QUEST Community Science Blog

Your house may not be your biggest contributer to global
warming. Credit: Jim Gunshinan.

My focus in this blog had been on green homes, but there are other areas of our lives that account for our total carbon footprint–how much carbon we are responsible for adding to the atmosphere–a measure of our contribution to global warming. Our houses and apartments, but also our cars, air travel, and the food we eat all contribute.

Don Fugler, who does research for the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation, estimated the amount each area of our lives contributes to our carbon footprint. He used a hypothetical family of four (two adults, two kids) in Ottawa, with a medium-sized house (2,400 square feet), and two cars (Ford Explorer and Honda Fit) to do the calculations. Both parents work and travel about 20 miles roundtrip to work each weekday. The kids travel a few miles each day back and forth to school. Both parents make a total of five trips to Toronto and five trips to other places each year for business, and the family goes on a yearly ski trip to Whistler by air travel, and back and forth by car to visit relatives in Nova Scotia once a year.

For us Californians, replace Ottawa with Oakland, Whistler with Lake Tahoe, add a trip to Hawaii, and subtract most of the energy used for heating a house, and I think we come close to the Canadian example.

The folks who brought us the movie also gave us a nifty
carbon calculator. Use it to measure the size of your carbon
footprint (go to www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction).
Credit: www.climatecrisis.net

Our hypothetical family, according to Don’s calculations, emits about 13 tons of CO2 from their house, about 14 tons because of air travel, about 10 tons from their cars, and about 5 tons from the food they eat (including growing, shipping, and waste disposal). Notice that the highest amount is from air travel!

The folks who brought us the movie An Inconvenient Truth also provide an online calculator so that you can more accurately calculate your contribution to global warming–the site also gives good information on how to reduce your carbon footprint. Don recommends that we conduct more and more of our business using the Internet instead of traveling far from our homes, live close to our jobs in dense urban areas with good public transportation, ride our bikes a lot, and all become vegetarians.


Jim Gunshinan is Managing Editor of Home Energy Magazine. He holds an M.S. in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree from University of Notre Dame.

It’s rather mind-boggling to walk into the storage rooms at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. The rooms hold all manner of skulls, skeletons, pelts, and entire specimens that are intact in jars and drawers. I was there with Gabriela Quirós, the producer of the QUEST story “Resurveying California’s Wildlife – 100 Years Later”. The Museum is generally not open to the public, except on Cal Day, which is the University’s annual open house celebration. Monica Albe, the Museum’s bubbly Senior Museum Scientist, accompanied by her equally enthusiastic fellow scientist, Allison Shultz, gave us a tour.

The Museum contains over 640,000 specimens of amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals and 50,000 tissue samples that have been specially preserved since the turn of the last century. It’s considered to be the largest university museum collection of its kind in the country. While it may even seem a bit disconcerting at first to see this enormous collection– especially the specimens that have been stuffed to be appear more life-like– the historical importance of the collection is tremendously significant.

Many of the specimens were collected in the early 1900’s by the Museum’s first Director, Dr. Joseph Grinnell, a zoologist who realized how quickly the environment was changing under the influence of human civilization. He set out to meticulously document various regions in California by amassing specimens and creating field notes, photographs, maps, letters and other archival materials. Grinnell understood how valuable this information would be in the years to come to future generations who wanted to learn more about our ever-evolving landscape. Present-day scientists are able to utilize this information for climate change research and can even extract DNA to perform genetic tests.

Monica is the Museum’s preparator and oversees its Specimen Preparation Laboratory for UC Berkeley students. Veterinary hospitals or park employees donate specimens for her and her students to work on and she has a special license that allows her to collect any roadkill that she finds. The Museum usually preps specimens in three ways in order for scientists to have several options of study available to the: anatomy and biology (specimens that are prepared with taxidermy methods), skeletons, and entire specimens preserved in fluid. Monica even has a collection of dermestid beetles that help to completely clean the skeletons.

The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology is celebrating its 100th birthday this year and has several special centenary events to commemorate the occasion!

Watch the “Resurveying California’s Wildlife 100 Years Later” TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources. Don’t forget to see the behind-the-scenes photos from this story.

Jenny Oh is an Associate Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.

