Recently, though, the driving-Fords gig took a slightly different twist: I was invited to take part in a Green Driving Challenge. I and four others from Regina spent a couple of days each with a Lincoln MKZ Hybrid. The goal was to get the best gas mileage (er, kilometrage?) you could manage. The drive with the best results would win a fabulous prize.

Not having driven a hybrid before, I was a bit unprepared for their unusual (compared to ordinary cars) behavior.

To begin with, there’s the fact that when you turn the ignition key, the engine doesn’t start. The dash lights up (does it ever), but nothing else seems to happen: if you don’t remember you’re in a hybrid, your first thought is that you have the car in gear instead of in Park. But in fact, the car has started: it’s just that it begins running on its batteries, and doesn’t get that nasty old gasoline engine involved until you pull away from the curb.

Similarly, the engine shuts down whenever you come to a stop at an intersection, also a bit disconcerting, especially if, like me, you once owned a car that used to do the same thing back in the days when that was definitely a bug and not a feature, since it had no electric motor to get you moving again.

At first I drove the car rather normally. This produced alarming results on the instant gas-usage meter on the right side of the display, right next to the cute little cartoon of growing leaves (see, the more “green” you’re driving, the more leaves appear: as I said, cute, but just a little, um, cartoonish; I could do without it, myself, despite being fully in touch with my inner child). I soon realized that you could use that gas-usage meter to keep your numbers low, but I think I realized it too late: although I managed a 6.7 l/100k final result, the winner of the challenge outdid me by about a litre/100k. In the end, I tied for second.

The trick to being uber-efficient? Not getting in a hurry, and letting the electrics do as much of the work as possible getting the car up to speed. Indeed, the only way I got down to 6.7 l/100k was to take a Zen approach to driving: step lightly on the accelerator, and then meditate while slowly easing up to the Nirvana of the speed limit. It’s a relaxing way to drive on non-busy streets, but not very practical on a busy city street with people breathing down your tailpipe.

Still, there’s no question it’s a low-mileage vehicle, and beyond that, a very pleasant car to drive and to ride in. And however I may feel about the cartoon leaves, they do make you think about how you’re driving…which can’t help but make you a little bit greener.

After all, even if you’re not formally involved in a green driving challenge, driving green is its own reward.

(Oh, sorry about the copied-from-the-Web images: I was so busy driving green I forgot to take any photos of the car while I had it.)

But there’s an obvious problem with this. That stuff we’re turning into fuel is also food for humans and feed for animals.

(And as an aside, how come we always call it “animal feed” as opposed to “animal food”? And why don’t we ever refer to “human feed”? Hmm?)

A lot of the plant is wasted when you grow crops for fuel or food. The leaves and stems, with their tough cell walls made of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin, are more of a nuisance than anything else. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a use for what is now plowed under or burned?

There is, or there soon will be, thanks to research aimed at using bacteria to convert this “lignocellulosic biomass” into fuel in its own right.

A just-published article in Nature reveals the state of the art. Titled “Microbial production of fatty-acid-derived fuels and chemicals from plant biomass,” it describes the successful engineering of the common bacterium Excherichia coli–better known as E. coli and generally in the news when it contaminates water or meat and makes people sick–into a producer of biodiesel.

One of the co-authors of the research study is Jay Keasling, chief executive officer for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). “We’ve got a billion tons of biomass every year that goes unused,” he says, adding that fuel produced from that biomass could make up for as much as half of U.S. oil imports, turning “the U.S. Midwest into the new ‘Mideast’.”

That’s not hyperbole: by one estimate, lignicellulosic biomass could produce more than 7,500 litres of renewable petroleum per acre.

The researchers modified the E. coli genome, inserting genetic code for the production of an enzyme called hemicellulase, which can break down hemicellulose into smaller sugar molecules which E. coli can then turn into fatty acids.

E. coli normally produces only as much of the fatty acids as it needs for its own cell membranes. But the researchers’ E. coli were further modified so that the fatty acids just kept coming, turning each bacterium into a microscopic biodiesel factory.

The process takes place in fermentation vats, into which the bacteria expel little drops of oil. Turn off the impellers, and the oil floats to the top, where it can be skimmed off.

Even better, by tweaking the process, chemical products ranging from solvents to lubricants to jet fuel could conceivably be produced.

