According to a new census from the USDA, farmers are reducing their costs by embracing renewable energy to power their operations in very unexpectedly big way. The use of renewable sources focused just on the use of solar panels, wind turbines, and methane digesters.

The tremendous rise in the degree of adoption of renewable energy in itself surprised and pleased the Agriculture Department, which under Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is attempting to spread the use of renewable energy on farms in order to cut greenhouse gases which that could make farming in the US among the worst casualties of climate change by the end of this century, and almost impossible within the next few centuries.

The report is even more encouraging in that it covers adoption only up through the end of 2009. Surprisingly to me, methane digesters came in last among the three sources. By that the end of 2009, 121 US farms were using methane digesters to make energy for farm operations. Another 1,420 farms were using wind turbines to power farm operations and 7,968 were using photovoltaic solar electric or solar thermal energy.

Solar PV provides electricity. One California fruit grower uses solar to power pumps to irrigate land, or it can be used for any electrical use. Solar thermal collectors use the heat of the sun to provide hot water, which could be used to heat barns – with the hot water piped through a concrete floor supplying radiant heating – or to provide hot water for food or wine processing. Cogenra Solar combines both types of solar for maximum efficiency at a winery in Northern California.

California led the nation with almost 25% of all farms nationwide using renewable energy. Runners-up were Texas, Hawaii and Colorado with at least 500 operations using their own renewable energy power on the farm.

But the gap in the Midwest breadbasket may be good news too, because it may be due to competing good renewable energy policy in some states designed to encourage renewables. Midwestern farms are hosting wind turbines supplying utility-scale power to the grid. Iowa for example, allows companies to pay farmers to host turbines on farms.

These Midwestern turbine-hosting farms would not be included in this survey since these turbines are owned and operated by those energy companies that simply lease farm land in order to supply the general grid. Thus Iowa farms, while maybe not powering their own operations, were nevertheless by 2009, already supplying a staggering 15% of Iowa electricity just from wind turbines, set in their fields of amber grain.

The money saved by farmers with renewable energy was cheering too. Farmers in nearly every state reported savings on their utility bills. The savings were especially noticeable in New York, where, utility bill savings reported by respondents topped $5,000 for 2009.

Obama announces government greenhouse gas emissions targets
By Anne E. Kornblut and Juliet Eilperin

President Obama set greenhouse gas emissions targets for the federal government, announcing Friday that it would aim to reduce its emissions by 28 percent in 2020.

"As the largest energy consumer in the United States, we have a responsibility to American citizens to reduce our energy use and become more efficient," Obama said in a statement. "Our goal is to lower costs, reduce pollution, and shift Federal energy expenses away from oil and towards local, clean energy."

The White House estimated a savings of $8 billion to $11 billion in energy costs.

The announcement came hours after the Obama administration delivered a non-binding pledge to other countries that the United States would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

The Obama administration submitted its reduction target to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat under the Copenhagen Accord, a non-binding deal brokered by the United States last month at the U.N.-sponsored climate talks. Under the deal President Obama helped secure in Copenhagen, major emitters of greenhouse gases are expected to "inscribe" their reduction targets by Jan. 31.

The international commitment states that the United States will cut its emissions "in the range of 17 percent, in conformity with anticipated U.S. energy and climate legislation, recognizing that the final target will be reported to the Secretariat in light of enacted legislation." It remains unclear if Congress will pass a comprehensive climate bill this year.

Several key developing nations, such as China and India, have not yet indicated what they will commit to under the agreement.

Five years after beginning their work in the frozen and rocky terrain of northern Alaska, scientists led by Professor Darrell Kaufman finally made a breakthrough in their study of Arctic lakes, a discovery that impacts the study of climate change and has even bigger implications for the debate over who or what is causing it.

The research centers on the study of frozen lakes found within the Arctic Circle in Alaska, where a meticulous examination of various aspects of the lake allowed the scientists to observe and study the average summer temperatures for each year, going back nearly two millennia.

Kaufman, a professor in the College of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability, used the lakes to compile that list of averages.

“My co-authors and I combined evidence from three different natural sources of information about past summer temperatures in the Arctic: ice cores, tree rings and mostly from lake sediment,” Kaufman said. “This enabled us to develop a robust estimate of the average summer temperature across the Arctic that extends to before the Little Ice Age, when most of the Arctic experienced the coldest temperatures of the last 8,000 years.”

Kaufman led an international research team in their extensive stud, which included many of his former students. Caleb Schiff, the director of NAU’s Sedimentary Records of Environmental Change Laboratory and one of the students who worked on the expedition, said there is much to glean about past weather patterns from the muddy sediment of lake bottoms.

“For the study, I looked at how the oxygen-isotope ratios of lake water and diatoms compared to climate patterns during the 20th century,” Schiff said. “The findings suggest that lake water isotopes and the precipitation from these waters are a viable proxy for interpreting past changes of large, synoptic climate patterns.”

