Green members of the European parliament stood en masse and held up placards Tuesday in protest against the EU Commission approval of the cultivation of genetically modified potatoes.

A pampering session at the beauty salon always works wonders for morale – not just for humans, but also for sharks and manta ray fish. Australian scientists have discovered that these large marine creatures regularly congregate at certain spots on the Great Barrier Reef to be groomed by smaller fish.

Olson Lewis Dioli & Doktor Architects recently shared their appreciation of upcycling with youngsters at the Brookwood School Sustainability Fair by teaching them how to turn trash into treasure. The firm taught children at the elementary school how to save simple wooden pallets from the incinerator and craft their very own bird abodes!

The children were provided with a premade kit made from the wooden pallets, and had help from architects on the scene to piece the parts together. The result of their efforts was a batch of adorable, hand made birdhouses perfect for encouraging birds’ own form of upcycling – nest building. The Sustainability Fair, which was open to the public, successfully gathered students, parents, community members, and organizations, in order to promote the use of sustainable practices, like upcyling, “a life-long habit”.

Thanks for the tip Henry Louis Miller!

+ Olson Lewis Dioli & Doktor Architects

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Post tags: birdhouse, carpentry, eco design, green design, Olson Lewis Dioli & Doktor, sustainable design

A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there's a considerable amount of methane (CH₄) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There's as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.

Here's why: methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, significantly more powerful than carbon dioxide. There are billions of tons of methane trapped under the permafrost, and if that methane starts leaking quickly, it would have a strong feedback effect -- warming the atmosphere and oceans, causing more methane to leak, and on and on. The melting of methane ice (aka "methane hydrates" and "methane clathrates") is probably the most significant global warming tipping point event out there. If we see runaway methane from underneath the Siberian permafrost, we could see temperatures increasing far faster than even the most pessimistic CO₂-driven scenarios -- perhaps as much as 8-10° C, very much into the global catastrophe realm. To put it in context: rapid methane releases have been implicated in extinction events in Earth's geologic past.

(Here's one piece of mitigating information: it's unclear how long this methane leak has been happening, or the degree to which the measured methane levels exceeds previous amounts. If we're lucky, this is actually a status quo situation, and we still have time before we reach a tipping point. But basing our strategy on "if we're lucky" is not very wise.)

Because of this tipping point/feedback process, a runaway methane melt won't stop on its own. When I've written before about desperation as a driver for the rapid (and risky) implementation of geoengineering, this is precisely the scenario I had in mind. If this news holds up, and if it can be shown that the methane leak is actually increasing, then I believe that we are certain to engage in geoengineering, and probably will do so before we have enough good models and studies to suss out any unwanted consequences. We'd be faced with a choice between guaranteed catastrophe or terrible uncertainty.

We'd probably try every geoengineering option available in the event of a methane runaway, but the one that most people would focus on would be the temperature management strategies: stratospheric sulfate injection, seawater cloud brightening, and (unlikely to happen but certain to get a lot of media attention) orbiting reflectors. But there's one more method we should consider. Understanding its potential requires a bit of science talk.

I noted earlier that methane is a "significantly more powerful" greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. More specifically, it's at least 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO₂; some reports (such as the first piece I linked to above) cite it as 30x stronger, and I've been seen as much as 72x stronger. The difference comes from how the effect is measured over time -- methane and carbon dioxide leave the atmosphere at very different speeds. Although CO₂ takes upwards of a century to cycle out naturally, methane takes only about ten years. Why the difference? Chemical processes in the atmosphere break down CH₄ (in combination with oxygen) into CO₂+H₂O -- carbon dioxide and water. In addition, certain bacteria -- known as methanotrophs -- actually consume methane, with the same chemical results. These processes have their limits, however; an abundance of methane in the atmosphere can overwhelm the oxidation chemistry, making the methane stick around for longer than the typical 8-10 years, and the commonplace methanotrophic bacteria evolved in an environment where methane emerges gradually.

These are pretty much the only two natural methane "sinks." There are a few small-scale human processes that can make use of methane (for the production of methanol for fuel, for example) and function as artificial sinks, but such efforts would be hard-pressed to capture methane released across two million square kilometers. So here's where we start to think big.

Both of the natural processes are, in principle, amenable to human intervention. The oxidation of methane into CO₂ and water is a well-understood phenomenon, and relies on the presence of OH (hydroxyl radical); upwards of 90% of lower atmosphere methane is oxidized through this process (PDF). But OH is something of a problem chemical, in that it's also a key oxidation agent for many atmospheric pollutants, such as carbon monoxide and NOx. Although we could produce OH to enhance the natural chemical oxidation process, the side-effects of pumping enough OH into the atmosphere to oxidize all of that methane would be unpredictable, but almost certainly quite bad.

