C-Questor Carbon Markets and Climate Change News Letter

BSX Approves Listing of the Ordinary Shares of GHG Energy Corporation

2010-05-14T08:34:00.000+01:00

Hamilton, Bermuda: 6th May, 2010 – The Listing Committee of the Bermuda Stock Exchange (BSX) announced the approval of the listing of the Ordinary Shares of GHG Energy Corporation, (GHG) (the ”Company”). The listing is effective from 28th April, 2010.
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The Company was incorporated in Delaware, USA on 1st February 2010.

GHG was incorporated specifically as a Special Purpose Acquisition Vehicle to specialise in investments in low or zero carbon renewable energy technologies and related projects. Climate change is already a multi-billion dollar commercial sector and the United Nations has estimated that it will grow to $1.48 trillion by 2020. The Company intends to take advantage of this market opportunity by establishing or acquiring climate change products and services, or entering into alliances to provide such products or services, in six alternative or renewable energy investment sectors: Bio-Energy; Aquatic Energy; Energy Storage; Energy Saving; Wind Energy and Solar Energy.

Mr. Neil Cockle, Chief Executive Officer GHG, said: “I am delighted that GHG is now listed on the BSX; the Company will benefit from the international prestige and enhanced profile afforded by its BSX listing. Together with the finance raised, this will help us to make the acquisitions and partnerships that are central to the delivery of our business strategy. The management team intends to leverage these benefits in order to grow the Company’s activities over the coming months and years for the benefit of all stakeholders.”

BCB Securities Limited sponsored the listing of the Ordinary Shares of the Company.

“We are extremely pleased to have the opportunity to sponsor GHG Energy Corporation and look forward to continuing our relationship with the company," stated Randy Morris of BCB Securities Limited.

The issue is being introduced for listing under the Restricted Marketing provisions of the Exchange and is for securities that are aimed at Qualified Investors, being individuals or institutions that invest either a minimum of $100,000 or otherwise meet one of the suitability tests defined by the Exchange.

“The BSX is delighted to welcome the Ordinary Shares of GHG Energy Corporation to listing”, said Mr. James S. McKirdy, Chief Compliance Officer of the BSX.

For further information on GHG, please visit http://www.ghg-energy.com or contact Suzanna Hammond or Stephanie Charteris on +44 (0)20 7630 6633 or email: suzanna@green-energy-group.com or stephanie@green-energy-group.com.

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For more information on the Bermuda Stock Exchange (BSX), contact Bruce McMartin at 1-441-292-7212 or bmcmartin@bsx.com. Information is also available at www.bsx.com on Bloomberg at BSX .

The BSX was founded in 1971 and is the world’s leading fully electronic offshore securities market. The BSX list equities, mutual funds and bonds, as well as depository receipts. The BSX is a full member of the World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) and an affiliate member of IOSCO. In addition, the BSX is recognized by the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) as a Designated Offshore Securities Market under Regulation S, The Financial Services Authority in the UK as a Designated Investment Exchange, The Bermuda Monetary Authority as a Recognised Investment Exchange and an Approved Stock Exchange under Australia’s Foreign Investment Funds (FIF) taxation rules.

A Bad Bet on Carbon

2010-05-14T08:32:00.000+01:00

By ROBERT BRYCE

ON Wednesday, John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman introduced their long-awaited Senate energy bill, which includes incentives of $2 billion per year for carbon capture and sequestration, the technology that removes carbon dioxide from the smokestack at power plants and forces it into underground storage. This significant allocation would come on top of the $2.4 billion for carbon capture projects that appeared in last year’s stimulus package.
That’s a lot of money for a technology whose adoption faces three potentially insurmountable hurdles: it greatly reduces the output of power plants; pipeline capacity to move the newly captured carbon dioxide is woefully insufficient; and the volume of waste material is staggering. Lawmakers should stop perpetuating the hope that the technology can help make huge cuts in the United States’ carbon dioxide emissions.
Let’s take the first problem. Capturing carbon dioxide from the flue gas of a coal-fired electric generation plant is an energy-intensive process. Analysts estimate that capturing the carbon dioxide cuts the output of a typical plant by as much as 28 percent.
Given that the global energy sector is already straining to meet booming demand for electricity, it’s hard to believe that the United States, or any other country that relies on coal-fired generation, will agree to reduce the output of its coal-fired plants by almost a third in order to attempt carbon capture and sequestration.
Here’s the second problem. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has estimated that up to 23,000 miles of new pipeline will be needed to carry the captured carbon dioxide to the still-undesignated underground sequestration sites. That doesn’t sound like much when you consider that America’s gas pipeline system sprawls over some 2.3 million miles. But those natural gas pipelines carry a valuable, marketable, useful commodity.
By contrast, carbon dioxide is a worthless waste product, so taxpayers would likely end up shouldering most of the cost. Yes, some of that waste gas could be used for enhanced oil recovery projects; flooding depleted oil reservoirs with carbon dioxide is a proven technology that can increase production and extend the life of existing oilfields. But the process would be useful in only a limited number of oilfields — probably less than 10 percent of the waste carbon dioxide captured from coal-fired power plants could actually be injected into American oilfields.
The third, and most vexing, problem has to do with scale. In 2009, carbon dioxide emissions in the United States totaled 5.4 billion tons. Let’s assume that policymakers want to use carbon capture to get rid of half of those emissions — say, 3 billion tons per year. That works out to about 8.2 million tons of carbon dioxide per day, which would have to be collected and compressed to about 1,000 pounds per square inch (that compressed volume of carbon dioxide would be roughly equivalent to the volume of daily global oil production).
In other words, we would need to find an underground location (or locations) able to swallow a volume equal to the contents of 41 oil supertankers each day, 365 days a year.
There will also be considerable public resistance to carbon dioxide pipelines and sequestration projects — local outcry has already stalled proposed carbon capture projects in Germany and Denmark. The fact is, few landowners are eager to have pipelines built across their property. And because of the possibility of deadly leaks, few people will to want to live near a pipeline or an underground storage cavern. This leads to the obvious question: which members of the House and Senate are going to volunteer their states to be dumping grounds for all that carbon dioxide?
For some, carbon capture and sequestration will remain the Holy Grail of carbon-reduction strategies. But before Congress throws yet more money at the procedure, lawmakers need to take a closer look at the issues that hamstring nearly every new energy-related technology: cost and scale.
Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author, most recently, of “Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green’ Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future.”

