b l a s t u l a reblog++

Is there value in knowledge for the sake of knowledge? My gut says “of course,” but when the question comes down to dollars and cents – and it does, in the case of funding for arts, science, and other often intangible cultural resources — it’s helpful to have a more practical argument on hand.

I thought about this issue a lot last weekend, when I traveled to North America’s epicenter of livable density to attend a sold-out screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival. The film was The Atom Smashers, a documentary about Illinois-based Fermilab and the international race to discover the Higgs boson. The film was produced by Andrew Suprenant at Chicago-based nonprofit 137 Films (COI: several members of the 137 team are good friends of mine).

The documentary does a thorough job of explaining the heady topic of atomic physics (with the help of smart line-drawing animations) and humanizing the scientists, who take tango lessons, raise kids and nurture dreams of rockstardom when not scrutinizing data in pursuit of the Higgs. The Fermilab physicists work with the Tevatraon, a four-mile ring equipped with high-charged magnets (and a comic-book-worthy name). The Tevatron accelerates infinitely small atomic particles to high speeds and then crashes them into one another so that they break apart, allowing the scientists to peek at what’s inside … and search for anything that they’re not expecting to see. What gives the story its drama is that as the Fermilab scientists are continuing their decades-old search, the CERN laboratory in Switzerland is building and readying its Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator that’s bigger, more modern and more powerful than the Tevatron. Once CERN begins to operate the LHC, the Fermilab team admits it’s unlikely they will be able to keep up.

What happens if they find the Higgs? Well, as the theory goes, the Higgs is the missing link that gives clusters of protons, neutrons and electrons the quality of mass … thus enabling life to exist as we know it. So if they find the Higgs, they get to understand one key foundational truth of the universe. And the United States gets to claim that ours was the first nation to know.

But is that enough? The Higgs is not the cure for cancer. It won’t bring clean water to impoverished populations in developing countries. It’s pure understanding for the sake of understanding. And as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that it’s difficult to set a budget for deep knowledge of the universe.

In recent years, the Fermilab physicists have watched their funding drop by hundreds of millions, as science funding in the United States was cut dramatically. In one interview during the film, experimental physicist Sheldon Stone (co-chair of the terminated Fermilab BTeV experiment) is concerned about the future of scientific discovery in general:

“We’ve had colleagues in Australia who are getting a lot of the grad students who used to apply to the U.S. The number of grad student applications to physics to the U.S. is going down dramatically. They’re going to other places in the world. Because other places in the world are investing in science.”

Stone, of course, had a personal interest at stake. But interviewee Natalie Angier, a science journalist for the New York Times, put the topic in a larger context that I think brings it closer to home:

I’ve talked to scientists who said when they were young, back in the 50s and 60s, science was seen as something “ooh, cool!” You know, you were, maybe, OK you were a little geeky, but you were cool! Because there was the space race, there was a lot going on, the future was beckoning, you had these world’s fairs, everyone was so excited — and that’s sort of gone away. And science is not seen as something that’s drawing the best minds. And why should it? Because if you become a scientist in this society, it guarantees you total obscurity!

As directors Monica Long Ross and Clayton Brown told the audience after the screening, the process of making of the film brought together two seemingly different constituencies – scientists and artists. These are groups who constantly have their hand out to donors, governments and institutional funders because their work simply doesn’t often earn enough money on its own. Some art, of course (like the most recent Batman), and some science (like the chemistry keeping my cereal crunchy in milk) earns plenty of dollars. But one question that’s worth asking is, what would the world be like if culture was a free market, and the less practical contributions to these liberal fields simply couldn’t fight hard enough to continue to be produced? And why are scientists — who, in my opinion, are part of our front lines in the most challenging crisis our planet has ever faced — rewarded with so little attention?

The documentary looks at the issue from a national standpoint, homed in primarily on this local story. But it made me think, and it’s worth saying especially in these scary economic times, that this is an important issue to examine and re-examine at the local, regional, national and global levels. What resources are important to us … and what secrets are worth the quest for understanding? It’ll be interesting to see what comes first: an answer to the Higgs theory, or a renewed pride in American science.

The Atom Smashers will be broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens on November 25. Details here.

Photos courtesy of 137 Films.

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in Features at 5:05 PM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by Julia Levitt


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by Julia Levitt from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog innovation

This article was written by Jeremy Faludi in July 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

You can’t do green design without green materials, and material innovations tend to come from chemists. Chemists also produce many products in their own right: paints, adhesives, cleaning products, whole industries. So what are chemists doing to save the world?

