Please Don't Feed the Algae

Global warming isn't the primary cause of all environmental problems, but it still plays a hand in most.  Take the Upper Middle River outside of Baltimore where, last month, 200,000 fish were suffocated by an algae bloom that led to anaerobic conditions in the water.  The algae bloomed from a combination of warm temperature and an over-abundance of nutrients in the water.  When the weather cooled, the algae died, decaying through a chain of microbial feeding frenzies that consumed dissolved oxygen and released toxins damaging fishes' gills.  Dead fish compounded the effect of dead algae. Not to say that we will suffocate from all of the die-offs occurring around us (though the oxygen concentration in our air is falling), but this is an example of how the fate of a lesser ecosystem occupant can dramatically affect higher species.

The Maryland Department of the Environment has not identified any single pollution source as the trigger for the algae bloom, but leaves open the possibility that an accumulation of nutrients (read "fertilizer") could be to blame. It will be poetic justice when, in the coming decades, the rising seas reclaim the land surrounding this Chesapeake Bay tributary away from homeowners who prized their lawns while poisoning more sentient creatures.

Yet, if cumulative small trespasses can lead to ecological disasters, abundantly small acts of stewardship may also mitigate others.  If you have forested land anywhere in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, Forests for the Bay is a resource treasure trove that can help you care for it.  It takes only a 1 minute free sign up process to open up the treasure house.

Insanity Checks

Now that the COP-21 Paris climate confab has devolved into muddling over short-term economic privilege instead of the physical threat of global warming, let's see how this sharpens our focus of future first-order impacts nearer to home.  Taking at face value the effects listed in the draft 2015 Maryland Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act Plan, we can assume that the worst case is now the most likely within most of our lifetimes, since Maryland's and most other parties' minuscule contributions to the solution will be of little consequence against the outpouring of fossil fuel and peat gas emissions arising from the Far and Middle East.  Here are aspects of Maryland's inescapable future environment and some checks on future decisions that could prove insane if we follow our usual course.

1. Sea Level Rise over 4 feet: The U.S. Navy has new port real estate at the Solomons Recreation Center in lieu of the industrial area.  Midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy can make it to their seamanship classes only if they can skillfully navigate a boat through the canals leading to Luce Hall.  All over the shoreline, beaches have become cliffs and cliffs have become beaches. The value of waterfront property declines precipitously.  Implications for infrastructure: question any decisions involving new development near the Bay.
2. North and South Polar Ice Melts: Solomons Island is now an island, indeed.  The Chesapeake Biological Laboratory has a 360-degree view of their subject matter.  Your fortunate friends who once gazed from their patios at the water are now unfortunate (former) friends who now envy your choice of more insular habitat.  The Cove Point Community that once stood up to Dominion Power must now flee King Neptune.  Broomes Island is swept away.  The 231 bridge to Benedict is gone.  The Atlantic Test Range Facilities are put to the ultimate Atlantic test. The U.S. Naval Academy holds all training now in lifeboats.  Both Baltimore and Washington, DC have soggy bottoms, but nothing in comparison to Norfolk, VA.  The U.S. Navy's Atlantic Fleet is nearly defunct. Implications for infrastructure: don't tear down any upland facilities of sound construction, as possible substitutes for those washed out to sea.
3. Heavy Precipitation Events: Occasional flooding of streams and rivers endangers properties situated thereon, devaluing them, as well. Untreated sewage pours into rivers and bays, making parts of the region resemble scenes out of India.  Implications for infrastructure: higher ground is more valuable real estate, but rainwater catchment becomes critical.
4. Heat Waves: Maryland is the lazy South. It's slow down or die from heat stroke. Traditional crops fail from daytime heat and lack of cool nights. Biochar saves the day for those with the foresight to deploy it early. Meat is a luxury as livestock are ever more difficult to sustain. Implications for infrastructure: Make solar power a priority, especially where large air conditioning demand exists.  Value trees that shade your roof. Use biochar in your garden or farm.
5. Ecosystems shifting: Changes in climate are too extreme for many species to adapt, causing imbalances to established equilibria, leading to species extinctions, causing loss of biodiversity, spiraling into devastation of ecosystems.  Ecosystem services are no longer available.  Life suffers. Implications for infrastructure:  forests and forest gardens, linked by corridors, can prop up some of the hardier species to maintain adequate ecosystems that may resurge once the human population is sufficiently extinguished due to its own folly.
6. Increases in pests: Winter, which often eradicates insect and microbe pests, is now mild allowing pestilence to gain strength earlier in the growing season, reducing agricultural yields. Implications for agriculture: Disease resistance and crop diversity is more important in seed selection and propagation.  Mono-cropping big ag has to give way to small-holders who are allowed to save seed.  This is a reversal from current trends in Maryland.
7. Ocean Acidification: Crustaceans cannot grow their shells. Food chains are disrupted. Implications for Maryland: pick a new state symbol.  Crabs will be a relic (except the softshell variety).  Any sea life is probably not a good choice.