Of course, it’s important to note that the research reported in Nature is just a proof of concept. There’s no commercially viable process for doing any of this yet–but Keasling hopes there will be within a very few years. Work will continue as the researchers search for ways to make use of even more of what’s in the feedstock–not just the hemicellulose.

There’s already a company standing ready to market fuels and other microbe-produced chemicals. Based in California, LS9, founded by a geneticist and a plant biologist, helped fund the research reported in Nature. LS9 points out that the crude oil produced by bioengineered bacteria has none of the contaminating sulfur of regular crude oil, so it’s cleaner. And despite its unorthodox origins, it can be refined like any other crude oil in a standard refinery.

There are other companies pursuing their own paths. Amyris Biotechnologies, for example, says it has also created bacteria capable of providing renewable hydrocarbon-based fuels. There are many more.

Why would this be preferable to ethanol production as it is currently carried out? Aside from the aforementioned fact that we’re presently turning food into fuel, hydrocarbon fuels are more efficient than ethanol, packing about 30 percent more energy into any given quantity. And even better, they take less energy to produce: ethanol production, which involves distilling, requires 65 percent more energy than hydrocarbon production does.

Perhaps the oil industry will slowly evolve away from the purview of drilling companies and into the realm of agriculture.

As for the marketing slogan for this new germ-produced form of fuel, I think I’ve come up with a winner: “E. coli. It’s not just for food poisoning anymore.”

What do you think?

In 2007-2008, 36 percent of apiaries surveyed by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that some of their colonies had simply…disappeared, a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD.

In the most recent survey, covering September 2008 to April 2009, 26 percent of the apiaries reported that some of their colonies were lost to CCD, a lower number but still alarming: not just to beekeepers, for whom these kinds of losses are economically unsustainable, but for those of us who like to eat, because bees pollinate 80 percent of fruits and vegetables, and a much as a third of the food we consume relies on bees being trucked around the country to provide this service.

Hypotheses as to what might be causing CCD have ranged all over the map, including one that cropped up immediately, got a lot of press, was generally considered debunked, and has now cropped up again: radiation from cell phone towers.

The new round of “cell phones are killing the bees” stories arose from a single short news item out of India claiming that a study by Dr. Sainudeen Pattazhy, an environmentalist and zoology teacher at Sree Narayana College in Kerala, had shown that electromagnetic radiation from mobile towers and cell phones had the potential to kill worker bees. Dr. Pattazhy went so far as to say that “if measures are not taken to check mushrooming of mobile towers, bees could be wiped out from Kerala within a decade.”

How widespread was the story? I heard about it when my eight-year-old daughter announced that she’d been told in class that cell phones are killing the bees.

Naturally, I started Googling.

The best response I found was from Kenneth R. Foster, a Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania whose own research is focused on the biomedical applications and health effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields—the kind of fields produced by cell phone towers.

Professor Foster, not without some difficulty, tracked down Dr. Pattazhy and asked for information about the study, receiving finally via email “a two-page document that consisted almost entirely of editorializing with his views about the hazards of radiofrequency energy.” The only actual experiment mentioned consisted of placing mobile devices hear hives for a few days. Dr. Pattazhy did not respond to Professor Foster’s requests for information on “study design, methods of assessment, what controls he used in the study, hypotheses tested, statistical analysis of data, or other aspects of a valid study,” causing Foster to conclude, “there was NO STUDY.”

Foster himself quotes a 1981 study published in the journal Bioelectromagnetics on the effects of radiofrequency energy on honeybees, conducted as part of an assessment of the potential environmental impact of proposed solar-power satellites that would beam high-intensity microwaves back to earth.  That study found no evidence of any negative impact on bees exposed to radiation at frequencies similar to those used by cellphones—and at much higher power densities.

What was particularly interesting about the claim from Dr. Pattazhy is that it seems to have gotten widespread media attention in the same week in which another press release came out with the headline “Genomic Study Yields Plausible Cause of Colony Collapse Disorder.”

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers from the University of Illinois and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the study found fragmented ribosomal RNA (genetic material from ribosomes, the factories inside cells in which proteins are made) in the guts of honey bees from hives afflicted by CCD at much higher levels than in bees from healthy hives.