How to Jumpstart Carbon Capture and Storage

2010-05-14T08:29:00.000+01:00

By James D. Wolfensohn
Published May 13, 2010

The International Energy Agency estimates that carbon capture and storage (CCS) could contribute 19 percent of the total greenhouse gas emission reductions necessary between now and 2050.However, in order to make such a contribution, an estimated 3,400 CCS projects would need to be in place, trapping and burrowing away a volume of CO2 equivalent to twice the volume of oil and gas the world currently extracts each year. Existing technologies are insufficient to deliver on this scale.CCS is a nascent industry facing substantial hurdles. Commercial deployment of this technology involves overcoming a range of challenges, including policy and regulatory obstacles, financial and commercial barriers, technological issues and public acceptance. It will also require unprecedented cooperation between governments and private sector organizations.

The Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute (GCCSI), whose International Advisory Panel I chair, is an effort to address these very challenges and to ensure that the full potential of CCS is achieved. It was created to bring governments, industry and financial institutions together to galvanize global efforts to demonstrate and deploy CCS technology at an industrial scale.Central to this work is the need to invest in knowledge development and sharing, and organization analysis. The GCCSI is developing a global knowledge exchange program to coordinate the effective and timely international collection and dissemination of knowledge on CCS technology and implementation.By analyzing information from a range of sources, including distilling lessons from existing and proposed CCS demonstration projects, the GCCSI seeks to further global knowledge and expertise in this field and to serve as an impartial and trusted advisor to governments and industry in sharing this knowhow.The GCCSI’s knowledge program will be a broad reaching and dynamic service, drawing on information provided by GCCSI’s 200+ membership, as well as information elicited by region-specific teams that will continue to grow over the next year. These "local" teams will keep in contact with stakeholders in their jurisdiction and closely monitor developments in their region.Governments around the world have so far committed an estimated US$16 billion for individual industrial-scale CCS projects. These projects are already yielding valuable new experience and lessons which GCCSI hopes to leverage. The GCCSI is negotiating the sharing of information from these and future projects with governments from the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, Norway and the European Economic Commission.This year, the GCCSI will provide targeted financial support for up to 10 CCS projects around the world to assist companies in targeting specific barriers to their CCS projects. In turn, the companies will help support the GCCSI’s knowledge development and sharing activities. For instance, some projects are examining industrial uses for CO2, as opposed to having the gas stored.Carbon capture and storage is not a silver bullet in the fight against climate change, but it could play an integral role in limiting emissions in the decades ahead. Given the great barriers facing the commercial deployment of CCS, however, the industry is unlikely to fulfill its potential without a concerted effort to accelerate its development. The GCCSI is committed to achieving this goal and working with its members aspires to see CCS established as one of the new engines of the green economy.James D. Wolfensohn is chairman of Wolfensohn & Company LLC, a private investment firm and an advisor to corporations and governments. He also chairs the International Advisory Panel of the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute.The institute holds a members' meeting today and tomorrow in Pittsburgh that is bringing together over 200 members including governments, leading corporations, non-government bodies and research organizations to discuss new approaches to accelerating CCS. GCCSI VP Dale Seymour wrote about the importance of collaboration in the process in a recent post for GreenBiz.com.

India's new fast-breeder on track, nuclear power from September next

2010-05-14T08:26:00.000+01:00

With another critical component set to join the Rs.5,600-crore ($1.25 billion) fast-breeder reactor at Kalpakkam, some 80 km from Chennai, scientists at the 500 mw nuclear power plant said the project will be up and running, as scheduled, by September next year.
The component that will be installed this week is called a thermal baffle, a cylindrical safety vessel that is part of the crucial equipment, which helps in keeping the sodium used in the plant cool.
"The 60-tonne thermal baffle, measuring some 12-metre in diameter and more than six metres in height, is made of stainless steel and is expected to be installed inside the main vessel this week," Prabhat Kumar, project director of the power plant, told IANS.
The sodium-cooled fast reactor, designed by the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR), has three vessels -- a safety vessel, a main vessel and an inner vessel, all of which are critical to keep the fast-breeder reactor cool.
The baffle will go into the main vessel, also made of stainless steel, weighing some 200 tonnes, which will also hold the coolant liquid sodium, the reactor's core containing the fuel, and other components essential for nuclear power generation.
"The thermal baffle acts as a buffer wall against the radiation from the inner vessel, which holds liquid sodium at 550 degrees Celsius, and helps maintain the temperature in the main vessel at 400 degrees Celsius," said P. Chellapandi, associate director-design of IGCAR.
Officials said the fast-breeder reactor, being built by Bharatiya Nabhikiya Vidyut Nigam Ltd, or Bhavini, is one of the key projects of India's three-stage nuclear power programme. India became the sixth country to have such technology, way back in 1985.
Speaking about the overall project, officials explained that more than 55 percent of the work was over, with 425 people, out of the 525 employees sanctioned so far, already on the payrolls of Bhavini.
"Orders worth Rs.3,550 crore ($785 million) have already been placed and around Rs.2,300 crore ($510 million) has been spent on the project till date," Kumar said. "Funding has not been a problem as the government will finance 76 percent of the cost."
He said, while the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) will fund 4 percent of the project cost, the remaining is expected to be met out of borrowings. "But till date, Bhavini has not drawn any money from NPCIL, nor has it resorted to any borrowings."
India currently has 17 nuclear power reactors under operation with a capacity of 4,120 MW. This is expected to go up to 7,280 MW after the completion of six projects under implementation, including the 500-MW fast-breeder reactor at Kalpakkam.

Suspension from Kyoto carbon trading looms for Bulgaria

2010-05-14T08:24:00.000+01:00

13 May 2010, 23:46 CET
(SOFIA) - Bulgaria will likely be suspended from carbon emissions trading as of June 30 for failing to comply with UN recommendations, Environment Minister Nona Karadzhova said Thursday.
The UN Compliance Committee of the Kyoto Protocol has taken a preliminary decision to revoke Bulgaria's accreditation to trade in carbon emissions, which is likely to be definitively confirmed on June 30, the minister said.
Bulgaria's previous government had not complied with the committee's recommendations to bring its system for recording greenhouse gas emissions up to scratch, she said, blasting the previous administration for its "criminal inaction."
The ruling will deprive Bulgaria of its right to sell an annual 40 million surplus sovereign pollution rights under Kyoto -- known as Assigned Amount Units or AAUs -- which were expected to generate up to 500 million leva (250 million euros) and which the government was counting on to battle the budget deficit.
It would also jeopardise companies' trading of surplus carbon credits -- the so-called EU Allowances (EUAs) -- which the European Commission just approved in late April.
Karadzhova expressed hopes Thursday that industries would be able to trade at least some of their surplus carbon credits by June 30, when the ban would come into force.
The government, however, would not be able to do this as parliament has yet to pass key legislation regulating carbon trade.
Karadzhova said she hoped to restore the country's accreditation as early as November.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, Bulgaria agreed to cut its CO2 emissions by 8.0 percent compared to their 1988 level and emit no more than 130 million tonnes of CO2 a year.

