Worldchanging reports that a chinese company has been developing an algae farming system similar to what we’ve been discussing in the office; clear tubes filled with algae and salt water.  Brad’s idea about bubbling CO2 through the mixture seems to be the impetus for the project; they’re using the algea to create biofuel from CO2 produced by underground coal gassification:

At ENN’s research campus in Langfang, an hour’s drive from Beijing, scientists are testing microalgae to clean up the back-end of a uniquely integrated process to extract and use coal more efficiently and cleanly than is possible today.

Coal is first gasified in a simulated underground environment. The carbon dioxide is extracted with the help of solar and wind power, then “fed” to algae, which can be then used to make biofuel, fertiliser or animal feed.

…

“Algae’s promise is that its population can double every few hours. It makes far more efficient use of sunlight than plants,” said Zhu Zhenqi, a senior advisor on the project. “The biology has been proven in the lab. The challenge now is an engineering one: We need to increase production and reduce cost. If we can solve this challenge, we can deal with carbon.”

The algae must be harvested every day. Extracting the oily components and removing the water is expensive and energy intensive.

Reading through the comments from Worldchanging yesterday I stumbled upon much discussion of the various types of green.  This all seems a bit absurd to me, but it does start to grapple with some of the various streams of though regarding sustainability:

From Bright Green Environmentalism:

Bright green environmentalism is an ideology based on the belief that the convergence of technological change and social innovation provides the most successful path to sustainable development.

The term “bright green”, first coined in 2003 by writer Alex Steffen, refers to the fast-growing new wing of environmentalism, distinct from traditional forms. Bright green environmentalism aims to provide prosperity in an ecologically sustainable way through the use of new technologies and improved design^.

Its proponents tend to be particularly enthusiastic about green energy, electric automobiles, efficient manufacturing systems, bio and nanotechnologies, ubiquitous computing, dense urban settlements, closed loop materials cycles and sustainable product designs. “One-planet living” is a frequently heard buzz-phrase. They tend to focus extensively on the idea that through a combination of well-built communities, new technologies and sustainable living practices, quality of life can actually be improved even while ecological footprints shrink.

The term “bright green” has been used with increased frequency due to the promulgation of these ideas through the Internet and recent coverage in the traditional media.

Alex Steffen describes contemporary environmentalists as being split into three groups, “dark”, “light”, and “bright” greens.

“Light greens” see protecting the environment first and foremost as a personal responsibility. They fall in on the transformational activist end of the spectrum, but light greens do not emphasize environmentalism as a distinct political ideology, or even seek fundamental political reform. Instead they often focus on environmentalism as a lifestyle choice. The motto “Green is the new black” sums up this way of thinking, for many. This is different from the term “lite green”, which some environmentalists use to describe products or practices they believe are greenwashing.

In contrast, “dark greens” believe that environmental problems are an inherent part of industrialized capitalism, and seek radical political change. Dark greens believe that dominant political ideologies (sometimes referred to as industrialism) are corrupt and inevitably lead to consumerism, alienation from nature and resource depletion. Dark greens claim that this is caused by the emphasis on economic growth that exists within all existing ideologies, a tendency referred to as “growth mania”. The dark green brand of environmentalism is associated with ideas of deep ecology, post-materialism, holism, the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock and the work of Fritjof Capra as well as support for a reduction in human numbers and/or a relinquishment of technology to reduce humanity’s impact on the biosphere.

More recently, “bright greens” emerged as a group of environmentalists who believe that radical changes are needed in the economic and political operation of society in order to make it sustainable, but that better designs, new technologies and more widely distributed social innovations are the means to make those changes – and that society can neither shop nor protest its way to sustainability.  As Ross Robertson writes, “[B]right green environmentalism is less about the problems and limitations we need to overcome than the “tools, models, and ideas” that already exist for overcoming them. It forgoes the bleakness of protest and dissent for the energizing confidence of constructive solutions.”

And, let us not forget the beloved ‘Deep Greens‘

The Deep Greens are those who hold a more wholistic, ecological and yes, scary word – spiritual world view. These include the the Deep Ecologists such as Joanna Macy, Thomas Berry and David Korten, Evolutionary Spirituality advocates such as Barbara Marx Hubbard and Andrew Cohen, social ecologists and many of the people within the Transition Towns movement.

For the Deep Greens there has to be a wholistic approach – head, heart and hands, and we have to transform on the deepest of levels, and all levels – individual, communal and political. For me the Deep Greens are as positive and optimistic as the Bright Greens and believe we can create a sustainable world that will bring an appealing quality of life.