Once completely compiled, the data revealed some interesting trends, allowing the team to draw new conclusions from their research.

“The warmth in the Arctic during the second half of the 20th century, combined with the last decade, is striking against the backdrop of the previous 1,900 years,” Kaufman said. “The slow natural cooling trend that we detected and quantified in the proxy records should have continued. Instead, the second half of the 20th century was warmer in the Arctic than any other half-century of the last 2,000 years.”

Kaufman said the evidence points to human activity as the cause of the deviation from the trend.

“None of those natural factors that caused climate to change in the past is powerful enough to account for the recent warming trend, which occurred along with the build-up of greenhouse gases,” Kaufman said.

Professor Scott Anderson, a paleoecologist and NAU professor, agreed with Kaufman’s conclusions.

“First, the study shows that climate was clearly cooling until the 20th century,” Anderson said. “Second, the evidence that Darrell presented suggests that it is highly likely that the warming during the 20th century is an anomaly, and it is correlated with human activities. I think that this is yet another piece of evidence in the mountain of evidence that humans can have, and probably already are having, a severe impact on our climate.”

The research conducted by Kaufman and his team was published in Science magazine earlier this month. Schiff said many scientists are lauding the study as a new standard for climate change data.

“Until something more comprehensive comes out,” Schiff said. “it will often be cited by others working in the field of climate change.”

According to a new study to be published in the journal Biotechnology for Biofuels, 20% of the watermelon crop doesn’t go to market every year due to imperfections, bad spots, or weird shapes. These watermelons are left in the field and then plowed right back into the ground. According to the authors of the study (Benny Bruton and Vincent Russo from the USDA-ARS, South Central Agricultural Research Laboratory, and Wayne Fish), these watermelons could be used to produce the biofuel ethanol.

The watermelon juice can be fermented and used directly or it can be used as a “diluent, supplemental feedstock, and nitrogen supplement” with other biofuel crops. If it is used as a supplement to other crops, it could first be used in nutraceutical production and serve an economic and health purpose in that capacity as well. Watermelons could be used to produce the nutraceuticals lycopene (found to be important to prostrate health) and L-arginine (an amino acid that is critical for the production of nitric oxide). After being used to produce these, the waste juice can be used for ethanol production.



Hundreds of thousands of tons of watermelons are lost every year. They are grown and then left in the ground because of superficial imperfections. The authors of this new study show that they could be very useful as a renewable energy source. “The results of this investigation indicate that watermelon juice as a source of readily fermentable sugars represents a heretofore untapped feedstock for ethanol biofuel production. The 8.4 t/ha of unmarketable watermelons left in the field at harvest would produce about 220 L/ha of ethanol for on-farm use or as an additional revenue stream for the grower.”

There’s an interesting idea being batted around by a United Kingdom think tank called the Policy Exchange: that planes should use all the available supply of biofuels, and other alternatives should be used for cars.

The reasoning in the study is pretty simple, at least as reported by the BBC. First, it’s argued that supplying the fuel needs of cars would require biofuel crops to cover an area probably too large to be practical. The second reason is that planes, unlike cars, can’t run on other alternatives like batteries or compressed natural gas. The high energy needs of a plane demands liquid fuel.

In the European Union, rules mandating 10 percent biofuels for all transport have already been reversed, and there has been plenty of acknowledgement elsewhere that biofuels probably won’t be the perfect solution for cars — except, of course, from the biofuel industry, which lobbies actively to sell more auto fuel. So this study can join many others sharing a common theme — that biofuels are just one small piece of the transportation puzzle.

But the Policy Exchange also seems to be overlooking one big problem, which is that planes tend to run on specialized fuels with high energy content. At least in the United States, the most common biofuel produced is ethanol, which has a much lower energy content than gasoline, and wouldn’t be suitable for any commercial plane.

The fuels that would work in aircraft are mostly up-and-coming. Fuels made from algae and jatropha, a berry-growing plant that is still being domesticated, have both been successfully tested on flights. But neither one of those sources currently accounts for a noticeable portion of the market.

So for the future, it probably makes sense to pay attention to the Policy Exchange, and start thinking about how new biofuel production can be directed to applications that require a liquid fuel. But what about existing biofuel capacity — the many ethanol plants in the United States and elsewhere, that aren’t going away any time soon?

When the motor manufacturers are in dispute with the US Environmental Protection Agency, you wouldn't win much for guessing which side I'm likely to be on. But this time you'd be wrong.

The EPA has to decide whether or not to allow more ethanol to be blended with gasoline. At the moment the limit for ordinary motor gas (petrol) is 10%. The agency is inclined to raise this to 15%. The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers is trying to prevent or postpone it. I'm with the car makers, though not for the reasons they cite; ethanol's effect on a vehicle's performance is not what keeps me awake at night. Since 2004 I've been banging on about the impact of biofuels on the environment and global food supplies, and I've been horribly vindicated.

