Using phytoplankton to trap carbon dioxide faces a snag

Messing around with ecosystems is an unpredictable business. That proved true again this week when a group of Indian and German researchers gave their first report from the biggest ever experiment in geo-engineering: an expedition to pour iron into the Southern Ocean, a vast area that encircles Antarctica, to stimulate a giant bloom of phytoplankton.

We did!

Phytoplankton are tiny algae that absorb carbon dioxide when they grow and then lock up some of the greenhouse gas when they die and sink to the seabed. Stimulate the growth of more phytoplankton, the theory goes, and you might send more CO2 to the bottom of the ocean, where it cannot contribute to global warming. But the experiment did not quite turn out like that.

The voyage, a joint venture by India’s National Institute of Oceanography and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, was controversial from the start. Some environmental groups claimed it was akin to pollution, and thus illegal. At one point, therefore, the German government ordered the Wegener Institute to suspend operations while it looked into the matter. Eventually, permission to continue was given and the research ship Polarstern made a two-and-half-month passage through stormy seas following the bloom that the researchers had created.

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American innovation faces its biggest test for decades

In the dark hours of the second world war, scientists of the Manhattan Project worked secretly in the hills of Tennessee. This month, tucked in those same hills, scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory sat listening to their new mission. Thomas Mason, Oak Ridge’s director, stood beside a slide show, letting its contents sink in. The budget for the Department of Energy (DoE), a chart showed, was $24.2 billion in 2008. This year Congress gave the DoE $38.7 billion in the stimulus package and another $27 billion in appropriations. Mr Mason’s main message was simple: “We’ve really got to deliver.”

Politicians have been making noises about energy independence and climate change for some time. Federal spending on research and development, however, has remained far below the levels of the 1970s (see chart). Now rhetoric is finally being matched by cash. Within the DoE’s budget, Congress has appropriated $7.8 billion for energy R&D, 18% more than last year, and the stimulus provided about $8 billion. On March 23rd President Barack Obama and Steven Chu, the energy secretary, explained how some of the money would be spent, with money for labs—a new building at Oak Ridge will house researchers for solar batteries and superconducting transmission lines—as well as support for scientists exploring everything from carbon sequestration to hydrogen. Spending money, however, is easy. Results require hard work.

The Manhattan Project yielded the atomic bomb; the Apollo programme sent a man to the moon. Mr Obama’s goal to cut emissions by 80% by 2050 is at least as ambitious. Meeting this deadline will require not just a price on carbon and the wide adoption of existing technology, but inventions that are still just a glimmer in someone’s eye. Making matters more complex, new innovations must be deployed by companies and used by the public. The atomic bomb and the space shuttle had the government as their only customer.

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An unusual energy source gets a try-out

Earlier this month engineers at Public Service of New Hampshire, the state’s largest electric utility, successfully tested a novel fuel mixture for one of its electricity-generating boilers: coal tempered with cocoa-bean shells. Hedonists have long rhapsodised about the seductive power of chocolate; now cocoa power may light homes as well.

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What’s wrong with policies on waste, and how to get them right

Corbis

At Pope’s creek, on America’s Potomac river, there’s a pre-Columbian rubbish tip of oyster shells covering 30 acres, to an average depth of ten feet. Humanity has always produced waste in vast quantities; but more people, more consumption and the contribution emissions from rubbish make to climate change mean that disposing of the stuff is an increasingly contentious issue.

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