Or the Viridian Design Movement:

The Viridian Design Movement was an aesthetic movement focused on bright green environmentalist concepts. The name was chosen to refer to a shade of green that does not quite look natural, indicating that the movement was about innovative design and technology, in contrast with the “leaf green” of traditional environmentalism. The movement tied together environmental design, techno-progressivism, and global citizenship. It was founded in 1998 by Bruce Sterling, a postcyberpunk science fiction author. Sterling always remained the central figure in the movement, with Alex Steffen perhaps the next best-known. Steffen, Jamais Cascio, and Jon Lebkowsky, along with some other frequent contributors to Sterling’s Viridian notes, formed the Worldchanging blog. Sterling wrote the introduction to Worldchanging’s book, which (according to Ross Robertson) is considered the definitive volume on bright green thinking. Sterling formally closed the movement in 2008.

So this is mostly just cool.  A researcher at IBM has just developed a way to perform computational algorithms on encrypted data, ‘homomorphic encryption‘ in the crypto-parlance.  For example, you could upload encrypted photos to Flickr and Flickr could adjust the color balance without ever decrypting the photo.  This isn’t a particularly useful example, but the general point here is that data being stored in ‘the cloud’ can now be stored and modified in an encrypted form.  Some comments from Forbes:

Homomorphic encryption, like any encryption, mathematically scrambles data so thoroughly that the unscrambling can be done only by someone possessing a secret key. But even though the encryption seems to produce chaos, it might preserve certain mathematical relationships among the possible inputs. If the encrypted version of input x, multiplied by the encrypted version of input y, equals the encrypted version of x times y, then the process is said to be homomorphic with respect to multiplication.

Fully homomorphic encryption would preserve not just multiplication but also addition. What’s the point of that tweak? Any computer algorithm–whether it sorts your mail or figures out whether you qualify for a tax deduction–boils down to a series of arithmetic steps. If an encryption scheme allowed any number of additions or multiplications, any computing application would be possible without decrypting data.

The idea of fully homomorphic encryption was first posited in a paper three decades ago by Ronald Rivest, an MIT professor and the coinventor of the famous RSA encryption scheme now ubiquitous in business transactions. Rivest and his two coauthors also suggested it was probably impossible.

The downside is that the initial aproach is extremely expensive computationally; something on the magnitude of 18 orders of magnitude for large datasets.  Hopefully future developments will reduce this…

From worldchanging:

Existence is the ultimate proof of the possible. Every time a bold new project is tried, and works, we advance our sense of the achievable. Given how much transformation we need in order to meet the challenges we face, we need many more attempts at innovation, and we’re not getting them. The achievable is not advancing quickly enough.

…

In his recent Long Now talk (MP3 here), economist Paul Romer tells a story. In the early 1970s, China was stuck in a societal inertia after the death of Mao. However, right next door, Hong Kong (administered by the British) was a thriving city-state based on trade and innovative manufacturing. Chinese leaders decided to see if they could copy Hong Kong’s success on a limited scale, and set up four “Special Economic Zones” where foreign investment was encouraged and capitalism was unconstrained. The experiments were so successful economically that their rules soon more or less became the guiding principles of the Chinese miracle. As Romer says, “Hong Kong was the most successful economic development program in history.”

In many ways, the Global North is as hamstrung in the face of bright green challenges as China was in the face of capitalism. What if the answer is a sustainability and social innovation equivalent of China’s answers: a sort of “Special Innovation Zone”?

Imagine a place — perhaps a shrinking city, or a badly savaged brownfield neighborhood — where laws were set up to strip rules and regulations down to a do-no-harm minimum (maintaining criminal laws and protecting health, safety, workers’ rights and civil liberties, but perhaps limiting liability and certainly slashing red tape and delays) allowing for wild deviations from existing patterns for buildings, systems and operations. Imagine a free-fire zone for sustainable innovations, where new approaches could be iterated and tested rapidly, and, when they work, sent to proliferate outside the Zone. Conversely, some of the freedom might paradoxically come from imposing boundary limitations that can’t yet be made practical or survive politically outside the Zone, such as bans on broad classes of chemicals or strict greenhouse gas emissions limits.

There’s also an interesting comment from Sean FitzGerald:

And now I realise why I find WorldChanging so frustrating.

The biggest barriers to social innovation are values, belief systems and world views.

Until you have a transformation of consciousness at all levels of society – individual, community, business and government – those institutional, legal and regulatory barriers will stay in place.

WorldChanging keeps pumping out innovative technologies, processes and systems and all I can think is: “Great, but it will never be implemented in time to save civilisation unless *we* change.”

…

I keep hearing from the technological optimists “All we need to do is swap out oil-based transport for electrified transport” or “All we need to do is retrofit our urban environments into paragons of sustainability” or now, “All we need to do is change the regulations that are holding innovation back”.

But it’s not “All we need to do.” You skip right over the very important step of having to change people first (or concurrently, at least). Until we change people’s values the latest, greatest sustainability-enhancing widget, technological breakthrough or grand social plan will stay on the drawing board.

To which ‘Brad’ comments:

True, Sean, the institutional, legal and regulatory barriers Alex describes derive from values, belief systems and world views, and it is those that need to change.However, in order to change those, you need to be able to propose a constructive vision based on differing world views by way of example.