There’s currently one famous green chemist in the world: Michael Braungart (founder of EPEA, co-founder of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry and co-author of Cradle to Cradle). The world needs about a hundred more.

We’ve written before about legislation (mostly in the EU) tightening standards for toxics, and about the huge strides needed to close today’s three critical gaps: knowledge (not only in the general public and governments, but in the chemical industry itself), safety (prioritizing hazards and enacting limits), and technology (developing safer, greener alternatives). But legislation can be slow and fickle, and the industry has a huge amount of inertia; many well-funded groups such as the American Chemistry Council lobby for the status-quo. What are chemists doing to lead?

They’re doing a lot of things, as it turns out. Some researchers are developing alternative plastics that don’t use petrochemicals, some associations are prioritizing green within their members, whole green-chem institutes are being founded, and groups are trying to teach chemists to green their processes. Sustainable chemistry is a baby, born thirty years ago but just now starting to crawl; let’s help it get up on its feet.

Greener Plastics

What if that “new car smell” were the smell of fresh-baked potatoes or toasted corn? In the last five years, several bio-plastics manufacturers have come to market, and more are in the lab. Rodenburg Biopolymers in the Netherlands makes potato-starch plastic for disposable cutlery and packaging, and several companies in China sell corn-starch or potato-starch cutlery; enough that it has a buzzword, “spudware”. NatureWorks PLA has a solid enough toe-hold in the market to be old news to many. A less-well-known competitor is PHA by Mechabolix. PHA has much better engineering properties than PLA (you can’t make a cell phone case out of pure PLA, but you could make it out of PHA); however, it has two serious downsides. According to this excellent year 2000 Scientific American article (re-posted on mindfully.org), manufacturing PHA “would consume even more fossil resources than most petrochemical manufacturing routes.” The second downside is that manufacturing it cheaply requires genetic modification of the corn crops.

Last year, Richard Wool at the University of Delaware created chicken feather and soy composite circuit boards. Not only do they replace the non-recyclable, energy-intensive fiberglass and epoxy materials, they are “a lighter, stronger, cheaper product with high-speed electronic properties.” This is especially relevant because the circuit board often has the highest ecological impact of any part in a computer or other consumer electronics device–more than the plastic case, and sometimes more than the electronic components on the board. The chicken feather / soy composite could also be used as a structural material for other applications. For years, the university’s ACRES team (Affordable Composites from Renewable Sources) has been researching different chemical pathways and feedstocks to determine the highest-performance and lowest-cost ways of making plastic out of soy.

Perhaps the most exciting is making plastic that sequesters CO2. Two years ago, Geoff Coates’s lab at Cornell University developed a polystyrene-like plastic made out of CO2 and orange peels. Now he has a small startup company, Novomer, to commercialize it. As his Cornell group website says, “Although it is estimated that Nature uses CO2 to make over 200 billion tons of glucose by photosynthesis each year, synthetic chemists have had embarrassing little success in developing efficient catalytic processes that exploit this attractive raw material.” The pages go on to describe the catalysts they found, which allowed them to achieve their breakthroughs. Keep an eye out in the next couple years for PLC (Polylimonene Carbonate), as well as the other polymers and catalysts that Novomer is making.

Associations and Institutions

Some big-name organizations are starting to push green chemistry. There are green chemistry institutions and networks in over 20 countries around the world; the ACS Green Chemistry Institute in the US has a decent list of them. The British government’s Chemistry Innovation Network has a strong sustainability initiative called the “Crystal Faraday partnership”. They make the importance of their mission clear:

“In the developed world, it is recognised that only 7% of production materials used in a process end up in the final product and that 80% of products are discarded after a single use. It is essential, therefore, that we seek to reduce material resources and ensure that any materials released to the environment are not toxic, harmful or persistent.”

