Will Bamboo Save the Earth?

An article in the New York Times covers the oft-praised virtues of bamboo and tells of a new way of overcoming the problems with propagating it. Here is an excerpt:

Bamboo is a workhorse at sequestering carbon dioxide and pumping out oxygen. It is a tough plant that manufactures its own antibacterial compounds and can thrive without pesticides. And its porous fibers make a cloth that breathes and is as soft as silk. In fact, there is such a stampede of fabric designers to China and Japan, where it is farmed and processed — no such industry exists in the United States — that in its May issue, National Geographic predicted that “this upstart fabric may someday compete with King Cotton.”
Yet as the world clamors for more, bamboo is in short supply. A plant that generally flowers only every 60 to 120 years and then dies is hard to propagate from seed. And growing it by dividing existing plants is notoriously difficult.
So when Jackie Heinricher and Randy Burr figured out how to make bamboo in test tubes — selling their first 2,000 plants in 2004 to local garden centers in the Skagit Valley in Washington — they made waves in the world of horticulture.
“It’s funny, because bamboo has this reputation for taking over the universe, and yet it’s the hardest plant to produce,” Ms. Heinricher, a biologist, said one afternoon in early June at the production center for her company, Boo-Shoot Gardens, here in Mount Vernon, a town about two hours north of Seattle.
Ms. Heinricher, who grew up with bamboo — her father tended golden bamboos all around their house in Olympia, Wash. — first tried to propagate the plant in the late 1990’s in a little greenhouse at her home in nearby Anacortes, where she lives with her husband, Guy Thornburgh, a marine biologist, and where she founded Boo-Shoot Gardens in 1998.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at http://www.irejn.org/.

Reducing US Emissions Daunting

An article in the New York Times reports,

Electric power companies, which emit about one-third of America’s global warming gases, could reduce their emissions to below the levels of 1990, but that would take about 20 years, no matter how much the utilities spend, according to a new industry study.
The study also calls for cutting the growth in demand for electricity, which the Energy Department expects to increase at 1.5 percent a year. The study assumes growth of just 1.1 percent a year, which implies a steady decline in electricity use for each unit of economic production.
It also calls for vast growth in wind energy and some solar energy. Renewable energy (leaving out hydroelectricity) now comes to only a little over 2 percent of kilowatt-hours generated; by 2030, it would be 6.7 percent.
The biggest slice, though, is from coal plants that would capture their carbon dioxide, compress it and pipe it underground for sequestration. This is a technology that has been barely demonstrated at this point. But in a little over 20 years, it would have to produce 14.6 percent of electricity supplies.
The technologies required do exist, at least at laboratory scale. But the study does not predict costs and stipulate what is economically feasible.
Many of the changes forecast by the utility group depend on prices and on consumer attitudes. For example, it projects that 10 percent of new vehicle sales by 2017 will be plug-in hybrids, which would carry enough batteries to run a car for the first 20 or 30 miles daily; on days when a motorist went farther, the fuel would be gasoline.
There are no commercially available batteries for that task, however, and hybrids sold today constitute a tiny fraction of the market.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at www.irejn.org.