Acton Institute PowerBlog - Entries from Thursday, May 3, 2007

The Acton Institute is looking for great charities. The Samaritan Award is a $10,000 award given to a charity that is primarily privately funded and whose work is direct, personal and accountable. There are also second and third place prizes of $1,000 as well as a special edition of WORLD Magazine that will feature the top 10 charities in the United States. All programs that apply for the Samaritan Award will be entered into the Samaritan Guide which is a comprehensive tool that gathers information about charities throughout the country.

You can apply for the Samaritan Award here. Applications are available from May 1, 2007 through May 31, 2007.

The previous winners of the Samaritan Award include the Lives Under Construction Boys Ranch - Residential Treatment Program (Lampe, MO) in 2005 and the Christian Women’s Job Corps (CWJC) - Job Coaching for Working Poor Program (Nashville, TN) in 2006. Other honorees can be viewed in the Samaritan Guide, as well as details about their programs.

I encourage all of our readers who are involved with charities to encourage them to apply. We seek to recognize and reward the good work that they do. Visit http://www.samaritanguide.org for more information.

One more note related to the week’s reflections on energy and the environment. This brief piece from Marketplace highlights coal’s newfound popularity, “Coal makes a comeback” (here’s an in-depth and more technical piece from the NYT. HT: Instapundit).

Marketplace reporter Jeremy Hobson notes the need for coal to be integrated into an energy policy oriented toward independence: “The U.S. has more coal than any other country. $27 billion worth is mined every year. That’s why everyone, from unions to politicians to scientists, is getting on the coal bandwagon.”

Some scientists are arguing that the negative environmental impact of coal-burning power plants can be significantly mitigated by the advent of new cleaning technologies, presumably including the use of “scrubbers” which divert CO2 emissions from smoke stacks.

Many of these technologies, such as scrubbers, are focused on limiting the input of GHGs into the atmosphere. But there is a shift that is beginning to focus much more on sequestration and removal of GHGs. That is, there are two elements to consider: how much CO2 or other GHGs are put into the atmosphere and how quickly they are taken out, through both natural and artificial means.

Robert O. Mendelsohn, of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, made this point in his comments at the Copenhagen Consensus of 2004. He writes, “Although the bulk of carbon emissions in the future come from burning fossil fuels, policy makers should consider more than just energy policies to reduce carbon emissions. Another important policy option is to include carbon sequestration in forests. By growing timber trees longer and by setting aside vast tracts of marginal forestland for conservation, land use policies can sequester a large stock of carbon in living forests.”

Well-planned and properly planned reforestation is indeed an important part of that second element by sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere. But new technologies like carbon capture devices also will be an important feature of any attempts to manage the climate.

According to reports published last week (HT: Slashdot), Global Research Technologies, LLC (GRT) has announced the first successful “demonstration of a bold new technology to capture carbon from the air. The ‘air extraction’ prototype has successfully demonstrated that indeed carbon dioxide (CO2) can be captured from the atmosphere. This is GRT’s first step toward a commercially viable air capture device.”

It’s an encouraging step to see that the media and politicians, but most especially commercial businesses, are beginning to pay attention to the possibilities for sequestration and GHG removal and not just focusing on consumption and emissions. There’s definitely going to be a commercial demand for carbon capture devices. Maybe someday we’ll all wear some sort of mask that mitigates the .3 tons per year of CO2 that a human being emits just by breathing.

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2007 Samaritan Award Call for Entries

Emissions and a New Coal Boom

Recent Video