..A must read for for every US voter and concerned citizen.. challenges the reader to explore new possibilities and new mindsets that will ultimately be required if the world is truly ready to make a change.. amazon.com US onlyWorking with the Earth, rather than wrecking it
Tuesday, 20 April, 2010
15:00 PM
WARNING; Lucy Wyatt's book Approaching ChaosA press crushes oil seed rape and sets it on the journey to becoming biofuel. (High-protein pellets are bi-products that can be used as animal feed or burned for heat.) The biofuel not only keeps a tractor moving but fires an electricity generator. "When this is running, it can pick up the load from the whole farm. It's really powerful," says Lucy. At one stage they did lay a cable for a potential wind turbine, but she reckons this plant is more flexible.
Lucy believes they're one of the first enterprises in East Anglia to commission a 100% biofuel generator. The farm could be self-sufficient in electricity, she says, but they're keeping below the 2,500-litre output level that can be processed without having to register with the tax people. "So it limits the amount we can produce, which is really silly, but we just don't want the hassle of having to fill in forms every month."
Growing rape in a completely eco-friendly way has proved a bit of a headache, admittedly. Combating the pollen beetle – whose presence can lead to tiny yields – is a challenge hard to overcome without resorting to spraying, while fattiness and sometimes water content has to be removed from the crop. Methanol is used to help break it down – not totally green, but it does result in high-quality fuel.
Lucy's also proud of a biofuel boiler that heats water for the office. Outside, a solar cell powers a little fountain in the stable yard. The horses sometimes drink from it.
FUEL FOR THOUGHT: Lucy Wyatt with the biofuel station on the family farm in Suffolk. MyPhotos24 Ref - SP 010 Lucy Wyatt 6Green consumption and false economies
Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief
I LIVE in the San Francisco Bay Area, the epicentre of smug green consumerism, where self-proclaimed environmentalists drive to wholefood shops to load their fuel-inefficient hybrid SUVs with too much organic produce. They should read Heather Rogers's stories and weep.
Rogers travelled a long way to investigate the emerging green economy. Her destinations included supposedly organic sugar-cane plantations in Paraguay and tracts of rainforest in Borneo that are being felled to produce palm oil for biofuel.
Having flown all over the globe, Rogers did not try to salve her conscience by buying "carbon offsets", which are supposed to negate air miles by funding tree-planting or renewable electricity projects in developing countries. When you read her account of the problems with auditing these schemes in India, you'll understand why.
Green Gone Wrong is primarily a fast-paced travelogue, which leads to some loose ends and an uneven structure. In India, for instance, we are told that a carbon-offsetting project is "perhaps" composting ash into organic fertiliser, "but I saw no trace of it". (Having done my share of "touristic" journalism, I've experienced similar difficulties: on a flying visit, it is hard to tell whether you're looking at part of the problem, or part of the solution.)
The section on housing, meanwhile, is dominated by a glowing account of developments in Germany that put more power into the grid than they remove. I would like to have seen more discussion of whether or not this is because green housing is intrinsically easier to get right than green agriculture.
I wanted a synthesis, not a succession of anecdotes. In this regard, another problem is Rogers's apparent distrust of quantitative analysis. For example, she dismisses analysis of thetotal greenhouse emissions over the production cycle of a food as often failing to capture the realities of how crops are grown in distant lands. Maybe so, but without quantitative rigour, we are forced to lean on assumptions that may be as ill-founded as those this book demolishes.
Rogers seems to view nuclear power as bad and small farms as good. But can we develop a low-carbon economy without a nuclear component, and does a local farmers' market result in higher or lower greenhouse emissions per kilo of produce than a food industry that achieves economies of scale by hauling much larger quantities of food, even if the distances are greater? A true green economy can be built once we have the answers to these and other equally tricky questions.
Book information:
Green Gone Wrong by Heather Rogers
Published by Verso/Scribner
£16.99/$26
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Biofuels are a wide range of fuels which are in some way derived from biomass.
Your idea?