Go-ahead for offshore wind farm sites

2010-05-14T08:21:00.000+01:00

By Emily Beament, Press Association
Tuesday, 11 May 2010
Expansions to offshore wind farm sites around the English coast which will provide enough power for an extra 1.4 million homes were given the green light today by the Crown Estate.
Five wind farm developments, off the coasts of Suffolk, Kent, Cumbria and in Liverpool Bay were given the go-ahead to extend their area, creating an extra 1.7 gigawatts (GW) of power.
All the area extensions will be subject to a full, new planning application, environmental impact assessment and consultation before construction can begin, the Crown Estate said.
And two projects off the coast of Norfolk have been given the go-ahead to install extra capacity to harness more wind energy within their designated offshore area.
In total the extensions permitted by the Crown Estate will provide an additional 2GW of power to the grid.
It is hoped the developments will add to England's energy security and provide jobs and a stable flow of construction projects for the supply chain before the massive "Round 3" expansion of offshore wind kicks in.
Rob Hastings, the Crown Estate's director of the marine estate, said the extra 2GW of power had been driven by "developers' appetite" for offshore wind.
He said: "It is another positive step in the maturing of the offshore wind industry and will significantly support the growth of the supply chain as it adds further to the pipeline of construction projects.
"This announcement shows the Crown Estate's commitment to help develop this maturing sector with a view to driving the UK offshore wind energy industry forward and creating a long-term sustainable energy source for the UK."
RWE Npower Renewables welcomed the green light to develop another wind farm with SSE Renewables next to their Outer Gabbard Sandbank site, around 19 miles off the coast of Suffolk.
The new "Galloper wind farm" scheme, which would have a capacity of around 500MW, will double the wind power which will be generated from the area.
Paul Coffey, chief operating officer of parent company RWE Innogy, said: "The opportunity to develop a wind farm close to the Greater Gabbard offshore wind farm site has a number of advantages: we know that this is an excellent site for a wind farm, there is already the necessary infrastructure in place, and if consented one can benefit from the long-term operational and maintenance activities due to the close proximity of the two wind farms."
Maria McCaffery, chief executive of industry body RenewableUK, said the announcement gave "definitive and positive" evidence of the environmental and commercial viability of existing offshore wind projects.
"The site extensions come as a direct consequence of the UK's world-beating offshore wind farms showing that, after a successful start, they have further potential for growth," she said.
In addition to the Greater Gabbard extension, Vattenfall Wind Power has been given approval to extend its Kentish Flats and Thanet projects off the coast of Kent, and Dong Wind UK has received the green light to extend Burbo Bank, near Liverpool, and Walney, Cumbria.
Centrica Renewable Energy has been permitted to install extra capacity on Race Bank and Warwick Energy can add to its Dudgeon site capacity, both off the Norfolk coast.
Responding to the announcement, Friends of the Earth climate campaigner Tony Bosworth said: "This is another significant step forward along the path to a greener, safer future.
"The UK's renewable energy potential is huge - maximising it would slash emissions, increase energy security and generate tens of thousands of jobs.
"All the major political parties agree on the need to build a low-carbon economy - urgent measures to boost green energy must be a top priority for whoever forms the next government."

Futuristic Green Float project will test limits of technology

2010-05-14T08:19:00.000+01:00

Japanese scientists, engineers and financiers have begun work on a project that will make the construction excesses of Dubai look timid: a tower 1km (3,300ft) high and a vertical farm balanced on a floating concrete lilypad.
By the year 2025, it is claimed, all the necessary technology should be ready to start building — assuming a suitable patch of calm, equatorial ocean can be identified.
At first glance, the Green Float project seems highly improbable: artificial rafts have never been built on this scale before, much less ones capable of supporting what will be, by far, the world’s tallest building. Even the investment bank Nomura, which is the chief facilitator of the project, has not speculated on how much it will cost or who will pay for it.
Energy will be drawn from solar power, so plentiful sunshine is a must, while the structure of the island demands reliably calm waters, low wind speeds, predictable temperature and a low risk of tsunamis or typhoons.
The project is expected to lure a number of Japan’s largest technology groups and the research work has already begun at leading universities and engineering companies.
The engineering giant Shimizu envisages building the tower from super-light alloys derived from the magnesium in seawater. Once an island with a diameter of 3km is created, each new floor of the tower will be built at ground level, pushing the previous floor down into the sea. When the 1,000-metre mark is reached, the tower will be raised to its full height. The huge circular base will be part mangrove plantation, part cornfields and part livestock ranch — all built on a lattice of 7,000-tonne honeycomb pontoons.
Each floating city, suggests the blueprints, will power and feed itself, supposedly providing a carbonneutral habitat for 50,000 people.
Eventually, the idea is to string more floating units together, creating a “lilypad” flotilla of man-made islands capable of sustaining a total population of one million people.

Liberal Democrats to abstain in parliamentary vote on nuclear plants

2010-05-14T08:18:00.000+01:00

Plans for up to ten new nuclear power stations could be blocked after the appointment of Chris Huhne, a strongly anti-nuclear Liberal Democrat, as Energy Secretary. Under the coalition agreement, Lib Dem MPs would abstain in a parliamentary vote on a national planning statement on new nuclear plants.
Mr Huhne said yesterday that he would strongly oppose any form of public subsidy for nuclear plants, which remain far more expensive than gas-fired power stations.
He said: “If [power companies] come up with a plan that genuinely involves no public subsidy and that’s the agreement of the coalition Government — and I think frankly a very credible agreement in the current fiscal circumstances — then they will put it through the normal planning process under a new national planning statement and the proposal will go forward in the normal way.
“And we are committed on the Liberal Democrat side of the coalition that we will not vote against that.

