Wednesday, January 07. 2009
[Estimated aggregated distribution of pigs, poultry, cattle, and small ruminants. Source: FAO, 2006g.]
In a recent summary report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Livestock’s Long Shadow), trillions of farm animals across the globe were found to generate a whopping 18% of CO2 emissions. That is more than cars, buses, and airplanes. Hard to swallow that flying could reduce your carbon footprint more than eating meat, but as the New York Times put it: “Flatus and manure from animals contain not only methane, but also nitrous oxide, an even more potent warming agent. And meat requires energy for refrigeration as it moves from farm to market to home.” (”As More Eat Meat, a Bid to Cut Emissions,” Dec 3, 2008.)
[The United Nations expects beef and pork consumption to double between 2000 and 2050. Photo: Michel de Groot for The New York Times.]
A pig farm in Sterksel, Netherlands has begun cooking its manure (3000 pigs worth) to capture the methane trapped within. The (bio)gas is then, in turn, used to generate electricity for the local power grid. And this is now becoming a growing trend as environmentally responsible agri-businesses try to curtail emissions. Without this activity the pig manure would be stored in open storage tanks for about 6-9 months before being used as fertilizer for farm lands. Cattle and pig manure, when kept in open-top basins, tanks or lagoons open to the atmosphere, undergo anaerobic fermentation and release greenhouse gases (methane, CO2 and N2O) to the atmosphere, not to mention the potent aroma.
[Estimated distribution of industrially produced pig populations. Source: LEAD.]
[Estimated distribution of industrially produced poultry populations. Source: LEAD.]
To make matters more complicated, the growing demand for meat, has lead to a need for more farm feed, especially soy, which is increasingly supplied by forest clearing. Therefore essential “carbon sinks” are being removed to make way for the release of harmful methane.
Several countries have already implemented mandates for methane reduction. In Denmark, farmers are required by law to inject manure under the soil instead of on top of fields, which enhances its fertilizing effect and prevents emissions from escaping. And New Zealand recently announced that it would include agriculture in its new emissions trading (scheme by 2013. To that end, the government is spending tens of millions of dollars financing research and projects like breeding cows that produce less gas and inventing feed that will make cows belch less methane.
[Source: New York Times]
Other uses for methane capture and biogas have found their into transportation, such as Biogasmax (buses) and Svensk Biogas (rail).
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Via InfraNet Lab
Personal comment:
Ou quand les cochons produisent de l'électricité (et les fermes animales plus de CO2 que les voitures)! Voir le post plus bas sur le côté désormais assez psychédélique de la production d'énergie! A propos, et les humains, combien?
Et sinon, vous vous souvenez de Mad Max III et de Bartertown?
Finalement. vous pouvez également consulter le graphique en fin d'article et choisir les produits que vous consommez en fonction, aussi (en plus de l'énergie grise), de leur coùt en CO2.
[Jumeriah Beach, Dubai. via: wiki commons]
You have no doubt heard that even the luxury goods industry is smarting from the economic woes that surfaced prominently in 2008. And the development equivalent of this, the luxury urbanism across the Middle East, has now also decided to shelve - a few projects. How odd in fact that a collaboration between a luxury goods brand (Versace) and a Middle East brand city (Dubai) would be offering press releases deep into December on such an ostentatious project as a climate-controlled beach.
The Palazzo Versace Beach proposal ambitiously seeks to single-handendly suck the heat out of its sand; to make the beach cool. Ah, but “how?”, you say? (Of course, “why?” is also valid.) One possible implementation is to employ a radiant-slab-like foundation to the sand. Though certainly avid and vigorous sandcastle builders would encounter a snag when they dig their moats. Another possibility is to maintain nearby giant cool-air blowers. But I thought all these Versaciates left their respective domiciles to get away from it all, not smack on to a runway airstrip?
It is difficult to restrain the desire to modify our environment. Making the cold … warm, and the hot … cool. Isnt this the very foundation of architecture even prior to HVAC, a controllable micro-climate? Open a window, and ta-da, a cool breeze. Close a window, and ah, toasty.
Today, often architecture is more circumstantial to large-scale environment modulating systems.
[Seagaia Ocean Dome opened in Japan in 1993, with visitor numbers peaking at 1.25m in 1995.]
The Ocean Dome, the world’s largest environmentally controlled.. uh … environment maintained an air temperature held around 30 degrees celsius and the water at around 28. Life was certainly a beach at least until it closed in 2007.
[Olafur Eliasson, The weather project (2003) in Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, London.]
Olafur Eliasson’s “Weather Project” employed a fine mist to complete the sunset haze environment of the hundreds of mono-frequency lamps. The mist would accumulate into faint, cloudy formations,varying with eacn visit.
[An Te Liu, Cloud (2008) for the Venice Biennale. ©cameraphoto arte.]
An Te Liu’s “Cloud” is a battalion of reassembled ionizers, dehumidifiers, and air purifiers running continuously, even exhuastively, in search of 100% pure air.
In Cloud, the appliances are merged, creating mutant assemblies and further confusing the scale at which the work is to be read. It is configurable, expandable and networked, and as a one-to-one reading it is intrusive – even excessive – and highlights the fear of unmediated interior environments. As a larger-scale work it is less Modernist urbanism than Futurist space-junk, since most of the material is intercepted by Liu, no doubt through online bartering portals, en route to dumps as the global e-waste burden grows. At its largest scale it is read as a machined equivalent of an actual cloud abstracted into its components of moisture processing, air exchanges and atmospheric densities, and imagines the potential, as in snow-blowing machines, of generating entire weather conditions at will.
