Carbon dioxide streams into a pond near the Sulphur Bank mine at Clear Lake. Volcanic gases are a very small factor in the atmospheric system that controls world climate. Photo by Andrew Alden

Here in the Bay Area, it's easy to find volcanic influences: Just visit one of our many hot springs, or Clear Lake, where I took this photo. These gassy springs that are bubbling with carbon dioxide are associated with young magma underneath the northern Coast Range. Many people believe that volcanic emissions of CO₂ are a much greater influence on world climate than CO₂ from human activities. Is that right?

The answer is no. It's a persistent delusion, similar to the idea that U.S. foreign aid is responsible for the national debt. Volcanoes erupt because of water vapor dissolved in lava. Volcanoes do release CO₂, sometimes a great deal of it, but humans have been outdoing nature for a long time. Geoscientists have made many estimates of global volcanic CO₂ production because it's one of those important numbers in the long-term, geologic carbon cycle. Plate tectonics carries buried carbon down into the deep Earth, and volcanoes burp it back up again.

At the global scale, the natural carbon cycle is slow and gentle, although the numbers may seem large: Volcanoes on land and under the sea release somewhere between 150 and 260 million tons of CO₂ per year. However, human emissions of this greenhouse gas are around 35 billion-with-a-B tons a year when you add up burning oil and gas, manufacturing cement, running coal-fired power plants, and changes in land use like digging up soil and cutting down forests. We are a preposterously greater emitter of CO₂ — two orders of magnitude greater. And while volcanoes are pretty steady, humans are getting worse and worse.

Volcanologist Terry Gerlach, of the U.S. Geological Survey, has been publicizing this inconvenient truth. In a 2011 article in Eos, aimed at scientists, he puts the numbers in a geological context. If volcanoes had to match the human output, he says, it would require one or more Yellowstone-size supereruptions every year. Put another way, there would have to be ten Mount St. Helens eruptions every single day. (By the law of averages the U.S. would get one of these about once a week.) I say, lie back in your local hot spring and rejoice that CO₂ emissions are a problem that human ingenuity and action can address.

Learn more about the basics of volcanic gases at Volcano World.

Some happy bike commuters from the 2008 Bike to Work Day
Credit: Len Gilbert

On Thursday, May 14th, expect a jump in the number of bikes on the road in San Francisco. The reason for the inflation? Bike to Work Day. This will be the 15th Annual Bike to Work Day in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area, and this year nine Bay Area counties will participate in the festivities. The event seeks to promote a healthy way of commuting by featuring commute convoys, energizer stations, prizes for costumes and decorated bikes and downtown bike valet parking. Many organizations like the California Academy of Sciences have put together bike-commute teams to support the event.

The Bay Area is not the only city promoting bicycle advocacy. The best known community bike program was started in the 1960s in Amsterdam. Known as a bicycle sharing system, bicycles were available on a large scale, allowing people to have ready access to these public bikes rather than owning personal ones. This allowed people to shift from transit to bicycle and back again. These programs have not only been successful in Europe but the United States as well.

One of the first community bicycle projects in the United States started in Portland, Oregon in 1994 by several civic and environmental activists. A number of bicycles were available on the streets for use. Since then many other communities have set up similar projects. One was set up at Burning Man in 2007, following the example of the Portland Yellow Bike program.

150,000 commuters are expected to forgo their car commute and bike into work on May 14th. Nationally, many more will commute by bike during the entire month of May to support National Bike Month.

There are some great perks to commuting by bike to work: Bikes are much cheaper than cars. Typically, a bike will cost around $700 per year; compare that to the cost of a car (which includes insurance, repairs and gas), around $8000 per year (according to the American Automobile Association). Not only is it cheaper, the carbon footprint of commuting by bike is drastically lower as well. A gallon of gas releases about 20 lbs of CO2 into the air; a bicycle creates no CO2 emissions. Bicycling is also a great way to stay healthy and active without having to make a trip to the gym.

All in all, Bike to Work Day is an individually and environmentally healthy way to get to and from work. For more information on Bike to Work Day, bike routes, and services offered for bicyclists visit http://btwd.bayareabikes.org/.

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A sample of switchgrass at Sandia National
Laboratories

So when QUEST decided to move forward on producing a story about biofuels, I welcomed the opportunity to assist Series Producer Josh Rosen in its crafting. Being QUEST, we weren't content to merely renumerate the different kinds of biofuels and how cellulosic ethanol is more efficient than corn-based ethanol. Instead, our story focuses on the pioneering work being done by researchers affiliated with the Joint BioEnergy Initiative (JBEI), a multi-billion dollar research initiative based in Emeryville, as they look beyond ethanol to the next generation of biofuels. So not only is JBEI looking at various feedstocks like switchgrass, rice, poplar and innovative ways to “deconstruct” the cellulosic material, it also attempts to synthesize fuels that work more efficiently in America's automotive fleet, still overwhelmingly reliant on gasoline.

But even top researchers at JBEI like Jay Keasling and Blake Simmons caution that this next generation of biofuels won't be coming online for years. Moreover, new research suggests that the net production cycle of biofuels, from the clear-cutting of trees to grow the crops to their transport to markets far away, may yield as many or more emissions as the use of petroleum-based fuel. A recent Op-Ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle by UC Berkeley Alex Farrell cites the reason for this as primarily one of production– the way we clear land for growing biofuels, as well as our emphasis on the use of food-based crops like corn and soybean, which aren't terribly efficient sources of ethanol to begin with.

Tad Patzek, also at UC Berkeley, has been an ardent critic of the carbon-neutral reputation of biofuels, garnering controversy for conducting studies that some other researchers have criticized for their calculations of emissions arising from biofuel production. (See Patzek's co-authored article on page 19 of the March 2007 edition of Energy Tribune). Earlier this year, a study by researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute suggests that biofuels are not created equal, as those made from U.S. corn, Malaysian palm oil and Brazilian soy yield more emissions than their petroleum-based counterparts, given the environmental damage they reap when grown for fuel. The study cites recycled cooking oil and biofuel made from grassy and woody cellulosic material as being more intelligent choices for cutting down on emissions.

And so the debate continues, struggling to keep pace with the technological progress made by scientists toiling away in their quest to find the holy grail of an efficient, cheap and environmentally-friendly biofuel.

Watch the "Biofuels: Beyond Ethanol" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Sheraz Sadiq is an Associate Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.

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