London

Shit, I don't have any time to write about this... we formed teams, I got 4 people to join my idea of Green Homes - "You save money. You save the planet. We do the work." The idea is on the wiki if you want to search for it! It's basically copying www.1bog.org but adding other types of generation besides PV, and also adding energy efficiency services, and then implementing the idea in Europe (probably the UK first, but we need to do a bit more research first). My team is two French girls and a French guy (somehow the nationalities ended up grouping, although I'm not with the other American), and a Dutch guy. Madeleine studies atmospheric science, Claire environmental science, Etienne mechanical and chemical engineering, and Frank business and engineering. I would describe the folks in my group as on the quiet side, but they're bright and motivated too. They are also more technical-minded, and I anticipate having to coax them to not worry about which particular mix of technology we use in a home, and focus more on how to sell our services.



We have been meeting the rich and famous in our London lectures... one of the 5 guys who started the European Climate Exchange with $20 million in seed capital and sold it the other day for $400 million... he couldn't get the smile off his face. Nicholas Stern, of the infamous Stern Report, which attempted a cost-benefit analysis of dealing with climate change. We also went to Lloyd's of London and heard about the insurance industry's response to climate change, and got a tour of their big crazy Geiger-esque building. The street in front of our (crappy circa 1970's) student residence is filled with Bentley after Porsche after Jaguar after Audi (and an odd Ferrari).

Today (Wednesday) we went to another research farm, Rothamsted, home to the longest-running agricultural experiments in the world (150-odd years), and the largest agricultural research center in the world. It was started by John Bennet Lawes, who invented artificial phosphate fertilizers, and then started a farm to prove that they helped plants grow faster. They've been experimenting on the effects of fertilizers, crop strands, herbi/fungi/pesti-cides on yields, and today they examine ecology more, like what happens to biodiversity when pH changes, or when you add fertilizer (natural biodiversity at the farm is 40 species per plot; add fertilizer and the most adept plants crowd out the others, and diversity drops to 3-4 species; drop the pH and only a few species, 1-2, can cope). It reminded me of the oceans, how the northern oceans are incredibly productive but rely on a few key species (who 'crowd out' the others, just like the plants), and the tropics are incredibly diverse but not particularly productive. And I think maybe humans are the ultimate species, we've gotten so good and providing resources to ourselves that we're steadily crowding out all the other species.

Rothamsted also maintains the UK willow depository; they grow several hundred species and maintain a seed bank. They also cross-breed to get higher-yielding strains for use in co-firing with coal. They also look at how to use all parts of a plant for something at large scales, like a big bio-refinery. Another area of research is the effects of 'bio-char' on soil; bio-char is where you pyrolyze (burn w/o oxygen) biomass, and it makes this big chunk of stable carbon, which you put in the soil where it stores the carbon and improves the soil - although people don't really know by how much, but since it stores carbon people are very excited about it right now. We saw a brief Ph.D. student present her findings on how areas with sugar cane/ethanol production in Brazil are better off than those areas without, but it wasn't clear whether sugar cane production improved the areas, or the areas were chosen for production because they were better to start with (and of course there wasn't time for questions). Rothamstead also does research on crop disease and food security, like if plants start blooming 2 months earlier by 2050 because of climate change, what happens disease-wise? Similarly, they examine how to decrease CO2 production in agriculture, e.g. if you add fungicides you need less N fertilizer to attain the same yields, and N fertilizer production and application is by far the biggest contributor to GHG production in agriculture.

Alright, I realize that was probably boring but I have to go to dinner in 10 minutes and I'm just trying to unpack what we heard today a bit. We also had a super boring lecture on market research which lasted two hours and seemed like a whole lot of common sense, which is disappointing since it was from the dean of the 3rd ranked business school in Europe. I need to start bringing my laptop to the lectures so I can multi-task. I seriously don't know when we will write a business plan; they went way over the top with the lecture schedule.

I posted some London pictures (and more Paris ones) on facebook, but I won't reproduce them here because Blogger is seriously shit at posting pictures and it gives me a headache. Paris is here and London is here (link to FB, no log-in or membership required).