Alan Shusterman

In order to reach maximum efficiency, windmills must be spaced far apart. This allows each rotor to capture ‘clean’ air moving across its blades. Unfortunately, arranging windmills for high efficiency means that wind farms must occupy a fairly large patch of land.

Professor John Dabiri, Center for Bioinspired Engineering, Caltech

Prof. John Dabiri, Center for Bioinspired Engineering, Caltech, may have found another way. After noticing that schools of fish can often swim more efficiently than individual fish, he set out to find out why. The results led him to a new design for wind farms: relatively small vertical axis turbines mounted in tight clusters. These turbines can do something that standard airplane-like rotors cannot: efficiently convert ‘dirty’ air vortices generated by neighboring turbines into energy. Read more in the March/April 2013 issue of Sierra magazine.

Chem profs don’t usually weigh in on tax policy, but it’s the season for thoughtful giving and nothing says, “I care about you,” like a thoughtful gift. That’s why I’m suggesting the US adopt a carbon tax in the new year.

The rationale for such a gift is easily explained. We have been treating the sky as a huge toilet for over half a century. A list of all the chemicals that get belched, burned, or boiled into the atmosphere would make for some scary reading so I’ll just talk about one thing: “carbon”. (This usually refers to CO2, but it can also mean CH4 and other, less common, substances – hey, this really is about chemistry!)

Carbon emissions are causing global warming. This is a global problem and one that will get worse over time. And the only “solution” at this time is to reduce those emissions. A carbon tax can do that. It would be a gift to the entire planet and to generations to come. Reducing carbon emissions is the gift that says, “I care about you.”

If you would like to read more about the need for carbon taxes (and join me in guessing how to pronounce “Pigou” and “Pigouvian”), check out Paying For It by Elizabeth Kolbert (The New Yorker, 2012 Dec 10, p. 29)

Update Dec 28, 2012: Yesterday’s NY Times carried a story about carbon taxes in Ireland (Carbon Taxes Make Ireland Even Greener, E. Rosenthal). Not everyone likes them (the politicians who enacted the taxes have been voted out), but they are helping cut Ireland cut its carbon emissions. As a former energy minister put it, “We are not saints like those Scandinavians — we were lapping up fossil fuels, buying bigger cars and homes, very American,” said Eamon Ryan, who was Ireland’s energy minister from 2007 to 2011. “We just set up a price signal that raised significant revenue and changed behavior. Now, we’re smashing through the environmental targets we set for ourselves.”

(Update: On 11 Oct 2021 the Reed College Board of Trustees announced its decision to divest the college’s endowment from fossil fuels. Read about it here.)

With Hurricane Sandy behind us (except if you live in those forgotten parts of America called New York or New Jersey), Americans are revving up their furnaces, cars, Xmas light displays, and hopping aboard airplanes to visit family. Lucky us.

Reuters (Despair after climate conference, Dec 9) reminds us, though, that not everyone is so lucky.

Kieren Keke, foreign minister of the island nation of Nauru (pop. 9,322), told Reuters, “Much much more is needed if we are to save this process from being simply a process for the sake of process, a process that simply provides for talk and no action, a process that locks in the death of our nations, our people, and our children.”

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