Tag: EarthTalk

Cargo Shipping & Pollution

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Cargo shipping creates huge amounts of air and marine pollution. What’s being done to change this given the large number of everyday goods that travel this way?
—JJ, Newark, NJ

The vast majority of goods we use and enjoy have spent at least some time traveling on cargo ships. In fact, such ships facilitate more than 80 percent of global trade. Unfortunately, these huge ships that ply the world’s oceans and waterways burn lots of fossil fuels—some individual ships burn upwards of 100 tons of oil a day. If the global cargo shipping industry were a country, it would rank sixth overall in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions (higher than South Korea, Iran, and Canada).

Some 80 percent of goods for sale around the world make their way from point A to B on a cargo ship, so cleaning up this industry is key to greening the overall economy. Credit: Chuttersnap, Unsplash.

Cargo ships have several other negative environmental effects as well. They also emit large amounts of fine particles, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide—all bad for us and our environment. As if the emissions weren’t bad enough, cargo ships also run into marine life at an alarming rate: Ship strikes are one of the leading causes of death for many of the world’s whale species.

But as bad as all this sounds, cargo shipping is one of the most efficient and eco-friendly ways to get items from point A to B. Big ships emit only about half as much CO2 as trains, one-fifth as much as trucks and only one-fiftieth of what airplanes would emit to transport the same load.

Nonetheless, environmental concerns continue to dog cargo shipping. In response, shipping companies have started to employ innovative strategies to save fuel and reduce pollution, such as so-called “slow steaming” whereby ships can burn less fuel and reduce emissions by traveling more slowly than usual.

Transitioning to cleaner fuels—such as liquified natural gas (LNG)—is another obvious short-term solution, but it can only get us so far. Another band-aid fix is the installation of exhaust scrubbers, which spray a fine mist of water to remove pollutants from ships’ exhaust before they can make their way up into the atmosphere. But scrubbers require energy, which leads to more fuel being burned. Also, the wastewater they generate is sometimes dumped into the ocean, which negatively affects marine organisms.

Longer term, environmental advocates are hoping for the wholesale decarbonization of the shipping industry. Plans are on the table for clean-burning hydrogen-powered cargo ships. Meanwhile, the first electrically-propelled cargo ship, Norway’s Yara Birkeland, is nearing completion. This 260-foot long vessel will carry chemicals and fertilizer on a relatively short 30-mile route.

Despite these advances, cargo shipping will continue releasing large amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere for the foreseeable future. Though battery-powered ships are finally moving off the drawing board and into the water, their range is simply too limited to allow for mass replacement of existing cargo fleets. The energy density of batteries will need to increase by a factor of ~30 before such replacements can begin taking place en masse. Given the likely slow pace of change, buying local is probably the average citizen’s best option for reducing shipping-based emissions in the short term.

CONTACTS: “The environmental cost of shipping stuff is huge…,” “CO2 emissions for shipping of goods,” “Shipping and climate change,” The uncounted cost of shipping’s environmental impact.

EarthTalk® is produced by Roddy Scheer & Doug Moss for the 501(c)3 nonprofit EarthTalk. Send questions to: question@earthtalk.org.

Internet Data Centers & Energy-Efficiency

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Internet data centers are fast becoming the largest power hogs in the world. What’s being done in this industry to make Internet usage more energy-efficient?
—M. T., Reno, NV

Though our online activity uses no paper, it still consumes quite a lot of energy. Data centers account for much of this energy use. These warehouse-sized buildings contain arrays or “farms” of servers, which are essentially souped-up computers that have many uses, including storing data and supporting all the activity on the internet. They are the hardware behind the proverbial “cloud.”

Data centers like this one use up lots of power; that’s why environmentalists are urging the biggest players in the industry to go with renewable energy sources where possible. Credit: CommScope.

Like the personal computers we all use, servers require electricity to function. Since internet users can call upon them to provide information at any time, they must remain on 24/7. Furthermore, as with any form of electrical activity, the functioning of this large number of servers packed together in a small area can result in overheating, making the need for cooling an additional energy cost for data center managers.

According to data center provider vXchnge, U.S. data centers alone use over 90 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually—about what 34 coal-powered plants generating 500 megawatts each produce. ComputerWorld magazine reports that the energy consumption of data centers worldwide will likely account for 3.2 percent of global carbon emissions by 2025—about as much as the airline industry—and as much as 14 percent by 2040.