“Picorna-like” viruses are known to attack the ribosomes of bees, hijacking them to produce viruses instead of proteins, and U.S. bees are heavily infected, possibly due in part to the fact that the varroa mite, accidentally introduced to the country in 1986, carries these viruses.

Bees with compromised ribosomal function can’t cope as well with many of the other proposed causes of CCD, including pesticides, fungal and bacterial infection, or inadequate nutrition, or with the stress of being carted around the country to provide pollination.

Maybe it even leaves them vulnerable to cell-phone radiation…but I doubt it.

Fermenting the sugars found in corn or other grains into ethanol has been around for a long time, of course, and it’s pretty much a proven technology. On the other hand, do we really want to be turning food into fuel?

More promising have been recent advances in turning lignocellulose, the stuff that makes up the cell walls in plants, into ethanol and other fuels: that would allow us to use grasses, wood chips, straw and other non-food as biomass.

Now comes word of a fuel-producing technology that doesn’t require biomass of any sort: just carbon dioxide and sunlight. And no, I’m not talking about trees.

On Monday, a Massachussetts company called Joule Biotechnologies announced that it has the technology to convert carbon dioxide directly into transportation fuels and chemicals. Not only that, they say, “this eco-friendly, direct-to-fuel conversion requires no agricultural land or fresh water.”

The company was founded in 2007, and relies on something it calls “Helioculture” technology, mixing, as the New York Times’s article on the announcement puts it, “CO2, Slime and Sunshine.”

More specifically, the company grows genetically engineered microorganisms in specially designed bioreactors. The microorganisms are photosynthetic, able to use energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide and water into ethanol or hydrocarbon fuels.

The process works well in the laboratory, so the real question is if it can be scaled up to an industrial-sized plant. To find out, Joule plans to break ground on a modular pilot plant early in 2010 that will produce ethanol (trademarked as SolarEthanol), and the following year hopes to begin construction on a commercial-scale operation that can also produce hydrocarbons and associated chemicals, “several of which have already been demonstrated at laboratory scale.

It’s looking for sites near CO2 producers such as coal-fired power plants and cement kilns, with locations in Texas, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico, places with lots of sun and lots of space, under consideration

Open spaces are needed because a large plant would look a lot like a solar array: a huge field covered with panels, except these panels, rather than producing electricity, would produce liquid fuels

The company estimates that a single acre covered with its “SolarConverter” panels (flat, transparent, and about the size of a sheet of plywood) could produce 20,000 gallons of ethanol at a cost of $50 a barrel. (That makes it competitive with oil, although it’s worth noting that that price includes existing subsidies: what the unsubsidized cost would be, I don’t know.)

At that level of production, if you built enough plants to cover, in total, an area the size of the Texas panhandle, you could meet all of the United States’ transportation fuel needs.

In Technology Review, writer Kevin Bullis notes that the company’s technology sounds similar to that of biofuels produced by algae—but the company says it is not using algae, and its stated production estimates are an order of magnitude greater than algae-based biofuels, which are estimated to have potential yields of only 2,000 to 6,000 gallons per acre.

Its estimated cost of production is also only a fraction of that of algae-based biofuels, which currently would require crude oil to rise to $800 a barrel in order to be competitive.

Besides, algae produces oils that have to be refined, whereas Joule says its microorganisms will produce ethanol or hydrocarbons directly. The Joule microorganisms also excrete the fuels, whereas algae has to be harvested and processed to extract oil.

Too good to be true? Maybe. But there are other companies in the race to develop the same kinds of technology. And with the push to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and move away from fossil fuels, that race is only going to get hotter.

So remember the name: Joule Biotechnologies.

Someday, its genetically modified critters could be cheerfully churning out the fuel that powers your car.

An article in the November 1 issue of Science sets out the challenges. Entitled “Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet,” it was written by a team of 18 scientists and engineers from major universities (including McGill), U.S. government laboratories and agencies, and even Exxon Mobil. The U.S. Department of Energy funded the project.

The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from 275 to 370 parts per million in the past century. Unchecked, it will pass 550 parts per million this century. Climate models and the study of past climate changes indicate that that could warm Earth’s climate as much as it cooled during the last Ice Age. Stabilizing the level of CO2 lower than that will require “Herculean efforts,” the authors conclude.

