A future of poisoned oceans, withered crops, and irate polar bears is nobody's idea of a good time. It's clear to anyone who is paying attention that our civilization is due for an upgrade. Bright Green covers the news, ideas, opinions, and trends littering the road to an environmentally sustainable future.
Audi's 'Green Police' Super Bowl ad controversial
Perhaps you saw that ad during the Superbowl in which eco-enforcing "Green Police" seem run a police state of sorts. They arrest a man for choosing plastic bags at the checkout counter, storm a house for a battery discarded in the garbage, and handcuff another man on his front porch in a "light bulb crackdown." He'd installed incandescent — rather than, presumably, compact fluorescent — light bulbs.
During nearly its entire one-minute duration, the ad keeps the viewer guessing as to what it's selling — until the very end when a single driver passes unmolested through an "eco-check" roadblock. (Is that an aardvark sniffing out eco-offenses, by the way?)
The car he's driving is, we learn, an Audi — the Audi A3 TDI clean diesel to be exact — a five-seater that's supposed to get 42 miles per gallon on the highway, as well as have "healthy portions of low-end torque." Green Car Journal dubbed it the "green car of the year."
The ad, which elicited glee or despair – depending on where one falls on the "people-are-degrading-the-environment" spectrum – has generated substantial buzz on the Internet not least because of its ambiguity.
It serves as a nice litmus test of — well, something that’s not entirely clear, but which echoes sentiments often voiced in discussions around environmental degradation and human-caused climate change.
Audi's eco-friendly alternate universe looks rather Orwellian, with checkpoints, raids (one man is pulled out of a hot tub; at 105 degrees, the temperature was too high), and constant intrusion into people's private lives — a kind of libertarian nightmare.
The sole character who gets off easy in this world is the guy with the "greenest car" (manufactured by you-know-who).
But — and here viewer confusion seems unavoidable — who wants to be a winner in this universe? As Groucho Marx once said, "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." In other words, thanks, but no thanks. That's one in-crowd we'd rather not be in with.
And that's why many, although not all, who lean greenward seem to dislike the commercial.
Of the ad, The New York Times says, "This misguided spot put the 'mental' in 'environmental."
One commenter at Discover says, "Green, yet it mocks the environmental movement. I don’t get it."
Another, this one at the NFL site, takes it literally — and is afraid: "This is by far the scariest commercial I’ve ever seen! This is not just a commercial. Its every liberal’s and Hippie’s ... dream."
A blogger at Get Energy Smart Now!, meanwhile, calls it "The Most Environmentally Unfriendly Super Bowl Ad." The soundtrack to the commercial — "Green Police" — is a reworked song by rock band Cheap Trick, originally titled "Dream Police."
The blogger then points out that "Green Police" was a term used for uniformed Nazi police (Ordnungspolizei or Grüne Polizei) in Nazi Germany:
It is simply astounding that a German company would play against such a framing, making oblique references to a Nazi police unit and providing what many will see as a broadside against environmentalism as somehow fascist in nature.
Such horrible framing in an advertisement for a green product makes “Green Police” the most environmentally unfriendly Super Bowl advertisement of 2010.
At the very least, the indictment proves wrong a forecast made in late January by the online publication Daily Finance. Said the paper: "it's certainly never fortuitous for a German company to bring up reminders of the Third Reich. ... Still, it's likely that most U.S. viewers won't connect the 'Green Police' in their history books with the ones in Audi's Super Bowl Ad."
Grist has a slightly more nuanced take on the ad. "At first blush this seems like more teabagging -- appealing to angry white men with the same old stereotype of environmentalists as meddling do-gooders obsessed with picayune behavioral sins," says David Roberts
But after considering that interpretation, he rejects it, concluding, "The ad only makes sense if it's aimed at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police -- people who may find those obligations tiresome and constraining on occasion, who only fitfully meet them, who may be annoyed by sticklers and naggers, but who recognize that living more sustainably is in fact the moral thing to do. This basically describes every guy I know."
Mr. Roberts then points out that everyone arrested in the commercial is a man. (I'll add that all offenders are also Caucasian. At least one green policeman, on the other hand, is African-American. But that's it for diversity in this eco-fascist world.)
Is the gender-skewing significant? Roberts thinks so. Middle-class males are Audi's target demographic, he says. The message to that demographic: "Here's a way to meet your green obligations and still have a ["mean"] car! The Audi A3 is both green and desirable -- indeed more desirable because it's green. Buried deep in this ad, in other words, is a bright green message: prosperity, pleasure, and sustainability can be achieved together."
