Continuing on with our Going Green Tips series, Going Green Tip #6 should be no surprise (we’re starting with the big boys). The general tip is to stop using coal power. Easier said than done, right? Maybe, but it is VERY important, and there are a lot of reasons why it’s easier now than ever.

Although it would be fun to talk about all the great energy sources and programs you can use to cut the coal, I think I will save those for future going green tips posts. In this one, I’ll focus on why cutting the coal is so important (so that everyone is clear on why this is such a high priority).

To start with, here is a nice intro on what coal is from the Power Scorecard:

Coal is the solid end-product of millions of years of decomposition of organic materials. In truth, coal is stored solar energy. Plants capture the energy from sunlight through photosynthesis, which directly converts solar energy to plant matter. Animals that then eat the plants to convert that energy again, storing it in their own bodies.

Over millions of years, accumulated plant and animal matter is covered by sediment and stored within the earth’s crust, gradually being transformed into hard black solids by the sheer weight of the earth’s surface. Coal, like other fossil fuel supplies, takes millions of years to create, but releases its stored energy within only a few moments when burned to generate electricity. Because coal is a finite resource, and cannot be replenished once it is extracted and burned, it cannot be considered a renewable resource.

One major issue with the burning of coal is that it is a leading contributor to global warming pollution. In fact, 73% of carbon dioxide emitted from electricity generators comes from coal power plants.

But coal is also a major source of numerous other environmental problems.

• “[C]oal power plants are responsible for 93 percent of the sulfur dioxide and 80 percent of the nitrogen oxide emissions generated by the electric utility industry…. These emissions spawn the acid rain that is eating away red spruce forests in the Northeast and Appalachia, and rob previously pristine streams of brook trout and other fish species in the Adirondacks, upper Midwest and Rocky Mountains,” the Power Scorecard reports.
• “Coal emissions also cause urban smog, which has been linked to respiratory ailments,” the Power Scorecard adds.
• “Coal plants are also a major source of airborne emissions of mercury, a toxic heavy metal…. In the West, about 87 percent of coal is removed from the earth through strip mining, which can contaminate soils with heavy metals and destroy near-surface aquifers. In the East, coal is sometimes mined by removing entire mountain tops to more easily extract the subsurface mineral reserves.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists, which also delves into the massive environmental damages related to coal mentioned above in much more detail, reports that, “Coal generates 54% of our electricity, and is the single biggest air polluter in the U.S.”

Coal and Human Health

Even if you care not for the environment at all, the human health consequences of all of this are humongous. And if you actually took those (alone) into account, the price of coal would be almost twice as high. “In 2005, the health damages caused by coal power cost $120 billion” (emphasis added).  Unfortunately, we don’t take the price of our health problems or the price of the environments we destroy into account, and our governments actually subsidize coal to a great degree.

But, you can take these issues into account and can switch to a cleaner power source, yourself. And, at the least, if you are financially strapped and have no affordable options in your area, you can cut your energy usage, in general, which is good for addressing all of the concerns above and is also good for your finances.

Perhaps this should have come earlier in our series, but without a doubt, cutting coal is a major “going green tip,” and something I think we will come back to repeatedly in this series.

Photo Credits: DerGuy82 via flickr & Stuck in Customs via flickr

Awww… did you miss your cool green news over the long weekend?

1. Even Henry Ford experimented with making cars from hemp. (Treehugger)
2. Are Energy Star ratings really all that meaningful? (Greenspace)
3. A new study says Africa’s civil wars are not influenced by environmental disasters like drought and heat waves. (BBC)
4. The legal showdown over Asian carp in the Great Lakes begins today. (LA Times)
5. Is a robot that moves like a snake useful for field research? See for yourself–watch snakebot climb a tree! (Ecogeek)

NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch Satellite Monitoring Program monitors global sea-surface temperature using satellite-derived data, and uses this information to predict coral bleaching, which occurs when ocean temperatures are higher than normal in coral reef areas.