The world today requires 12 terawatts (12 trillion watts) of power generating capacity, of which 85 percent is fossil-fueled. Power requirements continue to soar as the world’s economy continues to grow. Stabilizing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere by mid-century while permitting the current level of economic growth will require 30 terawatts of carbon-free power production, the study estimates–and we don’t have the technology to achieve that.

Possible sources of carbon-free power include hydrogen, biomass, solar thermal and photovoltaic, wind, hydropower, ocean thermal, geothermal and tidal.

Hydrogen sounds good, but doesn’t exist in geological reservoirs, which means it is usually extracted from hydrocarbons–and per unit of heat generated, more CO2 is produced by making hydrogen from fossil fuel than by burning the fossil fuel directly.

The other sources mentioned currently provide less than one percent of the world’s power, and all suffer from the same problem: low power production per area. For example, producing 10 terawatts of energy using biomass would require more than 10 percent of the Earth’s surface, roughly equivalent to the area covered by all of human agriculture, and a solar array that could produce 10 terawatts would cover a square 470 kilometres on a side. (All the photovoltaic cells shipped from 1982 to 1998 would cover a square only three kilometers on a side.)

Even if we could scale up solar arrays and windmill farms to meet our needs, existing power grids, designed for centralized power plants, couldn’t manage the loads. So another challenge we face this century may be the complete reengineering of our electrical distribution systems.

Another way to harness solar energy is the space solar power satellite, a huge solar array in space that transmits power to Earth by microwave. But getting 10 terawatts of power to Earth by this method would require 660 orbiting solar arrays, each the size of the island of Manhattan. Launch costs, note the study’s authors with admirable understatement, are likely to be “high.”

What about nuclear power? Well, fission, our current method of nuclear energy generation, not only creates radioactive waste and lends itself to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, it’s based on a non-renewable resource, uranium. Meeting the mid-century power needs using fission, the study’s authors estimate, would use up the world’s known reserves in just six to 30 years.

The best hope for a long-term energy solution remains fusion. Fission releases energy through by splitting a large atom (that of uranium); fusion, which powers the sun, releases energy by fusing two small atoms (of forms of hydrogen) together. Fusion powers the sun. Current research has brought fusion power close to the break-even point, at which the amount of energy produced by the fusion reaction is equal to the amount of energy required to bring about the fusion reaction. But fusion power plants are still years away.

The study’s authors believe a massive Apollo-style research and development program will be required to ready new power sources for the world in time to stabilize the CO2 levels in the atmosphere at a reasonable level…and time’s a-wasting.

“Combating global warming by radical restructuring of the global energy system could be the technology challenge of the century,” the authors conclude. “…Stabilizing climate is not easy. At the very least, it requires political will, targeted research and development and international cooperation. Most of all, it requires the recognition that…the fossil fuel greenhouse effect is an energy problem that cannot be simply regulated away.”

Primitive, industrial-revolution technology has gotten us into this mess; it will take advanced, futuristic technology to get us out.

Judging by the 2001 Michelin Challenge Bibendum, some of us will, but many won’t.

The Challenge Bibendum (Bibendum is the real name of the made-of-tires Michelin Man) offers manufacturers an opportunity to demonstrate alternative-fuel vehicles in real-world conditions.

This year’s challenge drew 27 production cars and 18 prototype cars. It included a critique of the vehicles’ design at the Automobile Club of Southern California, a performance test at the California Speedway in Fortuna, and a 430-kilometre drive to Las Vegas.

Several different power sources were used. Six cars in the competition didn’t use an alternative fuel at all–they used gasoline. Technological improvements continue to make gasoline engines cleaner–a new car in Europe, for instance, emits only one 10th of the harmful gases emitted by the average eight-year-old car–and more efficient, which means gasoline engines will continue to be used in cars for years to come.

Two entries were powered by biofuels, fuel made from renewable resources such as plants. Ethanol is the most widely used biofuel; currently it’s usually added to gasoline to improve performance and reduce pollution.

Four entries made use of diesel technology. Although diesel engines have been around since the earliest days of the automobile, they’re gaining renewed attention because they’re more efficient than gasoline engines and emit lower levels of unburned hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide, and because of new technology that boosts performance and fuel economy. Further work needs to be done, however, to nitrogen oxide and soot emissions. It’s estimated that 50 percent of light vehicles sold in Western Europe will be diesel powered within the next few years (in the United States it’s expected to be only three percent).

