Today the BBC ran a story entitled “Grass Biofuels cut CO2 by 94%.”  This 94% is meant to be in comparison to fossil fuel, based on the fact that a recently grown biofuel, when burned, can only release as much CO2 as it absorbed when it was growing.  Thus biofuels are considered ”carbon neutral.”  The BBC story [...]

Earlier this month, in our post “Biofuel’s Potential,” we compared the best case biofuel yields today - about 10,000 barrels per square mile per year - to the best case biofuel yields in the future according to many biofuel experts - about 50,000 barrels per square mile per year.  To summarize, the difference between 10,000 barrels [...]

If the present is problematic, that doesn’t mean the future has no potential.  We have railed against the catastrophe in progress throughout the tropics, as the last rainforests are razed to grow sugar cane and oil palms.  Over and over, we’ve reminded readers to beware of carbon taxes and carbon trading schemes, because European carbon [...]

We have just published an interview with noted climate scientist Roger Pielke, Sr., a retired professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, and a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Since July 2005 he has written and maintained Climate Science, a blog that serves as a scientific forum for [...]

Now there’s a mouthful.  A relatively unheralded study released nearly two years ago by scientists at UC Berkeley explains the significance of this phenomenon on forests and climate.  In a report on the UC Berkeley news website entitled “Deep-rooted plants have much greater impact on climate than experts thought,” hydraulic redistribution is defined as the [...]

Once in a while you run across something that challenges just about everything you thought you knew.  “Terra preta” (Portuguese for “black earth”) are anomalous deposits of deep, rich soil found in large pockets of land throughout the Amazon.  Once thought to be 100% comprised of thin, fragile soil that would immediately desertify if the trees were removed, [...]

Today we caught up with Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor of environmental health at Columbia University, who is arguably the world’s leading proponent of “vertical farming” or, if you will, industrial scale hydroponic and aeroponic crop production within high-rise buildings.  If you go to his website www.verticalfarm.com, you will find a very in-depth body of [...]