Last year, we helped NOAA install a sea-surface temperature (SST) buoy in Kimbe Bay to measure the actual SST in the water and beam the information back to NOAA via satellite – the first one in the Coral Triangle. NOAA has been using this information to validate the accuracy of their satellite-derived data, and so far both instruments are tracking very closely (i.e. showing the same temperature).

Recently, Mark Eakin of NOAA warned us that their monitoring devices indicated that the SST in Kimbe Bay had exceeded the bleaching threshold twice in two months (May and June), and that the reefs were at Bleaching Alert Level 1 (which means that some bleaching is expected within a few weeks).

In mid-July, the Kimbe team and I conducted a rapid survey of the reefs on the western side of Kimbe Bay with Walindi Plantation Resort.  As NOAA had predicted, there was some coral bleaching in Kimbe Bay. Most of the bleached corals were from susceptible genera like branching and plate Acropora, with a few massive and mushroom corals also bleached.  Bleaching was quite mild with 1-2% of corals bleached from 3-25m deep.  There was more bleaching in shallow water (5-10%), but this was probably related to unusually low tides at the time.

This concentration of bleaching near the surface was despite the fact that the water temperature was 30oC down to 20m or more!  That’s probably because Kimbe Bay is located in the Western Pacific Warm Pool – the warmest water in the world.  While the water is pretty warm it is not that much warmer now than it usually is at this time of year, so most corals do not appear to be very stressed by the warm sea temperatures.

However, coral bleaching can develop over a number of weeks, and our Kimbe Bay team has implemented a Bleaching Watch Program to keep a close eye on the situation in Kimbe, and they will let us know if anything changes. Fortunately, water temperatures are dropping now and the threat of bleaching seems to have passed.

If we do get a major bleaching event in Kimbe, we will implement a rapid field assessment to identify areas that appear more resistant or resilient to coral bleaching.  Our field teams will then work with local communities to ensure that these areas are included in the MPA network and protected from other threats.

(Image 1: Snorkelling over a shallow coral reef off Restoff Island in Kimbe Bay, West New Britain, Papua New Guinea. This area is one of the Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) which The Nature Conservancy helped design to protect the biodiversity of the bay. Credit: Mark Godfrey/TNC. Image 2: NOAA’s near real time SST data for Kimbe Bay, showing that SSTs (purple line) exceeded the bleaching threshold (light blue line) twice in May and June, with a Bleaching Alert 1 issued in June. You can monitor this data for Kimbe Bay and other places at NOAA’s website. Credit: NOAA.)

The following post is guest-authored by Patrick McCarthy, the director of the southwest Climate Change Initiative; Nature Conservancy Director of Conservation Programs, New Mexico.

Watching Russia struggle through a deadly summer of heat, drought and wildfires was déjà vu for many of us here in the Southwestern United States.

The scenes unfolding in news photographs – of residents and tourists outfitted with surgical masks against the famous backdrop of St. Basil’s Cathedral barely visible amid the smoke – reminded me of the summers of 2000-2003 when breathing smoke from wildfires became a frequent occurrence in Arizona and New Mexico.

During one of these wildfire outbreaks, I knew parents of a newborn baby who traveled south and stayed away for weeks to keep their child’s lungs clear of smoke from the fires – just as this month, mothers in Moscow were trying to flee the city’s acrid air with their small children, if they had somewhere else to go. The health effects of inhaling smoke and fine particles from wildfires can include eye and respiratory tract irritation, reduced lung function and worsening of asthma and bronchitis.

Arizona’s largest-ever recorded wildfire, the Rodeo-Chediski fire, occurred in June 2002, when two fires merged together, burning 467,000 acres before finally being controlled nearly three weeks later. Much of the area in Navajo County was sparsely populated, but about 30,000 people were evacuated and the ponderosa pine forest was largely lost and transformed into a different landscape.

The Arizona fire, burning simultaneously with Colorado’s Hayman fire, and many others during a succession of exceptionally warm summer droughts, was a wake-up call to many people in the Southwest that climate change was really happening.