There were nine electric cars in the competition. Eight were vehicles already in production, but even so, most analysts think that for the foreseeable future, electric cars will only be used for people who don’t have to drive very far. Although battery technology is improving, electric cars’ range is still limited and they require lengthy recharging.

Nine hybrid cars were entered in the competition; they combined small, fuel-efficient gasoline engines with electric motors. Hybrids have more range than pure electric cars, because the gas engine keeps the batteries charged. They even capture and use energy normally wasted as brake heat. The downside: two heavy, expensive powertrains in the same small car.

Propane powered only one prototype entry in this year’s challenge. While propane is a very clean fuel and results in reduced maintenance costs, is also has a lower energy content than gasoline, which means you need a much bigger storage tank, which adds cost and weight.

Compressed Natural Gas powered four production and two prototype vehicles. CNG is the cleanest fossil fuel of all, inexpensive, and gentler to an engine than gasoline. But, like propane, it requires a big storage tank, and even with one, can’t match the range of a gasoline-powered vehicle.

Hydrogen, which burns nearly pollution-free, producing primarily water vapor, powered two prototype vehicles (including one of the most unusual a replica of a 1965 427 Cobra!). The big problem with hydrogen is that it must be compressed and stored in bulky tanks, and provides even less energy by volume than propane or CNG. It’s also expensive.

Hydrogen doesn’t have to be burned directly, though; instead, it can be used to produce electricity in a fuel cell, some version of which powered nine prototype vehicles from seven different manufacturers. Fuel cells are two to three times more efficient than a gasoline engine, produce no emissions except water, and are proven technology already in use in spacecraft. Until recently, their cost and size precluded their use in automobiles, but new cheaper, smaller fuel cells are now available. In fact, most major manufacturers plan to have fuel cell-powered cars in production soon, some within a year or so.

On the down side, fuel cells are still expensive, the cylinders to store hydrogen are still big, costly and heavy, and, of course, there is no network of hydrogen fueling stations. That probably means the first fuel cell-powered cars will have on-board devices that create hydrogen from gasoline or methane–but that adds complexity, weight and cost.

Cars using every type of power received “A” grades in some aspect of the challenge, indicating no one alternative power source holds a clear advantage. But Michelin’s Challenge Bibendum shows that there are other ways to power cars than with the gasoline engines we’ve been using for more than a century–and hope for cleaner air in the future.

The term “greenhouse effect” is usually used today in reference to a predicted gradual warming of the Earth caused by an increase in various gases in the atmosphere, primarily due to human activity.

Really, however, the greenhouse effect has been at work for eons, which is a good thing, because it’s what keeps Earth’s mean surface temperature high enough (17 degrees Celsius) for life to thrive.

About 40 percent of the energy we receive from the sun arrives at such short wavelengths that it zips through the atmosphere unimpeded. It warms the ground, however, which then radiates heat back at a much longer wavelength–a wavelength which certain gases, especially carbon dioxide and methane, absorb. This heats them, and thus warms the entire atmosphere.

The amount of greenhouse gases and the mean surface temperature have varied over Earth’s lifetime. The temperature has been so cold much of the planet was covered with ice, and so warm sub-tropical flora and fauna flourished at the poles.

Currently, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is on the rise, due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels and the cutting down of forests (trees remove carbon dioxide from the air, but once they’re dead, they release carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere as they burn or decompose). Before the Industrial Revolution, the atmosphere contained about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Today, it contains 360 parts per million, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an assembly of Earth’s top climatologists, estimates that by the end of the 21st century, that level could be anywhere from 480 to 800 ppm.

Methane, produced when bacteria decompose organic matter, has also increased due to human activities, including raising livestock, wetland rice farming and the disposal and treatment of garbage and human and animal wastes.

The IPCC estimates that carbon dioxide levels of 560 ppm could cause an increase of 1.1 to 3.3 degrees Celsius in the planet’s average temperature next century. Considering Canadian winters, that doesn’t sound too bad or too extreme. But consider: during the last ice age, when three kilometres of ice covered most of North America, the average temperature was only 2.5 to 5 degrees cooler than it is now. Even slight changes can have huge effects.