“So if there’s a majority in Parliament in favour of a particular proposal — and there are an awful lot of ‘ifs’ here — then new nuclear will go ahead.”
In 2006, Mr Huhne attacked Labour for planning new nuclear plants. In a statement still on his website, he said: “Not only does nuclear cause a great threat to the environment through the large amounts of waste produced, but it is also economically unviable.
“Since the Chernobyl disaster, no nuclear power station has been built anywhere in the world without huge amounts of government subsidy.”
Ben Caldecott, head of UK policy at Climate Change Capital, the low-carbon investment manager, said: “There is a danger new nuclear will be kicked into the long grass. The Lib Dems have been such strong opponents of nuclear that it would be amazing if it was a Lib Dem energy secretary who instigated a new-build programme.
“I suspect that Chris Huhne will do his best to put it on the back burner.”
The Nuclear Industry Association said: “We would certainly hope it wasn’t kicked into the long grass and, as yet, we have no reason to think it will be.” It added that, subject to approval, the industry was planning to open the first new reactor at the end of 2017 and then additional reactors every 18 months-to-two years after that.
The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats both want to abolish the Infrastructure Planning Commission, which was created by Labour to speed up the planning process for new nuclear plants.
However, the nuclear industry has been encouraged by the coalition agreement to set a minimum price for permits for emitting greenhouse gases. This would make nuclear more competitive by raising the cost of generating electricity from coal and gas.
Lakis Athanasiou, an analyst at Evolution Securities, said: “The main impact on new nuclear development of a Lib Dem heading DECC (Department of Energy and Climate Change) is likely to be more subtle than outright opposition, with delays caused by less desire to promote new nuclear and remove obstacles.”

Countryside to sprout solar farms as firms cash in on subsidy scheme

2010-05-14T07:01:00.000+01:00

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

Fields in Gloucestershire’s rolling countryside, immortalised by Laurie Lee in Cider With Rosie, may soon be covered by thousands of solar panels.
Despite the lack of guaranteed sunshine, the solar farms will make a guaranteed profit because of a generous subsidy funded through increases in household energy bills.
The rate of installation of solar panels will increase five-fold in Britain this year because of this feed-in tariff, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Ecotricity, a renewable energy company based in Stroud, is planning dozens of solar farms and is considering sites near its headquarters.
Dale Vince, the company’s founder, admitted that trying to generate solar power under England’s frequently grey skies was an inefficient way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Even in the sunniest parts of England, the farms will generate a third less electricity than farms of the same size in southern Spain.
However, Mr Vince said that the Government’s feed-in tariff scheme, which began last month, had made solar farms economically viable.
He intends to announce within weeks the location of the first 25-acre, 5-megawatt solar farm. By 2020 Ecotricity plans to be generating 500 megawatts of electricity from solar panels, enough to power more than 100,000 homes. Mr Vince told The Times: “We are planning to build grid-connected solar farms all over the country.
“We are looking on the East Coast, the South West, the South East and around here in Stroud. We don’t want to go too far north because the sunshine drops away. Halfway up the country would be the cut off, a bit north of Birmingham.”
He denied that solar farms would be a visual blight on the landscape, arguing that they would be less obtrusive than wind turbines or rows of polytunnels used to grow fruit and vegetables.
“They won’t stand more than 2 metres (6.5ft) tall so you won’t see them if you look across the landscape because they will be obscured by hedgerows. “You would see them if you were standing on a hill but the visual impact is very minor compared with wind arrays.”
However, Mr Vince said that some of his farms would have solar panels and turbines in the same fields. “Solar panels and wind turbines complement each other well because in summer the winds are lighter but there is more sunlight, with the opposite in winter.”
He said that solar panels were six times as expensive per unit of electricity generated as onshore wind turbines, which are themselves several times more costly than gas or coal plants.
Commenting on the subsidy available, Mr Vince said: “We don’t think [a feed-in tariff policy] is the best way to go but it’s here and rather than sit and sulk and say it shouldn’t be done, we are just going to get on and do it.
“The more people do it, the more efficient and cheaper the technology gets.” The farms will cost £15-20million each but Ecotricity will receive index-linked income for 25 years from the feed-in tariff, which starts at 29p per kilowatt hour. This should deliver a return of at least 8 per cent a year.
The coalition Government has pledged to keep the tariff. Indeed, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats argued while in opposition that the rates were too low.
John Marjoram, the deputy mayor of Stroud and one of Britain’s first green councillors when elected in 1986, welcomed the idea of solar farms but said that 40 per cent of the district was in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
“Of course we would encourage every sort of renewable energy because we are so far behind the rest of Europe. But we will also have to consider the visual impact,” he said.
The Campaign to Protect Rural England said that it would be better to place banks of solar panels on factory and warehouse roofs and above car parks. It said that some farms in the countryside could be acceptable, depending on the quality of the landscape.
Fields in Gloucestershire’s rolling countryside, immortalised by Laurie Lee in Cider With Rosie, may soon be covered by thousands of solar panels.
Despite the lack of guaranteed sunshine, the solar farms will make a guaranteed profit because of a generous subsidy funded through increases in household energy bills.
The rate of installation of solar panels will increase five-fold in Britain this year because of this feed-in tariff, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Ecotricity, a renewable energy company based in Stroud, is planning dozens of solar farms and is considering sites near its headquarters.
Dale Vince, the company’s founder, admitted that trying to generate solar power under England’s frequently grey skies was an inefficient way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Even in the sunniest parts of England, the farms will generate a third less electricity than farms of the same size in southern Spain.
However, Mr Vince said that the Government’s feed-in tariff scheme, which began last month, had made solar farms economically viable.
He intends to announce within weeks the location of the first 25-acre, 5-megawatt solar farm. By 2020 Ecotricity plans to be generating 500 megawatts of electricity from solar panels, enough to power more than 100,000 homes. Mr Vince told The Times: “We are planning to build grid-connected solar farms all over the country.
“We are looking on the East Coast, the South West, the South East and around here in Stroud. We don’t want to go too far north because the sunshine drops away. Halfway up the country would be the cut off, a bit north of Birmingham.”
He denied that solar farms would be a visual blight on the landscape, arguing that they would be less obtrusive than wind turbines or rows of polytunnels used to grow fruit and vegetables.
“They won’t stand more than 2 metres (6.5ft) tall so you won’t see them if you look across the landscape because they will be obscured by hedgerows. “You would see them if you were standing on a hill but the visual impact is very minor compared with wind arrays.”
However, Mr Vince said that some of his farms would have solar panels and turbines in the same fields. “Solar panels and wind turbines complement each other well because in summer the winds are lighter but there is more sunlight, with the opposite in winter.”
He said that solar panels were six times as expensive per unit of electricity generated as onshore wind turbines, which are themselves several times more costly than gas or coal plants.
Commenting on the subsidy available, Mr Vince said: “We don’t think [a feed-in tariff policy] is the best way to go but it’s here and rather than sit and sulk and say it shouldn’t be done, we are just going to get on and do it.
“The more people do it, the more efficient and cheaper the technology gets.” The farms will cost £15-20million each but Ecotricity will receive index-linked income for 25 years from the feed-in tariff, which starts at 29p per kilowatt hour. This should deliver a return of at least 8 per cent a year.
The coalition Government has pledged to keep the tariff. Indeed, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats argued while in opposition that the rates were too low.
John Marjoram, the deputy mayor of Stroud and one of Britain’s first green councillors when elected in 1986, welcomed the idea of solar farms but said that 40 per cent of the district was in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
“Of course we would encourage every sort of renewable energy because we are so far behind the rest of Europe. But we will also have to consider the visual impact,” he said.
The Campaign to Protect Rural England said that it would be better to place banks of solar panels on factory and warehouse roofs and above car parks. It said that some farms in the countryside could be acceptable, depending on the quality of the landscape.