Those at This Dish is Vegetarian, meanwhile, take the commercial more at (a certain) face value.
"Kudos to Audi for addressing an important issue with a sense of humor rather than the standard doomsday scenario that is typically associated with the Green movement," they say.
Editor's Note: The Monitor's Environment section has a new URL. And there's also a new URL for our Bright Green blog. We hope you'll bookmark these and visit often.
What's really causing Himalayan glaciers to melt?
Two weeks ago, it emerged that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had made a mistake. The IPCC's last report, completed in 2007, had forecast that, given the current rate of global warming, Himalayan glaciers would "very likely" disappear by 2035.
This date, it turns out, wasn't based on a study appearing in a peer-reviewed science journal, but on an article published in the popular science magazine New Scientist a decade ago. The article apparently misquoted Indian glaciologist Syed Iqbal Hasnain.
Hasnain has said that he noted the error when it first appeared in print all those years ago, but never contacted the magazine about correcting it. How an article in the popular press made it into the pool of studies considered by the IPCC — the panel says it focuses on peer-reviewed studies — remains something of a mystery.
But, it should be noted, the erroneous estimate did not make it into the guide for policymakers. It appears only in the full report. So what about those glaciers?
Although there's still disagreement on how much Himalayan glaciers, sometimes called "the third polar region," are melting (see Monitor colleague Ben Arnoldy's story on the difficulties of studying ice in the volatile region) glaciologists tend to agree that they are melting, and that this poses a significant problem in the long run.
More than a billion people in Asia rely on glacial meltwater for a steady, year-round supply of fresh water. If the glaciers disappear, the region's water supply might be threatened.
Now, a new study by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and NCAR, finds that human-emitted aerosols are the single major contributor to glacial melt in the Himalayas.
In this case, increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide are not melting the mountain glaciers, say the authors. Particulate matter, particularly black carbon from cooking fires and coal-fired plants in India, is the real culprit.
These particulates can melt ice in two ways. First, floating in the air, they absorb sunlight and heat the surrounding atmosphere. Warmer air melts glaciers and changes precipitation patters.
In fact, weather stations across India measured a decrease in sunlight reaching the ground of about 0.5 watts per square meter per year between 1964 to 1990. After 1990, that rate of decrease went up to 1.1 watts per square meter per year.
Particulates can also melt the ice when they precipitate out of the air and land on it. Snow and ice normally reflects much of the sun's energy — up to 90 percent — back the way it came. But a layer of soot on top of the ice will absorb the sunlight, warm the ice beneath, and melt it.
The current study, which appears in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, finds that 90 percent of observed Himalayan glacial loss in recent decades is from aerosols. Black carbon soot alone, which occurs when combustion is incomplete, is responsible for 30 percent of that melt.
The amount of soot in the air has increased substantially in the area.
Between 1990 and 2000, black carbon emissions from India increased by 46 percent, say the authors. They increased by another 51 percent in the past decade.
According the National Snow and Ice Data Center, while some parts of the Himalayas have actually seen an increase in snow in recent decades, a large swath of the Himalayas has seen a decrease of about 16 percent in the same period.
The authors propose that the increases in snow in some regions is also an effect of black carbon — specifically, it heats the atmosphere, increases upward movement, or convection, of air, and that alters precipitation patterns. Rain and snow decrease in some areas and increase in others.
The good news is, while CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a century, black carbon lingers for a much shorter time. So if most of the Himalayan glacial melt observed in recent decades is due to not to increases in carbon dioxide but to more particulate pollution, then it can be much more easily addressed, at least theoretically: Simply burn coal and biomass more cleanly.
How difficult this may be to achieve is, of course, another story.
Editor's Note: The Monitor's Environment section has a new URL. And there's also a new URL for our Bright Green blog. We hope you'll bookmark these and visit often.
Centralia, Pa.: How an underground coal fire erased a town
If officials in Pennsylvania's capital, Harrisburg, have their way, the borough of Centralia, Pa., will soon cease to exist.
There's not much left of the northeastern Pennsylvania coal town these days. Even in the early 1980s, some two decades after the underground fires began, more than a thousand people called Centralia home. But as the poisonous gases continued to seep from fissures in the ground, and as the sudden sinkholes threatened to cast people into the smoldering depths, the town emptied out.
Today, fewer than a dozen people remain.
Now the state wants those last holdouts gone. As the Associated Press's Michael Rubinkam reports, state officials have ordered Centralia's remaining residents to leave so that their homes can be demolished.