The possible consequences are frightening. Some forests could become grasslands; some grasslands (southern Saskatchewan, perhaps?) deserts. Longer, hotter summers and shorter, milder winters could be punctuated by more extreme storms, leading to floods and other weather disasters. Species unable to adapt could become extinct; familiar songbirds and animals like polar bears and manatees could vanish forever. Coastal cities could suffer from rising sea levels and more powerful hurricanes. Mosquitoes could become more plentiful, and carry tropical diseases like malaria and dengue fever further north. Crop failures could result in a huge worldwide refugee problem.

Environmentalists can point to plenty of other horrendous possibilities. What they can’t do–yet–is prove that human-induced warming has already begun.

It’s true that the IPCC stated in 1995 that “the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.” It reached that conclusion because the average temperature of the planet has increased by about half a degree this century, and because that warming has occurred in the fashion predicted by the most sophisticated computer models.

However, since then, new models and new discoveries have added new uncertainty. Many scientists believe it will be another 10 years before we can say unambiguously that we have seen the “fingerprint” of human activity in global warming.

Those who fear the economic consequences of possible legislated efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions point to this uncertainty as good reason to hold off on any action. But even most of the scientists who say human-induced warming has not yet begun don’t doubt that it will. This century’s warming apparently falls within natural variations in climate–but that doesn’t mean humans didn’t cause it. And out basic understanding of the greenhouse effect tells us that increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere must eventually cause warming.

As a result, governments worldwide are faced with an unpleasant choice: do nothing, or too little, and face possible catastrophe, or reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, and face the wrath of an inconvenienced public.

I don’t envy them–but for all our sakes, I hope they make the right choice.

In the most common kind of landfill, trash is dumped in a hole in the ground, spread out in layers, compacted as tightly as possible, and then covered with soil. Each completely covered, compacted unit of waste is called a cell; in Regina’s landfill, by way of example, each cell consist of three metres of garbage covered with a metre of dirt. Adjoining cells, all the same height, make up a “lift”; lifts are built on top of each other until the landfill is complete.

As soon as the garbage is in the landfill, it begins to change.

The first change is compaction. Not only is it compacted as it’s deposited, but as more and more garbage is piled on top of it, it compacts further. Even a well-compacted landfill may settle 15 percent; a poorly compacted one may settle 25 percent.

Next, some of the garbage begins to decompose, passing through three different stages, each involving different bacteria. At first, it’s aerobic bacteria (which means they use oxygen, not that they wear spandex and sweat a lot) who eat away at the waste, producing carbon dioxide, water and nitrate. As the oxygen is used up, anaerobic (non-oxygen-using) microbes get into the act, producing acids (which begin to dissolve some of the inorganic material) and more carbon dioxide. Finally, methane-producing anaerobic bacteria take over, turning the acids into methane and carbon dioxide.

This produces a lot of gas: roughly 4,000 cubic feet per ton of waste. Some escapes at once into the atmosphere; some is trapped in the landfill, which is why modern landfills have gas wells drilled into them. In fact, in some locations, plans are afoot to use garbage-produced methane to generate electricity.

A landfill enters the final stage of decomposition when all the readily degradable organic material has been broken down–a process that can take years, or even decades. Methane production decreases, and the landfill is said to have stabilized.

But the garbage still hasn’t gone away. Because landfills are so tightly sealed away–especially modern landfills, which use extensive synthetic lining materials to prevent leakage–a lot of our trash ends up mummified.

The University of Arizona’s Project Garbage analyzed city landfill sites. Even after two decades, up to half of the organic material had not decayed. Bananas, carrot tops, onion parings and hot dogs were still recognizable 20 years after they were dumped. Newspapers clearly proclaimed the latest news from the war in Europe. Apparently only about 10 percent of landfill material biodegrades quickly; the rest changes at a snail’s pace.

Project Garbage turned up some other interesting facts. For example, most people think fast-food packaging, polystyrene foam and disposable diapers are major constituents of garbage. In fact, less than one-third of one percent of the total volume of landfill garbage is fast-food packaging; expanded polystyrene foam accounts for no more than one percent, and disposable diapers approximately 1.4 percent. Plastics in general account for only 16 percent of landfill volume: paper, on the other hand, accounts for a whopping 40 percent.

