How seaweed can help; a bio-rich edge of China; teaching recycling; substituting pesticides for robot laser
| | Tuesday, November 16, 2021 | | | | |
| In today’s newsletter, how seaweed can help; a bio-rich edge of China; teaching recycling … and substituting pesticides for robot laser. | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERIN SCHAFF, THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX | |
By Robert Kunzig, ENVIRONMENT Executive Editor
The map my colleague Katie Armstrong made (see below) shouldn’t have surprised me. I knew trees in North Carolina and elsewhere were being cut down to be burned in European power plants. But I didn’t fully appreciate until I saw Armstrong’s map that it was happening all over the Southeast—that there are at least 20 mills from Virginia to Texas chopping wood into tiny pellets, and that millions of tons of the stuff are already being shipped each year from at least 10 different ports in the region.
It’s as if a giant funnel were draining Southeastern woods into European furnaces, one cigarette filter-sized pellet at a time—all in the name of fighting climate change. And it’s all based on a fundamental error, many scientists say.
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| When the European Union set up its pioneering carbon emissions trading scheme in 2005, it defined wood as a zero-emissions fuel, Sarah Gibbens reports. At first, that seemed to make sense: If a new tree grows to replace the one that was burned, it will absorb carbon from the air to offset the emissions from the burning.
“The whole wood pellet industry is basically being driven by this,” Princeton researcher Tim Searchinger told Gibbens. Coal-fired power plants in the U.K. and elsewhere have been switching to wood pellets, thereby reducing their emissions fees—but not their actual emissions.
The problem, Searchinger and many other scientists say, is that while trees do indeed absorb carbon, they do so only in the long run—they take decades longer to grow than they do to burn. But in the long run the glaciers will have melted; we don’t have decades to wait to cut emissions. And right now, most evidence suggests, burning whole trees puts more carbon in the air than coal, because wood is less efficient. (Pictured at top, young pines in Virginia; below left, the pellets; below right, logs at a North Carolina pellet factory.) | | | |
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| At the COP26 environmental summit that ended last weekend in Glasgow, more than 130 countries signed a pledge to end deforestation by 2030. But the issue of burning trees for energy wasn’t on the agenda.
On Saturday I listened in on the livestream of the last session. The delegate from Palau talked about children living in flooded homes (pictured below, the sea rise-threatened nation of Tuvalu). Delegates from places such as the Maldives, Chile, Indonesia, and Argentina all expressed their willingness to compromise and support a draft agreement they were unhappy with—one that made at least slow progress toward the goal, as Alejandra Borunda reported.
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY MARIO TAMA, GETTY IMAGES | |
| At this divisive time, it made me choke up a bit, to think that representatives of just about every country on Earth were in that hall, talking to each other, trying to work out the most arcane rules about how we as a species get and spend energy. It seemed an embryo of what we need more, not less of—in spite of all the shouting outside about what a catastrophic failure the text was. What those delegates were doing was hard.
But the details matter. The loophole that defines wood as a zero-emissions fuel emerged from an earlier COP meeting, Searchinger told Gibbens. In the last session in Glasgow, European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans talked about how Europe had gotten rich off the coal-fired Industrial Revolution. “Coal has no future” now, he said. He didn’t mention that European countries had switched to coal back in the 18th century only after cutting down and burning most of their own forests. From that perspective, importing pellets from North America, in order to switch from coal back to wood, seems like a historic step backward.
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY REBECCA HALE, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION | |
Undersea forests: Talk about fireproof. Environmentalists see farming carbon-absorbing seaweed, then sinking the mature plants to the bottom of the ocean, as a way to fight climate change. Farming seaweed in just 3.8 percent of the federal waters off the California coast—that’s 0.065 percent of the global ocean suitable for growing macroalgae—could neutralize emissions from the state’s giant agriculture industry, researchers tell Nat Geo. Oh, and here’s how a sprinkling of seaweed in a cow’s diet could go a long way toward curbing bovine burps, which contain the harmful greenhouse gas methane. (Pictured above, kelp, Irish moss, and sea lettuce harvested off the coast of Maine.)
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY PAUL SALOPEK | | | Glimpses of an older Earth: The Gaoligong mountains sit on the edge of the world’s most populated nations, carpeted with at least 5,000 higher plant species (and more are being discovered.) As part of his walking journey along civilization’s ancient routes, Nat Geo Explorer Paul Salopek writes about finding refuge for a few days in the deep folds of the range. The area (pictured above) also is home to some 700 species, including 154 mammals, 419 birds, 21 amphibians, 56 reptiles, and 49 fish. “It is an ark of life,” he writes in his latest dispatch from his Out of Eden Walk. (Pictured above is Yang Wendou, a member of the Bai ethnic minority, who is walking with Salopek.) | | | |
 | PHOTOGRAPH BY MASKOT, GETTY IMAGES
| | | Waste not, want not: How do you teach the next generation about the benefits of recycling? “Many kids are eager to help with recycling,” fifth-grade teacher Chrystelle Panatier tells us. “But they don’t always know the right place to put things, or where the recyclables go next.” Here are 11 answers to questions submitted to us by kids. (Pictured above, family and children sorting waste and recycling in Stockholm, Sweden.) | | | |
| This week’s question(s): Recycling may have changed a bit in the past year or two. Feel free to answer any one of these questions: Do you recycle at home? Does your community have a recycling program? Do you know if recycling rules have changed recently for you? If you recycle, do you think your efforts are helping the planet? Let us know! We’re love to share some of your responses in a coming newsletter. | |
We hope you liked today’s Planet Possible newsletter. Today's newsletter was edited and curated by Monica Williams, Heather Kim, and David Beard. Have an idea or link for us? Let us know at david.beard@natgeo.com. | | | |
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