Nobody really knows exactly what started the fire, which began at a town dump in 1962. The burning trash ignited an exposed coal seam, and the fires seeped into the labyrinth of tunnels and shafts below. Over the next two-decades, firefighters tried eight times to douse the subterranean blaze, but the fire always seemed to be several steps ahead of them. Eventually, they gave up. Extinguishing the fire would be too expensive, and anyway it didn't seem to pose too much danger.
In the early years of the fire, Centralians enjoyed not having to shovel their sidewalks and being able to harvest tomatoes from the warm ground in midwinter, Smithsonian magazine notes. But then, as the ground below turned to ash, the pavement started to buckle. The trees started dying. People started passing out in their homes from the toxic fumes.
Centralia's moment of clarity came in 1981, when the ground beneath 12-year-old Todd Domboski opened up. Todd, who had been cutting through a resident's yard, saved himself from plunging into the toxic inferno below by clinging to a tree root until a cousin rescued him.
Two years later, Congress appropriated $42 million to buy and demolish every home in the town. By 1990, only 63 people remained. In 2002, the US Postal Service eliminated Centralia's ZIP Code.
Still, a few diehards remained, squatting in houses they no longer own after the government seized them through eminent domain in the early 1990s. Some claim that the whole thing is a plot to seize mineral rights.
As the Monitor's Carmen Sisson noted in 2006, Centralia's mammoth deposits of anthracite, which once promised limitless prosperity, are now expected to burn for another 250 years.
Today, the town is not so much of a ghost town as it is a big open space with a grid of empty streets. The homes have been demolished, the rubble cleared, and the driveways now lead to nowhere.
As the AP's Michael Rubinkam notes, it didn't have to be this way. Had town officials taken swift action back when they first became aware of it, Centralia could still exist.
[The fire] could have been extinguished for thousands of dollars then, but a series of bureaucratic half-measures and a lack of funding allowed the fire to grow into a voracious monster — feeding on millions of tons of slow-burning anthracite coal in the abandoned network of mines beneath the town.
At first, most Centralians ignored the fire. Some denied its existence, choosing to disregard the threat.
Half-measures. Complacence. Conspiracy theories. Denial. These themes are familiar to anyone who follows environmental topics. As Centralia is deleted from Pennsylvania's official registers, we can only hope that the name will remain in our minds as a lesson about how creeping, incremental threats can, if ignored, destroy the very ground ground beneath our feet.
Follow Eoin on Twitter.
Editor's Note: The Monitor's Environment section has a new URL. And there's also a new URL for our Bright Green blog. We hope you'll bookmark these and visit often.
Low-flow toilets have improved
To be frank, I’ve never thought much about toilets. In the past, whenever I’ve found myself in the market for a new john, the only thing that concerned me was its exterior design. I like things that are elegant and old (or, at least, that have that authentic antique look.)
But now in my effort to become a better human being, as well as renovate Sheep Dog Hollow in as green and economical manner as possible, I’ve become immersed the history and recent technological advances of the toilet. (For instance, did you know the derivation of the word? It’s from the word toile: “French for ‘cloth’ draped over a lady or gentleman's shoulders whilst their hair was being dressed, and then … by extension … the whole complex of operations of hairdressing and body care that centered at a dressing table.” ( Continue… )
The delicate toilet question
Few people enjoy chatting casually about the bathroom, let alone about toilets. But since they’re responsible for as much as 40 percent of the water consumed inside most households, and water is becoming an increasingly precious resource, it's time to talk toilets here at Sheep Dog Hollow.
(For new readers, Sheep Dog is the 100-year-old farmhouse that we’re attempting to renovate in a green and economical manner. For our regular readers, please forgive the repetition.)
Now I confess that I stole the “talk toilets” line from a Sierra Club website, which has a delightful post that starts right up front: “Let’s talk toilets…” (Writing for the highly respected, very proper Monitor, I figured I had to get to the point in a more refined, less direct manner.)
Among other things, the post notes that “The U.S. Government Accountability Office reports that water managers in 36 states expect water shortages in the next 10 years, even under normal, non-drought conditions.” ( Continue… )
Airplane contrails and their effect on temperatures
Maybe you did some airplane travel over the holidays, and maybe, once your plane reached cruising altitude, you noticed the vapor trails from other jetliners crisscrossing your path. Or possibly one day recently, you simply looked up and noticed many thin, white clouds crisscrossing the sky.
