I noticed this today - it is 2 years old now but is worth having a look at if you want to be horrified at how quickly the world's fisheries are collapsing - Net losses.

Dave Roberts has a post at Grist outlining his take on the debate about building large power plants on sensitive land — specifically a solar thermal power plant in the Mojave desert - Taking distributed energy seriously.

Many folks are conflicted over the seeming clash between conserving America’s remaining wild landscapes and expanding clean energy supplies. What to do?

To begin with, it seems prudent to postpone the conflict as long as possible, by making every effort to satisfy new energy demand with low-carbon resources on land that’s already developed. Senator Feinstein has gestured in that direction, but neither California or any other state has ever offered serious, sustained support to what’s loosely called distributed energy — energy generated, stored and managed at the local level.

The U.S. power industry has always had a fondness for gigantism: huge plants, remotely located, generating electricity that’s sold cheaply and used profligately. Wind farms on the Plains and solar plants in the Southwest desert, connected to cities by expensive new transmission lines, fit the familiar model. Regulations provide incentives for this development, which utilities know how to manage, and which politicians understand.

Yet the land and water problems facing solar plants should be a reminder that all large new industrial projects impose social costs. Perhaps it’s time to take distributed energy seriously.

What would a new model look like? Solar panels over every parking lot, brownfield, warehouse, and residential roof. Small-scale wind turbines on every bridge, microhydro in every stream and river, advanced geothermal in every back yard, waste heat capture on every industrial plant. Batteries that store power to be used or sold when it’s worth most. An IT-infused grid that can manage complexity; devices that display real-time use and price information; variable power pricing. Every building sealed and weatherized, every appliance and electric car net-connected.

In such a system, it’s not just energy that’s distributed, it’s social and economic power. The result is more democratic and resilient (though such benefits rarely find their way into conventional price comparisons). If “consumers” become producers, managers, and innovators, perhaps the desert tortoise and the world can be saved.

I suspect a mix is going to be the only way forward - both localised, distributed renewables and large scale wind and solar thermal - pure distributed microgeneration (for all its valuable attributes) will probably prove too expensive and intermittent to meet all our energy needs. Dave thinks the societal implications of going the pure distributed model are worthy of plenty of thought.

The last paragraph is something that’s been an interest of mine for a long while: how will distributing the ability to generate, manage, and store power affect social dynamics? What will it look like when communities are more self-sufficient? What kind of innovations will spring up when everyone has access to the levers of energy, the way the internet gave everyone access to information infrastructure? What kind of lives will people live when their energy and gas bills are radically reduced or even eliminated? This is heady futurist sort of stuff, too much to get into in this post, but I suspect the changes will be far more sweeping than anyone can anticipate.

Which leads to a final point: cost comparisons between central-plant power and distributed power are woefully inadequate, typically focusing in on price-per-kWh. Of course rooftop solar fails by that comparison. But what happens when you factor in the saved cost of transmission lines that don’t have to be built? What happens when you factor in the efficiency gains made possible by smart appliances, smart vehicles, and smart grids? What happens when you factor in the fact that money spent on these systems will circulate almost entirely within a community rather than leaving it? What happens when you factor in energy independence, resilience, innovation, jobs?

There are “system of systems” benefits around distributed energy that we can’t yet predict, much yet place a dollar value on. As in so many areas, the question should not be how to save pennies, but how to construct the kind of lives, the kind of society, that reflects our highest aspirations.

Yale "Environment 360" has an article about a report in Nature warning "The Earth has nine biophysical thresholds beyond which it cannot be pushed without disastrous consequences ... ominously, we have already moved past three of these tipping points" - Provocative New Study Warns of Crossing Planetary Boundaries.

Now, ironically, civilization has become so powerful that it can reshape the planet itself. “We have become a force to contend with at the global level,” as Johan Rockstrom of the Stockholm Resilience Center in Sweden, puts it. Humans have changed the chemistry of Earth’s oceans, lowering their pH and causing ocean acidification. We are shifting the composition of the atmosphere, raising levels of carbon dioxide higher than they’ve been in at least the past 800,000 years.

