climate

The Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) at the University of Wisconsin has been developing global databases of contemporary and historical agricultural land use and land cover. SAGE has chosen to focus on agriculture because it is clearly the predominant land use activity on the planet today, and provides a vital service?i.e., food?for human societies. SAGE has developed a ?data fusion? technique to integrate remotely-sensed data on the world?s land cover with administrative-unit-level inventory data on land use (Ramankutty and Foley, 1998; Ramankutty and Foley, 1999; Ramankutty et al., in press). The advent of remote sensing data has been revolutionary in providing consistent, global, estimates of the patterns of global land cover. However, remote sensing data are limited in their ability to resolve the details of agricultural land cover from space. Therein lies the strength of the ground-based inventory data, which provide detailed estimates of agricultural land use practices. However, inventory data are limited in not being spatially explicit, and these data are also plagued by problems of inconsistency across administrative units. The ?data fusion? technique developed by SAGE exploits the strengths of both the remotely-sensed data as well as the inventory data.

An analysis was performed at NREL to examine the global warming potential and energy balance of power generation from fossil and biomass systems including CO2 sequestration. To get the true environmental picture, a life cycle approach, which takes into account upstream process steps, was applied. Each system maintained the same constant generating capacity and any lost capacity due to CO2 sequestration was accounted for by adding power generation from a natural gas combined-cycle system. This paper discusses the systems examined and gives the net energy and GWP for each system.

The U.S. Department of Energy has supported a research and development program for the establishment of renewable, biomass-derived, liquid fuels for the better part of the last twenty years. These 'biofuels' represent opportunities to respond to uncertainties about our energy security and the future health of our environment. Throughout its history, the Biofuels Program has experienced an ongoing fiscal 'roller coaster'. Funding has ebbed and flowed with changing political and public attitudes about energy. The program was initiated in a flood of funding in the late 1970s related to the energy shortages experienced in that period. The flooding turned rapidly to drought as falling oil prices dissipated public concern about energy supplies. In the late 1980s, funding for the program slowly increased, driven by national security issues.