In light of all this, finding ways to cut energy use has become a big priority in the industry. One of the simplest strategies is to locate data centers in cool climates, and use outdoor air to counter excessive heating. Alternate options include cooling inlet air by running it underground, or using a nearby water source for liquid cooling. Another issue is separating hot air produced by servers from the colder air used to cool them—no easy task if the servers are all housed together. But there are plenty of cheap solutions. Google, for example, uses low cost dividers from meat lockers for this purpose.

Another way data centers can reduce cooling costs is to design servers that can operate at high temperatures without overheating. Recent research shows that servers can operate at much higher temperatures than initially believed without compromising safety or efficiency. But not all data centers are comfortable letting their servers run hot. Other ways to make server farms more efficient include optimizing grid-to-server electrical conversions and reducing the energy required by “sleeping” servers.

The good news is the industry is making strides in the right direction. Apple, Facebook and Google all power 100 percent of their data center and other operations with renewables, albeit through the purchase of “renewable energy credits” akin to carbon offsets that air travelers can buy to keep their carbon footprints in check. Microsoft is moving toward 70 percent renewable energy by 2023, while laggard Amazon still only gets about half its data center power from renewables. And Switch, one of the largest U.S.-based data center companies, transitioned all of its facilities to run on nothing but renewables in 2016, including the nation’s largest data center in Reno, Nevada.

CONTACTS: “How to Improve Data Center Power Consumption & Energy Efficiency,” “Why data centres are the new frontier in the fight against climate change,” “Amazon is breaking its renewable energy commitments, Greenpeace claims.”

EarthTalk® is produced by Roddy Scheer & Doug Moss for the 501(c)3 nonprofit EarthTalk. Send questions to: question@earthtalk.org.

Corn’s Effect On The Environment, Q&A With EarthTalk

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How did corn become such a dominant crop in the U.S. and what’s the effect on the environment of growing so much of it?
—J.S., Washington, DC

It’s true that corn is the most dominant agricultural product in the U.S., and perhaps the world. Originally domesticated in Central America, European explorers initially shunned it. But when their crops failed, the conquerors of the New World decided to integrate corn into their agricultural efforts. Fast forward: A couple of hundred years and this tall grass now covers 90 million acres of land in America alone, and accounts for some 10 percent of total crop production globally.

Although Americans love corn, its ubiquity in our diets and agricultural sector isn’t so good for the planet. Credit: Livier Garcia, Pexels.

Corn is so ubiquitous in our food system that an estimated 70 percent of the atoms in the body of the average American originally came from it.

One of the reasons corn is so dominant is that, as far as crops go, it excels at converting raw materials into chemical energy. Growing corn generates far more calories per unit of land than nearly any other crop. Another key factor in corn’s rise was the surplus of ammonium nitrate after the end of World War II. Agricultural scientists repurposed this compound, originally stockpiled for explosives, into a cheap form of fertilizer. This allowed corn to be grown in the same fields year after year, without depleting the nitrogen already in the soil. Additionally, corn is incredibly versatile. We can eat it, process it into syrup and use it as a sweetener, fuel our cars with it, and feed it to our animals.

Currently, we use approximately 40 percent of corn grown in the U.S to create ethanol, and 36 percent to feed animals. Unfortunately, both uses wreak havoc on the environment. Ethanol has a low “energy-returned-on-energy-invested” ratio, meaning we must put a large amount of energy into producing it, in some cases even more than ethanol itself generates.

Even just growing corn is far from environmentally friendly. Conventional monoculture farming (the way most corn is grown) degrades soil and often leads to harmful runoff into streams and rivers. Pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers can all wreak havoc on aquatic organisms.

An indirect negative effect of the supremacy of corn has been its help in fueling explosive growth in the livestock industry at home and abroad. These days we use about 80 percent of the world’s farmland for animal production. But as a result of animals’ inefficiency in converting feed to energy, animal agriculture produces only 18 percent of the world’s calories.

So, what can we do? On a political level, agricultural subsidies for corn can be either eliminated or redistributed. Some 60 percent of farm subsidies in the U.S. go toward corn and other grains, while only one percent goes toward promoting healthier and more eco-friendly fruits and non-grain vegetables.

Farmers themselves can transition from monoculture practices to those that incorporate a wider variety of species into the mix. As consumers, one of the best measures we can take is to buy organic corn. Organic agriculture is not quite as eco-friendly as some make it out to be, it’s miles ahead of conventional farming.

CONTACTS: “The Environmental Risks Of Corn Production,” “How a national food policy could save millions of American lives.”

EarthTalk® is produced by Roddy Scheer & Doug Moss for the 501(c)3 nonprofit EarthTalk. Send questions to: question@earthtalk.org.