You can see it all as just weather, and say that the rain falls on the just and the unjust equally, or you can see it as Noah did and start doing something to try to save your family, or perhaps even your community, state or region.

Keep the Home Fires Burning

Most analyses of the greenhouse gas emissions problem hold the precept that we cannot quickly reduce our use of energy.  Hence, the introduction of technology to displace fossil fuel usage with more sustainable sources must serve as a substitute source of energy.  Oftentimes, the substitute is nearly as polluting as the original, or of dubious marginal value since it is difficult to estimate emissions from all potential sources.

Likewise, it is difficult to estimate the contribution of ecosystems to CO2 reduction.  This is why biochar is struggling to be recognized as an important, if small, part of the solution to the problem of global warming.  Biochar is made with little, if any, production of useful energy compared to incineration of biomass, which produces little, if any, biochar.  This is why the National Academy of Sciences gave biochar such short shrift in their recent study of carbon sequestration approaches. Maryland, unfortunately, adopted this study as the basis for sequestration in their climate action plan.

In order to embrace biochar, you have to allow for the possibility that satisfaction can come through many avenues.  Power may not be any more satisfying than assurance of abundant harvests along with restoration of biodiversity and soil health.  Electricity to power an ever more computerized lifestyle may be less satisfying to millions than lungs working to be filled with fresh air, while growing crops to fuel muscles demanding a more intrinsic energy source.

Energy is more fungible than biochar, but not as much as you might think.  Biochar's uses continue to expand beyond even the 55 identified by Ithaka Institute in 2013.  How can such a useful resource be overlooked, simply because it is not a significant source of energy?

Yet, were the world economy to break down today and trade in fossil fuels slow to a trickle, what would many people resort to?  Ubiquitous small outdoor fires for cooking and cleaning would turn into a climate and ecological disaster.  There are better ways to apply current technology to burning of wood. Coupling these with the production of biochar will help insulate us from climate change, peak oil, and financial folly.

Crash and Burn

Going into the COP-21 Paris climate talks, the U.S. position is reportedly to emulate Maryland's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act, bringing carbon emissions for the whole country down 27% by 2025.  I imagine this won't be very hard, since peak oil and financial disaster will force us down that path eventually, anyway.

Meanwhile, Maryland can't seem to see the forest for the trees of gas lines crisscrossing the state. Though informed in 2010 that Maryland's abundant biomass could provide a portion of the state's energy, clean power investment has favored natural gas, solar, and wind power.

It would be comforting if Maryland would ban fracking like New York did this year. Otherwise, investments in cleaner power plants, such as the PSEG Keys Energy Center being built up in Brandywine, may end up as incentives to further damage the environment.  While it may beat coal and gas export in terms of carbon emissions, natural gas is non-renewable and only sets us up for a big gap when we deplete it without adequate alternatives.  Solar and wind won't come close to providing the level of energy that we get from fossil fuels.  Wood biomass could help some, but we have to begin putting the infrastructure in place.  In addition to building new types of facility-scale power plants, we need to reshape the workforce to concentrate it on sustainable forestry.  It is time to turn the corner, even if we have to slow down in doing so.

Playing with Fire

I am proud to be a Marylander just for the simple fact that our state is a leader in the fight against climate change.  Maryland's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act (GGRA) rivals the plans of such progressive states as Switzerland in the rapidity envisioned for reducing emissions to fight global warming.  Since GGRA was enacted in 2009, Maryland has actually reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions faster than required by the plan, which calls for a 25% reduction of the 2006 level of emissions by 2020.  We are now at the point where an update to the plan is needed, as the Act must be reapproved in 2016.

Insofar as the real importance of Maryland's plan is not in drawing down emissions, but in showing other states how it is possible to do so while growing the economy, the GGRA is laudable. I do, however, have my reservations as to motives and the ultimate outcome.  It's not that Maryland is just so small as to have little bearing on global warming, it's that, at this point in the game (and more so in 2020, when other states might begin catching on), we cannot reduce atmospheric CO2 enough, fast enough to avoid catastrophe unless we immediately abandon business as usual (and/or put all our hopes in a "hail Mary" geo-engineering program).  By "business as usual," I include the reliance on economic growth for sustainment of the economy.  A major result of capitalistic, exponential growth is that it drives us deeper into fossil fuel dependence, while these limited resources become ever more expensive and environmentally harmful to extract.

Case in point: the Cove Point LNG export facility.  One of the most frequent concerns raised in public hearings held by the Maryland Climate Change Commission was the amount of GHG that would be induced by the facility's operations. Calculations show that this total would negate more than half of the GHG reduction progress made throughout the state since 2006 when the final results of the GGRA are tallied after 2020.  This effect was not included in the GGRA Plan Update, in spite of public input.  Even if it had, much of the effect would be masked by the fact that a good portion of those emissions are "off-shored," either to other states where the gas is shipped from, or to the end users overseas.