These are contrails, perhaps one of the most directly observable ways human activity can change the weather. They form when, as exhaust spews from jet engines, moisture condenses on particles of soot in the subfreezing air.
They usually appear above 26,000 feet where the air is less than -40 C (also -40 F.) But factors besides altitude also play a role in their formation. Depending on how much moisture is in air, for example, contrails last shorter or longer. Moisture availability also dictates whether they form at all, and how much they grow after formation.
As it turns out, they also impact temperatures at Earth's surface, although by how much and in which direction — up or down — is still being worked out.
Initially, scientists thought that contrails, like the naturally occurring cirrus clouds they resemble and sometimes seed, had an overall warming effect. Although contrails clearly reflected incoming sunlight, they also trapped heat from below that would otherwise escape into space. Scientists therefore thought contrails had a net warming effect.
Then Sept. 11, 2001 presented a unique opportunity to study what the sky looked like without airplanes and contrails. In the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, the FAA prohibited commercial aviation over the United States for three days. That's when David Travis, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, thought to look at how temperatures might differ at temperature stations around the country.
He found that [PDF], for those three days, the average range between highs and lows at more than 4,000 weather stations across the US was 1 degree C wider than normal. In other words, contrails seemed to raise nighttime temperatures and lower daytimes ones.
But the real effect was in daytime highs, which were much higher. That would seem to indicate that, contrary to prevailing thinking, contrails might have a net cooling effect.
Certain areas seemed particularly sensitive to the absence of contrails. Because of unique climatic conditions in the atmosphere in these regions — chiefly, moisture-laden air — the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest are often covered by contrails. But when planes stopped flying right after 9-11, Travis also found that these areas saw the most dramatic increase in daytime highs.
Some have suggested that these results were skewed because unusually clear weather prevailed that week in September 2001. In other words, it was natural variation, not the absence of contrails, that led to the large temperature differential immediately following 9-11.
But there's no doubt that whether the net effect is to cool or warm, contrails can quite dramatically change cloud cover.
Immediately after 9-11, other scientists looked at contrails left by military planes, the only aircraft allowed to fly. They noticed that when planes flew in a cloudless area west of Washington D.C., within just a few hours, contrails that had begun as vapor trails just a few meters in width covered 20,000 square kilometers (7,722 square miles).
A 2006 study published in Nature, meanwhile, provided more details. The authors concluded that when a contrail forms — day or night, for example — determines whether the net effect will be warming or cooling. (Here's Scientific American's write-up [PDF] of the article.
Planes flying between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. comprised only one-quarter of total flights examined. But they were responsible for 60 to 80 percent of contrails' warming effect ontemperatures. That's because contrails at night trap outgoing heat radiation.
Contrails during the day, meanwhile, offset their heat-trapping effect by reflecting incoming sunlight. Likewise, winter flights, which account for only 22 percent of annual air traffic, were nonetheless responsible for half the warming by contrails.
"[F]light rescheduling could help to minimize the climate impact of aviation," conclude the authors.
Or, as the Scientific American article puts it, "Kiss the red-eye good-bye."
Of course, aviation's real impact on climate probably has nothing to do with contrails. In 2005, NASA's James Hansen published a study to that effect. He found that, even if the number of contrails were quintupled, global mean temperature would increase by just 0.03 degrees C (0.05 degrees F.). Aviation emissions, which are rising dramatically, are the true culprit.
According to this Wired story, aviation is on track to have a 1.5 billion-ton carbon footprint by 2025. The entire 27-nation, 457-million-person European Union emits some 3.1 billion tons of CO2 yearly at this point.
And yet, although the net impact of contrails may pale in comparison to the net impact of carbon emissions, engineers are already thinking up solutions to contrail formation. One has proposed a powerful microwave beam mounted on the jet engine. The idea: Evaporate the condensing water and soot particles before they become contrails.
Scientist Frank Noppel, who's researching this idea, says the job would cost just 0.1 percent of a jet engine's power. Sound crazy to have a microwave pointing back the way you came? Rolls-Royce has reportedly filed a patent on the technology.
Editor's Note: The Monitor's Environment section has a new URL. And there's also a new URL for our Bright Green blog. We hope you'll bookmark these and visit often.
What to do when the new shake roof buckles?
So far Martin and I have been extremely fortunate in our attempt to renovate Sheep Dog Hollow in as green and economical manner as possible. While the 100-year-old farmhouse has needed a complete overhaul – from its once impressive granite foundation to its crumbling roof – we’ve been blessed to work with capable carpenters and masons who’ve dealt quickly with whatever problem the old house has thrown up at them. And there have been plenty.