This view is supported by concrete evidence:

• Analysis of retrospective data (actual temperatures recorded by hundreds of weather stations) shows that the Southwest is warming more rapidly than many other parts of the U.S. except Alaska. Mean annual temperature increased across most locations in the Four Corners states, with some habitats, such as alpine areas, warming more than 2 degrees F between 1951 and 2006.

• Throughout the western U.S., including Southwest forests, there has been a significant increase in uncharacteristically large and severe fires. A study of a database of Western wildfires since 1970 led by A.L. Westerling of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at the University of California found that increased spring and summer temperatures and earlier spring snowmelt were associated with an increase in the frequency, duration and seasonal extent of large wildfire activity.

• Recent warming has extended the period in which bark beetles are able to reproduce, allowing them to attack drought-stressed trees in droves and resulting in widespread infestations and wholesale changes in the structure of Western forests.

• The Southwest Climate Change Initiative identified 48 cases of recent ecological change in the Southwest that may be linked to climate change.

More than half involved population declines of species, with the rest including shifts in species’ geographical distribution, timing of life events like breeding and increases in invasive species. Most were from high-elevation forested areas, such as the Jemez and Sacramento Mountains, where recent climate exposure has been particularly extreme (warm and dry).

If we allow greenhouse gases to continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, we are loading the dice and increasing the likelihood of extreme — and potentially deadly — weather events.

Even the vast, largely intact landscapes of the Southwest are at risk from climate change, especially in a region where the natural forces of fire and water drive ecosystems. Land management goals once developed for a stable environment may become irrelevant, unattainable or impractical across the rapidly warming Colorado Plateau – the high-elevation Four Corners region that is studded with national parks.

This is why The Nature Conservancy is acting now to help southwestern forests — such as the Jemez Mountains, near Los Alamos, New Mexico — to cope with rapid climate change. Using our science-based and collaborative approach, the Conservancy is working with government agencies like the U.S. Forest Service to integrate comprehensive planning for climate change into routine fire and forest management practices for federal lands and surrounding areas.

For example, in the forests of northern Arizona — a habitat of the endangered Mexican spotted owl — the Conservancy is working with the U.S. Forest Service’s Four Forest Restoration Initiative to pursue strategies such as low-intensity controlled burns and forest thinning to promote resilience. Protecting cool, moist refuges and connecting habitat patches are strategies to help the owls get where they need to go for food and nesting even as the climate changes.

The time is now to prepare our forests and our communities for what is to come. When we work to lower emissions, restore and protect our forests, and make our cities and landscapes healthier and more resilient, we do what we can to lower our collective risk for the kind of wildfire disaster we’ve seen before in the Southwest – and saw again this summer in Central Russia.

(Photo: A fire crew comprised of members from The Nature Conservancy, US Forest Service, The Arizona Land Department and the City of Flagstaff set prescribed fires to build forest resilience at the Conservancy’s Hart Prairie Preserve near Flagstaff, AZ – part of the Four Forest Restoration Initiative area. Photo Credit: Edward Smith)

Get your fresh air right here–only 25 cents a bottle and comes in a variety of flavors.

1. Hong Kong’s hottest new commodity? Bottles of fresh air. (Green)
2. Bill Gates answers Andy Revkin’s questions on energy R&D and more. (Dot Earth)
3. Instead of asking how much cap-and-trade costs, why not ask how much it saves? (Green Biz)
4. The future does not look bright for freshwater eels. Nor the present. (YaleE360)
5. Saving rhinos with cyanide? The owner of a nature preserve in South Africa goes to desperate measures to stop poaching. (Extinction Countdown)

It’s still pretty warm outside, but these five links are as cool as can be.

1. New images and data from NASA reveal a surge in Amazon wildfires.  (Mongabay)
2. A famous climate skeptic does an about-face– and suggests a global tax on carbon emissions.  (Green)
3. Is “dry water” our next great hope for stopping climate change?  (GreenBiz)
4. A push toward sustainability is helping some companies not just survive tough economic times, but thrive.  (Grist)
5. Back-to-school time already?  Here’s how to kick off your year, eco-style.  (The Daily Green)