A number of scientists have warned in recent years that if we keep pushing the planet this way, we will cause sudden, irreversible damage to the systems that made human civilization possible in the first place. Typically, they’ve just focused on one of these tipping points at a time. But in today’s issue of the journal Nature, Rockstrom and 27 of his fellow environmental scientists argue that we have to conceive of many tipping points at once. They propose that humans must keep the planet in what they call a “safe operating space,” inside of which we can thrive. If we push past the boundaries of that space — by wiping out biodiversity, for example, or diverting too much of the world’s freshwater — we risk catastrophe.

Unfortunately, the authors of the Nature paper maintain, we’ve already started pushing out beyond these boundaries without knowing where they actually are. “We’re sitting on top of a mesa right now, and we’re driving around, but we don’t have our lights on and we don’t even have a map,” says Jonathan Foley, a co-author of the new study and the director of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment. “That’s a dangerous way to move around.”

In their new study, Foley and his colleagues put down stakes to mark where they believe seven of these boundaries lie. By their estimate, we have already pushed beyond three of these boundaries, and are moving quickly toward the other four. “We’re running out of time,” says Rockstrom.

Ross Gittens has an article in the Age on the relationship between the economy and the environment (taking a few swipes at PM Rudd's pretend climate policy along the way), and noting glumly recent reports on our large projected population increase - It's the ecosystem, stupid.

Everyone (rightly) condemns economists for their failure to foresee and warn us about the global financial crisis, but here's a climate crisis we've seen coming for years and we can't take it seriously. Even the economists who brought us the emissions trading scheme don't adequately appreciate the problem we've got. They think all we've got to do is switch to low-carbon energy sources (ideally by finding a way to capture all the carbon emitted by burning coal) and the economy can go on growing as if nothing had happened. Being economists, they see us as all living in an economy, with this thing at the side called the environment that occasionally causes problems we need to deal with. As usual, wrong model.

In reality, the economy exists within the ecosystem, taking natural resources from that system, using them and then ejecting wastes, including sewage, garbage and all forms of pollution and greenhouse gases.

The global economy grows as the world's population grows and as people's material living standards rise. The problem is that the human population and material affluence have grown so much in the past 200 years that our economic activity is putting increasing pressure on the ecosystem that ensures our survival. On the one hand we're chewing through non-renewable resources at a rapid rate and using renewable resources faster than their ability to renew themselves. On the other, we're spewing out wastes faster than the ecosystem can absorb them.

Global warming is, of course, an example of the latter. But it's just the most acute respect in which global economic activity is undermining the healthy functioning of our ecosystem. Think of the way we're destroying the world's fish stocks, the way farming practices are causing acidification, desertification and erosion of land, the way dams and irrigation are destroying our rivers and the way human ''progress'' is destroying species.

All this is happening with only about 15 per cent of the world's population enjoying high material living standards similar to ours. Now consider what happens to the global economy's use of natural resources and generation of wastes when China and India - accounting for almost 40 per cent of the world's population - get on a path of rapid economic development to raise their citizens' standard of living to something approaching ours. Since the rich countries are reluctant to countenance a decline in living standards, to put it mildly, and the poor countries most assuredly won't abandon their quest for affluence, there's one obvious variable that could be used to limit global economic activity's deleterious impact on the ecosystem: population growth.

Limiting population growth in the developing world and allowing population to continue on its established path of decline in the developed world wouldn't be easy, but it would be easier than trying to prevent rising living standards among those already living.

Hence my dismay when Treasurer Wayne Swan's announcement last week that Australia's population in 40 years time is now expected to be 6.5 million greater than was expected just three years ago was received without the blinking of an eyelid. Ho hum, tell me something interesting.

Transmaterial has a post on self-powered water quality monitors that can be deployed in rivers - Responsive Archipelago.

Developed by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang, River Glow is a system of floating pods that monitors water quality and displays a variable light signal that is visible from the water or onshore. Each unit consists of an underwater pH probe, super bright LEDs, uncoated fiber-optic strands, and photovoltaics that provide power to rechargeable batteries. When deployed in public waterways, the system creates an ethereal cloud of light hovering above the water’s surface that changes colors according to the condition of the water.

The system is energy self-sufficient, low-cost, modular, and easy to deploy, offering an alternative to expensive and time-consuming testing of water samples in a remote research laboratory. The component system allows for swapping of alternative energy-harvesting devices, water-quality sensors, and low-energy lighting or actuators.

O'Reilly's ETech Conference in March has some interesting sessions on the agenda. One session which caught my eye is on AMEE - the “Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine”, which aims to measure the "carbon footprint of everything".

If all the energy data in the world were accessible, what would you build?

The Climate Change agenda has created an imperative to measure the energy profile of everything. As trillions of dollars flow into re-inventing how we consume, we have a unique opportunity to start with open data and open systems. AMEE is an open aggregation platform for energy and CO2 data, algorithms, and transactions. We aim to dramatically accelerate change, because we need to.

AMEE is a neutral aggregator of reliable carbon data, for use by commercial and noncommercial groups. Active users include the UK Government, Google, Morgan Stanley, and The Royal Society for the Arts. Developer API keys are available, and we’ll be showing some of the applications.

Peter Matthiessen (author of "The Snow Leopard") has an article in The New York Review Of Books on the slow creep forward of big oil on he north slope of Alaska - "Alaska: Big Oil and the Inupiat-Americans".

On August 2 of this year, asserting a symbolic claim to almost half of the Arctic Basin, a Russian submarine with two parliamentarians on board planted a corrosion-resistant titanium flag more than two miles down directly under the North Pole. In its international implications, the flag-planting anticipated a second epochal event when, on August 21, it was officially announced that the Northwest Passage, emerging at last from millennia of ice, was navigable and open to commercial shipping, removing as many as five thousand miles from long world voyages by way of the Panama Canal. A week later, on August 28, came the latest reports of a scarily accelerating loss of Arctic sea ice attributed by most scientists to global warming, a loss that on September 5 would be confirmed as the greatest on record.

All of these circumstances, of course, bore directly on the imminent development of the Arctic sea floor as a lucrative new field for the industrial extraction of the fossil fuels whose carbon emissions were the principal component of the greenhouses gases that are the primary cause of Arctic warming in the first place. As in Iraq, what was driving all this activity, for better or worse, was the region's mineral resources, and as in Iraq, the one clear beneficiary of this earth disaster was the international energy industry, a.k.a. Big Oil. Though present estimates may be inflated and not all of the deposits economically accessible, it is thought that these undersea deposits might suffice to fuel the world for a few years, after which this last clean wilderness will be fatally filthied and contaminated and lost forever to mankind. ...

When the energy industry's twenty-seven-year campaign to drill the refuge coastal plain was forestalled by the Republican loss of Congress in 2006, the Inupiat and the Gwich'in who had most to lose were among those Americans most relieved that Big Oil's unrelenting pursuit of fossil fuels into the heart of America's most pristine and magnificent wildlife sanctuary had at least been slowed. But as it turns out, the industry was less interested in the refuge as a marginal oil and gas field than as a shore base for a vast drilling operation in the oil-bearing strata not far off the coast, with even more ominous implications for the native people.

Faithfully supported by the Bush administration, corporations like Shell Oil were expediting plans to prospect and develop Alaska's continental shelf, littering the Beaufort Sea with drilling ships and wells, supply ships and barges, airplane and helicopter racket, blasted-out harbors, ice-fortified steel piers, and hundreds of miles of pipe—not only an immense increase in contamination and disturbance but an incalculably risky project that threatened to overwhelm the adaptive capacity of the indigenous sea hunters and an entire precious ecosystem already seriously under stress from Arctic warming.

Environmentalists are quite aware that despite society's desperate need for clean energies, carbon fuels will drive the world economy for years to come, and political pressures for ocean drilling may be insurmountable. But the risks of ecological disaster from irreparable accidents such as oil spills in Arctic seas are truly enormous, which is why critics feel so strongly that the oil industry's ambitions are premature at best and at worst reckless. In addition to severe operating and maintenance difficulties in fierce Arctic conditions—never satisfactorily tamed even on land—any offshore drilling operation would have to deal with freezing ocean storms and shifting ice and four bitter months of winter darkness.

When one considers the more than four thousand spills--over one a day--recorded by the oil industry in its land operations in the last decade, and keeping in mind that offshore hazards are far greater, the inevitable accidents seem certain to accumulate into an ongoing and permanent calamity. A black effluvia of crude petroleum and drilling mud and chemical pollutants would spread inshore, suffocating plankton and invertebrates and bottom-dwelling fish and poisoning great stretches of Arctic coast with a viscous excrescence. The same toxic mixture will blacken the drifting ice, fouling the pristine habitat of Arctic birds, the Pacific walrus, four species of seals, and the beleaguered polar bear, while contaminating the migratory corridors of the white beluga and endangered bowhead whales—all this defilement made much worse by the grim fact that no technology has ever been developed for cleaning up spilled oil in icy waters. Even in spills in temperate waters, such as the Exxon Valdez disaster, only an average of less than 15 percent is ever removed.

While the engines of the legacy fossil fuel industry grind grimly onwards in the far north, there are some brighter signs elsewhere in Alaska - Popular Mechanics has a report on a low temperature geothermal power development near Fairbanks - "Geothermal Power in Alaska Holds Hidden Model for Clean Energy".

The whine of the power plant sounds like a jet engine as refrigerant blasts through the turbine at 1000 mph. Though the equipment is compact, the din fills the vast hangar, and mechanical engineer Gwen Holdmann has to shout to be heard: “What you see here is very Alaskan. It’s not painted. It’s not pretty. But it’s real.” I place my hand on the steel door capping the plant’s evaporator; it’s warm to the touch, filled with Alaska’s most promising new energy source—plain water.

It’s midnight at Chena Hot Springs Resort, 56 miles northeast of Fairbanks, and outside, the July sun has only just slipped below the horizon. Holdmann’s blond hair escapes a loose ponytail as she climbs onto a metal walkway to point out the heat exchanger. A black-eared husky named Amberlynn watches her every move from below. “The cool thing about this ... ,” she begins, as she does most sentences, and it occurs to me that it’s appropriate every time: This is cool. It is Alaska’s first geothermal plant, and it’s producing electricity from lower temperature water than any plant in the world.

Heat stored beneath the Earth’s surface holds 50,000 times the energy of all the oil and gas in the world combined. If it could be harnessed, it would be an ideal source of base-load power: Geothermal is cleaner than fossil fuels, and more reliable than alternative sources like tidal, wind, wave and solar. Today, geothermal plants in the United States generate nearly 3000 megawatts of electricity—enough to power South Dakota. Almost all of it comes from reservoirs that are at least 300 F.

The water rising through a fracture in the granite pluton under Chena is only 165 F. Experts didn’t think it was hot enough to produce serious power. But with the nearest electrical grid 32 miles away and generators burning through $1000 worth of diesel fuel daily, Chena had the incentive to prove the experts wrong. Now, its tepid water not only generates electricity, it heats the resort’s buildings, maintains a greenhouse and keeps an ice museum frozen year-round. There are thousands of such low- to moderate-temperature geothermal systems scattered throughout Alaska and the rest of the country. Power plants like the one at Chena could tap them to produce tens of thousands of megawatts of electricity.

“I think we have an opportunity here in Alaska to be leaders in moving toward a more renewable energy economy,” Holdmann says, her voice an equal mix of practical and impassioned. “The cost of power can be exorbitant in our villages—as high as a dollar a kilowatt-hour. It’s a real bummer for a lot of these communities, but it can also be a real motivating factor.” She pauses at the door of the hangar. “We’re an oil-producing state and we’re worried about our energy costs. It’s just a matter of time before the rest of the country catches up to where we are.” ...