That said, we’ve been spared the harrowing scenarios that can be found with a quick Google of “home renovation nightmares.”
But now we have a problem, and a serious one. The new cedar shake roof that was finally put on in the past two weeks has buckled after the first serious rain. And not just a little. ( Continue… )
The new generation of green builders
Meet Joe Rios, known around here at Sheep Dog Hollow as “Joe Gas.” In his early 20s, he’s in the vanguard of a new generation of builders with a green consciousness and a determination to keep on the cutting edge.
As he was growing up, it never occurred to the Connecticut native that he’d get involved in environmentally conscious building. Nope. He was going to be a diesel mechanic and work on the big rigs.
But he fell into a job working at a natural gas company. Then he met Tony Silverio, who owns a heating and plumbing company in Old Saybrook, Conn., that specializes in geothermal heating and cooling systems and other green technologies, such as natural gas-fired tankless water heaters. ( Continue… )
Protecting Earth from asteroids
Last week, a meteorite reportedly crashed through the roof of a doctor's office in Virginia. No one was hurt when, traveling at some 200 miles per hour, a half-pound space rock smashed into an examination room, breaking into pieces on the concrete floor. But the incident highlighted the not-insignificant threat posed by asteroids and ice balls from space.
The consequences of a sufficiently large asteroid or comet strike could be catastrophic, which is why you're reading this in a blog about the environment:. Depending on size, an amount of energy equivalent to tens of thousands and even many millions of nuclear bombs would be released on impact. Such a strike could be disastrous not just for civilization, but for the planet's entire web of life.
If it landed in the ocean, the impact would send walls of water in all directions, inundating continental margins. If it struck land, it could ignite continent-wide fires.
And while the destruction would be immediate around the strike zone, the problems would likely become global in the aftermath: Dust injected into the atmosphere could block sunlight. Photosynthetic organisms would stop growing. Everything else that depended on them would suffer the consequences of a reduced food supply. Mass starvation would ensue.
The last asteroid strike on this scale is widely thought to have contributed to the dinosaurs' end 65 million years ago. The asteroid, which left a 110-mile-wide crater off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, was only six miles in diameter, roughly the size of Manhattan Island. But three-quarters of life on Earth disappeared.
Scientists generally agree that asteroid impacts in the future are a near-certainty – smaller ones more often, larger and much more catastrophic ones less often. Scientists think that asteroids like the one that ended the dinosaurs' reign hit Earth every 100 million years or so.
That's why, in 2005, Congress mandated that NASA should try to detect 90 percent of near earth objects (NEOs) with a diameter of more 140 meters or more by 2020. Asteroids of this size hit earth roughly every 30,000 years.
Before that, in 1998, Congress asked that NASA find 90 percent of all NEOs measuring more than 1 kilometer in diameter within 10 years. These hit with less regularity, but could cause substantially more damage.
Late last week, the National Research Council released a progress report that found that NASA has been quite good at locating and tracking objects larger than 1 km in diameter. But, due to insufficient funding — only $4 million yearly for tracking NEOs — NASA wouldn't meet the goals set out by Congress in 2005.
"The current near-Earth object surveys cannot meet the goals of the 2005 George E. Brown, Jr. Near-Earth Object Survey Act directing NASA to discover 90 percent of all near-Earth objects 140 meters in diameter or greater by 2020," the report states. Then the authors lay out a few options for getting the job done:
If completion of the survey as close to the original 2020 deadline as possible is considered most important, a space mission conducted in concert with observations using a suitable ground-based telescope and selected by peer-reviewed competition is the best approach. This combination could complete the survey well before 2030, perhaps as early as 2022 if funding were appropriated quickly.
If cost conservation is deemed most important, the use of a large ground-based telescope is the best approach. Under this option, the survey could not be completed by the original 2020 deadline, but could be completed before 2030. To achieve the intended cost effectiveness, the funding to construct the telescope must come largely on the basis of non-NEO programs.
The report also calls on the US to lead the formation of an international body to monitor and deal with NEO threats.
According to experts cited by Space.com, NASA needs an additional $1 billion in funding over the next 15 years to attain its goal of cataloguing all potentially threatening asteroids. As of today, NASA's Near Earth Object Program is aware of and tracking 6,691 objects.
NASA estimates that every few million years, an asteroid comes along that could threaten civilization. Every 2,000 years, a football field-size meteor hits Earth, causing significant damage to the immediate area. Anything smaller than 25 meters will likely burn up in Earth's atmosphere.
