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From plant to power
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Petrol might yet survive the green revolution. Some investors are taking seriously the con- cept of ‘green gasoline’ — transforming the woody remains of plants into exact replicas of today’s transportation fuels.
Many see promise because, unlike other biofuels, this product would blend smoothly into today’s petrol-driven infrastructure. “This is one I like. It’s got a chance of making it,” says Lanny Schmidt, a chemical engineer who works on combustion processes and alternative fuels at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Yet this ‘biomass-to-liquid’ approach is one of the least known in the biofuels portfolio, and barely makes a dent in alternative fuel quotas.
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Do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels?
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A fundamental, generally implicit, assumption of the Intergov- ernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and many energy analysts is that each unit of energy supplied by non-fossil-fuel sources takes the place of a unit of energy supplied by fossil- fuel sources (1–4). However, owing to the complexity of economic systems and human behaviour, it is often the case that changes aimed at reducing one type of resource consumption, either through improvements in efficiency of use or by developing substitutes, do not lead to the intended outcome when net effects are considered (5–9). Here, I show that the average pattern across most nations of the world over the past fifty years is one where each unit of total national energy use from non- fossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-quarter of a unit of fossil-fuel energy use and, focusing specifically on electricity, each unit of electricity generated by non-fossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-tenth of a unit of fossil-fuel-generated electricity. These results challenge conventional thinking in that they indicate that suppressing the use of fossil fuel will require changes other than simply technical ones such as expanding non-fossil-fuel energy production.
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The Biofuels Landscape Through the Lens of Industrial Chemistry
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Replacing petroleum feedstock with biomass in the production of fuels and value-added chemicals carries considerable appeal. As in industrial chemistry more broadly, high-throughput experimentation has greatly facilitated innovation in small-scale exploration of biomass production and processing. Yet biomass is hard to transport, potentially hindering the integration of manufacturing-scale processes. Moreover, the path from laboratory breakthrough to commercial production remains as tortuous as ever.
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Beneficial Biofuels—The Food, Energy, and Environment Trilemma
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Exploiting multiple feedstocks, under new policies and accounting rules, to balance biofuel production, food security, and greenhouse-gas reduction.
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Implications of Limiting CO2 Concentrations for Land Use and Energy
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Limiting atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations to low levels requires strategies to manage anthropogenic carbon emissions from terrestrial systems as well as fossil fuel and industrial sources. We explore the implications of fully integrating terrestrial systems and the energy system into a comprehensive mitigation regime that limits atmospheric CO2 concentrations. We find that this comprehensive approach lowers the cost of meeting environmental goals but also carries with it profound implications for agriculture: Unmanaged ecosystems and forests expand, and food crop and livestock prices rise. Finally, we find that future improvement in food crop productivity directly affects land-use change emissions, making the technology for growing crops potentially important for limiting atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
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Virtual Hot Spots
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Physiological ecologists who design computer models to predict how animals handle heat are forecasting the effects of climate change
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Roles and Effects of Environmental Carbon Dioxide in Insect Life
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Key Words
behavior, olfaction, antennal lobe, herbivory, oviposition
Abstract
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a ubiquitous sensory cue that plays mul- tiple roles in insect behavior. In recent years understanding of the well-known role of CO2 in foraging by hematophagous insects (e.g., mosquitoes) has grown, and research on the roles of CO2 cues in the foraging and oviposition behavior of phytophagous insects and in behavior of social insects has stimulated interest in this area of insect sensory biology. This review considers those advances, as well as some of the mechanistic bases of the modulation of behavior by CO2 and important progress in our understanding of the detection and CNS processing of CO2 information in insects. Finally, this review briefly addresses how the ongoing increase in atmospheric CO2 levels may affect insect life.
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Can Plants Adapt? New Questions in Climate Change Research
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As it becomes increasingly apparent that human activities are partly responsible for global warming, the focus of climate change research is shifting from the churning out of assessments to the pursuit of science that can test the robustness of existing models. The questions now being addressed are becoming more challenging:The questions now being addressed are becoming more challenging: Can water-use efficiency of plants keep up with rising temperatures? Will we see a greening period for some decades, even a century, before facing a rapid browndown as threshold temperatures are reached? Or could the thresholds be reached much sooner because of interactions of biophysical processes? Is the carbon storage issue missing the point?
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Montane meadow change during drought varies with background hydrologic regime and plant functional group
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Key words:drought; forbs; hydrological gradient; plant community; woody plants.
Abstract. Climate change models for many ecosystems predict more extreme climatic events in the future, including exacerbated drought conditions. Here we assess the effects of drought by quantifying temporal variation in community composition of a complex montane meadow landscape characterized by a hydrological gradient. The meadows occur in two regions of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (Gallatin and Teton) and were classified into six categories (M1–M6, designating hydric to xeric) based upon Satellite pour l’Observation de la Terre (SPOT) satellite imagery. Both regions have similar plant communities, but patch sizes of meadows are much smaller in the Gallatin region. We measured changes in the percent cover of bare ground and plants by species and functional groups during five years between 1997 and 2007. We hypothesized that drought effects would not be manifested evenly across the hydrological gradient, but rather would be observed as hotspots of change in some areas and minimally evident in others. We also expected varying responses by plant functional groups (forbs vs. woody plants). Forbs, which typically use water from relatively shallow soils compared to woody plants, were expected to decrease in cover in mesic meadows, but increase in hydric meadows. Woody plants, such as Artemisia, were expected to increase, especially in mesic meadows. We identified several important trends in our meadow plant communities during this period of drought: (1) bare ground increased significantly in xeric meadows of both regions (Gallatin M6 and Teton M5) and in mesic (M3) meadows of the Teton, (2) forbs decreased significantly in the mesic and xeric meadows in both regions, (3) forbs increased in hydric (M1) meadows of the Gallatin region, and (4) woody species showed increases in M2 and M5 meadows of the Teton region and in M3 meadows of the Gallatin region. The woody response was dominated by changes in Artemisia spp. and Chrysothamnus viscidiflorus. Thus, our results supported our expectations that community change was not uniform across the landscape, but instead could be predicted based upon functional group responses to the spatial and temporal patterns of water availability, which are largely a function of plant water use and the hydrological gradient.
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A Large-Scale Deforestation Experiment: Effects of Patch Area and Isolation on Amazon Birds
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As compared with extensive contiguous areas, small isolated habitat patches lack many species. Some species disappear after isolation; others are rarely found in any small patch, regardless of isolation. We used a 13-year data set of bird captures from a large landscape-manipulation experiment in a Brazilian Amazon forest to model the extinction-colonization dynamics of 55 species and tested basic predictions of island biogeography and metapopulation theory. From our models, we derived two metrics of species vulnerability to changes in isolation and patch area. We found a strong effect of area and a variable effect of isolation on the predicted patch occupancy by birds.
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