Green Options

Global warming forces natural resources into unnatural conditions, and the people who rely on them are similarly forced into unnatural positions

The environmental impacts of the peanut butter recall will take years to unravel.

Vietnam faces a stark choice. Its farmlands are shrinking as government policy to achieve ‘industrialised nation’ status by 2020 continues. But national food security has always been a focus of Vietnamese political and cultural life. How is it to balance these two competing aims. One answer is through the use of atomic energy.

It’s a decidedly low-tech way to deal with a 21st century problem, but a newly published paper argues that the world can cut carbon dioxide emissions up to 15 percent a year by taking the crop waste leftover after the harvest and dumping it into the deep ocean.

Stuart Strand of the University of Washington and coauthor Gregory Benford of the University of California at Irvine argue in the journal Environmental Science & Technology that such a reduction is possible by dumping 30 percent of world crop residues at least 1,500 meters deep in the oceans. The method would lock up the carbon in the crop waste deep underwater for thousands of years, the authors said.

Perhaps by 2050 we’ll all be growing bananas in our energy efficient homes?

A large Florida landscaping business has planted a 22-acre biomass crop at its nursery that will produce enough fuel to operate its fleet of 25 diesel trucks.

Brian Shank, president of Clermont Scapes in Groveland, Florida, said he decided to plant a 22-acre plot of Jatropha in order to save money for his hurting business, but also to set an example for other companies looking for cost-effective ways to help the environment.

From our friends at ZapRoot: Farmers take it to the extreme to protect their crops. The Auto Alliance has jump on the green bandwagon. These Guys are Full of **it returns.

Links for this week’s edition:

sustainablog - Killing for Crops
Gas 2.0 - Ecodriving with the AAM
EcoScraps - McDonalds Green Billboard
Shell and the Alberta Oil Sands
Sad Hippies

A new global project is screening food crops for useful traits that can be adapted for reversing the effects of climate change and boost their diversity and sustainable production.

This will involve the setting up of crop banks and seed vaults, so to speak, in developing countries that depend on staples such as corn and rice, to tap on their valuable ’sustainability traits’ as a way of conserving the diversity of the world’s food crops.

In attempts to boost food security, crops from banana to sweet potato will be screened to identify material that plant breeders can use to produce varieties adapted to conditions associated with climate change.

I’m quite the dreadful snob when it comes to the consumption of alcohol. Whereas the less intellectual types may sit on verandas, sipping red wine, discussing Voltaire, I’m indoors, crate of cheap lager at my side, football on the telly.

Whereas they may swill the grape juice, inhale the aroma and swoon over the subtleties cascading o’er the taste buds, I’m already on my third can and the match yet to start.

But my, how I jolted when I came across a story suggesting that English vineyards may, in decades to come, suffer because our summers are set to become too hot.

Another municipality has discovered the potential of small-scale biodiesel production. Utah State University (USU), in conjunction with the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT), has decided to experiment with growing oil-seed crops in the grassy medians dividing I-15.

The unusual idea came from Dallas Hanks, a 44-year-old biologist who is working on his doctoral degree at USU. With an initial $50,000 boost fromUDOT , Hanks aims to prove the 2,500 miles of state-owned highway right-of-way could

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