The Biochar Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Environmental’

Environmental pollution is serious concern for human civilization. Increasing population pressure, industrialization, urbanization and deforestation is creating havoc for environment.  Pollution level of soil, water and air is increasing day by day. Pollution can be controlled by checking their source, or by removing the pollutants from one place and dumping them at another place (common strategy followed for disposing solid wastes).   Many strategies have been designed based on science , economics and politics to efficiently clean the pollutants. The traditional cleaning processes are labour intensive, time taking, expensive and are themselves very messy. Mere cleaning or removing the pollutants from one place is not at all a solution to combat pollution. Elimination of toxic waste and pollutant is the only solution. Bioremediation could change this scenario of waste treatment.  “Bioremediation” means using living organisms to do a cleanup job. It can also eliminate the need of expensive and labour intensive process like digging, chemical treatments, incineration and land filling. Using bioremediation we can actually eliminate the solid wastes rather than mobilizing them from one place to another.

Bioremediation was first noticed about 10 years ago when more than 11 million gallons of crude oil spilled into water from a tanker; the spill was cleaned by using genetically engineered bacteria, which “eats” the oil. It is well known that plants and microbes can break down chemicals and petroleum into harmless products, breaking down of metals is far more difficult and is rarely done. Rather, with metals the effort is usually to “bind” or “immobilize” or “sequester” these so that if they are in water they remain accumulated in one place and not leach throughout the ecosystem. If the immobilizing plants or micro-organisms are on land, they collect the metals so that they can be carted off or sometimes released through the leaves in harmless forms and amounts.

According to the agronomists of the Department of Agriculture, the estimated cost of using plants to clean polluted soils could be “less than one-tenth the price tag for either raging up (scraping or digging) and trucking the soil to a hazardous waste landfill or making it into concrete” “Phytoremediation” takes advantage of the needs of certain plants – including trees, grasses and aquatic plants – to remove, destroy or sequester hazardous substances from the environment. The most common types of phytoremediation are rhizifiltration (uptake of toxins through roots), rhizoextraction (taking and storing contaminants in roots), phytotransformation (degradation of toxins through metabolism), phytostimulation (plants stimulating bacteria or fungi to degrade pollutants), phytostabilization (reducing the mobility of pollutants), phytovolatilization (uptake and transpiration of volatile compounds by plants). Certain plant species are called hyperaccumulators. They “have the ability to extract elements from soil and concentrate them in easily harvested plant stem, leaves and shoots”.

Currently, there is little bioremediation making use of transgenic plants, in part because it is relatively new area and in part, unfortunately, because of antitransgenic activists efforts. But, its future lies with the transgenics. In their normal state, the plants may process pollutants too slowly for our needs. But in what is one of many cases of bioengineering piggybacking on other bioengineering, these plants are genetically induced not only to grow faster than normal but also to consume waste more quickly as well. Transgenic crops can directly or indirectly be useful in combating the problem of pollution. For direct use, plants can be transformed to increase their ability of phytoremediation. Indirectly, use of transgenic crops can reduce the need of harmful chemicals in agriculture, thus cutting off the source of pollution.

Researchers have inserted a gene from mammalian liver enzyme into the tobacco plant. The enzyme successfully breaks down a variety of toxic chemicals, chlorinated solvents. These transgenic tobacco plants are extremely fast at absorbing toxins such as TCE (trichloroethylene), dibromide, carbon tetrachloride, venyl chloride and chloroform. They are as much as 640 times faster than normal tobacco plants. The plants take the pollutants and degrade them completely.

Richard Meagher from the University of Georgia, Athens, is coaxing Arabidopsis plants into cleaning up dangerous mercury from hazardous waste sites. The dumped mercury is converted into methyl mercury by the microbes. Methyl mercury gets accumulated in the food chain to the levels (biomagnifications) that could cause severe neurological problems. Meagher isolated a bacterial enzyme, called mercuric ion reductase, that converts the metal ion into its less toxic forms, and placed this gene into Arabidopsis. The transformed plants grew well in the mercury contaminated soil and released mercury in to the air in harmless form (Phytovolatilization). Methyl mercury never got a chance to form. To increase the cleanup efficiency, Meagher gave the plants a shorter life span, so it can be grown and harvested six or seven times a year, and he gave it more height so that it can absorb considerably more mercury during each of those lifespans. The amount of mercury that the transformed plants converted was 10 nanograms per milligram of plant tissue per minute by weight of the plant tissue. Richard Meagher also had a trick to tackle the problem of arsenic contamination. His team of researchers in the University of Georgia inserted two unrelated genes of E. coli into Arabidopsis, allowing it to remove arsenic from the soil and transport it to the plant’s leaves. The transgenic plants accumulated seventeen times as much fresh weight and thrice as much arsenic per gram of plant tissue as nontransgenic plants. Many metal transporter gene families have been identified which could be incorporated in plants lacking them to increase the ability to accumulate the metal ions from polluted soil or water (Hyperaccumulation). These gene families are prominent in the genomes of different species of  genus Aspergillus (a fungus).

