December 6th, 2009 by Tom Schulz
BioCee’s story on Public Radio’s “Living on Earth Program”. I learnt that we are now the “Magic Bug Guys”. Sounds like fun. For those of you who haven’t followed the news on BioCee: After receiving an NSF grant for desulfurization of petroleum products, we were amongst the Top 3 recipients of the brand new ARPA-E grants. This time for our participation in a consortium with the University of Minnesota and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, making “direct solar fuel”. BioCee’s bioreactor will be the home for two types of microorganisms that produce biofuel directly from sunlight and CO2. See BioCee’s website for the press release and the news articles.
December 6th, 2009 by Tom Schulz
My friends at the Climate Prosperity Alliance have published their new tool to account for investments in the Green economy. They call it the “Global Climate Prosperity Scoreboard”, and they have found that already over $1 Trillion have been put to use in the Green economy since 2007.
Climate Prosperity Alliance
“The Climate Prosperity Alliance uses the Climate Solutions 2 computer model of Australia’s Climate Risk Pty., showing how $1 trillion invested every year for the next 10 years can assure the global transition to sustainable prosperity and job growth. This $10 trillion is less than the bailouts of failed banks in the USA and Europe and less than 10% of the world’s pension and institutional funds of $120 trillion. Institutional fund managers can shift 10% of their assets away from hedge funds, risky derivatives and commodity speculation to real investments in a greener global economy, thereby assuring their beneficiaries a healthier future.”
The leaders behind the Climate Prosperity Alliance are Dr. Marc A. Weiss, Chairman and CEO of Global Urban Development and Chair of the Climate Prosperity Alliance, and Dr. Hazel Henderson, futurist, author of “Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy” (Chelsea Green, 2006) and president of Ethical Markets Media.
A big thank you to Peter Matthies at the Conscious Business Institute for bringing this initiative to Germany.
November 21st, 2009 by Tom Schulz
After publishing the worldwide CO2 emission chart in a variwide format some friends wrote that I should follow up with a chart just for the U.S.
So here it is. Feel free to download the PDF file and use it according to the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License.
Interesting to see that oil-producing states have a much higher per capita CO2 emission than the non-oil-producers. Also interesting: California and Texas are both the largest states but are very different in CO2 emissions per capita.
Data sources are the U.S. EPA (2007 CO2 emissions from fuel combustion), and U.S. Census (2007 estimated)
Download the PDF here or from Slideshare:
CO2 US States 2007 – 091121
November 16th, 2009 by Tom Schulz
It’s time for a chart that makes it easy to see both the absolute size of CO2 emissions per country and the per capita emissions — at one glance. The trick is to draw an area chart, similar to what McKinsey did in the now famous chart that demonstrates the cost of measures for greenhouse gas reduction: “U.S. MID-RANGE ABATEMENT CURVE – 2030“.
In the new chart, we used 2007 data from the International Energy Agency from their 2009 edition of CO2 Emissions from Fuel Combustion: Highlights. Each country or region is represented by a rectangle. The height of the rectangle corresponds to the per capita emissions, and the width corresponds to the population size. Therefore, the total area of all rectangles adds up to the total worldwide CO2 emissions.
It becomes immediately clear how difficult any limitation or decrease of CO2 will be. Countries like the U.S. have a multiple of CO2 emissions per capita compared to India, China, or Africa; it is in the U.S. then where the most potential for savings from the current levels lies. However, most of the growth is expected in China and India, and we can see that there is just no way these countries could ever grow into the levels of European or U.S. CO2 emissions per capita. The Earth would not sustain it.
Download the PDF file here or get it on Slideshare:
Worldwide CO2 Emissions (2007) v091116
