora o mesmo acontece com o pinhão-manso. Pressionado por produtores e usineiros, o governo vai alterar a legislação para que a produção comercial de sementes e mudas seja legalizada.
A Lei no 10.711/03 estabelece que somente variedades de plantas inscritas no Registro Nacional de Cultivares podem ser produzidas em escala comercial. No caso da soja, por exemplo, há mais de 400 variedades inscritas. Como o pinhão-manso não era utilizado para produção comercial, ainda não tinha o registro e, por isso, há cerca de 45 dias, uma carga de 10 toneladas foi apreendida no Mato Grosso. “Isso motivou os produtores a pedirem uma solução ao governo, que afinal é o que mais defende o plantio do pinhão-manso para biodiesel”, afirma Mike Lu, presidente da recém-criada Associação Brasileira dos Produtores de Pinhão-Manso (ABPPM).
Sob pressão política, o Ministério da Agricultura aceitou inscrever a planta no Registro Nacional de Cultivares, mesmo sem estudos sobre a origem genética da cultura. No entanto, o pinhão foi inscrito como espécie, e não como variedade ou cultivar. A produção ficará condicionada à assinatura de um termo de compromisso entre produtores e processadores e depende do crivo da Consultoria Jurídica do Ministério da Agricultura.
“O problema é que não existem estudos sobre o pinhão-manso no Brasil. Hoje não sabemos sequer quais são as variedades disponíveis”, afirma Marcos Drummond, pesquisador da Embrapa Semi Árido. Segundo ele, estudos internacionais afirmam que a planta pode produzir 8 mil quilos por hectare, mas estudos feitos pela Embrapa apontam uma produtividade média de 1,1 mil quilos por hectare com irrigação. “Houve muita pressão pelo governo para que a Embrapa desse aval ao plantio, mas o que podemos dizer até agora é que a planta tem potencial, mas ainda falta saber qual a melhor variedade e a melhor maneira de cultivá-lo”, diz Drummond.
Álvaro Nunes Viana, diretor de Fiscalização de Insumos Agrícolas do ministério, pondera que o artigo 47 da Lei de Sementes permite a inscrição como espécie. “Há limitações ao plantio. Não tem um sistema, a maturação não é uniforme e há risco de disseminação de pragas e doenças. Não podemos ficar omissos, em nome do interesse público, e também não podemos endossar totalmente”.
O acordo político patrocinado pelo ministro da Agricultura, Reinhold Stephanes, prevê um plano de monitoramento para garantir critérios de cultivo. “A Embrapa e a Epamig vão aproveitar para obter dados para o sistema de cultivo”, diz Viana. “Temos que alertar para os riscos de um fracasso”, afirma.
De acordo com a ABPPM, enquanto o quilo de soja (que rende 200 ml de óleo) é vendida a R$ 0,67 em média, o quilo da semente de pinhão-manso custa R$ 0,30 e gera em torno de 400 ml de óleo bruto. Conforme dados da Embrapa, a área plantada com pinhão-manso no país saltou de 500 hectares em 2006 para 20 mil neste ano. E a previsão é aumentar para 50 mil hectares no próximo ano, o que exigiria uma produção adicional de 300 toneladas de sementes.
Cibelle Bouças e Mauro Zanatta
A explosão do plantio de soja transgênica no fim dos anos 90 forçou o governo legalizar o seu plantio. Agora o mesmo acontece com o pinhão-manso. Pressionado por produtores e usineiros, o governo vai alterar a legislação para que a produção comercial de sementes e mudas seja legalizada.
A Lei no 10.711/03 estabelece que somente variedades de plantas inscritas no Registro Nacional de Cultivares podem ser produzidas em escala comercial. No caso da soja, por exemplo, há mais de 400 variedades inscritas. Como o pinhão-manso não era utilizado para produção comercial, ainda não tinha o registro e, por isso, há cerca de 45 dias, uma carga de 10 toneladas foi apreendida no Mato Grosso. “Isso motivou os produtores a pedirem uma solução ao governo, que afinal é o que mais defende o plantio do pinhão-manso para biodiesel”, afirma Mike Lu, presidente da recém-criada Associação Brasileira dos Produtores de Pinhão-Manso (ABPPM).
Sob pressão política, o Ministério da Agricultura aceitou inscrever a planta no Registro Nacional de Cultivares, mesmo sem estudos sobre a origem genética da cultura. No entanto, o pinhão foi inscrito como espécie, e não como variedade ou cultivar. A produção ficará condicionada à assinatura de um termo de compromisso entre produtores e processadores e depende do crivo da Consultoria Jurídica do Ministério da Agricultura.
“O problema é que não existem estudos sobre o pinhão-manso no Brasil. Hoje não sabemos sequer quais são as variedades disponíveis”, afirma Marcos Drummond, pesquisador da Embrapa Semi Árido. Segundo ele, estudos internacionais afirmam que a planta pode produzir 8 mil quilos por hectare, mas estudos feitos pela Embrapa apontam uma produtividade média de 1,1 mil quilos por hectare com irrigação. “Houve muita pressão pelo governo para que a Embrapa desse aval ao plantio, mas o que podemos dizer até agora é que a planta tem potencial, mas ainda falta saber qual a melhor variedade e a melhor maneira de cultivá-lo”, diz Drummond.
Álvaro Nunes Viana, diretor de Fiscalização de Insumos Agrícolas do ministério, pondera que o artigo 47 da Lei de Sementes permite a inscrição como espécie. “Há limitações ao plantio. Não tem um sistema, a maturação não é uniforme e há risco de disseminação de pragas e doenças. Não podemos ficar omissos, em nome do interesse público, e também não podemos endossar totalmente”.