It’s also not true that we’re producing garbage at an ever-rising rate. In fact, we’re still generating roughly the same amount of waste per person as we did 100 years ago–it’s just changed. A century ago, the average North American generated 1,200 pounds of coal ash per year from home stoves and furnaces, and a lot more food had to be thrown away because of the lack of packaging and refrigeration.

Nor are we in danger of being buried in garbage. At the current rate, all of America’s garbage for the next 1,000 years would fit into a single landfill only 120 feet deep and 44 miles square. Landfills’ two big problems are that they’re expensive, and they’re subject to NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard–understandable, because a poorly constructed landfill eventually becomes a major environmental problem). This has led to a shortage of landfills in some areas.

So recycling this newspaper is still a good idea. If you throw it out, future archaeologists might thank you; future generations might not.

We use fossil fuels primarily for power generation and transportation. Huge strides have been made in reducing emissions, but scrubbers and catalytic converters don’t change the fact that fossil fuels are non-renewable, or get rid of carbon dioxide, the main culprit in the projected global warming. This has spurred the search for alternatives.

Fast-flowing rivers can be harnessed to spin turbines and generate electricity. Hydroelectricity doesn’t pollute, but its dams and river diversions can flood habitats.

Nuclear fission splits the large uranium nucleus into two smaller nuclei, releasing huge amounts of energy which can make steam to spin turbines. Nuclear energy is also emissions-free, but reactors are expensive to build and waste disposal remains a concern.

The “ultimate” alternative is fusion, in which two light nuclei are fused to form a heavier one, releasing even more energy than fission, but it won’t be practical for decades.

Fusion powers the sun, whose energy can be tapped either through photovoltaic cells, which turn sunlight directly into electricity, or through mirrors, which focus the sun’s heat. On the plus side, solar energy is inexhaustible and emits no pollutants; on the down side, it requires huge tracts of land covered with solar cells or mirrors.

Wind power is the other major alternative; California, the world leader, has 15,000 wind turbines producing about one percent of its electricity– enough for all the homes in San Francisco. The technology is simple: the wind spins a windmill which drives a turbine. Windmills don’t pollute, but again, they take up huge amounts of land.

When you talk about replacing fossil fuels in automobiles, most people think of electric cars. Changing to electric cars without changing to alternative forms of power generation simply shifts fossil fuel use from automobile to power plant. (Some studies indicate that could actually increase pollution.) But if you could combine alternative power generation with an electric car, you’d have a true emissions-free vehicle.

Electric cars have been around since the early 1900s, when they were as fast as any other car. They were abandoned because existing batteries were heavy and had to be recharged frequently. Things haven’t changed much: although today’s high-tech electric cars look great and can go from zero to 100 kph in eight seconds, they have a range of only a couple of hundred kilometres and then have to be recharged for several hours.

There’s still no miracle battery on the horizon, but there could be a better alternative: a fuel cell. A fuel cell uses an on-going chemical reaction to generate electricity; it’s different from a battery in that it has to be supplied with fuel from an external source. Theoretically, a fuel cell can convert fuel to electricity with nearly 100 percent efficiency. (The internal combustion engine is only 10 to 20 percent efficient.)

Fuel cells work with almost any hydrocarbon fuel, including gasoline, while producing little pollution and maintaining high efficiency, but the best fuel of all, in a fuel cell or straight up, would be hydrogen, because burning hydrogen produces only one by-product: water. Unfortunately, hydrogen is also very expensive to produce and store, which means that for now hydrogen-powered cars aren’t practical.

Today’s solar-powered cars are fragile, expensive and slow. Barring some huge advance in solar cell technology, they’ll stay that way.

The only non-fossil fuel that’s being used on a large scale is ethanol, or grain alcohol, created through fermenting plant material. Its cousin is methanol, or wood alcohol, originally made from wood but now produced from carbon monoxide and hydrogen or processed from natural gas.

Both can be used directly in car engines modified to resist their corrosiveness, and both burn very cleanly. Added to gasoline, they produce gasohol, which can be burned in unmodified engines. Gasohol burns more slowly, coolly and cleanly than gasoline, providing greater octane and fewer pollutants.

The “alternative fuels” most in use today, however, are still fossil fuels. Propane (a component of natural gas) is one; another is natural gas itself. They both burn cleaner than gasoline and produce only about half as much carbon dioxide.

Of course, we’ve got a huge infrastructure built up around our existing use of fossil fuels, and that means any changeover to alternatives will be gradual. But it will happen.

