Word: turning
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...farmers seeking better soil have traditionally relied on slash-and-burn agriculture, which generates greenhouse gases and decimates forests. If instead those farmers slow-smoldered their agricultural waste to produce charcoal - in effect, slash-and-char agriculture - they could fertilize existing plots instead of clearing more land. This in turn would reduce emissions in the atmosphere, and so on in a virtuous circle of environmental renewal...
...power a tractor and a biochar tailored to improve particular soils. "If you're going to grow food, you have to do it responsibly," says Bob Hawkins, Eprida's project manager. "And one way of doing that is to use it to generate sustainable energy." A prototype can turn a ton of ground peanut shells into 600 lb. (270 kg) of biochar, with energy as the bonus...
Iceland knows a bit about kicking the fossil-fuel habit. At the turn of the last century, life on the isolated island was bleak. It had been among the poorest nations in Europe for centuries, and a smoky haze choked Reykjavik, thanks to the coal inhabitants burned during the interminable winters. In the 1930s, Icelandic engineers successfully diverted underground water to heat an elementary school, and the rest of the capital slowly followed suit. When the global oil crisis hit in the 1970s, efforts to turn this local resource into electricity - by drilling holes into underground heat pockets and reservoirs...
Perhaps not surprisingly, in Reykjavik talk about geothermal power can sometimes take an evangelical turn. One afternoon in May, in the slick offices of Reykjavik Energy, Gudmundur Thoroddsson points out a World Bank study that lists electricity above corruption, crime and access to capital as the biggest obstacle to budding entrepreneurs in Africa. "It saddens me when I come to a place where you have a big oil-driven generator sitting on top of a geothermal field and you're paying three or four times the cost [for energy]," says Thoroddsson, the former CEO of Reykjavik Energy's investment...
...success. If REDD is enshrined in the next global climate-change deal, set to be negotiated by the end of 2009, there is likely to be a sudden spike in demand for avoided deforestation projects, as developed countries angle to meet new carbon caps and tropical nations start to turn their forests into cash. But doing a REDD project right isn't easy, points out Zoe Kant, TNC's carbon markets manager and the brains behind the Noel Kempff project: experts are few, locales are remote and most countries lack the technical capacity to run schemes on their own. Some...