O acordo político patrocinado pelo ministro da Agricultura, Reinhold Stephanes, prevê um plano de monitoramento para garantir critérios de cultivo. “A Embrapa e a Epamig vão aproveitar para obter dados para o sistema de cultivo”, diz Viana. “Temos que alertar para os riscos de um fracasso”, afirma.
De acordo com a ABPPM, enquanto o quilo de soja (que rende 200 ml de óleo) é vendida a R$ 0,67 em média, o quilo da semente de pinhão-manso custa R$ 0,30 e gera em torno de 400 ml de óleo bruto. Conforme dados da Embrapa, a área plantada com pinhão-manso no país saltou de 500 hectares em 2006 para 20 mil neste ano. E a previsão é aumentar para 50 mil hectares no próximo ano, o que exigiria uma produção adicional de 300 toneladas de sementes.
Cibelle Bouças e Mauro Zanatta
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Poison plant could help to cure the planet
The jatropha bush seems an unlikely prize in the hunt for alternative energy, being an ugly, fast-growing and poisonous weed. Hitherto, its use to humanity has principally been as a remedy for constipation. Very soon, however, it may be powering your car.
Almost overnight, the unloved Jatropha curcushas become an agricultural and economic celebrity, with the discovery that it may be the ideal biofuel crop, an alternative to fossil fuels for a world dangerously dependent on oil supplies and deeply alarmed by the effects of global warming.
The hardy jatropha, resilient to pests and resistant to drought, produces seeds with up to 40 per cent oil content. When the seeds are crushed, the resulting jatropha oil can be burnt in a standard diesel car, while the residue can also be processed into biomass to power electricity plants.
As the search for alternative energy sources gathers pace and urgency, the jatropha has provoked something like a gold rush. Last week BP announced that it was investing almost £32 million in a jatropha joint venture with the British biofuels company D1 Oils.
Even Bob Geldof has stamped his cachet on jatropha, by becoming a special adviser to Helius Energy, a British company developing the use of jatropha as an alternative to fossil fuels. Lex Worrall, its chief executive, says: "Every hectare can produce 2.7 tonnes of oil and about 4 tonnes of biomass. Every 8,000 hectares of the plant can run a 1.5 megawatt station, enough to power 2,500 homes."
Jatropha grows in tropical and subtropical climates. Whereas other feed-stocks for biofuel, such as palm oil, rape seed oil or corn for ethanol, require reasonable soils on which other crops might be grown, jatropha is a tough survivor prepared to put down roots almost anywhere.
Scientists say that it can grow in the poorest wasteland, generating topsoil and helping to stall erosion, but also absorbing carbon dioxide as it grows, thus making it carbon-neutral even when burnt. A jatropha bush can live for up to 50 years, producing oil in its second year of growth, and survive up to three years of consecutive drought.
In India about 11 million hectares have been identified as potential land on which to grow jatropha. The first jatropha-fuelled power station is expected to begin supplying electricity in Swaziland in three years. Meanwhile, companies from Europe and India have begun buying up land in Africa as potential jatropha plantations.
Jatropha plantations have been laid out on either side of the railway between Bombay and Delhi, and the train is said to run on more than 15 per cent biofuel. Backers say that the plant can produce four times more fuel per hectare than soya, and ten times more than corn. "Those who are working with jatropha," Sanju Khan, a site manager for D1 Oils, told the BBC, "are working with the new generation crop, developing a crop from a wild plant — which is hugely exciting."
Jatropha, a native of Central America, was brought to Europe by Portuguese explorers in the 16th century and has since spread worldwide, even though, until recently, it had few uses: malaria treatment, a windbreak for animals, live fencing and candle-mak-ing. An ingredient in folk remedies around the world, it earned the nickname "physic nut", but its sap is a skin irritant, and ingesting three untreated seeds can kill a person.
Jatropha has also found a strong supporter in Sir Nicholas Stern, the government economist who emphasised the dangers of global warming in a report this year. He recently advised South Africa to "look for biofuel technologies that can be grown on marginal land, perhaps jatropha".
However, some fear that in areas dependent on subsistence farming it could force out food crops, increasing the risk of famine.
Some countries are also cautious for other reasons: last year Western Australia banned the plant as invasive and highly toxic to people and animals.
Yet a combination of economic, climatic and political factors have made the search for a more effective biofuel a priority among energy companies. New regulations in Britain require that biofuels comprise 5 per cent of the transport fuel mix by 2010, and the EU has mandated that by 2020 all cars must run on 20 per cent biodiesel. Biodiesel reduces carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 80 per cent compared with petroleum diesel, according to the US Energy Department.
Under the deal between BP and D1, £80 million will be invested in jatropha over the next five years, with plantations in India, southern Africa and SouthEast Asia. There are no exact figures for the amount of land already under jatropha cultivation, but the area is expanding fast. China is planning an 80,000-acre plantation in Sichuan, and the BPD1 team hopes to have a million hectares under cultivation over the next four years.
Jatropha has long been prized for its medicinal qualities. Now it might just help to cure the planet.
- D1 Oils, the UK company leading the jatropha revolution, is growing 430,000 acres of the plant to feed its biodiesel operation on Teesside — 44,000 acres more than three months ago, after a huge planting programme in India. It has also planted two 1,235-acre trial sites this year in West Java, Indonesia. If successful, these will become a 25,000-acre plantation. Elloitt Mannis, the chief executive, says that the aim is to develop energy "from the earth to the engine".
Jatropha: costs and benefits
- Jatropha needs at least 600mm (23in) of rain a year to thrive. However, it can survive three consecutive years of drought by dropping its leaves
- It is excellent at preventing soil erosion, and the leaves that it drops act as soil-enriching mulch
- The plant prefers alkaline soils
- The cost of 1,000 jatropha saplings (enough for one acre) in Pakistan is about £50, or 5p each
- The cost of 1kg of jatropha seeds in India is the equivalent of about 7p. Each jatropha seedling should be given an area two metres square.