Table 1.Gene family responsible for reducing metal toxicity

Metal                                Gene family

Zinc                                          ZIP

Niclel/Cobalt                            NiCoT

Manganese                             Nramp

Chromium                                CHR

Arsenite                              ArsAB, ACR3

Copper                             Ctr2, P-ATPase

Iron                                         FeT, IRT

Cation                                     CDF

Heavy metal                      ABC, P-ATPase

Source: Transport database (www.tcdb.org)

A large source of pollution in most of the developing and underdeveloped countries is in the agriculture sector. Lot of pollution is caused by the harmful compounds, used as pesticides and weedicides. Many transgenic crops like BT-cotton are now being produced which doesn’t require harmful pesticide sprays thus preventing  the environment from being polluted by the harmful chemicals, which can cause severe disorders and even lethality to several fauna and even human beings by the processes like bioaccumulation and biomagnification. Use of insect resistant sweet corn in Florida has reduced the use of pesticide to 112,000 lbs/year (79%). Use of virus resistant raspberry in Oregon and Washington has decreased pesticide use to 371,000 lbs/year (50%). Insect resistant cotton in U.S. has reduced the use of pesticides to 2.7 million lbs/year. Herbicide resistant tomato in California has reduced the use of weedicides to 88,000 lbs/year (88%).

Table  2. Reduction in use of pesticide and weedicide due to use of transgenic crops

Crop—Reduction in pesticide and weedicide use—Production increase per year

Herbicide-resistant Tomatoes in California —88,000 lbs./yr. (88%)—.7 million

Insect-resistant Sweet corn in Florida—112,000 lbs./yr. (79%)—.3 million

Virus-resistant Raspberry in Oregon / Washington—371,000 lbs./yr. (50%)—.5 million

Insect-resistant Cotton in U.S.*—2.7 million lbs./yr.— million

(Source: National Center for Food and Agriculture Policy, Washington, DC)

Environmental pollution is increasing rapidly and it must be regulated and eliminated at a pace faster than the rate of increase of pollution to secure healthy life to the flora and fauna of the planet Earth. Transgenic crops with improved traits of absorbing more and more harmful chemicals and metal ions from the environment can be of great help in increasing the rate of elimination of pollutants thus, rescuing the environment from pollutants. Knowledge of metal ion transporter gene families can be used to make transgenic plants with ability to clean harmful metal ions from the environment. Use of weed and pest resistant transgenic varieties of crop plants can decrease the use of pesticides and weedicides and thus indirectly be helpful in combating environmental pollution.

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The need for tax shifting – lowering income taxes while raising taxes on environmentally destructive activities – in order to get the market to tell the truth has been widely endorsed by economists. The basic idea is to establish a tax that reflects the indirect costs to society of an economic activity. For example, a tax on coal would incorporate the increased health care costs associated with breathing polluted air, the costs of damage from acid rain, and the costs of climate disruption.

Nine countries in Western Europe have already begun the process of tax shifting, known as environmental tax reform. The amount of revenue shifted thus far is small, just a few percent. But enough experience has been gained to know that it works.

Among the activities taxed in Europe are carbon emissions, emissions of heavy metals, and the generation of garbage (so-called landfill taxes). The Nordic countries, led by Sweden, pioneered tax shifting at the beginning of the 1990s. By 1999 a second wave of tax shifting was under way, this one including the larger economies of Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Tax shifting does not change the level of taxes, only their composition. One of the better known changes was a four-year plan adopted in Germany in 1999 to shift taxes from labor to energy. By 2001, this had lowered fuel use by 5 percent. A tax on carbon emissions adopted in Finland in 1990 lowered emissions there 7 percent by 1998.

Environmental tax reform is spreading, with the reform process now under way in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The United States imposed a stiff tax on chlorofluorocarbons to phase them out in accordance with the Montreal Protocol of 1987. At the local level, the city of Victoria, British Columbia, adopted a trash tax of $1.20 per bag of garbage, reducing its daily trash flow 18 percent within one year.