A sample of switchgrass at Sandia National
LaboratoriesIt doesn’t need to be said that there’s a heated debate about how to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions with actions that lessen our society’s carbon footprint. Biofuels like ethanol or biodiesel are one option. They’re touted as being carbon neutral because the CO2 they emit comes from crops which had previously sequestered them in the atmosphere. In contrast, petroleum produces CO2 emissions that had previously been buried deep in the earth’s crust, adding to the other green house gases in the environment. For example, the U.S. Department of Energy - citing research by the Argonne National Laboratory – states that ethanol derived from corn emits 25% less greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum and that the savings with cellulosic ethanol, made from a feedstock like switchgrass, are much higher, in effect producing no additional greenhouse gases.

So when QUEST decided to move forward on producing a story about biofuels, I welcomed the opportunity to assist Series Producer Josh Rosen in its crafting. Being QUEST, we weren’t content to merely renumerate the different kinds of biofuels and how cellulosic ethanol is more efficient than corn-based ethanol. Instead, our story focuses on the pioneering work being done by researchers affiliated with the Joint BioEnergy Initiative (JBEI), a multi-billion dollar research initiative based in Emeryville, as they look beyond ethanol to the next generation of biofuels. So not only is JBEI looking at various feedstocks like switchgrass, rice, poplar and innovative ways to “deconstruct” the cellulosic material, it also attempts to synthesize fuels that work more efficiently in America’s automotive fleet, still overwhelmingly reliant on gasoline.

But even top researchers at JBEI like Jay Keasling and Blake Simmons caution that this next generation of biofuels won’t be coming online for years. Moreover, new research suggests that the net production cycle of biofuels, from the clear-cutting of trees to grow the crops to their transport to markets far away, may yield as many or more emissions as the use of petroleum-based fuel. A recent Op-Ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle by UC Berkeley Alex Farrell cites the reason for this as primarily one of production– the way we clear land for growing biofuels, as well as our emphasis on the use of food-based crops like corn and soybean, which aren’t terribly efficient sources of ethanol to begin with.

Tad Patzek, also at UC Berkeley, has been an ardent critic of the carbon-neutral reputation of biofuels, garnering controversy for conducting studies that some other researchers have criticized for their calculations of emissions arising from biofuel production. (See Patzek’s co-authored article on page 19 of the March 2007 edition of Energy Tribune). Earlier this year, a study by researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute suggests that biofuels are not created equal, as those made from U.S. corn, Malaysian palm oil and Brazilian soy yield more emissions than their petroleum-based counterparts, given the environmental damage they reap when grown for fuel. The study cites recycled cooking oil and biofuel made from grassy and woody cellulosic material as being more intelligent choices for cutting down on emissions.

And so the debate continues, struggling to keep pace with the technological progress made by scientists toiling away in their quest to find the holy grail of an efficient, cheap and environmentally-friendly biofuel.

Watch the “Biofuels: Beyond Ethanol” TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Sheraz Sadiq is an Associate Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.

When football fans tune in on Super Bowl Sunday next weekend, they’ll be watching a greener Super Bowl, according to the NFL. Demand for carbon credits is booming, with companies from Dell Computer to Enterprise Rent-a-Car offering their customers offsets with their purchases. But critics are concerned that consumers don’t know what they’re buying - or might not be getting what they’re promised.

The 2006 Word of the Year was “carbon netural” in the The New Oxford English Dictionary. But there’s still a lot of debate about what it means. Many people compare the U.S. carbon offset market to the Wild West. Since there is no regulation, how do you know what you’re buying?

There are several guides to carbon offsets that have been created by non-profit organizations, designed to help the average consumer (see related resources). But part of the problem is that many people are still debating what a carbon offset should be. And that’s a debate that can be found in the blogosphere.

One place you can find it is on the Grist.org blog which has many bloggers writing about green issues. Forestry offset projects, which sell credits based on the fact that trees sequester– or hold carbon dioxide, have come under fire. You can read about a few of the critiques here, here and here.

Another blog, Treehugger.com, has followed the issue as well. They posted this comparison of offset providers to help their readers do their homework and this more in depth guide on the issues buyers should be aware of.

Of course, one of the earliest debates over offsets was whether offsets would act as “indulgences”, distracting consumers from making concrete changes in their lifestyles to reduce their carbon footprint. Terrapass, one offset retailer, has tried to investigate this by surveying their customers. They found that the majority of them had already had green habits. Still, the virtues of offsets are a matter of personal opinion.

You may listen to the “Cashing in on Carbon” radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Lauren Sommer is an Associate Media Producer for QUEST.

latitude: 37.325510, longitude: -120.640341