Aid and Relief Awareness for the World

A lot have happened since the previous post. The earthquake in China was undoubtedly a major disaster for the country and a test for the aid and relief organizations, just like in Myanmar. But today it is the day we all need to be optimistic and hopeful for the future of our planet. We are the only habitants responsible for the current environmental situation and the only ones capable of doing something about it, starting today.

World Environment Day or “WED” goes back to 1974, the first WED, with the slogan “Only one Earth”. Wikipedia has an extensive list of previous years’ WEDs and the cities that hosted the major activities. This year, WED will be hosted by Wellington, New Zealand. The UN Environment Program (UNEP) has a special page dedicated to this year’s WED and the highlights at Wellington. This year the slogan is “CO2 – Kick the habit”.

Most people think of CO2 as a poison, a necessary evil for our petrol-based economy and civilization. But the truth is that CO2 is one of the most “natural” gases for out planet, since it is the major by product of burning organic molecules like glucose and sugar. It is also a major growth factor for plants and all the “green” life that covers most of our land and oceans. Then why is it such a big problem for us with the global warming and the severe changes in weather patterns?

In reality, CO2 becomes a trouble when it settles high up in the atmosphere and cannot be “recycled” naturally by the plants and forests. The thing is that we could be in a much better situation today if the rain forests in the Amazon and Indonesia were in the same extent today as they were in the beginning of the 20th century, regardless of our inexplicable persistence to petrol fuel as the major source of our energy. Then, how can we use the plants to fight CO2 emissions?

The answer to this has already been studied extensively by NASA and ESA in future projects for teraforming Mars into an Earth-like environment: it is called algae. It is one of the simplest forms of green life, abundant in both land and (mostly) sea, capable of high-efficiency transformation of CO2 into carbon and pure oxygen via photosynthesis. Photosynthesis happens everywhere there is a green plant, the problem is that it doesn’t happen fast enough to keep up with our daily CO2 emissions.

Recently, two private firms in Arizona, USA, APS and GreenFuel, have successfully built a “green” reactor energy complex for capturing and transforming CO2 emissions back into energy, using tubes of seaweeds (a type of algae). The CO2 goes into the water-filled tube where the algae grows, it gets captured via photosynthesis and the end result is biofuel (extracted as oil from the grown algae turf), ethanol (distillation process) and protein-rich by products that can be used as food for cattle. The algae itself can be dried out completely and used as burning material, a substitute for coal and lignite. So in essence, the CO2 plus solar energy turns into new carbon-based fuel, which on turn translates to CO2 when it burns again, and so on.

The best thing about this technology is that it has already been tried in the APS-Greenfuel energy complex very successfully. On February 21st, APS announced that it will launch a large-scale project with this technology and by the year 2011 a 280-megawatt station will be able to serve 70000 houses in Arizona. This proves that sometimes the solution is so simple and so obvious that it only takes one good idea to make it happen.

For more information:

• SOLANA project (APS)
• Algae bioreactor system
• “Algae could be fuel of the future”