10 questions for Chris Huhne, the new energy and climate change secretary

2010-05-14T06:59:00.000+01:00

From reforms to the UK's renewable energy strategy to tackling the nuclear question, the new energy and climate change secretary faces a daunting in-tray• What the coalition means for environmental policies

James Murray for BusinessGreen, part of the Guardian Environment Network
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 13 May 2010 10.20 BST
Chris Huhne has been appointed energy and climate change secretary - here are the issues he must face immediately:
1. What are you going to do about the nuclear option?
You are a member of a party that has long been staunchly opposed to nuclear energy, but now you are the energy secretary in a government that wants to move forward with plans for a new fleet of nuclear reactors.
The agreement between the Lib Dems and Conservatives insists you have " agreed a process" that allows Liberal Democrats to maintain their opposition to nuclear power while letting the government pass the National Policy Statements needed for new nuclear power plants.
It sounds OK on paper, but hardly smacks of the stable investment climate energy firms will need if they are to invest billions in nuclear. How will you reassure them that they can and should continue work on new reactors?
2. How do you plan to reform the Renewables Obligation?
It has never been perfect, but the big renewable energy developers understand and are comfortable with the current form of renewable energy subsidy. The Lib-Con coalition has agreed to effectively replace it with an extended feed-in tariff, while maintaining the current banded ROCs.
This was a Conservative idea and they said that moving towards a feed-in tariff would simplify the system, but does extending one subsidy scheme while retaining the previous regime really make things simpler?
More importantly, at what level will you set the feed-in tariff for different technologies? Too high and you are wasting bill payers money, too low and you will cripple the renewable sector. The UK is already facing an ominously tight deadline to meet its renewable target and any uncertainty for investors will only make meeting it harder. This needs to be sorted out quickly.
3. What are you going to do with councils that block wind farms?
Your predecessor, Ed Miliband, said the main reason the UK had such a poor performance on renewable energy over the past decade was because Tory councils blocked proposed wind farms. Both Miliband and your colleague Simon Hughes wanted renewable energy targets for individual councils to stop them opposing each and every renewables project. But any move to force through onshore wind farms will face fierce opposition from your new allies on the Conservative back benches.
The planning system remains the biggest barrier to new renewable energy capacity. How do you plan to address it?
While we're talking about renewables, the Lib-Con deal promises measures to encourage marine energy. What are they? This is one of the few green areas where the UK leads the world and it needs help – fast.
4. A floor price on carbon – really?
The Conservatives want a floor price on carbon and the Lib Dems have agreed. But how do you plan to impose it? The EU emissions trading scheme is a pan-European market, so how do you intend to effectively impose a floor price on carbon for British firms? Even if you can do it, how do you plan to stop them being left at a competitive disadvantage to their European counterparts? Most importantly, at what level do you set the floor price? Recent experiences have proven that anything under €20-€30 (£17-£25.50) is less than useless for many low-carbon technologies, but that is far higher than the current carbon price.
5. Can the green investment bank really make a difference?
Almost everyone agrees with some kind of low-carbon infrastructure bank in principle, but it will have to be pretty sizeable to make a substantive difference. Where will the money come from?
6. How will you sell green home loans?
Regardless of whether you call it the green deal or the pay-as-you-save scheme, the plans for a new green home loan scheme are to be welcomed. They should help overcome the upfront costs that stop many people improving the energy efficiency of their home. The only issue is whether you can sell it and get people to take out the loans. It is going to need a serious marketing strategy – any ideas?
7. What are you going to do about waste?
No one wants to talk about rubbish when they are trying to win votes, which is why the Conservative and Lib Dem manifestos only included a few sentences on waste strategy. But it is one of the most neglected areas of environmental policy and a sector where the UK could build genuine leadership. Talk of zero-waste ambitions and the promise of measures to encourage anaerobic digestion are welcome, but where is the detail?
8. What will you say when BAA come hammering on your door?
You've agreed to cancel the third runway at Heathrow, block any new runways at Gatwick and Stansted, and introduce a new per-plane levy on flights to replace the air passenger duty. In short, you've made an enemy of the aviation industry from day one. Many environmentalists would say this is no bad thing, but the industry is bound to argue that the UK needs more airport capacity. Are you going to stand up to them, or could we still get a Boris Island runway in the Thames Estuary?
9. How are you going to keep DECC relevant?
Even the government's staunchest critics would accept that the formation of the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) was a success. Under the leadership of Ed Miliband it enjoyed a high profile and the ear of Number 10. How do you plan to keep the Department's work near the top of the political agenda when all the focus will be on spending cuts and the health of the new coalition? The PR side of the job is going to be important, particularly with the Mexico summit coming up in November.
10. What are you going to say to Simon Hughes and Greg Clark when you bump into them in the Commons?

Coalition environment ministers: who's who

2010-05-14T06:55:00.002+01:00

Profiles of Chris Huhne, Caroline Spelman and Philip Hammond, the ministerial team that will drive UK climate and environment policy

Allegra Stratton and David Adam
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 13 May 2010 14.59 BST

From left to right: transport secretary, Philip Hammond, energy and climate secretary, Chris Huhne, and environment, food and rural affairs secretary, Caroline Spelman. Illustration: Reuters, Getty, AP