One of the largest and most respected groups of chemists, the UK’s Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), is celebrating its 50th year, and its 2007 Jubilee report “is not merely a report of past successes. It is much more a call to arms”. The IchemE’s chief executive said, “Over the next decade, chemical engineers’ work will be crucial as we tackle global issues such as climate change, waste reduction and access to clean water.” The report is all about the progress being made in environmental safety, energy, water, and other sustainability issues. Aimed at laypeople, it’s sprinkled with success stories and challenges. For instance, produce bags that allow the fruits or vegetables to ‘breathe’, increasing shelf life; this doesn’t sound exciting until they point out that “Longer life means produce can be transported by sea rather than road transport (which produces 228 times more CO2 emissions) and air freight (which produces 90 times more).” Another nugget: “Cafeteria food waste has a biogas production potential nearly ten times that of animal manure, making it an interesting potential source of renewable energy.” And even some biomimicry: they mentioned a new, safer method of industrial bleaching, based on an enzyme from a microbe discovered in Yellowstone National Park.

Training and Guidance

Currently there is little more than a trickle-down of green chemistry knowledge between companies, governments, NGOs, and universities. Companies’ chemical information is proprietary, and many environmental impacts have never been measured, much less publicized. Some universities and government agencies have data on a few specific chemicals, but lack a centralized clearinghouse of information. MBDC may have the best database of chemical environmental data, but it is private and expensive information. Opening up the faucets of these knowledge flows, and getting them all in one tub big enough to splash in, may be the most important step for the industry right now. Several groups are trying to crank the taps.

Britain’s Chemistry Innovation Network has a roadmap for sustainable technologies, including trends and drivers, specific needs of the industry, the business case, a review of technologies, and case studies. These are aimed at everyone in the chemical industry. UC Berkeley’s Framework for California Leadership in Green Chemistry Policy recommends policy directions for lawmakers. For consumers, the Ecology Center put together a consumer guide to toxic chemicals in cars, HealthyCar.org. The site ranks over 200 vehicles in terms of indoor air quality, as well as rating child car seats for brominated flame retardants, and explaining what chemicals to be concerned with and why.

Chemists looking to learn should check out the EPA’s 2002 textbook, Green Engineering: Environmentally Conscious Design of Chemical Processes. There’s also a newer EPA tool, the downloadable Green Chemistry Expert System. It’s a piece of software that “allows users to build a green chemical process, design a green chemical, or survey the field of green chemistry.” For a less technical introduction, they have a web page listing their Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry:

1. Prevent waste
2. Design safer chemicals and products
3. Design less hazardous chemical syntheses
4. Use renewable feedstocks
5. Use catalysts, not stoichiometric reagents
6. Avoid chemical derivatives
7. Maximize atom economy
8. Use safer solvents and reaction conditions:
9. Increase energy efficiency
10. Design chemicals and products to degrade after use
11. Analyze in real time to prevent pollution
12. Minimize the potential for accidents

Most of these principles are aimed at being less bad. Michael Braungart argues convincingly that we need to shoot higher than that, we need to aim to be good. Zero is not a positive outcome. But some of them are positive goals, and for those that aren’t, even if less-bad is as good as we can do for now, we need to keep a longer-term positive goal in mind.

Some awards are even being given for green chemistry: Britain’s Green Chemistry Network has had awards for seven years under various names with the IchemE. The US EPA has a Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award. The Royal Australian Chemical Institute also has a Green Chemistry Challenge Award.

The Future of Chemistry

Will the chemical market start to go green by itself, as a few industries are starting to do? Not yet. Michael Wilson, a researcher at UC Berkeley, told me that “green chemistry entrepreneurs have a difficult time breaking into the market because there are fundamental data gaps in chemical toxicity that prevent buyers from choosing safer chemicals… The market is therefore operating very inefficiently and will require corrections through public policy.” He said “by requiring that producers generate and distribute standardized, robust information on chemical toxicity (for use by downstream industry, business, consumers, workers) we will open new markets for green chemistry entrepreneurs.” This is the knowledge gap mentioned at the beginning, which the groups described above are working to close.

Wilson was hopeful about green chemistry entrepreneurs he knows, which “have some brilliant products supported by solid data - that reduce costs significantly and also make a substantial environmental contribution.” (For instance, Advanced Biocatalytics, and Novozyme.)

But before the market will steer itself towards green, we need to also close the safety gap: “regulations (such as RoHS, WEEE and the REACH) [need] to force clean technology change (that won’t happen any other way).” And finally, he argues “state investment in green chemistry research, education, technical assistance, and training will be essential.” Such a combination — new regulations, targeted research and bold commitments to innovation — will close the technology gap, giving us alternatives and kick-starting new industries on the right path to a bright green future.