One of the newer taxes gaining in popularity is the so-called congestion tax. City governments are turning to a tax on vehicles picture of urban traffic entering the city, or at least the inner part of the city where traffic congestion is most serious. In London, where the average speed of an automobile was 9 miles per hour – about the same as a horse-drawn carriage – a congestion tax was adopted in early 2003. The $8 charge on all motorists driving into the center of the city between 7am and 6:30pm immediately reduced the number of vehicles by 24 percent, permitting traffic to flow more freely while cutting pollution and noise.

Environmental tax shifting usually brings a double dividend. In reducing taxes on income – in effect, taxes on labor – labor becomes less costly, creating additional jobs while protecting the environment. This was the principal motivation in the German four-year shift of taxes from income to energy. The shift from fossil fuels to more energy-efficient technologies and to renewable sources of energy reduces carbon emissions and represents a shift to more labor-intensive industries. By lowering the air pollution from smokestacks and tailpipes, it also reduces respiratory illnesses, such as asthma and emphysema, and health care costs – a triple dividend.

When it comes to reflecting the value of nature’s services, ecologists can, for example, calculate the values of services that a forest in a given location provides. Once picture of logging operation these are determined, they can be incorporated into the price of trees as a stumpage tax of the sort that Bulgaria and Lithuania have adopted. Anyone wishing to cut a tree would have to pay a tax equal to the value of the services provided by that tree. The market would then be telling the truth. The effect of this would be to reduce tree cutting, since forest services may be worth several times as much as the timber, and to encourage wood and paper recycling.

Some 2,500 economists, including eight Nobel Prize winners in economics, have endorsed the concept of tax shifts. Former Harvard economics professor N. Gregory Mankiw, who was nominated to be Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors in early 2003, wrote in Fortune magazine: “Cutting income taxes while increasing gasoline taxes would lead to more rapid economic growth, less traffic congestion, safer roads, and reduced risk of global warming – all without jeopardizing long-term fiscal solvency. This may be the closest thing to a free lunch that economics has to offer.” Mankiw could also have added that it would reduce the military expenditures associated with ensuring access to Middle Eastern oil.

The Economist has recognized the advantage of environmental tax shifting and endorses it strongly: “On environmental grounds, never mind energy security, America taxes gasoline too lightly. Better than a one-off increase, a politically more feasible idea, and desirable in its own terms, would be a long-term plan to shift taxes from incomes to emissions of carbon.” In Europe and the United States, polls indicate that at least 70 percent of voters support environmental tax reform once it is explained to them.

Subsidies, which are essentially “negative taxes,” also must be reformed. Each year the world’s taxpayers underwrite $700 billion of subsidies for environmentally destructive activities, picture of oil rig such as burning fossil fuels, over-pumping aquifers, clear-cutting forests, and overfishing. A 1997 Earth Council study, Subsidizing Unsustainable Development, observes that “there is something unbelievable about the world spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually to subsidize its own destruction.”

Subsidies are not inherently bad. Many technologies and industries were born of government subsidies. Jet aircraft were developed with military R&D expenditures, leading to modern commercial airliners. The Internet was a result of publicly funded efforts to establish links between computers in government laboratories and research institutes. And the combination of the federal tax incentive and a robust state tax incentive in California gave birth to the modern wind power industry.

But just as there is a need for tax shifting, there is also a need for subsidy shifting. A world facing the prospect of economically disruptive climate change, for example, can no longer justify subsidies to expand the burning of coal and oil. Shifting these subsidies to the development of climate – benign energy sources such as wind power, solar power, and geothermal power is the key to stabilizing the earth’s climate. Shifting subsidies from road construction to rail construction could increase mobility in many situations while reducing carbon emissions.

In a troubled world economy facing fiscal deficits at all levels of government, exploiting tax and subsidy shifts with their double and triple dividends can help balance the books and save the environment. Tax and subsidy shifting promise both gains in economic efficiency and reductions in environmental destruction, a win-win situation.

History judges political leaders by whether they respond to the great issues of their time. For today’s leaders, that issue is how to deflate the world’s bubble economy before it bursts. This bubble threatens the future of everyone, rich and poor alike. It challenges us to restructure the global economy, to build an eco-economy.

The choice is ours – yours and mine. We can stay with business as usual and preside over a global bubble economy that keeps expanding until it bursts, leading to economic decline. Or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that stabilizes population, eradicates poverty, and stabilizes climate. Historians will record the choice, but it is ours to make