Here is a big boost for low-tech, low-cost, potentially very high-impact solutions to “dangerous anthropogenic interference” (DAI) with the climate system:  a solar-powered cooker that costs less than $5 to build.  I wrote about the FT’s Climate Change Challenge last month here.  The FT and its partners, Forum for the Future and HP, are providing exactly the kind of support for these sorts of critically important, innovative, and scalable projects that they need.

See this from the BBC on the winner, the Kyoto Box, including an interview with the inventor, Jon Bøhmer, who lays out all the many positives.  See also the FT article from today.  “Mr. Bøhmer hopes the box will be eligible for carbon credits, hence the name Kyoto box, making a yearly profit of €20-€30 (£18-£27) per stove, which would enable further expansion and easily cover the cost of replacing the cooker after five years.”

I love solar cookers and have written about them in several contexts including at Black Carbon and Solar Cookers.

Computers - This is, as you might suspect, an area where lots of energy gets consumed.  According to Emerson, at their “Energy Logic” webpage:  “Data centers in the United States alone soaked up about 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or $4.5 billion worth of electricity in 2006. If current energy usage trends continue, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency predicts U.S. data centers will use more than 100 billion kWh by 2011, representing $7.4 billion in annual electricity costs and 2.5 percent of the nation’s total electricity.”  It’s clearly in the best interests of industry to get these numbers down.

I used to live across the street from a million-square-foot “telco hotel” that Cisco routers and other high-energy equipment packed from wall to wall and floor to ceiling.  Think that stuff doesn’t generate heat?  They had AC going all the time in all weather.  Lot’s of noise as a result, which was our community’s main concern.  In any event, to get the energy consumption down, one thing you want to do is cut down on the heat, and thus the need for the AC.  That’s one of Emerson’s strategies.  For more from them, see this information.

Green IT is a big, critically important and rapidly growing field.  Nobody covers it better than GreenerComputing, part of the complex of “GreenBiz.”  (I referenced one of the sister sites, “Greener Building News” and its editor, Rob Watson, at this post recently.)  There’s a huge quantum of useful and well-crafted information at GreenerComputing.

The Climate Savers Computing Initiative is an initiative embraced by industry and supported by such environmental pioneers as NRDC and WWF.  Its members include Dell, Google, HP, Microsoft and a very good number of other big and medium-sized IT players.

Concrete - Here’s an area of the “old economy” that is still very much with us and essential to growth and economic well-being throughout the world.  However, there’s a real GHG burden:  making Portland cement is responsible for about five percent of carbon dioxide from anthropogenic sources.  Concrete Is Remixed With Environment in Mind from the “NY Times” highlights some breakthroughs in this essential industry, including sequestering carbon by bubbling carbon dioxide through wet cement.

The article also notes an exciting possibility that I talked about in Desalination and Energy, Plus A Concrete Idea for Carbon Sequestration from last summer, namely using seawater in an industrial process that takes waste heat and carbon dioxide from power plants to make cement.  Calera says it can take more than 90% of the carbon dioxide from power plant emissions to, for all intents and purposes, sequester it in concrete.  Sweet.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) has a robust Cement Sustainability Initiative (CSI).  See this recent report, Climate Actions, from the CSI for a look at the various fronts on which progress is being made to reduce GHG.  For more on the industry itself, see the Portland Cement Association’s website.

Obama’s Team, Continued - Climate experts get key US posts is the headline from the BBC.  John Holdren, a physicist, Harvard professor, and director of the Woods Hole Research Center, has been named Obama’s top science advisor.  Holdren is a passionate advocate of early and decisive action on warming.  See also this from Woods Hole on the announcement in which Holdren says:  “None of the great interlinked challenges of our time - the economy, energy, environment, health, security, and the particular vulnerabilities of the poor to shortfalls in all of these - can be solved without insights and advances from the physical sciences, the life sciences, and engineering.”

Obama also named marine biologist Jane Lubchenco to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an agency that has critical importance in how we monitor the environmental changes that are occurring.  She is a professor at Oregon State and another outspoken member of the scientific community on the issue of climate change.  See her webpage here.   (Coincidence that Michelle Obama’s brother is the basketball coach at Oregon State?  Probably.)

Further Thoughts on Poznan - There were several important developments at these UNFCCC meetings worth noting.  (See here and here for previous posts.)  The road to Copenhagen will yet be tortuous and stony, but, for one thing, the idea of intensified efforts on “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation” (REDD) has taken hold.  We are not only diminishing the capacity of forests to sequester carbon in cutting them down, but burning them increases carbon dioxide.  (I’ve written about forests a number of times at the blog.)

REDD is a full-tilt assault on the problem and there are victories being won aside from the more deeply energized commitment won in Poznan.  Brazil has made the battle against rainforest destruction its own and that has incalculable value in setting an example for others.  I heard Stephan Schwartzman from EDF speaking this past week at a webinar about this and other REDD-related matters.

Another milestone occurred in the launch of the Adaptation Fund.  Bloomberg News put it this way here:  “Poor countries at the United Nations climate talks in Poland may win approval to tap into a $990 million fund as early as next month to cope with the damage of global warming, their biggest victory in 11 days of debate.”

Another of the main developments was the firm commitment to an arduous work plan for the coming year.  See this summary from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and the comprehensive coverage from the UNFCCC, which includes webcasts, and all the documentation.  Finally, listen to Yvo de Boer, UNFCCC executive secretary, at his final media briefing.

Smart Grid, Green Buildings - Further to my notes below on the smart grid, see Intelligent Buildings Meet the Smart Grid from “GreenerBuildings News” and the accompanying articles.  As Rob Watson, the executive editor, notes “Today, we recognize that a network of decentralized, building-level services connected through the grid results in a much more robust, and sustainable, alternative than the autonomous Earthships of yesteryear.”

In a related story, from RenewableEnergyWorld.com, titled Report Details Potential of Combined Heat and Power in US, we learn that if the US had 20% of generating capacity coming from CHP by 2030, we would realize a 60% reduction of the projected increase in carbon dioxide emissions.  I heard an energy consultant once say that not having CHP as a standard should be construed as criminal behavior.  You can see why.

Renewables Beat the Old Energy - In another item from the always excellent RenewableEnergyWorld.com, we get that a study from Stanford gives quantitative reasons why nuclear, coal and biofuels are very much the wrong path if we want “to improve energy security, mitigate global warming and reduce the number of deaths caused by air pollution”  You can read this important paper here, at “Energy & Environmental Science.”  (See also my reference to a terrific article, “Exajoules of Hope,” at a post from August.)

People say that you can’t rely on solar because it doesn’t run at night, besides how are you going to store energy that you don’t need at a given time? Well the folks at MIT seem to have come up with what amounts to all the answers. “With today’s announcement,” reads the press release, “MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.”

The key to the breakthrough is ” a new catalyst, consisting of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode. When the catalyst is placed in water and electricity runs through the electrode, oxygen gas is produced. When another catalyst is used to produce hydrogen gas, the oxygen and hydrogen can be combined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power a house or an electric car, day or night.” (For an abstract of the paper in “Science,” go here.)

“With Daniel Nocera‘s and Matthew Kanan‘s new catalyst, homeowners could use their solar panels during the day to power their home, while also using the energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen for storage. At night, the stored hydrogen and oxygen could be recombined using a fuel cell to generate power while the solar panels are inactive.“

(Graphic/Patrick Gillooly, MIT)

Here’s a video of Daniel Nocera, the lead researcher on this.

James Barber, the Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London and one of the world’s leading experts on photosynthesis, was over the moon: “This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind. The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem.”