(From a forthcoming essay in Architectural Design guest edited by Sean Lally.)
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Via InfraNet Lab
Personal comment:
A propos des projets climatiques, bons ou mauvais... On constate qu'il y a un intérêt lorsqu'il y a une création qui induit un cadre neuf, un détournement et une combinaison.
Si il ne s'agit que de luxe-confort (refroidir la plage à Dubai) ou de reproduction (Ocean Dome), alors l'intérêt est plus que limité et l'on se trouve dans une dépense énergétique totalement superflue (tout comme le service offert).
[The Rotation of the Earth via Creative Commons.]
New advances in tidal power hint at the massive amount of rotational energy located within the earth. As early as the 1970s, the Soviet Union was exploring methods to harness this rotational energy directly. The prominence of the current energy crisis has sparked new research by physicists to test the ability to tap into this resource.
The amount of energy in the earth is vast - the kinetic energy of rotation alone is 2.137 x 1029 Joules. Channeling this energy would require a slowing in the rotational force of the earth. This process is continually transpiring due to frictional losses from ocean tides and tidal power. Assuming we harnessed a fraction of the earth’s rotational energy, increasing the length of a day by a mere one second, it would consistently yield 2.5848 x 1024 Joules (approximate and assumes losses to friction) of energy.
According to the Energy Information Administration’s 2006 statistics, the total American energy usage (comprising of residential, commercial and industrial) is 1.0989 x 1018 Joules per month, a fraction of the energy available in the earth’s rotation. Although these numbers are approximate, most physicists agree that the amount of rotational energy is vast if we can manage a way to harness it.
[An equation of Ingredients for Energy Production: rotation and a mega-gyroscope.]
In most energy production, one form of energy is converted to another via gears, pulleys, magnets, etc. If we consider the earth’s rotation as a form of energy, to harness it, we would need to create a ring of resistance that would covert this to electricity. Gyroscopes are privileged devices in this manner because they maintain their orientation in space. According to Physicist, C Johnson, if one could build a massive ferris-wheel type gyroscope on the North Pole, there would theoretically be a potential to harness this energy. The gyroscope would initially be started with a motor and once in motion, it would spin endlessly. Further, the gyroscope would have to be fixed to the earth – the difference between the earth’s rotation and the gyroscope would create a torque, or moment force as Johnson posits, “The Earth’s rotation would externally directly drive the gear train, using the gyroscope simply as a fixed object to push against.”
Johnson’s research builds on twenty years of experiments carried out by the Soviet Union during the 1970s. The Soviet experiments were not successful because they were incurring dramatic energy loss through a system of gears that ‘speed up’ the motion of the earth. Although, Johnson’s research has fewer losses (he calculates a constant production of 587 watts), there is still a long way to go before realizing his device. There are other nascent devices that operate on similar principles but a great deal of research needs to occur due to large frictional losses and the mega scale of the mechanisms involved.
Although not technically a renewal resource of energy, the amount of kinetic energy in the earth’s rotation is abundant and would last for thousands of years. Further, it would create no pollution, greenhouse gases or deplete natural resources. It would, however, make the days and nights longer, but that doesn’t seem to be too large of a trade-off.
[Satellite image of the North Pole revealing NW Passage. The next site for a mega-energy project?]
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Via InfraNet Lab
Personal comment:
Cela me parait intéressant de constater à quel point la recherche de solutions durables au niveau de l'énergie libère une certaine quantité d'imagination... On constate aussi qu'il y a des façons assez délirantes d'aller chercher de l'énergie, par exemple ici de rallonger les journées d'une seconde! Une énergie "ex-dimensionnelle" où l'on modifierait l'échelle du temps (rallonger les journées)?
On mourrait dès lors à nouveau "relativement" plus jeunes, avec tout ce que cela implique d'économies pour les assurances et les caisses de pension... Du pain béni pour les verts libéraux...
Forever at the Victoria & Albert Museum from Universal Everything on Vimeo
If you’re based in London and looking for something to do one day this month, we recommend that you visit Universal Everything’s installation, Forever, which is currently on show in the John Madejski Garden at the V&A. The project, a collaboration between Matt Pyke, Karsten Schmidt and Simon Pyke, consists of a large videowall installation of endless animations that responds to an ever-changing soundtrack…
“Forever is an art project formed from generative music and generative visuals and is a commission for the museum’s new digital programme,” explains Schmidt. “Simon Pyke has composed the music and sound – he’s created hundreds of different soundscapes, drums, all in the same key so that anything can be mixed together. It will evolve over the two months it’s on, so you’ll never hear, or see, the same thing twice. It’s based on the same kinds of micro-patterns as Mozart’s generative minuets, but on a more detailed level. When the sound is intense it will trigger pulses on the visual side and visual elements will also feed back into the music.”
An online installation, generating a series of downloadable video podcasts, will coincide with the V&A exhibition on Universal Everything’s website. The studio has also created a making-of film which reveals the thinking behind - and the work involved creating the installation. You can view it below…
The Making of Forever / Victoria & Albert Museum from Universal Everything on Vimeo
Forever runs at the V&A until 1 February. Admission is free.
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Via Creative Review
Personal comment:
Musique générative et design génératif: endless variations? ce qui ne veut pas dire "endless quality" car à chaque fois le processus semble plus intéressant que le résultat. Le syndrome du "screen saver" n'est jamais très éloigné si la proposition n'arrive pas à développer une présence forte.
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