Which gets to the heart of why this seems like an interesting idea to me; it allows the development of new models.  I see a lot of potential pitfalls here, most of the ‘restrictive’ building codes cities adopt are responding to catastrophic failures in the past – throwing these out opens the door to all sorts of unanticipated consequences.  The chinese free zones that are mentioned had one enormous benefit; they were duplicating a model which had already been tried and shown to work.

The Obama Administration will lend Tesla Motors $465 million to build an electric sedan and the battery packs needed to propel it. It’s one of three loans totaling almost $8 billion that the Department of Energy awarded today to spur the development of fuel-efficient vehicles.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that the Department of Energy is also lending $5.9 billion to Ford to retool factories in five states. Nissan will receive $1.6 billion to refurbish a factory in Tennessee to produce electric cars. The loans are the first awarded under the $25 billion Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program to help automakers offset the cost of retooling to build eco-friendlier cars that are at least 25 percent more fuel-efficient than 2005 models.

via Wired

Bercy Chen Studio and Avant Guardist Specialty Fabrication, in collaboration with Kirwin Horticultural, has completed installation of the planted-roof at the Peninsula House. In order to drive down cost and increase quality, Bercy Chen Studio has developed a proprietary planted-roof system. Whereas conventional greenroof manufacturers do not supply the water-barrier membrane, the most critical and costly component, the BCS system contains all components from water-barrier through protection and drainage layers to soil and vegetation. The system can accommodate a series of plant species, but is geared toward native flowers and grasses. The benefits of using native plant species include compatibility with native fauna as well as minimal watering requirements. The BCS planted-roof system is currently being installed at half the cost of other systems. Design and install of several systems is underway and completion is due later this year.

Bercy Chen Studio and Avant Guardist Solar is now a Registered PV Contractor with Austin Energy. Bercy Chen Studio employs North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners (NABCEP) Certified Solar PV Installers, a nationally recognized certification. This certification ensures that customers will qualify for the Austin Energy incentive rebates offered to residential customers. Through AE rebates and additional Federal tax credits, customers can realize solar PV arrays at a 50% reduction off installed cost. Additionally, a typical solar array can account for roughly half of the energy needs of the average household. Bercy Chen Studio offers full service estimation, design and installation of PV arrays by manufacturers such as Solyndra, Sharp, Sanyo, Suntech, and others. BCS is currently at work designing and installing several PV arrays which will be producing power in the next 6 to 9 months.

Following up on yesterday’s news that Spaceport America has begun construction, New Scientist has news that a team working at York University are proposing that we build an inflatable tower out of kevlar tubes which could lift cargo into the upper atmosphere.  They’ve built a 7-meter model, but something tells me that scaling up to 20km (a factor of 2,800) might entail some challenges.  They’re proposing using helium to inflate and lift the towers – I wonder if the cost of that much helium would really be much less than the cost of enough hydrogen to power a rocket?

The team envisages assembling the structure from a series of modules constructed from Kevlar-polyethylene composite tubes made rigid by inflating them with a lightweight gas such as helium. To test the idea, they built a 7-metre scale model made up of six modules (see image). Each module was built out of three laminated polyethylene tubes 8 centimetres in diameter, mounted around circular spacers and inflated with air.

To stay upright and withstand winds, full-scale structures would require gyroscopes and active stabilisation systems in each module. The team modelled a 15-kilometre tower made up of 100 modules, each one 150 metres tall and 230 metres in diameter, built from inflatable tubes 2 metres across. Quine estimates it would weigh about 800,000 tonnes when pressurised – around twice the weight of the world’s largest supertanker.

The Beverly Skyline House has been awarded the prestigious Green Good Design Award for “The World’s Leading Sustainable Green Design.” The international prize is awarded annually by The European Center for Architecture and The Chicago Athaneum: Museum of Architecture and Design. Bercy Chen Studio is the only recipient from Texas and other winners include HOK (USA), Samyn and Partners (Belgium), Kengo Kuma (Japan), BIG (Denmark), and ARUP Partners (UK). The Beverly Skyline Residence was a remodel of an existing home and sought to make the most of its modest budget by retaining much of the original structure, utilizing an extensive rainwater collection system, and employing glass blocks recycled from an abandoned hospital. Despite its small scale, the project was awarded the prize along with projects such as the Ford Motor Company Factory Visitor Center and the Headquarters for the Council of The European Union.

Inhabitat just posted some images of Foster + Partner’s designs for Spaceport America which started construction today.  I don’t really like the architecture, I just like the fact that there’s a commercial space port being built.  How cool is that!

As a brief aside – this is the type of story that really aggravates me about Inhabitat.  They post stories like this all the time about buildings that “will meet LEED building standards and includes some high-tech green building strategies”.  There’s so much credulity in the bloggoverse on the subject of green design, and so little justification.  Maybe this building is carbon negative and purfies the local atmosphere to boot; the building is a spaceport! I can’t imagine any activity which is at the same time uses more energy and provides less utility than space tourism.  That’s not to say it isn’t awesome, but “green”??!!!?!!?