So what about methanotrophic bacteria? Such bacteria have long been recognized in freshwater areas and soil, and have had limited use in bioremediation efforts. Methanotrophic Archaea -- similar to bacteria, but a wholly different kingdom of organism -- were recently identified in the oceans; research suggests that methanotrophic Archaea may be responsible for the oxidation of up to 80% of the methane in the oceans. Methanotrophic microbes can also be temperature extremophiles, as they were among the various species found after the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed.

We recently began to learn much more about how methanotrophic bacteria function, as a team from the Institute for Genomic Research sequenced the genome of the methanotroph Methylococcus capsulatus. The scientists discovered that Methylococcus has the genomic capacity to adapt to a far wider set of environments than it is currently found in. They also looked at the possibility of enhancing the microbe's ability to oxidize methane, although admittedly for purposes other than straight methane consumption.

So here's the proposal: we need to deploy methanotrophic microbes at the East Siberian Ice Shelf. Methanotrophic Archaea appears to be best-suited for this task, but we don't know as much about them as we do about bacteria. If we need to modify the microbes (to consume methane more quickly, for example), we may need to work on Methylococcus bacteria, making them viable in extremely cold seawater. I suspect that working with the Archaea will probably be sufficient, but it's important to think ahead about different pathways. Either way, we should consider just how we could make use of methanotrophs to avoid a methane-melt disaster. Given the size of the region, we'll need lots of them, but that's one advantage of biology over straight chemistry: the methanotrophs would be reproducing themselves.

We need to be aware of possible unintended consequences, but at this point, it's not clear how additional methanotrophs would pose a larger risk; moreover, a mass of methanotrophic organisms would undoubtedly be helpful for reducing overall atmospheric methane beyond the Siberian release. Nonetheless, there are some crucial questions we need to answer before we could consider deploying natural or GMO methanotrophs:

Most Americans would have a fit if their credit card or cell phone company sent a dollar amount at the end of the month with no itemized description to match. But we tolerate it from our utility companies with little complaint. If we’re going to change our energy habits, we’re going to need more information to do it. What kinds of information motivate consumers and what kinds irritate them? OPOWER, an energy efficiency software company, is betting that a new version of an old classic — the report card — will strike the right balance.

Read the rest of OPOWER Encourages Efficiency With Energy Report Cards

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Post tags: "energy efficiency", energy report cards, green design, green graphic design, home energy monitor, home energy use, information design, opower, smart meter, sustainable design, utility

Last week, we brought you news about Chef Daniel Angerer’s special cheese made from his wife’s breast milk, and boy did that open a can of worms! While we expected knee-jerk ‘EEEWWW‘ reactions from people, we didn’t really imagine the extent to which people would get up in arms about breast milk cheese – something which in our minds is totally natural, organic, and not gross in the slightest. People got so concerned about the breastmilk cheese issue that apparently the New York Department of Health came to pay Angerer a visit over the weekend.

Well you can rest assured that Angerer’s “My Spouse’s Mommy Milk Cheese” is not being sold to the public at his restaurant, Klee Brasserie – he confirmed that on the radio today. But we still don’t see what is so awful or scary about the idea of serving, local, organic, healthy cheese made from breast milk. How is this any less gross than eating cheese that came from the manure-covered teat of a factory-farmed, hormone-laden, antibiotics laden cow? After all, you have to admit that when it comes to foods that are organic, local, natural and free, human breast milk ticks all the boxes. And, remember, the stuff is naturally DESIGNED to be the ultimate human sustenance. So what do you think? Would you eat cheese made of human breast milk?

READ MORE AT INHABITOTS >

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Post tags: breast feeding, Breast Milk Cheese, breast milk foods, breastmilk cheese, Cheese, chef daniel angerer, Daniel Angerer, Danier Angerer, Dining in New York, Klee Brasserie, Mommy's Milk Cheese, New York Dining, New York restuarants, Weird Foods

Photo: Jurvetson

Telecom giant Nokia recently filed a patent for a cell phone powered by kinetic energy (one of our favorite kinds of energy here at Inhabitat!). The conceived phone would charge via built-in piezoelectric generators that will convert the user’s motions into power. Now, we’ve seen a ton of kinetic gadget concepts, but the fact that Nokia is taking interest and has gone so far as to file a patent is significant evidence that we may soon be seeing these types of electronics hit the market.

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Post tags: cell phone, eco cell phone, green cellular, green design, Greener Gadgets, kinetic energy, kinetically powered cell phone, Nokia, sustainable design