Chris Huhne: energy and climate change secretary (Liberal Democrat)
After a career as a City analyst and many posts as a financial journalist - including a period as Guardian economics leader writer - Huhne entered parliament in 2005. His sway to the left nearly secured him the top job of party leader when he ran against Nick Clegg, but most believe that was expediency and now he is in the centre.
He has had some experience in this role, having been the Lib Dems' environment spokesman. But he will now have to marry his own party's desire to reject nuclear power stations and increase to 40% the renewable energy target with the pragmatism of coalition. The Conservatives are in favour of new-build nuclear, but can the Liberal Democrat MP as energy secretary face down a Tory wish for new nuclear and also some Labour support?
Caroline Spelman: environment, food and rural affairs secretary (Conservative)
With 15 years' experience in the agriculture sector, Spelman is well-versed in the problems faced by farmers. Elected as MP for Meriden in the West Midlands in 1997, she was previously deputy director of the International Confederation of European Beet Growers in Paris, and a research fellow for the Centre for European Agricultural Studies at the University of Kent.
From 1981-84 she was sugar beet commodity secretary for the National Farmers Union (NFU). With her husband, she co-owns Spelman, Cormack & Associates, a food and biotechnology business.
In opposition, she has served as shadow international development secretary and spokeswoman for environmental affairs for Theresa May. In 2004 she became shadow secretary of state for local and devolved government affairs and was later promoted to Conservative party chairman. She was appointed shadow secretary of state for communities and local government last year.
Among the issues likely to feature in her first red boxes are the reform of the common agricultural policy, lobbying from her former colleagues at the NFU to reduce the regulatory burden on farmers and the future of the UK uplands.
Philip Hammond: transport secretary (Conservative)
MP for Runnymede and Weybridge since 1997, Hammond was a member of the conservative shadow health team before becoming trade and industry spokesman. He was made shadow chief secretary to the Treasury in 2007. He has some parliamentary experience of transport and environment, sitting on the environment, transport and regions select committee from 1997-98.
He could face some tricky early decisions. While the Liberal Democrats have talked of increases to fuel duty, the Conservatives want to peg it back. And the Lib Dems are keen on replacing vehicle excise duty with some form of road-pricing in future, which would be deeply unpopular with Tory supporters.

There's no right and wrong to tackling climate change

2010-05-14T06:53:00.000+01:00

Mike Hulme says we need to stop looking for climate change scapegoats and start engaging in honest discussion

Mike Hulme for ChinaDialogue, part of the Guardian Environment Network
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 13 May 2010 16.31 BST

Climate change has come to signify far more than the physical ramifications of human disturbance to the earth's atmosphere, says Mike Hulme - it's a social phenomenon too. One of the enduring characteristics of public debates and political negotiations about climate change is that the protagonists end up arguing about different things. Political arguments masquerade as arguments about science; ethical arguments become economic ones. Legitimate differences about ideologies and values are reduced to trading blows about the 'right' numbers – the decimal points on rates of warming; the number of noughts in the cost of climate change. We are not being honest with one another. The consequence is that the quality of both science and public debate suffers.
Since it first emerged as a prominent public-policy issue in the late 1980s, anthropogenic climate change has evolved into an idea that now carries an astonishing amount of ideological freight. Yet, too often, arguments about climate change continue to treat it as an environmental problem to be solved. But climate change is not a phenomenon of this kind. It is not like mercury pollution in rivers, asbestos in buildings or even ozone-depleting gases entering the stratosphere. These relatively 'tame' problems lend themselves to relatively straightforward solutions: the Montreal Protocol, for example, which opened for signature in 1987, successfully restricted and then prohibited the use of ozone-depleting substances.
Not so with climate change. Climate change is a 'wicked' problem. There is no unambiguous formulation of what the problem is and no opportunity to learn from other, similar cases. Proposed solutions are so embedded in matrices of social, economic and political cause and effect that they are likely to spawn further unforeseeable and unwelcome side effects. It is not surprising that some have despaired and are now suggesting that we must cut through this Gordian knot and find a more direct solution through climate engineering. Pumping aerosols into the stratosphere, it is claimed, would allow us to control the planet's temperature directly, bypassing these troublesome entanglements and this social inertia.
But climate change has come to signify far more than the physical ramifications of human disturbance to the composition of the earth's atmosphere and its energy balance. Climate change has become as much a social phenomenon as it is a physical one. Arguments about the causes and consequences of climate change – and the solutions to it – have become nothing less than arguments about some of the most intractable social, ethical and political disputes of our era: the endurance of chronic poverty in a world of riches; the nature of the social contract between state and citizen; the cultural authority of scientific knowledge; and the role of technology in delivering social goods. Climate change has become a metaphor for the imagined future of human life and civilisation on earth.
The different meanings that can be attached to the idea of climate change are illustrated well by considering ways in which the issue is framed in India. For many in this country, the key concerns are how to secure financial reparations for environmental damage caused by northern nations through the proxy of climate and how to use climate change to advance the development of the 500 million people living in absolute poverty. This framing of climate change is very different from that which prevails in much western discourse and implies a very different set of international and domestic policy prescriptions. The issue is less about how to reverse a two-degree temperature change, how to save polar bears or how to avoid metaphorical tipping points than it is about how to secure hundreds of billions of dollars to invest in basic human welfare.
It is not surprising, then, that arguments about climate change are invested with powerful ideological instincts and interests. Solutions to climate change vary from market-based mechanisms and technology-driven innovation to justice-focused initiatives and low-consumption localism as a form of lifestyle, each carrying ideological commitments. It is despairingly naive to reduce such intense (and legitimate) arguments to the polarities of 'belief' or 'scepticism' about science.
Belief in what, exactly? Is it the belief that humans are contributing significantly to climate change? Yes, science can speak authoritatively on this question. Or a belief that the possible consequences of future change warrant an emergency policy programme? Scientific evidence here offers only one strand of the necessary reasoning. Or a belief that such an emergency policy programme must be secured through an international, legally binding targets-and-timetables approach, such as Kyoto? On this, science has very little to say.
On the other hand, what exactly is it that the so-called sceptics are charged with? Scepticism that environmental scientists, businesses and central government are in collusion to fabricate evidence? This is barely plausible. Or scepticism that claims about the future that are based on scientific knowledge are sometimes overstretched and underplay uncertainties? The latter is a warning that all would do well to heed.
The problem here is the tendency to reduce all these complexities into a simple litmus test of whether or not someone believes orthodox scientific claims about the causes and consequences of climate change. This is dividing the world into goodies and baddies, believers and deniers. Climate change demands of us something much more sophisticated than this.
Rather than reducing climate change to arguments about how settled – or not – the science is (predictions in environmental science are rarely, if ever, settled), we need to provide the intellectual, educational, ethical and political spaces to argue fearlessly with one another about the very things that the idea of climate change demands we take a position on. These include our attitudes to global poverty, the role of the state in behavioural change, the tension between acting on knowledge or on uncertainty, the meaning of human security and the value of technological innovation. Where we stand on issues such as these will determine which sort of solutions to climate change we choose to advocate.
None of these things is new. They have been around for a long time – for at least the 50 years since novelist and physicist CP Snow declared that advancing science and technology was the only sure way to secure human welfare.
But the idea of climate change – suggesting, as it does, that our current development trajectory may not be as systemically benign as we might wish – demands that we re-examine these troubling issues. We must examine them explicitly and honestly. And we must respect the different legitimate positions people adopt about these ideological and ethical entanglements when they appear in public spaces. Indeed, we must foster such exchanges without applying the sleight of hand that turns them back into arguments about belief (or otherwise) in scientific claims.
Neither scientists nor politicians should try to discredit unorthodox views about how to respond to climate change by using the pejorative labels of 'denialist' or 'flat-earther'. Scientists must learn to respect their public audiences and to listen more closely to them. Now is no time for the elite to despair of democracy. We have only one planet, but we also have only one political system that most people would choose to live under. Politicians must learn not to hide behind science when asked to make complex judgements. Science is useful as a form of systematic critical enquiry into the functioning of the physical world, but it is not a substitute for political judgement, negotiation and compromise.
• Mike Hulme is professor of climate change at Britain's University of East Anglia. His latest book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity , is published by Cambridge University Press.
• This article was first published in the spring 2010 issue of the RSA Journal, a publication of the London-based Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and is used here with permission.