In 2008 the expansion of biofuel production was directly responsible for the decline in global food stocks, which caused grain prices to rise, catalysing famines in many parts of the world. Cereal stockpiles declined by 53m tonnes; the production of biofuels, mostly by the US, consumed almost 100m tonnes, according to a piece in the Economist on 6th December 2007. As the UN's special rapporteur, Jean Ziegler says, turning food for people into food for cars is, "a crime against humanity".

It's also a crime against the environment. In almost all cases, biofuels made from grain or oil crops create more greenhouse emissions than petroleum. This is partly because they lead to an expansion in total crop production, which means that forests must be cut down, unploughed pastures must be tilled and wetlands must be drained to accommodate it. The carbon stored in both the vegetation and the soil is released and oxidised. Two papers in Science (here and here) show that when land clearance is taken into account, biofuels made from grain or oil crops cause a big increase in emissions.

It's also because grain crops require nitrogen fertilizers, which produce emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas roughly 300 times as powerful as carbon dioxide. All told - apart from used chip fat (which can supply only a tiny fraction of motor fuel demand) - we're better off using petroleum.

SISIMIUT, Greenland – The Greenland shark, one of the largest species of sharks, is a nuisance to fishermen and its meat is toxic to humans, but researchers now hope the flesh can be used to create a biofuel for Inuits.

Native to the cold Arctic waters, thousands of the sharks get caught and die in fishermen's nets off Greenland every year. The beasts -- which can be compared to the Great White Shark in size at seven metres (23 feet) and can weigh up to a tonne -- are thrown back into the sea.

But at the Arctic Technology Centre (ARTEK) in Sisimiut in western Greenland, researchers are experimenting with ways of using the animal's oily flesh to produce biogas out of fishing industry waste.

"I think this is an alternative where we can use the thousands of tonnes of leftovers of products from the sea, including those of the numerous sharks," says Marianne Willemoes Joergensen of ARTEK's branch at the Technical University of Denmark.

Joergensen, in charge of the pilot project based in the Uummannaq village in northwestern Greenland, says the shark meat, when mixed with macro-algae and household wastewater, could "serve as biomass for biofuel production."

"Biofuel is the best solution for this kind of organic waste, which can be used to produce electricity and heating with a carbon neutral method," she said.

Biofuel based on sharks and other sea products could supply 13 percent of energy consumption in the village of Uummannaq with its 2,450 inhabitants, according to estimates.

The project could help the many isolated villages on the vast island to become self-sufficient in terms of energy.

Joergensen plans to run tests next year at an organic waste treatment plant in a project financed by the EU in Uummannaq, using shark meat mixed with wastewater and macro-algae to create a fish mince that can be used to produce biogas.

In Uummannaq, the Greenland shark represents more than half of the waste disposed of by the local fishermen.

"Entire trawlers are sometimes full of sharks and they are caught everywhere, especially off the east and west of Greenland, to the fishermen's great dismay," says Bo Lings who used to work on a big trawler.

"It's a large predator that devours fish, squid, seals and other marine life, and it also ruins the lines and nets of the halibut fishermen," adds Leif Fontaine, the head of Greenland's fishing and hunting association.

Fishing is Greenland's biggest export industry, with halibut its second-biggest product after shrimp.

The shark, which Inuits once hunted for its razor-like teeth that they used to make knives and for its liver oil that was used to light homes, has "become a problem for the environment."

Industry should set an ultimate goal of “zero landfill” of concrete, according to a new report from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD).

The study from the WBCSD’s Cement Sustainability Initiative (CSI) says recycling concrete is a better strategy that reduces natural resource exploitation and waste going to landfill.

Concrete is the second most-consumed material after water, with some 25 billion tonnes manufactured globally every year. Most concrete waste is generated not because the concrete is worn out, but usually because the structure itself has become redundant with changing infrastructure needs and planning.

Global data on concrete waste generation is not available, but some national data is available. For example, the US, Japan and Europe annually generate about 900 million tonnes of construction and demolition waste, which can be made up of 20 to 80 per cent concrete.

While some countries achieve near full recovery of concrete, most parts of the world overlook the potential of recovered concrete and send unnecessary waste to landfill. According to the WBCSD, low public concern helps contribute to this problem, as concrete waste poses relatively low hazard risks compared to other materials.

Old concrete can be broken down into aggregates (granular material) that can be used in road works projects. It can also be used as aggregates in new concrete.

The CSI recommends that governments and key stakeholders publicise data on construction and demolition waste and develop reliable and consistent statistics; that they develop economic incentives and legislation to allow infrastructure that promotes concrete recycling (particularly green building schemes); and that they set targets for the use of recycled concrete in both road construction and building industries.