- 20 per cent of seedlings planted will not survive
- Jatropha seedlings yield seeds in the first year after plantation
Almost overnight, the unloved Jatropha curcushas become an agricultural and economic celebrity, with the discovery that it may be the ideal biofuel crop, an alternative to fossil fuels for a world dangerously dependent on oil supplies and deeply alarmed by the effects of global warming.
The hardy jatropha, resilient to pests and resistant to drought, produces seeds with up to 40 per cent oil content. When the seeds are crushed, the resulting jatropha oil can be burnt in a standard diesel car, while the residue can also be processed into biomass to power electricity plants.
As the search for alternative energy sources gathers pace and urgency, the jatropha has provoked something like a gold rush. Last week BP announced that it was investing almost £32 million in a jatropha joint venture with the British biofuels company D1 Oils.
Even Bob Geldof has stamped his cachet on jatropha, by becoming a special adviser to Helius Energy, a British company developing the use of jatropha as an alternative to fossil fuels. Lex Worrall, its chief executive, says: "Every hectare can produce 2.7 tonnes of oil and about 4 tonnes of biomass. Every 8,000 hectares of the plant can run a 1.5 megawatt station, enough to power 2,500 homes."
Jatropha grows in tropical and subtropical climates. Whereas other feed-stocks for biofuel, such as palm oil, rape seed oil or corn for ethanol, require reasonable soils on which other crops might be grown, jatropha is a tough survivor prepared to put down roots almost anywhere.
Scientists say that it can grow in the poorest wasteland, generating topsoil and helping to stall erosion, but also absorbing carbon dioxide as it grows, thus making it carbon-neutral even when burnt. A jatropha bush can live for up to 50 years, producing oil in its second year of growth, and survive up to three years of consecutive drought.
In India about 11 million hectares have been identified as potential land on which to grow jatropha. The first jatropha-fuelled power station is expected to begin supplying electricity in Swaziland in three years. Meanwhile, companies from Europe and India have begun buying up land in Africa as potential jatropha plantations.
Jatropha plantations have been laid out on either side of the railway between Bombay and Delhi, and the train is said to run on more than 15 per cent biofuel. Backers say that the plant can produce four times more fuel per hectare than soya, and ten times more than corn. "Those who are working with jatropha," Sanju Khan, a site manager for D1 Oils, told the BBC, "are working with the new generation crop, developing a crop from a wild plant — which is hugely exciting."
Jatropha, a native of Central America, was brought to Europe by Portuguese explorers in the 16th century and has since spread worldwide, even though, until recently, it had few uses: malaria treatment, a windbreak for animals, live fencing and candle-mak-ing. An ingredient in folk remedies around the world, it earned the nickname "physic nut", but its sap is a skin irritant, and ingesting three untreated seeds can kill a person.
Jatropha has also found a strong supporter in Sir Nicholas Stern, the government economist who emphasised the dangers of global warming in a report this year. He recently advised South Africa to "look for biofuel technologies that can be grown on marginal land, perhaps jatropha".
However, some fear that in areas dependent on subsistence farming it could force out food crops, increasing the risk of famine.
Some countries are also cautious for other reasons: last year Western Australia banned the plant as invasive and highly toxic to people and animals.
Yet a combination of economic, climatic and political factors have made the search for a more effective biofuel a priority among energy companies. New regulations in Britain require that biofuels comprise 5 per cent of the transport fuel mix by 2010, and the EU has mandated that by 2020 all cars must run on 20 per cent biodiesel. Biodiesel reduces carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 80 per cent compared with petroleum diesel, according to the US Energy Department.
Under the deal between BP and D1, £80 million will be invested in jatropha over the next five years, with plantations in India, southern Africa and SouthEast Asia. There are no exact figures for the amount of land already under jatropha cultivation, but the area is expanding fast. China is planning an 80,000-acre plantation in Sichuan, and the BPD1 team hopes to have a million hectares under cultivation over the next four years.
Jatropha has long been prized for its medicinal qualities. Now it might just help to cure the planet.
- D1 Oils, the UK company leading the jatropha revolution, is growing 430,000 acres of the plant to feed its biodiesel operation on Teesside — 44,000 acres more than three months ago, after a huge planting programme in India. It has also planted two 1,235-acre trial sites this year in West Java, Indonesia. If successful, these will become a 25,000-acre plantation. Elloitt Mannis, the chief executive, says that the aim is to develop energy "from the earth to the engine".
Jatropha: costs and benefits
- Jatropha needs at least 600mm (23in) of rain a year to thrive. However, it can survive three consecutive years of drought by dropping its leaves
- It is excellent at preventing soil erosion, and the leaves that it drops act as soil-enriching mulch
- The plant prefers alkaline soils
- The cost of 1,000 jatropha saplings (enough for one acre) in Pakistan is about £50, or 5p each
- The cost of 1kg of jatropha seeds in India is the equivalent of about 7p. Each jatropha seedling should be given an area two metres square.
- 20 per cent of seedlings planted will not survive
- Jatropha seedlings yield seeds in the first year after plantation
Friday, October 19, 2007
Pinhão-manso pode ser liberado nos próximos dias
QUINTA, 18 OUTUBRO 200
O Ministério da Agricultura, Pecuária e Abastecimento (MAPA) apresentou uma possível solução para liberar o plantio e venda de sementes de pinhão-manso (Jatropha curcas L.). Em reunião realizada ontem (17) com pesquisadores da Embrapa, representantes da indústria de biodiesel e plantadores, o ministério sinalizou a possibilidade de inscrever a espécie no Registro Nacional de Cultivares (RNC).
O registro, que seria apenas como espécie e não como cultivar, ainda precisa ser validado pela área jurídica do ministério, mas a expectativa dos presentes no encontro é que haja um desfecho favorável nos próximos dias.