New global warming bill depends on drilling compromise

2010-05-13T08:27:00.000+01:00

By: Susan Ferrechio Chief Congressional CorrespondentMay 12, 2010
As Senate lawmakers grilled executives about the cause of a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Sens. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and John Kerry, D-Mass., prepared to unveil a bill to address global warming that would allow expansion of offshore drilling, despite threats of opposition from coastal-state Democrats.
The gravity of the situation in the Gulf, where hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil continue to pour into the ocean, have greatly complicated efforts to pass a comprehensive energy and climate bill this year, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., refused to guarantee the Senate will take up a bill at all before Congress adjourns.
Reid said he plans to "let this bill be seen by everyone that is interested in the subject, and I think the week that we get back after the Memorial Day recess I'll get all the chairmen together and take a look at what we need to do with energy for this year."
A draft of the proposal circulating around Capitol Hill showed Lieberman and Kerry tried to find a compromise between the Democratic opponents to new drilling in the wake of the Gulf disaster and the Republican and Democratic lawmakers who will not vote for an energy bill unless new drilling is included.
Kerry and Lieberman propose expanding offshore drilling but allowing some states the power to opt out of drilling up to 75 miles from their shores and to void any project if they stand to suffer "significant adverse impacts" from an oil spill.
Such a proposal could help win over Democrats such as Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who has threatened to filibuster an energy bill that expands offshore drilling. Nelson declined to comment on the plan Wednesday, telling the Washington Examiner that his staff is researching the proposal.
The Lieberman-Kerry proposal is designed to lure moderate Democrats, such as Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Begich of Alaska, who have long sought expanded drilling and profit sharing, and perhaps a few moderate Republicans, such as Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, both of Maine.
The global warming component of the bill calls for reducing carbon emissions 17 percent by 2020 and allowing states to sell the right to emit carbon dioxide.
"If we leave drilling out, it would be very problematic for me," Begich said. "Anyone who thinks that it's not going to be part of the next 50 years is dreaming. It's part of the mix. I think they tried to craft something that is a balanced approach."
Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., said the global warming component, more than the drilling provisions, threatens the bill's passage because senators from coal-dependent states will likely refuse to back a bill that is bound to raise energy prices.
"I think many of the other Midwestern senators feel the same way, when you are as reliant on coal at the present time as we are," Nelson said. "Anything that has a trade in it or a carbon tax is bound to raise rates in a place like Nebraska, and I'm very concerned about it."
sferrechio@washingtonexaminer.com

Biofuel combustion chemistry more complex than petroleum-based fuels

2010-05-13T08:25:00.000+01:00

LIVERMORE, Calif. - Understanding the key elements of biofuel combustion is an important step toward insightful selection of next-generation alternative fuels.
And that's exactly what Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories researchers intend to do.
In a new paper on the cover of the May 10 edition of the journal Angewandte Chemie, Sandia researcher Nils Hansen and Lawrence Livermore scientist Charles Westbrook take a look at the vastly diverse and complex chemical reaction networks of biofuel combustion.
The paper, "Biofuel Combustion Chemistry: From Ethanol to Biodiesel," examines the combustion chemistry of those compounds that constitute typical biofuels, including alcohols, ethers and esters.
Biofuels such as bioethanol, biobutanol and biodiesel are of increasing interest as alternatives to petroleum-based transportation fuels. According to Hansen and Westbrook, however, little research has been done on the vastly diverse and complex chemical reaction networks of biofuel combustion.
In general, the term biofuel is associated with only a few select chemical compounds, especially ethanol (used exclusively as a gasoline replacement in spark-ignition engines) and very large methyl esters in biodiesel (used as a diesel fuel replacement in diesel engines). The biofuels are oxygenated fuels, which distinguishes them from hydrocarbons in conventional petroleum-based fuels.
While much discussion surrounding biofuels has emphasized the process to make these alternative fuels and fuel additives, Hansen and Westbrook for the first time examined the characteristic aspects of the chemical pathways in the combustion of potential biofuels.
In collaboration with an international research team representing Germany, China and the United States, Westbrook, Hansen and former Sandia post-doctoral student Tina Kasper used a unique combination of laser spectroscopy, mass spectrometry and flame chemistry modeling to explore the decomposition and oxidation mechanisms of certain biofuels and the formation of harmful or toxic emissions.
"To understand the associated combustion reactions and to identify recurring reaction patterns, it is important to study prototypical variants of potential biofuels," Westbrook said.
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The work leading to the paper was funded in part by the Department of Energy's Office of Science, which supports fundamental research, including research aimed at understanding, predicting and ultimately controlling matter and energy at the electronic, atomic and molecular levels in order to provide the foundations for new energy technologies and to support DOE missions in energy, environment and national security.
Angewandte Chemie is the weekly, peer-reviewed scientific journal of the German Chemical Society.
Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (www.llnl.gov) is a national security laboratory that develops science and engineering technology and provides innovative solutions to our nation's most important challenges. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.

