Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
carbon dioxide back below ground into deep saline aquifers capable of
retaining the carbon dioxide for thousands of years with very little leakage
back into the environment. Carbon sequestration is essentially a challenge
to the conventional thinking, which holds that the fossil fuel industries can-
not be part of the solution to the greenhouse problem.” Socolow helped
promote this field of research by running a workshop on carbon sequestra-
tion in Washington in 1997. Early indications from research at CEES on
technical approaches to the sequestration of the carbon in fossil fuels sug-
gest that these technologies offer one of the least costly approaches to mit-
igating the greenhouse problem. From this perspective, hydrogen is the
transportation fuel of the future: hydrogen is most of what is left chemically
when carbon is extracted from a fossil fuel, and hydrogen fuel becomes
harmless water when its energy is used.
Socolow's work on lead has focused on the lead battery. He and his
CEES collaborator Valerie Thomas concluded that the lead battery could
become one of the first examples of a hazardous product managed in an
environmentally acceptable fashion. Industrial ecology makes the distinc-
tion between dispersive and recyclable uses of materials: because lead used
as a gasoline additive cannot be recovered, it is a dispersive use, while the
use of lead in a battery is a recyclable use.Accordingly, Socolow found him-
self confronting a new question: What should be the criteria for deciding
when recycling is environmentally acceptable? These criteria include,
Thomas and Socolow decided, nearly 100 percent collection of used bat-
teries; environmentally clean battery dismantlement, secondary lead refin-
ing, and battery reassembly; low worker exposures at each step; and exports
of used batteries only to places where equivalent stringent environmental
standards are in effect.
Socolow has also published a number of papers on nitrogen. Fertilizer
production and other human activities have more than doubled the Earth's
natural rate of nitrogen fixation, contributing to ecosystem imbalances, air
pollution, ozone depletion, and greenhouse effects. Socolow's paper “Nitro-
gen Management and the Future of Food: Lessons from the Management
of Energy and Carbon,” published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences,
suggests how productive approaches to carbon management,
such as focusing on end-use efficiency, encouraging markets in pollution
rights, and conducting targeted research and development, can be applied
to the emerging challenge of nitrogen management, at scales ranging from
the cornfield to the entire globe.
