Matt Damon has a new film out and rather that being a genius/bent cop/CIA trained killer his latest roll sees him caught up in something far more exciting...fracking!
Damon plays a salesman for a natural gas company traveling across the agricultural heartland of the USA tasked with persuading people to sign over their land so his company can get at the gas locked away beneath it. It won;t give anything away but watch the trailer below and you'll see that it doesn;t appear to go to plan...
Promised Land tackles something that is an incredible topical issue in America. As the boom in fracking continues more and more previously agricultural communities are being effectively taken over by the oil and gas industry. As I alluded too in my previous article on fracking there is a lot of heated debate going on as too if this is really a good thing or not. The Promised Land comes seems to be planted strongly in the 'against' campe. Indeed proponents of fracking are so worried about 'Hollywood takes on fracking' that they are rumored to be preparing an extensive campaign to counter the films message.
I think the most encouraging this about The Promised Land is that is is being made at all. 'The Inconvenient Truth' hit our screens years after climate change was a scientifically recognised phenomenon. That the entertainment industry is making this film now is a nice sign that it isn't just hippies and scientists care enough about what is happened to the Earth top want to talk about it.
Think of the phrase ‘green building’ for a moment. What comes
to mind? Maybe something frightfully cutting edge with solar panels on the roof
and a wind turbine in the back garden. Or perhaps you are more rustically minded
and instead think of a new age paradise, one that incorporates nature into the
home like a modern day Hobbit hole complete with a grass roof.
A green house…
I’ll bet you didn’t think of a road. Surely there is nothing
‘green’ about the ribbons of black asphalt that on a physical level cut up the
natural world more than anything else we build. However in Vancouver things are
a little different. The city has recently started building what have dubbed ‘greenroads’ using asphalt made entirely from recycled plastic and a ‘warm mix’
method of laying it. The essence the warm mix method involves adding a wax
(itself made from the recycled plastic) to the asphalt resulting in the
temperature at which the mixture achieves the correct viscosity for spreading to
fall by between 50 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit. This can result in a reduction in fossil
fuel use (usually gas) during the process of up to 20%.
Vancouver City Council
has indicated it is keen to roll out the method (no pun intended) from the
current test trial section of roads and according to Karyn Magnusson,
spokesperson for the city’s engineering service Vancouver would ‘love to embrace this as the norm rather than
a special mix’, especially if a local source of wax can be found. Rarely has
a city seemed so enthusiastic about what a relatively small change in policy
can do, although when you consider Vancouver’s aim to be the world’s greenest
city by 2020 it is perhaps unsurprising they’re keen.
A green road…
It isn’t just roads that can provide somewhat unusual examples
of green building. The Malaysian government sparked a few headlines recently
with its plans to build the world’s first ‘green city’ to house three million
people by 2025. This new ‘smart metropolis’ will be fuelled entirely by renewables,
have a comprehensive public transport network and be full of open ‘green spaces’ to
encourage social interaction and break the concrete jungle mould of most modern
cities. Although on a completely different scale from Vancouver’s road project
it is still far removed from the green building projects of most other countries
where the best the government can do is offer subsides to help individuals bolt
solar panels onto their roofs.
Plans for Iskandar. What
a green city looks like.
Green building then certainly isn’t just the preserve of eccentric
individuals with money to burn and it doesn’t have to be expensive or even
cutting edge (warm mix asphalt has been around for years). Simply applying
technology smartly to make construction more efficient can go a long way
towards making a building more energy efficient. It may look nice by having a
grass roof isn’t everything when it comes to being green.
Two weeks is a long time in the world of 24 hour news and I’ve
missed a few important developments in the world of climate science recently.
However anyone who is reading this from the UK and keeps more than a cursory
eye on the news will know that this week fracking was finally given the go ahead (again) and, if some people are to be believed, we are soon to enter a
golden age of energy self-sufficiency and cheaper bills for all.
There has been an infuriating amount of rubbish written
about the pro and cons of fracking over the past few months. Ever since it was
initially banned in 2011 after allegedly causing a number of minor earthquakes
near Blackpool it has been a highly polarising issue. On one side energies
companies and their supporters have spoken at length about huge untapped
reservoirs of gas and thousands of new jobs. They have told us with surprising certainty
how much gas is beneath out feet as we stroll for example, over the rolling
hills of Lancashire (£6bn a year according to Cuadrillia Resources) and it
would seem like madness in a time of economic uncertainty to ignore what may be
our greatest discovery of natural resources since North Sea Oil was first barrelled.
On the other side we have been warned of massive
environmental damage, especially concerning the pollution of water, at of
course the risk of more earthquakes. A picture has been painted of gung-ho
engineers blasting open the ground in a search for gas regardless of the costs.