Check back in 50 years: you’ll hardly know the place.

Well, it might be true that the world’s overall environment would be in better shape if we’d all stuck to living on nuts and berries in unheated caves–and maybe we would have if not for this darn thing called intelligence. First it was the spear, and then there was fire, and then some fool invented the wheel and the next thing you know, here we are in the age of computers, telephones, airplanes, satellites, CAT scans, smallpox vaccinations, high-yield agriculture–and, concurrently, oil slicks, ozone depletion, global warming and overpopulation. What’s a species to do?

Going back is hardly an option that the many people in the world who haven’t yet experienced some of the finer points of technological civilization is likely to stand for, and frankly it doesn’t appeal to me very much, either. Instead we must do what we’ve always done–apply our ingenuity. We got ourselves into this mess; now how do we get ourselves out?

In Japan, they’ve already started in a big way.

It seems the Japanese have decided, much in the same way that they decided that there could be a future in making computer chips, that the driving force in future economic growth will be environmentally friendly technology–”green tech,” for short. They’re pouring millions of dollars (well, yen, actually) into a nation-wide effort to developing such products as bio-degradable plastics, substitutes for ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, technology to absorb and utilized greenhouse-effect-producing carbon dioxide, and biotechnology to mop up oil spills.

For example, Tadashi Matsunaga and Shigetoh Miyachi, two of the country’s leading microbiologists, are trying to develop genetically engineered photosynthetic microorganisms that could mop up the carbon dioxide emitted from power stations and industrial plants.

They’ve built a two-litre prototype “biosolar reactor” filled with a genetically engineered bacterium and lit throughout by 600 optical fibres of a special kind that emit light evenly in all directions along their length. This reactor can absorb all the carbon dioxide out of ordinary air bubbled through it at the rate of 300 millilitres a minute. ( In a similar reactor installed in a power plant the light would come from the sun, hence the name “biosolar.”)

The reactor is still a long way from being able to scrub all the carbon dioxide out of power plant exhaust. For one thing, the levels of carbon dioxide in such exhaust are much higher than in normal air–but researchers have located a form of algae that grows happily at such high concentrations, and they hope to isolate the genes that give it that ability and transfer them to engineered microorganisms.

Another problem is one of sheer size. A typical megawatt power plant emits about 200 tons of carbon dioxide an hour. Even if it absorbed only a few percent of that, the biosolar reactor would itself produce several tons of algal sludge an hour.

But the researchers have some ideas on that topic, too. Miyachi hopes to create a strain of algae that makes a hard exoskeleton, like coral, in effect converting the carbon dioxide into calcium carbonate that can be safely dumped at sea. Matsunaga, on the other hand, would like to create a strain of microorganism that can produce useful byproducts, such as antibiotics and plant growth hormones.

Another example of this push for “green tech” was the recent announcement of a five-year, $15-million U.S. joint project between Japan and the U.S. to genetically engineer pollution-eating microorganisms. Led by James Tiedje, director of Michigan State University Center for Microbial Ecology, and Kieji Yano, professor of biology at Nagaoka University, the research is based on the fact that microbes ultimately consume or degrade all natural organic products, from leaves to garbage. The researchers believe that genetic engineering and an understanding of microbial evolution can be used to produce microbes that can degrade oil spills and other man-made pollutants such as PCBs.

In Japan, research into “green tech” is garnering huge support both from government and from business, ranging from Tokyo Electric Power Company to Nissan to Hitachi to life insurance companies to banks to Wacoal Corporation, Japan’s leading manufacturer of women’s underwear. Not only do such companies see the opportunity for becoming involved in leading-edge technology and gaining a foothold in a new growth industry, they also recognize that green tech is important to the well-being of everyone. (The Japanese call such public-minded support from a corporation “matsuri no kifu,” which translates roughly as a “donation to the village festival.”)

Technology is here to stay. It’s part of what makes us human and not just a species of particularly unattractive hairless apes. By misusing the tools we have invented (more through naivete than malice, I think) we have caused great damage to our home planet. But the proper use of those tools offer us hope that we may yet prevent further damage–and begin to repair what we’ve already caused.

The one thing we can’t do is simply throw our tools down and walk away, because that’s a walk that ends back in those unheated caves–and frankly, I hate nuts and berries.