Creative Commons Image Credit

Green Chemistry: Changing An Industry is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:24 AM)

Originally
from WorldChanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from WorldChanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog innovation

This article was written by Alex Lowe in June 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

To understand the subtleties and difficulties in ecological footprinting, think of accounting. In the past few years, Enron’s collapse and the scandals that surrounded WorldCom gave people a small glimpse into the intricacies of accountancy. To the uninitiated, the swirl of news reports circa 2003 must have posed several questions: How hard can accounting really be? How can any grey areas exist in an activity as seemingly concrete and dry as counting beans?

But grey areas abound, and the task of accounting for nature’s resources as well as their depletion from human demand is, to use the colloquial, a doozy. How can one compare the value of a single fish to that of a bushel of corn or a California redwood? How does that relationship change from the exhaust pouring out of your car or the dishwater circling your drain?

The methodology for answering these questions in ecological footprint analysis (EFA) is often criticized for being incomplete and for underestimating humanity’s true impact on the environment. In response, researchers at Redefining Progress have made several amendments to the standard methodology, and given their creation the handle ‘Ecological Footprint 2.0.’ (Best explained by the paper Footprint of Nations, 2005 Update.)

The first improvement that Redefining Progress made is including the total surface area of the earth to estimate biocapacity, whereas the earlier methodology (hereafter called ‘EF 1.0′) used only the accessible regions and, most glaringly, left out the open ocean. EF 2.0 also sets aside 13.4% of the world’s biocapacity for wild species. This number comes from a procedure called global gap analysis and reflects the amount of biocapacity needed for 55% of significantly threatened species to survive. EF 1.0 assumed that humans would occupy every last bioproductive hectare which leads to an artificially smaller ecological footprint and leaves no room for other species. In other words, the future envisioned by EF 1.0 has precious little work for nature photographers.

EF 2.0 also diverges from EF 1.0 in estimating the global food supply. EF 1.0 uses estimates of potential agricultural productivity furnished by the Global Agricultural Ecological Zone (GAEZ). Potential agricultural productivity measures the potential yield of food-energy from farmland in kilo-calories. While widely used, some researchers criticize this method because of its discrepancies with measurements of actual yields, such as those calculated in certain parts of Africa where actual production was significantly lower that potential production. EF 2.0 calculates the total amount of energy stored in a food source and subtracts the respiration of primary producers. This technique, called net primary productivity (NPP) estimates the full amount of available food-energy, and is a more accurate procedure for footprint needs than EF 1.0’s potential agricultural productivity.

Other researchers have added to the standard EF 1.0 methodology in different ways. Experts at the Global Footprint Network have improved estimates of the footprint that international trade creates by making use of the U.N.’s COMTRADE database, which tracks more than 600 products as they move between nations. These experts have also made the leap of reporting time-trends in the Living Planet Report 2006 in units of constant 2003 global hectares. This improvement ‘adjusts for inflation’ so that people can compare the bioproductivity of two different years on the same scale.

The UK’s Best Foot Forward research group throws two trademarked methodologies called ‘Stepwise’ and ‘EcoIndex’ into the mix, which break down the data from the National Footprint Accounts into several “categories of impact,” including direct energy, materials & waste, food & drink, personal transport, water, and built land. Each of these categories can be further reduced to smaller components which let experts zero in on which objects and behaviors in everyday life press down on the environment with the most relevant footprints. For example, the study City Limits focused on the footprint of London and found that eating meat has a footprint of almost six million gha, over 24 times the size of fruit’s footprint. If Londoners swore off meat, that change alone would decrease their footprint significantly.

But there are other ways that future research could refine these methods. For example, still missing from EF 2.0 and other methods is a way to account for the footprint of myriad other pollutants besides carbon. Presently, carbon is the only pollutant that ecological footprints consider. (Not surprising, considering the gravity of global warming) But there are many other pollutants that have significant deleterious effects on the environment, such as dioxins, mercury and endocrine-disruptors. With countries such as China and India growing massively in their production, these pollutants will make their impact felt by the environment as well as human health. Some pollutants, like radioactive waste, are not absorbed by the environment at all, and more refined measures must also take them into account. The work also excludes behaviors that harm ecosystems’ future health, such as soil erosion and overfishing. Hopefully this will be one of the directions that research takes as scientists around the world improve their estimate of humanity’s footprint.

Ecological Footprint 2.0 is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:42 AM)

Originally
from WorldChanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

to footprint

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from WorldChanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment