Global Warming Issues

An appeals board could have the final say in the outcome of the Desert Rock Power Plant. A coalition of Navajo and conservation groups has filed an appeal of a recently released Environmental Protection Agency permit, which granted approval to the contentious power plant.

The EPA announced its approval of the 1,500 megawatt power plant, which is proposed for Navajo land southwest of Farmington, on July 31. In the decision, the agency praised the proposed plant’s emission standards as among the most stringent in the country, even though it would add 10 million tons of carbon dioxide a year to local skies and increase Four Corners pollution by more than 30 percent.

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“Electrical energy storage is very important for all electrical and electronic systems,” says Qing Wang, associate professor of materials science and engineering. “Even renewable energy systems like solar cells need somewhere to store excess energy to be used at night.”

Wang and his research team reported Aug. 20 at the 236th national American Chemical Society meeting in Philadelphia in two papers, on the development of power density tunable polymers and polymer ceramic nanocomposites as electric storage materials for capacitors. Currently, power conditioning is carried out by capacitors, but Wang believes that eventually properly tuned polymer capacitors could replace batteries.

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A new catalyst makes hydrogen from ethanol with 90 percent yield, at a workable temperature, and using inexpensive ingredients.

Umit Ozkan, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State University, said that the new catalyst is much less expensive than others being developed around the world, because it does not contain precious metals, such as platinum or rhodium.

“Rhodium is used most often for this kind of catalyst, and it costs around $9,000 an ounce,” Ozkan said. “Our catalyst costs around $9 a kilogram.”

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A Bush administration rule barring states and local governments from requiring more air pollution monitoring is illegal, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out a two-year-old rule that may have allowed some refineries, power plants and factories to exceed pollution limits because the Environmental Protection Agency “failed to fix inadequate monitoring requirements … and prohibited states and local authorities from doing so.”

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The Australian Federal Government is giving away $50m to geothermal developers. The money will be used to cover the costs of exploration and drilling. The initiative comes after findings from Geoscience Australia which say that just 1 per cent of Australia’s latent Geothermal energy could produce 26,000 times the amount of energy used by Australians each year.

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Corn stover is made up of the leaves and stalks of corn plants that are left in the field after harvesting the edible corn grain. Corn stover could supply as much as 25% of the biofuel crop needed by 2030.

Scientists with the USDA-ARS Agroecosystem Unit located at the University of Nebraska examined the long-term sustainability of using corn stover as a biofuel crop.

When corn stover is not harvested as a biofuel crop, it can be left on the fields to restore vital nutrients to the soil. Full-scale harvesting of corn stover may deplete the soil.

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Every day, we breathe in 300 cigarettes’ worth of a newly discovered form of air pollution, new research shows.

H. Barry Dellinger, PhD, chairman of environmental chemistry at Louisiana State University, calls the new pollutants persistent free radicals or PFRs. He reported the finding at the 236th national meeting of the American Chemical Society, held Aug. 17-21 in Philadelphia.

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Across the ocean is a different story. Accidentally introduced to the Black Sea in the early 1980s, the warty comb jelly spread rapidly through the Caspian Sea in the 1990s and has most recently invaded the Baltic Sea. In Europe, M. ledyi is considered a voracious predator, easily snatching dinner from local fish. Countries surrounding the Baltic Sea are now concerned what’s going to happen to their waters.

“Their impact seems to be increasing and that’s been tied to warming water temperatures, giving them an ecological advantage,” says Sean Colin, assistant professor of biology at Roger Williams University. He and John Costello, professor of biology at Providence College, are at the MBL this summer to determine who and how much M. ledyi eats.

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Preliminary evidence from the lab of Hans Laufer suggests that certain concentrations of alkyphenols may be interfering with the ability of lobsters to develop tough shells. Instead, the shells are weakened, leaving affected lobsters susceptible to the microbial invasions characteristic of the illness.

“Lobsters ‘know’ when their shell is damaged, and that’s probably the reason when they have shell disease, why they molt more quickly,” says Laufer, a visiting investigator at the MBL for over 20 years and professor emeritus of molecular and cell biology at the University of Connecticut. “But ultimately, they still come down with the disease. And we think the presence of alkyphenols contributes to that.”

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Hi everyone who are reading my blog, my strong apologies, but I am the one who writes here and I am going to be out of computer and internet world for 3 days, so I will won’t write here. I`ll be back on Monday ! Then you’ll get tones of new articles