But in 1908, something — probably a comet — exploded over the Siberia. It flattened 2,000 square kilometers (772 square miles) of forest in a largely uninhabited region.
Scientists assumed that the object was some 70 meters across. But new research indicates it might have been just 30 to 50 meters wide. And it still caused extensive damage. Objects of this size are thought to arrive every 300 years.
Because of the newfound importance of this size class, and relatively short interval at which they arrive, the authors of the report recommend that "surveys should attempt to detect as many 30- to 50-meter objects as possible."
Illustrating just how difficult asteroids are to detect, last week New Scientist reported that a 10-meter asteroid passed quite close to Earth — about one-third the distance between Earth and the moon. We noticed it only when it was three days out, far too late to head it off had it been on a collision course with Earth.
In October, an asteroid of similar size detonated over Indonesia, creating a fireball visible from the ground. Last July, an amateur Australian astronomer noticed that something had smashed into Jupiter. No one predicted it.
The good news: Our NEO detection abilities are improving. Last week, the recently launched Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is scanning the heavens at infrared wavelengths, discovered its first near-Earth asteroid, a 1 km rock some 98 million miles away. It poses no threat to Earth — at least not on its current orbit.
Even if we saw an object headed our way with enough lead time, what could we do? The National Research Council report lists four approaches:
1. Get out of the way — evacuate of the soon-to-be-impacted area.
2. Use a "slow push" or "slow pull" exerted by spacecraft to nudge the asteroid off a collision course with Earth.
3. Fly something directly into the asteroid to change its path.
4. Detonating a nuclear device on or near the asteroid to either destroy it or move it off-course.
But for large meteors, such as the one that took out the dinosaurs, the authors acknowledge that there's currently no "feasible defense." Which doesn’t mean we can’t develop one.
The authors conclude their executive summary with an interesting discussion on the probability of catastrophes like this, and what — if anything — to do about it. The discussion echoes some arguments in the global warming debate — namely, that allocating resources now toward heading off potential catastrophes is, even if they're unlikely, a good investment if the catastrophes in question are costly enough.
[T]he committee points out a current estimate of the long-term average annual human fatality rate from impactors: slightly under 100. At first blush, one is inclined to dismiss this rate as trivial in the general scheme of things. However, one must also consider the extreme damage that could be inflicted by a single impact; this presents the classic problem of the conflict between extremely important and extremely rare. The committee considers work on this problem as insurance, with the premiums devoted wholly towards preventing the tragedy. The question then is: What is a reasonable expenditure on annual premiums?
The authors then outline three funding scenarios — $10 million, $50 million, and $250 million. The first option wouldn't be enough to achieve NASA's goals as currently state. The second option would, however. In the third scenario, NASA could achieve its goals and also provide for a space mission and real-life testing of NEO mitigation strategies.
Policymakers, the authors say, must decide which is best.
Lawns may contribute to global warming
It's the sort of headline that would grab the attention of any city dweller: Urban 'Green' Spaces May Contribute to Global Warming. As it turns out, "green spaces" doesn't mean pocket parks or wooded areas. It refers to grass. Grass in parks and grass covering athletic fields.
And, although the study – from the University of California Irvine – looked at grass in parks, the conclusions may give pause to lawn-proud homeowners, too:
Dispelling the notion that urban “green” spaces help counteract greenhouse gas emissions, new research has found – in Southern California at least – that total emissions would be lower if lawns did not exist.
Why?
It's not so much the grass -- which does remove CO2 from the air and store carbon in the soil -- but the care that the lawn needs: applying fertilizer, mowing, irrigation, leaf blowing, etc., all of which produce emissions (four times greater than the amount of carbon stored).
The two athletic fields looked at by the researchers produced even worse results than grass (which hort. and ag, scientists always refer to as "turfgrass") in picnic areas.
Soccer and baseball fields get such hard use that they're often aerated and replanted: Due "to soil disruption by tilling and resodding – they didn’t trap nearly as much carbon as ornamental grass [the grass in picnic areas] but required the same emissions-producing care," the university says.
Previous research demonstrated the carbon-storing ability of lawns, but didn't compare that to the emissions that result from grooming and other care.
All this matters because grass currently covers almost 2 percent of the land in the continental United States.
Editor's Note: The Monitor's Environment section has a new URL. And there's also a new URL for our Bright Green blog. We hope you'll bookmark these and visit often.
