The Kyoto Protocol and GHG

The Kyoto Protocol is an international treaty aiming to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions believed to cause global warming and climate change, the most pressing environmental issues of our time. The treaty requires developed countries to reduce GHG emissions to below 1990 levels, but does not set binding limits on developing countries such as China.
However, the parties to the Kyoto Protocol recognized that reductions in GHG emissions can often be achieved more economically in developing countries than in developed countries themselves. Therefore the parties created the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
The CDM enables developing country parties who carry out projects that reduce GHG emissions to receive credits for these reductions. These credits can be sold to developed country parties, which use them to offset their own emission reduction requirements. For the developed country party this is often a more cost-effective option than reducing reductions from their own domestic operations.

The above introduction to the Kyoto Protocol is taken from Arreon Carbon's website. You can find more information at http://www.arreon.com/

Butter or Guns

Whenever a nation sets out to war against another, it is forced to reallocate its resources, as you can either use your time, material and ingenuity to produce a plough or a sword. (The cost in human blood is another expense.)

Americans - as all of us westerners! - have grown so wealthy and lethargic that we don't really feel the immediate financial impact of the current war in Iraq. Partly because nobody pays close attention to government (as we should) and partly because the war is not financed by increased taxes but by loans from China and Japan (who buy the US treasury notes!).

It is interesting to look at the cost of the Iraq war, a war that was supposed to finance itself with re-invigorated oil exports from Iraq's abundant deposits (the 3rd largest in the world).

Ironically though, Iraqi oil is off the global market since the US invasion.

Ignoring the impact on the oil price which the war undoubtedly helped drive up and which is estimated to have cost US citizens 150 billion USD, the war against Saddam Hussein costs a whooping 200 billion USD annually. At the time of writing, this has added up to 700 billion USD in direct spending. Again, let's ignore the additional future costs of veteran's disability pensions, loss of productivity, etc. and only look at the 200 billion per year of direct spending.

The human mind is not capable of imagining such astronomic figures, therefore I would like to bring this amount into perspective by looking at how much real 'butter' would cost by comparison: (I take my figures from an article by David Leonhardt in the IHT of Jan 18, 2007 and Lester Brown's book "Plan B)

Universal Healthcare: 100 billion annually
(all people covered in the US)

Universal preschool: 35 billion
(early childhood education for every child in the USA: half days for 3 year olds and full day for 4 year olds)

Immunizations: 0,6 billion
(for the world's children against measels, whooping cough, tetanus, polio and diphteria)

Reforesting the earth: 6 billion

Protecting biological diversity: 31 billion

School lunch programs for the 44 poorest countries: 6 billion
(Apparently the most effective population control is educating women. To get poor families also to send girls to school, it has been proven that school lunches is the most effective incentive. I am not excluding boys from this program, but when forced to make a choice, poor families send boys to school, not girls.)

I could go on an on.


200 billion dollars is a huge sum. Throw a tenth of that amount at solar research or at subsidies of renewable energy generation and you'd make a real dent in green house gas emissions and global warming, not to mention increased independence from OPEC.

Wind Power is Exciting - and so is the human mind

I have been an avid fan, supporter and investor in wind power. Like most people, I think of windmills when talking about generation of electricity from wind power, but recently I came across these exciting futuristic-looking images of different approaches to harnessing the power of the wind.

I copied text and images from a site called http://news.com.com/ which is loaded with interesting stuff and I can highly recommend a visit there!

In another twist on wind power, inventors are designing kites and balloons to generate electricity.
The wind industry is undergoing rapid growth as utilities, prompted by government incentives, seek out cleaner sources of power generation. Typically, these commercial-grade projects involve large wind turbines, which stand 100 to 400 feet high.

Kites and balloons are not widely used, and they face some of the same challenges as traditional wind turbines, such as bird deaths and complaints over location. But that isn't stopping people from coming up with "flying" wind generators.
One company, Magenn Power, intends to build a helium-filled balloon that resembles a giant cog wheel.
As the wind passes over it, the system generates electricity through an onboard generator. Power is transferred to the ground via its tethers, according to company Chief Executive Mac Brown.






The advantage that high-flying machines have over traditional wind turbines is that balloons can benefit from more steady air flow, Brown said. The company's Power Air Rotor product would fly at 1,000 feet.
Magenn, which is seeking $5 million in initial funding, intends to sell a 4-kilowatt system to remote villages in Pakistan and India that don't have electricity. Over time, its plan is to develop systems that are tied to the electricity grid to customers in North America and Europe.


"The value proposition we have is getting wind power anywhere," Brown said. "With turbines, you have to site them on coastal or high-wind areas."
Kites, too, are making a go at more than recreational flying.
A company called KiteShip has developed a kite designed to help motor a commercial ship. The kite, whose largest size would be bigger than a football field, can cut a ship owner's fuel cost and pollution emissions by 20 percent, according to the company. A similar system is under development at Germany's SkySails, which says its oversize kite will be pulling a cargo ship sometime this year.









An Italian sensor manufacturer has proposed the Kite Wind Generator Project (KiteGen), which also aims to capture the power of high-altitude wind.




The research project imagines that power plants could be created with kites attached to a giant revolving "merry-go-round" structure.
Briza Technologies, meanwhile, has proposed what it calls the Hovering Wind Turbine, which is also meant to capture faster, high-altitude winds.



The idea behind the hovering turbine is that it would be used as an alternative to turbines in offshore wind farms.
Another advocate of capturing the force of faster winds is Sky WindPower. The company proposes that systems be placed in altitudes of 15,000 feet, according to the company Web site.