Se aprovada, a solução contornaria o problema que veio à tona há um mês e meio, quando a BiodieselBR.com noticiou que sem registro no RNC o cultivo do pinhão-manso fica proibido.
A notícia da proibição pegou de surpresa produtores e usineiros que já vinham investindo no plantio da oleaginosa.
“Resolvemos o problema no curto prazo. [A decisão] coloca todo mundo na legalidade”, frisa Mike Lu, presidente da Associação Brasileira de Plantadores de Pinhão-Manso (ABPPM).
A surpresa dos senadores veio quando mostrei que a lei proíbe o plantio de pinhão-manso no Brasil
Segundo Lu, o registro como espécie não dá aos produtores o direito de receber financiamentos, o que só ocorrerá quando o MAPA fizer o registro da cultivar. Um pedido de registro feito pela Empresa de Pesquisa Agropecuária de Minas Gerais (Epamig) está sob análise no ministério.
Além disso, segundo a proposta de liberação, a venda de sementes só seria autorizada se produtor e comprador assinarem um termo de compromisso a ser elaborado pelo MAPA. A medida serviria para deixar as partes cientes de que, para o ministério, faltam ainda informações importantes sobre o cultivo da planta.
O argumento da falta de informações irrita os usineiros, que acreditam no potencial do pinhão-manso para produzir biodiesel. “Esse é um problema do governo, que interrompeu várias vezes as pesquisas com a planta”, ataca Francisco Barreto, presidente da Bionasa, com sede em Porangatu (GO). “A maior parte das usinas já fomenta o plantio. O governo deveria ser mais rápido [na liberação] para dar confiabilidade a esse investimento”, afirma.
Para Barreto, o pinhão-manso “é prioridade absoluta.” Segundo ele, a Bionasa fez acordos de pesquisas sobre a oleaginosa com a Embrapa e universidades. A empresa fechará 2007 com 3.700 hectares plantados com pinhão-manso e pretende começar a usar a planta para produzir biodiesel a partir de 2011. A meta da empresa, que espera produzir 200 milhões de litros até julho de 2008, é chegar a 400 milhões até 2010.
O Ministério da Agricultura, Pecuária e Abastecimento (MAPA) apresentou uma possível solução para liberar o plantio e venda de sementes de pinhão-manso (Jatropha curcas L.). Em reunião realizada ontem (17) com pesquisadores da Embrapa, representantes da indústria de biodiesel e plantadores, o ministério sinalizou a possibilidade de inscrever a espécie no Registro Nacional de Cultivares (RNC).
O registro, que seria apenas como espécie e não como cultivar, ainda precisa ser validado pela área jurídica do ministério, mas a expectativa dos presentes no encontro é que haja um desfecho favorável nos próximos dias.
Se aprovada, a solução contornaria o problema que veio à tona há um mês e meio, quando a BiodieselBR.com noticiou que sem registro no RNC o cultivo do pinhão-manso fica proibido.
A notícia da proibição pegou de surpresa produtores e usineiros que já vinham investindo no plantio da oleaginosa.
“Resolvemos o problema no curto prazo. [A decisão] coloca todo mundo na legalidade”, frisa Mike Lu, presidente da Associação Brasileira de Plantadores de Pinhão-Manso (ABPPM).
A surpresa dos senadores veio quando mostrei que a lei proíbe o plantio de pinhão-manso no Brasil
Segundo Lu, o registro como espécie não dá aos produtores o direito de receber financiamentos, o que só ocorrerá quando o MAPA fizer o registro da cultivar. Um pedido de registro feito pela Empresa de Pesquisa Agropecuária de Minas Gerais (Epamig) está sob análise no ministério.
Além disso, segundo a proposta de liberação, a venda de sementes só seria autorizada se produtor e comprador assinarem um termo de compromisso a ser elaborado pelo MAPA. A medida serviria para deixar as partes cientes de que, para o ministério, faltam ainda informações importantes sobre o cultivo da planta.
O argumento da falta de informações irrita os usineiros, que acreditam no potencial do pinhão-manso para produzir biodiesel. “Esse é um problema do governo, que interrompeu várias vezes as pesquisas com a planta”, ataca Francisco Barreto, presidente da Bionasa, com sede em Porangatu (GO). “A maior parte das usinas já fomenta o plantio. O governo deveria ser mais rápido [na liberação] para dar confiabilidade a esse investimento”, afirma.
Para Barreto, o pinhão-manso “é prioridade absoluta.” Segundo ele, a Bionasa fez acordos de pesquisas sobre a oleaginosa com a Embrapa e universidades. A empresa fechará 2007 com 3.700 hectares plantados com pinhão-manso e pretende começar a usar a planta para produzir biodiesel a partir de 2011. A meta da empresa, que espera produzir 200 milhões de litros até julho de 2008, é chegar a 400 milhões até 2010.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Global Warming Weakens Trade Winds
The trade winds in the Pacific Ocean are weakening as a result of global warming, according to a new study that indicates changes to the region's biology are possible.
Using a combination of real-world observations and computer modeling, researchers conclude that a vast loop of circulating wind over the Pacific Ocean, known as the Walker circulation, has weakened by about 3.5 percent since the mid-1800s. The trade winds are the portion of the Walker circulation that blow across the ocean surface.
The researchers predict another 10 percent decrease by the end of the 21st century.
The effect, attributed at least in part to human-induced climate change, could disrupt food chains and reduce the biological productivity of the Pacific Ocean, scientists said.
The study was led by Gabriel Vecchi of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and is detailed in the May 4 issue of the journal Nature.
Humans to blame
The researchers used records of sea-level atmospheric pressure readings from as far back as the mid-1800s to reconstruct the wind intensity of the Walker circulation over the past 150 years. A computer climate model replicated the effect seen in the historical record.
Some of the computer simulations included the effects of human greenhouse gas emissions; others included only natural factors known to affect climate such as volcanic eruptions and solar variations.
"We were able to ask 'What if humans hadn't done anything? Or what if volcanoes erupted? Or if the sun hadn't varied?'" Vecchi said. "Our only way to account for the observed changes is through the impact of human activity, and principally from greenhouse gases from fossil fuel burning."
Earth's average temperature has risen by about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past century and many scientists believe greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide emissions from human activities are to blame.
"This is evidence supporting global warming and also evidence of our ability to make reasonable predictions of at least the large scale changes that we should expect from global warming," Vecchi told LiveScience.
By extrapolating their data and combining it with results from other models, the researchers predict the Walker circulation could slow by an additional 10 percent by 2100.
Driving force
The trade winds blow from the east at an angle towards the equator and have been used by sailors for centuries seeking to sail west. Christopher Columbus relied on the Atlantic's trade winds to carry him to North America. The winds get their name from their reliability: To say that a "wind blows trade" is to say that it blows on track.
The overall Walker circulation is powered by warm, rising air in the west Pacific Ocean and sinking cool air in the eastern Pacific.
This looping conveyer belt of winds has far-reaching effects on climate around the globe. It steers ocean currents and nourishes marine life across the equatorial Pacific and off the coast of South America by driving the upwelling of nutrient-rich cold water from ocean depths to the surface.
The Walker circulation is also primarily responsible for transporting water vapor that evaporates from the ocean surface west, towards Indonesia; there, the moisture rises up into the atmosphere, condenses, and falls back to Earth as rain.
The effects of global warming
Several theories on the effects of global warming predict a weakening of the Walker circulation. Scientists think it works like this:
To remain energetically balanced, the rate at which the atmosphere absorbs water vapor must be balanced by the rate of rainfall. But as temperatures rise and more water evaporates from the ocean, water vapor in the lower atmosphere increases rapidly. Because of various physical processes, however, the rate of rainfall does not increase as fast.
Since the atmosphere is absorbing moisture faster than it can dump it, and because wind is the major transporter of moisture into the atmosphere, air circulation must slow down if the energy balance is to be maintained.
A drop in winds could reduce the strength of both surface and subsurface ocean currents and dampen cold water upwelling at the equator.
"This could have important effects on ocean ecosystems," Vecchi said. "The ocean currents driven by the trade winds supply vital nutrients to near-surface ocean ecosystems across the equatorial Pacific, which is a major fishing region."
By Ker Than, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 03 May 2006 01:00 pm ET
Using a combination of real-world observations and computer modeling, researchers conclude that a vast loop of circulating wind over the Pacific Ocean, known as the Walker circulation, has weakened by about 3.5 percent since the mid-1800s. The trade winds are the portion of the Walker circulation that blow across the ocean surface.
The researchers predict another 10 percent decrease by the end of the 21st century.
The effect, attributed at least in part to human-induced climate change, could disrupt food chains and reduce the biological productivity of the Pacific Ocean, scientists said.
The study was led by Gabriel Vecchi of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and is detailed in the May 4 issue of the journal Nature.
Humans to blame
The researchers used records of sea-level atmospheric pressure readings from as far back as the mid-1800s to reconstruct the wind intensity of the Walker circulation over the past 150 years. A computer climate model replicated the effect seen in the historical record.
Some of the computer simulations included the effects of human greenhouse gas emissions; others included only natural factors known to affect climate such as volcanic eruptions and solar variations.
"We were able to ask 'What if humans hadn't done anything? Or what if volcanoes erupted? Or if the sun hadn't varied?'" Vecchi said. "Our only way to account for the observed changes is through the impact of human activity, and principally from greenhouse gases from fossil fuel burning."
Earth's average temperature has risen by about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past century and many scientists believe greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide emissions from human activities are to blame.
"This is evidence supporting global warming and also evidence of our ability to make reasonable predictions of at least the large scale changes that we should expect from global warming," Vecchi told LiveScience.
By extrapolating their data and combining it with results from other models, the researchers predict the Walker circulation could slow by an additional 10 percent by 2100.
Driving force
The trade winds blow from the east at an angle towards the equator and have been used by sailors for centuries seeking to sail west. Christopher Columbus relied on the Atlantic's trade winds to carry him to North America. The winds get their name from their reliability: To say that a "wind blows trade" is to say that it blows on track.
The overall Walker circulation is powered by warm, rising air in the west Pacific Ocean and sinking cool air in the eastern Pacific.
This looping conveyer belt of winds has far-reaching effects on climate around the globe. It steers ocean currents and nourishes marine life across the equatorial Pacific and off the coast of South America by driving the upwelling of nutrient-rich cold water from ocean depths to the surface.
The Walker circulation is also primarily responsible for transporting water vapor that evaporates from the ocean surface west, towards Indonesia; there, the moisture rises up into the atmosphere, condenses, and falls back to Earth as rain.
The effects of global warming
Several theories on the effects of global warming predict a weakening of the Walker circulation. Scientists think it works like this:
To remain energetically balanced, the rate at which the atmosphere absorbs water vapor must be balanced by the rate of rainfall. But as temperatures rise and more water evaporates from the ocean, water vapor in the lower atmosphere increases rapidly. Because of various physical processes, however, the rate of rainfall does not increase as fast.
Since the atmosphere is absorbing moisture faster than it can dump it, and because wind is the major transporter of moisture into the atmosphere, air circulation must slow down if the energy balance is to be maintained.
A drop in winds could reduce the strength of both surface and subsurface ocean currents and dampen cold water upwelling at the equator.
"This could have important effects on ocean ecosystems," Vecchi said. "The ocean currents driven by the trade winds supply vital nutrients to near-surface ocean ecosystems across the equatorial Pacific, which is a major fishing region."
By Ker Than, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 03 May 2006 01:00 pm ET
Monday, October 15, 2007
Turbine Free Wind Power: Alternative Alternative Energy
check this video:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1214137061?bctid=1233395616
Wind power is great, but those big turbines are inefficient (the bearings suck out a lot of energy) and, if you're a passing bird, dangerous. Shawn Frayne has come up with an alternative to this alternative energy, which he says is ten times more efficient than a turbine and, because it has no bearings, scales well to smaller sizes.
Inspired by the famous Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which you've all seen shaking itself apart, the Windbelt is a tight plastic strip stretched in a frame, joined to magnets at both ends. When the wind blows across the belt, it vibrates (like when you blow a blade of grass to make music) and the magnets move inside wire coils, generating power. This table top version will put out 40 milliwatts and can power an LED. It's cheap and simple, and can generate power from breezes as slow as 10mph, making it ideal for developing nations (California based Frayne worked in Haiti and saw a need for cheap power to replace dangerous kerosene lamps).
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1214137061?bctid=1233395616
Wind power is great, but those big turbines are inefficient (the bearings suck out a lot of energy) and, if you're a passing bird, dangerous. Shawn Frayne has come up with an alternative to this alternative energy, which he says is ten times more efficient than a turbine and, because it has no bearings, scales well to smaller sizes.
Inspired by the famous Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which you've all seen shaking itself apart, the Windbelt is a tight plastic strip stretched in a frame, joined to magnets at both ends. When the wind blows across the belt, it vibrates (like when you blow a blade of grass to make music) and the magnets move inside wire coils, generating power. This table top version will put out 40 milliwatts and can power an LED. It's cheap and simple, and can generate power from breezes as slow as 10mph, making it ideal for developing nations (California based Frayne worked in Haiti and saw a need for cheap power to replace dangerous kerosene lamps).
Saturday, October 13, 2007
CLIMATE CHANGE: Forests Join the Carbon Market
Zilia Castrillón* - IPS/IFEJ
BOSTON, Oct 6 (IPS) - With deforestation as the second leading source of climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions, experts are focusing the discussion on the viability of compensating countries for protecting their forests.
The proposal "Reduced Emissions from Deforestation" (RED) was not included in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. But now is being evaluated by scientists, companies and agencies in poor countries that have extensive forested areas.
The CDM allows governments and corporations of industrialised countries (required under the Protocol to cut greenhouse gas emissions) to meet part of their obligations by investing in "clean" projects in developing countries, by which they obtain certificates of emissions reductions -- at much lower cost than curbing emissions at home.
"Slowing emissions from deforestation would not stop climate change, but it could be an important part of a many-part strategy," Christopher Field, head of the global ecology department at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, said in an interview for this report.
RED emerged in 2005 at the 11th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, led by Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica, with support from the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. Its aim is to include "avoided deforestation" in the global market of carbon credits -- carbon dioxide being the principal greenhouse gas.
Implementation is expected to be finalized at the 13 Conference of Parties, to take place in December on the Indonesian island of Bali.
Brazil, for its part, proposes a fund with voluntary contributions of public money to compensate the effort made by developing countries to reduce deforestation, and that they would be remunerated based on prevented emissions.
In the article "Tropical Forests and Climate Policy", published May 10 in "Science Express" online magazine, Field and other researchers propose to slow the current pace of deforestation 50 percent by the year 2050.
That would be the equivalent of 50 billion tonnes of carbon prevented from being released into the atmosphere, or equal to six years of emissions of gases from fossil fuel combustion, the experts say.
But that figure is meaningless, says to Almuth Ernsting, of the Britain-based Biofuelwatch campaign. Because RED does not intend to stop industrial-scale logging, "there is growing evidence that many rainforests, including the Amazon forest, will collapse well before the destruction of a further 50 percent."
The Amazon is the forest ecosystem with the most carbon: 305 tonnes per hectare, of which 28 percent is in the soil, according to a 1998 study.
Its destruction would release 120 billion tonnes of carbon by 2050, which would be catastrophic to the global climate, says Ernsting.
The transformation of natural ecosystems into farmland entails a loss of 75 percent of the carbon in tropical soils. That implies between 18 and 20 percent of the total emissions from deforestation, according to experts.
There is about twice as much carbon stored in forests and soils as exists in the atmosphere, said William Moomaw, director of the Centre for International Environment and Resource Policy, at Tufts University in the United States.
If one area is preserved, and another is deforested, how is this to be counted, asks Moomaw by way of example. Planting trees in other areas to compensate for logging does not work because it often is done in areas not apt for forests, he explained.
This problem has come up with tree plantations intended to absorb carbon, and could be repeated in a scheme for reducing emissions from deforestation, say critics.
The carbon market helped finance monoculture plantations, and had negative results for the soil, local communities, water resources and, ironically, carbon emissions, says Biofuelwatch's Ernsting.
There is also concern about the difficulties in controlling changes in the carbon stores of forests once the system is applied.
"Monitoring entails some costs, but existing satellite technologies make the challenge relatively straightforward," says Field, of the Carnegie Institution.
National measurement systems can function, according to Moomaw. In the international arena, the European Union, United States and Brazil would need to form a coordinated satellite monitoring team, available for countries with few resources but rich in forests.
Compensation for avoided deforestation should reduce net emissions, encouraging a change in international frameworks and adopting an emissions tariff for countries with little or no historic deforestation, according to the study "No Forest Left Behind", published by Conservation International in the Aug. 14 issue of the online journal Public Library of Science - Biology. Countries with much forest and relatively little deforestation are: Belize, Bhutan, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, French Guiana, Gabon, Guyana, Panama, Peru, Suriname and Zambia. Inhabited mostly by indigenous peoples, they would enter the carbon market through "preventive credits" or compensation that they would forfeit if there is an increase in loss of forest.
In order for the system to function equitably, it is important that local communities participate, according to experts.
"The principle of avoided deforestation is not a bad principle, however the means through which it could be realised are complex and fraught with unequal power relations," says Helen Leake, of the non-governmental Forest Peoples Programme. "The devil is in the details."
(*This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS-Inter Press Service and IFEJ-International Federation of Environmental Journalists.) (END/2007)
BOSTON, Oct 6 (IPS) - With deforestation as the second leading source of climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions, experts are focusing the discussion on the viability of compensating countries for protecting their forests.
The proposal "Reduced Emissions from Deforestation" (RED) was not included in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. But now is being evaluated by scientists, companies and agencies in poor countries that have extensive forested areas.
The CDM allows governments and corporations of industrialised countries (required under the Protocol to cut greenhouse gas emissions) to meet part of their obligations by investing in "clean" projects in developing countries, by which they obtain certificates of emissions reductions -- at much lower cost than curbing emissions at home.
"Slowing emissions from deforestation would not stop climate change, but it could be an important part of a many-part strategy," Christopher Field, head of the global ecology department at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, said in an interview for this report.
RED emerged in 2005 at the 11th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, led by Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica, with support from the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. Its aim is to include "avoided deforestation" in the global market of carbon credits -- carbon dioxide being the principal greenhouse gas.
Implementation is expected to be finalized at the 13 Conference of Parties, to take place in December on the Indonesian island of Bali.
Brazil, for its part, proposes a fund with voluntary contributions of public money to compensate the effort made by developing countries to reduce deforestation, and that they would be remunerated based on prevented emissions.
In the article "Tropical Forests and Climate Policy", published May 10 in "Science Express" online magazine, Field and other researchers propose to slow the current pace of deforestation 50 percent by the year 2050.
That would be the equivalent of 50 billion tonnes of carbon prevented from being released into the atmosphere, or equal to six years of emissions of gases from fossil fuel combustion, the experts say.
But that figure is meaningless, says to Almuth Ernsting, of the Britain-based Biofuelwatch campaign. Because RED does not intend to stop industrial-scale logging, "there is growing evidence that many rainforests, including the Amazon forest, will collapse well before the destruction of a further 50 percent."
The Amazon is the forest ecosystem with the most carbon: 305 tonnes per hectare, of which 28 percent is in the soil, according to a 1998 study.
Its destruction would release 120 billion tonnes of carbon by 2050, which would be catastrophic to the global climate, says Ernsting.
The transformation of natural ecosystems into farmland entails a loss of 75 percent of the carbon in tropical soils. That implies between 18 and 20 percent of the total emissions from deforestation, according to experts.
There is about twice as much carbon stored in forests and soils as exists in the atmosphere, said William Moomaw, director of the Centre for International Environment and Resource Policy, at Tufts University in the United States.
If one area is preserved, and another is deforested, how is this to be counted, asks Moomaw by way of example. Planting trees in other areas to compensate for logging does not work because it often is done in areas not apt for forests, he explained.
This problem has come up with tree plantations intended to absorb carbon, and could be repeated in a scheme for reducing emissions from deforestation, say critics.
The carbon market helped finance monoculture plantations, and had negative results for the soil, local communities, water resources and, ironically, carbon emissions, says Biofuelwatch's Ernsting.
There is also concern about the difficulties in controlling changes in the carbon stores of forests once the system is applied.
"Monitoring entails some costs, but existing satellite technologies make the challenge relatively straightforward," says Field, of the Carnegie Institution.
National measurement systems can function, according to Moomaw. In the international arena, the European Union, United States and Brazil would need to form a coordinated satellite monitoring team, available for countries with few resources but rich in forests.
Compensation for avoided deforestation should reduce net emissions, encouraging a change in international frameworks and adopting an emissions tariff for countries with little or no historic deforestation, according to the study "No Forest Left Behind", published by Conservation International in the Aug. 14 issue of the online journal Public Library of Science - Biology. Countries with much forest and relatively little deforestation are: Belize, Bhutan, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, French Guiana, Gabon, Guyana, Panama, Peru, Suriname and Zambia. Inhabited mostly by indigenous peoples, they would enter the carbon market through "preventive credits" or compensation that they would forfeit if there is an increase in loss of forest.
In order for the system to function equitably, it is important that local communities participate, according to experts.
"The principle of avoided deforestation is not a bad principle, however the means through which it could be realised are complex and fraught with unequal power relations," says Helen Leake, of the non-governmental Forest Peoples Programme. "The devil is in the details."
(*This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS-Inter Press Service and IFEJ-International Federation of Environmental Journalists.) (END/2007)
Amazon Rainforest At Risk From Initiative To Connect South American Economies
Science Daily — An unprecedented development plan to link South America's economies through new transportation, energy and telecommunications projects could destroy much of the Amazon rainforest in coming decades, according to a new study by Conservation International scientist Tim Killeen.
However, Killeen reports that such a disastrous outcome can be avoided if steps are taken now to reconcile the legitimate desires for development with the globally important need to conserve the Amazon ecosystem.
His 98-page report, titled "A Perfect Storm in the Amazon Wilderness: Development and Conservation in the Context of the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA)," offers pragmatic approaches for resolving the enduring paradox between economic development and environmental protection.
Killeen, who has worked in the Amazon region for 25 years, fully supports the 12-nation IIRSA plan that seeks the historic goal of overcoming the geographic obstacles of the Amazon wilderness to connect the area's isolated economies. IIRSA investments will integrate improved highway networks, river ways, hydroelectric dams and telecommunications links throughout the continent -- particularly in remote, isolated regions -- to allow greater trade and create a South American community of nations.
Killeen's analysis shows that IIRSA's development projects will coincide with mounting pressures on the Amazon's ecosystem and its traditional communities. These pressures include climate change; logging; deforestation for agriculture; and mineral exploitation, as well as the impending boom in biofuel crops such as sugar cane.
"Failure to foresee the full impact of IIRSA investments, particularly in the context of climate change and global markets, could lead to a perfect storm of environmental destruction," Killeen says. "At stake are the greatest tropical wilderness area on the planet and the multiple benefits it provides."
October 5, 2007
The study offers three possible scenarios for the future of the Amazon region, and warns that infrastructure projects that are developed without timely or thorough environmental impact analysis will lead to the worst-case scenario -- widespread deforestation and the eventual loss of the Amazon jungle within three or four decades.
"Our hope is that this document will stimulate IIRSA to become an even more important and relevant initiative, one that incorporates the vision of an ecologically and culturally intact Amazon," writes Gustavo Fonseca, the Global Environment Facility's team leader for natural resources, in the publication's preface. "South America has an enormous economic incentive to conserve the ecosystem services provided by the Amazon, along with achieving real and effective regional integration. These are not mutually exclusive goals."
According to Killeen, the destruction of the Amazon as a result of currently-planned IIRSA projects would have profound and far-reaching consequences. The Amazon River basin is the world's largest reserve of fresh water, while the extensive Amazon wilderness regulates the continental climate, spawning annual precipitation that waters the multibillion-dollar agriculture industry of the Rio Plata basin to the south.
Cutting and burning of the Amazon forests could seriously jeopardize this industry as well as destroy the vast ecosystems that are home to indigenous people. It would also wipe out some of Earth's richest storehouses of terrestrial and freshwater life and would exacerbate global warming by releasing into the atmosphere the huge quantities of carbon stored in the biomass of the tropical forest -- estimated at about twenty times the world's total annual greenhouse gas emissions.
Killeen argues it doesn't have to be this way. He notes that intact Amazon forest could generate billions of dollars in carbon credits under a market system being negotiated to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. Biofuel crops, such as sugarcane could be planted on the 65 million hectares (162 million acres) of already deforested land, rather than clearing more jungle to establish new plantations. He also advocates other environmentally friendly solutions, such as fish farming, which could use the Amazon's abundant water resources to create economic opportunity for peasant farmers and produce millions of dollars in revenue.
"A visionary initiative such as IIRSA should be visionary in all of its dimensions, and should incorporate measures to ensure that the region's renewable natural resources are conserved and its traditional communities strengthened," Killeen writes.
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by Conservation International.
However, Killeen reports that such a disastrous outcome can be avoided if steps are taken now to reconcile the legitimate desires for development with the globally important need to conserve the Amazon ecosystem.
His 98-page report, titled "A Perfect Storm in the Amazon Wilderness: Development and Conservation in the Context of the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA)," offers pragmatic approaches for resolving the enduring paradox between economic development and environmental protection.
Killeen, who has worked in the Amazon region for 25 years, fully supports the 12-nation IIRSA plan that seeks the historic goal of overcoming the geographic obstacles of the Amazon wilderness to connect the area's isolated economies. IIRSA investments will integrate improved highway networks, river ways, hydroelectric dams and telecommunications links throughout the continent -- particularly in remote, isolated regions -- to allow greater trade and create a South American community of nations.
Killeen's analysis shows that IIRSA's development projects will coincide with mounting pressures on the Amazon's ecosystem and its traditional communities. These pressures include climate change; logging; deforestation for agriculture; and mineral exploitation, as well as the impending boom in biofuel crops such as sugar cane.
"Failure to foresee the full impact of IIRSA investments, particularly in the context of climate change and global markets, could lead to a perfect storm of environmental destruction," Killeen says. "At stake are the greatest tropical wilderness area on the planet and the multiple benefits it provides."
October 5, 2007
The study offers three possible scenarios for the future of the Amazon region, and warns that infrastructure projects that are developed without timely or thorough environmental impact analysis will lead to the worst-case scenario -- widespread deforestation and the eventual loss of the Amazon jungle within three or four decades.
"Our hope is that this document will stimulate IIRSA to become an even more important and relevant initiative, one that incorporates the vision of an ecologically and culturally intact Amazon," writes Gustavo Fonseca, the Global Environment Facility's team leader for natural resources, in the publication's preface. "South America has an enormous economic incentive to conserve the ecosystem services provided by the Amazon, along with achieving real and effective regional integration. These are not mutually exclusive goals."
According to Killeen, the destruction of the Amazon as a result of currently-planned IIRSA projects would have profound and far-reaching consequences. The Amazon River basin is the world's largest reserve of fresh water, while the extensive Amazon wilderness regulates the continental climate, spawning annual precipitation that waters the multibillion-dollar agriculture industry of the Rio Plata basin to the south.
Cutting and burning of the Amazon forests could seriously jeopardize this industry as well as destroy the vast ecosystems that are home to indigenous people. It would also wipe out some of Earth's richest storehouses of terrestrial and freshwater life and would exacerbate global warming by releasing into the atmosphere the huge quantities of carbon stored in the biomass of the tropical forest -- estimated at about twenty times the world's total annual greenhouse gas emissions.
Killeen argues it doesn't have to be this way. He notes that intact Amazon forest could generate billions of dollars in carbon credits under a market system being negotiated to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. Biofuel crops, such as sugarcane could be planted on the 65 million hectares (162 million acres) of already deforested land, rather than clearing more jungle to establish new plantations. He also advocates other environmentally friendly solutions, such as fish farming, which could use the Amazon's abundant water resources to create economic opportunity for peasant farmers and produce millions of dollars in revenue.
"A visionary initiative such as IIRSA should be visionary in all of its dimensions, and should incorporate measures to ensure that the region's renewable natural resources are conserved and its traditional communities strengthened," Killeen writes.
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by Conservation International.
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