To be fair, it seems that Maryland is not in the least in control of whether the Cove Point expansion takes place. The climate commission considered it to be too much of a hot potato to even address it, and even climate-friendly Governor O'Malley wouldn't challenge it during his term.  This gives me little hope that the District Court of Appeals in Columbia, MD will rule favorably toward the environmental petitioners in their suit to require the FERC to re-evaluate their decision to allow the Cove Point expansion.

It's not that the powers that be really care whether Maryland's economy grows under business-as-usual, it's that they want to continue the bubble economy at the national level as long as possible, at least until it becomes apparent that we have no hope to avoid human extinction other than a "hail Mary" play.

Terror Starts at Home

The heightened level of "security" brought on by the most recent global terrorist attacks and threats will likely be evident in several ways to all Americans right where they live.  One local organization that is primed to play in this game is the Calvert County Sheriff's Department.  They have been itching to take on any would-be disruptors of our sedate rural existence, so much so that they zero in on whatever appears alien.  Out of state license plates are one clue.  Visiting for the purpose of protest is another.

A situation like the one recently at Bank of America stadium involving repellers with a banner protesting the Cove Point Plant expansion was resurrected recently when charges and counter-charges were filed over the treatment of protesters who had been arrested following the crane climbing incident early this year at Dominion's staging site on the Patuxent River.  It is not at all surprising that the Sheriff's Department would put a stop to such a stunt.  Their main concern, however, appeared to have been avoiding prolonged embarrassment from any perceived inability to control a one-off situation (rather than concern for the safety of those involved).  Hence, the degree of paranoia necessary to assertively respond to the latest scare is endemic to our county's law enforcers. In the crane incident, it will be difficult to tell whether the counter-charges by the Sheriff's Department against one of the protesters for making false statements to an officer is legitimate (unless an audio recording was made), since it will be probably be a case of several officers' words against one interloper.

I'm not into conducting acrobatic stunts for public attention, so it's a bit hard to empathize with the crane climbers (though easy to believe their rendering of the bungled "rescue" by Sheriff's deputies), but reading about a more recent incident that involved out-and-out harassment reminds one of the infamous reputation of Baltimore's cops wrought from Freddy Gray's killing and reflected on the TV series, "The Wire."  The targeted group in this case was not the urban, drug-dealing set, but the socially conscious, anti-fracking set.  It seems our Sheriff's Department is intolerable of either of those extremes and feels it is their duty to violate individuals' safety and constitutional liberties to protect Calvert County (and their own personal benefactors) from any intrusion on the speedy execution of a project voted down by local opinion.

While I think the Cove Point expansion is a white elephant and economics, rather than activism, will kill it, the picture these incidents paint of our Sheriffs make me very leery of the more permissible homeland security rules-of-engagement they will operate under going forward.  It wouldn't take much on your part to wind up under a jackboot that you once thought was your protection.

Chicken Shit

Turning our gaze across the Chesapeake Bay where chicken factories are one of the salient features of the landscape, a group of activists called Food & Water Watch has raised protests against the incineration of chicken manure.  You might think, with my advocacy of using chicken litter to make biochar, I would take exception to that position.  The truth is, incineration is not how you make biochar.

F&WW seems to mainly want to make CAFO's go away, but their agitation against the Renewable Fuel Standard inclusion of manure as a Tier 1 renewable fuel is ostensibly based on increased air pollution from incineration.  A long and twisted tale leads to the current state of dissatisfaction over the way we deal with this resource.

We can begin with Martin O'Malley who, back in his days as Maryland Governor, made a deal with Exelon Corporation to fund $50 million of a project to convert chicken litter to energy in exchange for allowing them to merge with Constellation Energy.  The company that got the award to head up the manure power project, Green Planet Power Solutions, failed miserably.  Now, other players are hoping the money is still there for a more competent outfit to give it a try.

In the meantime, the Maryland Department of Agriculture has begun to assist poultry farmers with a much smaller pot of money under the Animal Waste Technology Fund.  A company called Renewable Oil International MD, LLC has been granted $1.2 million in support of developing a manure-fed energy system that makes biochar as a by-product.

The major action, however, is where a company called AgEnergy USA is talking with Perdue about making a $200 million manure-fired energy plant.

Biochar has been little but an afterthought to some of these projects, which leads me back to the F&WW argument.  Biochar is not made by incineration, but by pyrolysis, of which a particular method is gasification.  Pyrolysis involves heating material in a oxygen-deficient environment.  That means less NOx is produced and particulate matter is also kept low, depending on the speed of the process.   F&WW should like that.  I hope they do, because I think I like Food & Water Watch and would like to link arms with them to work for more local agricultural systems.