In what has become a highly emotive debate almost everything that has been said
needs to be taken with a very large pinch of salt.
Credit for this description of fracking goes to the very informative Climate Adaptation blog that brought my attention to it.
Firstly as a geologist (although not a very good one I
admit) I feel I must try to clarify a few things. There is no way that Cuadrillia
Resources or any other company with plans to exploit the shale formations of
the UK can know how much gas is there with the certainty they have been quoted.
Oil and gas exploration is one of the most difficult fields to be a geologist
in. Until drilling has started there is no way of being sure your predictions
are correct and the art of predicting where gas or oil may be lying is challenging
at best. In the early 1990s geologists predicted up to £1bn of oil might be
found underneath Windsor castle in Berkshire. A royally approved test well was
dug, much to the outrage of the Mayor of Windsor who declared that the town
would be turned into a ‘second Dallas’.
In the end nothing was found, all the hype was for nothing and two year old me
was deprived of the chance to grow up familiar with the sight of the nodding
donkey’s head pump. Oddly enough a recent and highly amusing article in the Daily
Mail made similar claims, declaring that shale gas could turn Blackpool into ‘Texas-by-the-sea’ due to the exploitation
a reservoir apparently containing two hundred trillion cubic feet of gas. I
wonder if we’ll be looking back on that in twenty years time thinking ‘where
did they get that from?’.
I also feel that there has been an unfair assumption that
fracking is by nature a reckless and highly dangerous activity. The same Daily
Mail article reprinted a number of horror stories from the US including claims
that fracking has made tap water flammable in some areas and suggestions that
the iconic hot springs at Bath could be threatened by nearby test wells. The
tabloids aren’t the only ones getting hysterical; most of the British
environmental movement has hopped onto the anti-fracking bandwagon. As I
outlined a few weeks ago in the piece on the IEA report on unconventional oil I
am no fan of further oil and gas extraction but if we’ve going to have a proper
debate on fracking in the UK then we should at least be fair minded in out
treatment of both sides. It is very easy to bash energy companies but we must
remember that unlike the US we have a greater level of regulation on oil and
gas extraction and that fracking has only been given the go ahead on the condition
of further ‘strong regulation’ on the
process. We must be thankful that for once the government took time over the decision
and that the temporary ban allowed for a detailed scientific review to be
carried out.
So fracking is going to happen. Assuming for a moment it doesn’t
cause all our rivers to run black and the ground to split asunder what does
this mean for the UK? Well if there really is all that gas down there then
there are huge potential economic benefits. Just as America is finding fracking
has the potential to provide jobs and fuel security, the kind of thing
politicians dreams are made of in times of recession and instability in the
middle-east. It is by no means a long term fix but it has been suggested that it
could be a much needed shot in the arm for the UK economy. Of course there are
the environmental risks to content with, however good the regulations are and
the fact that shale gas is still a fossil fuel. In an ideal world the money
that is going to be spent to breaking open shale formations up and down the
country would go on renewables instead but that it would seem is very wishful
thinking.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Whatever happens it will
be interesting to look back on the debate of the last year or so and see who
was right and who should have done some more research.
At the end of last week an interesting little article appeared on a number of news websites about a new report that had finally 'worked out' how much sea level had risen in the last two decades. At first this seemed like a bit of a non-story, there have been plenty of studies trying to quantify sea level rise before. However on a bit of further reading things get interesting because this is the first paper to be published combining data from ALL of the previous attempts to work out how much extra water has flowed into the oceans in the last few decades.
In theory this means that we should finally have a reliable record of previous anthropogenic sea level rise.
The graph above shows the paper's main conclusions. Both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been modeled separately and then combined to look at the overall picture. As you can see there is a very pronounced rise from the mid-nineties onwards following from a period of relative stability.
Of course the eagle eyed reader will noticed that this 'pronounced rise' is only about 11mm. Not only that but it can be argued that ice sheets and glaciers have been undergoing melting driven by human activity since before the start of the studies time period, so why does the data appear to only show a response from sea level in the late 1990s?
Still the finding have generated quite a bit of media interest (see the video below) and even if the results aren't exactly shocking they do demonstrate two things. Firstly the paper offers conclusive proof that sea level has been rising. Secondly the research itself shows that the scientific community can work together to produce reliable, informative pieces of literature. One of the main flaws in modern climate science has been its inability to work together without producing confused and conservative conclusions. This then is a step in the right direction.
Don't take it all from me though, you can see a short video here of one of the academics behind the research and also read the paper itself.
Reference:
A Reconciled Estimate of Ice-Sheet Mass Balance. Shepherd et al. Science, Vol 338 no. 6111 pp.1183-1189. 2012.
