Sustain Our Earth

Implantée en Inde depuis quatre ans, Prakti Design est une entreprise sociale spécialisée dans l'invention de fours propres et économes en énergie à destination des populations les plus pauvres.

Via Jón Sallé

Climate change, deforestation, sustainable sourcing. Voices of concern over these issues – and more – aren't only those of activists or the environmental community. Increasingly, disparate stakeholders and investors are chiming in. What was once a murmur is now a chorus, often built into business plans and integrated into corporate agendas.

 

In a recent preview of the 2013 proxy season, Ernst & Young reported that 45% of shareholder proposals focus on environmental and social topics. Interestingly, nearly one third of climate change and other sustainability proposals were withdrawn, indicating dialogue between corporations and shareholders on these issues that has satisfied both parties.

 

Shareholder expectations have historically pushed the corporate agenda, but why the growing interest in greener topics? Environmental and social issues – in other words sustainability issues – interest shareholders because they are strategic risk-management issues. Leading companies are taking their cue accordingly, renewing their focus on the need for resource efficiency and scenario planning. This response spans large industrial sectors including oil and gas, agriculture, food and beverage, manufacturing and utilities.

Via Olive Ventures

 

I’ve recently reported on a handful of ways that researchers are trying to lower the cost of capturing carbon dioxide, with the view to storing it underground or using it for something useful (see “Cheaper Ways to Capture Carbon Dioxide,” “Grasping for Ways to Capture Carbon Dioxide on the Cheap,” and “Fuel Cells Could Offer Cheap Carbon Dioxide Storage”).

 

All of these improvements shouldn’t obscure the fact that the potential of carbon capture is limited. Carbon capture and storage will never be able to accommodate all of the carbon dioxide we emit now. And quite frankly, carbon capture would have trouble just keeping up with the increase in coal consumption (see “The Enduring Technology of Coal”).

 

Capturing and storing carbon dioxide will always make electricity more expensive. In theory, low carbon sources like solar, wind, and nuclear might one day compete with fossil fuel power (and they do now in some places, for some purposes). It will always be cheaper just to let the carbon dioxide escape into the atmosphere.

 

Even if costs are made far lower than they are today, the impact of carbon capture will be limited by the sheer scale of infrastructure needed to store carbon dioxide. During combustion, each carbon atom from coal combines with two atoms of oxygen from the air, and this creates a huge amount of stuff. Even once the gas has been compressed into a liquid that can be piped to storage sites, the volume is immense.

 

Vaclav Smil, a professor at University of Manitoba and master of sobering energy-related numbers, calculates that if we were to bury just one-fifth of the global carbon dioxide emissions, we would need to build an industry capable of handling twice the volume of stuff as the entire oil industry, an industry that took 100 years to develop, driven by a large and mostly expanding market.

 

In some cases, at a limited scale, the cost of capturing carbon dioxide will be low enough (as it is now for capturing it from some industrial sources) that it can be sold for a profit for some applications. Future reductions in costs could expand these applications. But the market for carbon dioxide will be limited.

 

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Via Chuck Sherwood, Senior Associate, TeleDimensions, Inc

Proyecto de arquitectura futurista con el diseño de una eco granja urbana para producir alimentos sin contaminar.

 

Vincent Callebaut, es un famoso arquitecto nacido en 1977 en Bélgica, tiene una conocida oficina de arquitectura vanguardista y sin igual, al menos...por ahora.
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Via Ursula Sola de Hinestrosa