India's greenhouse gas emissions rise by 58%

2010-05-13T08:21:00.001+01:00

Energy sector responsible for over half of India's rise in emissions, says a new government report

From SciDev.net, part of the Guardian Environment Network
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 12 May 2010 15.06 BST

India's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions rose by 58 per cent between 1994 and 2007 with the energy sector contributing over half of the emissions, a new government report said.But India's emissions per unit national wealth (or gross domestic product), a measure of GHG intensity, declined by 30 per cent during this period, the report showed.India released its last emissions estimate in 1994. Minister for environment and forests Jairam Ramesh, who released the new report yesterday, said India was the first developing country to release 'updated' estimates.India's emissions are up from 1.2 billion tonnes in 1994 to 1.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2007.
The country now ranks fifth globally in total GHG emissions, behind the United States, China, the European Union and Russia in 2007. The emissions of the United States and China are four times that of India in 2007.
India's energy sector contributed 58 per cent of emissions followed by industry with 22 per cent and 17 per cent by agriculture.
In November 2009, ahead of the international climate summit in Copenhagen, India announced it would reduce its 'GHG emission intensity' — amount of gases released per unit growth in national wealth — by 20–25 percent between 2005 and 2020.Ramesh said India would continue to improve its methods for emission estimates, bridge data gaps and develop country-specific GHG emission estimate models.In October 2009, India announced setting up a new climate research centre and building climates satellites to improve data collection.

Helicopter sows moss on moors

2010-05-13T08:17:00.000+01:00

By Emily Beament
Wednesday, 12 May 2010

A rare moss was scattered across remote moorlands from a helicopter yesterday in an effort to help regenerate the moors.
The project is attempting to use sphagnum moss, which is able to hold many times its own weight in water and allows new peat to develop, to restore the peatlands of the Peak District.
The scheme's organisers said sphagnum moss maintained the high level of moisture needed to allow vegetation to flourish and protect peatlands from erosion. The moss was hit by acid rain and is in danger of disappearing from the national park.
Scientists have been able to propagate the tiny plant in a laboratory. If the trial by the Moors for the Future partnership is successful, the plan is to restore more than 2,000 acres of Peak District and South Pennine moorland.
Jon Stewart, from Natural England, said: "England's moorland peatlands are a crucial buffer against climate change through their role as a carbon store, but have been damaged by centuries of inappropriate management and pollution. We have to stop the rot and ensure that peatlands are properly looked after."

Coalition government: Could blue plus yellow equal green?

2010-05-13T08:16:00.000+01:00

The Tories and Lib Dems agree that we need a low-carbon economy and the parties have common ground on environmental initiatives, says Andy Atkins of Friends of the Earth

Andy Atkins
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 12 May 2010 17.03 BST
As the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats inched towards a coalition government over the past few days, much was made of the issues they differ on.
But one of the key things they agree about is the urgent need to develop a low-carbon economy and reap the huge economic benefits this will bring the UK.
With a coalition representing more than half of those who voted and 362 of 650 parliamentary seats, there is a clear mandate and opportunity to deliver a greener, safer future.
The possible appointment of Chris Huhne as energy and climate change secretary would be an encouraging development. Huhne championed green issues in his bid to lead the Lib Dems, and their manifesto made the most ambitious and integrated environmental commitments of the main parties.
An examination of the Lib Dem and Tory election manifestos and recent policy pledges shows significant common ground on green initiatives which could form the basis of a programme to cut emissions.
Based on this, the Queen's speech should contain at least two new green laws.
A new energy bill would deliver on pledges to boost green energy development, with both parties agreeing similar 2020 targets – the Conservatives want 15% of UK energy to come from renewable sources by this date, the Lib Dems 40% of electricity.
There is agreement on the need for new rules to limit climate-changing pollution from fossil fuel power stations and develop a smart electricity grid.
Nuclear is less clear – but if new legislation guarantees the Conservative commitment not to provide public money for new nuclear plants, it will be economically very difficult to build new reactors.
And a housing and local government bill would help deliver on pledges for more energy-efficient homes. It would also ensure local councils play their part in meeting UK climate targets by establishing local carbon budgets and thus limiting the carbon emissions their area can emit.
The emergency budget must have the development of a low-carbon economy at its heart. New green jobs and industries could be created by developing the UK's vast renewable energy potential – one of Europe's best – and slashing energy waste. This would also help tackle fuel poverty and increase fuel security by reducing our reliance on overseas fossil fuels.
The budget must deliver the promised green investment bank and create a fund to further boost the creation of new green jobs.
Opposition to Heathrow expansion was another common policy between the blue and yellow parties - the plan has now been scrapped
Of course other policies are clearly needed. Friends of the Earth is calling for new laws to tackle the greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation caused by the UK's dependence on imported feeds for meat and dairy.
The UK must also play a leading role in securing a strong and fair international agreement to cut global emissions – with the richest countries making the deepest cuts first.
And there must be a much stronger 2020 UK climate change target. Scientists have warned that the current policy, to curb UK emissions by 34%, is inadequate – and must be increased to at least 42% if the UK is to play its fair part in tackling climate change.
The Liberal Democrats backed this new target in the previous parliament – they must now do all they can to make it a central plank of the coalition's approach to curbing emissions.
Both the Lib Dems and the Conservatives must show that a new approach to politics will also deliver a new approach to delivering the low-carbon future we all need.
And if this government is successful in creating a greener future, it will set a powerful international example – and help kick-start real action to combat global warming and the devastation of our planet's natural resources.
• Andy Atkins is the executive director of Friends of the Earth

Coalition pledges to cut central government emissions by 10%

2010-05-13T08:14:00.000+01:00

Commitment by new government will account for 1% of all UK emissions - equivalent to taking 200,000 cars off the road

James Randerson
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 12 May 2010 17.34 BST

The new Conservative-Lib Dem coalition has pledged to cut central government emissions by 10% in the next 12 months - equivalent to taking more than 200,000 cars off the road. The commitment is the most high-profile success to date for the 10:10 climate change campaign, which launched in September last year.
Emissions from central government are about 1% of total UK emissions - as much as the city of Liverpool. A 10% cut is amounts to 600,000 tonnes of CO2.
"This is the first announcement the coalition has made, and the inclusion of their 10:10 commitment bodes well for the importance they'll place on carbon reduction this term," said Eugenie Harvey, campaign director of 10:10. "We're glad to see they're walking the walk."
The campaign, which is supported by the Guardian, calls on individuals, businesses and other organisations to make similar 10% cuts and has signed up over 65,000 people, 2,610 businesses and 3,100 organisations and educational institutions.
The movement includes Royal Mail, Lovebox music festival, Tottenham Hotspur football club and the Tate Modern as well as celebrities such as Delia Smith, Colin Firth and Radio 1 DJ Sara Cox.
Within days of the launch of the campaign, the members of all three front bench teams signed up on an individual basis. So far 158 local authorities have signed up. When they made the commitment, 50 councils were Conservative held, 32 Labour, 40 Lib Dem and 36 with no overall control (the balance of some of these councils will have changed in last week's elections).
In October, the Liberal Democrats brought legislation before parliament to sign up government and public sector bodies to 10:10. The Conservatives supported the measure but it was defeated by the Labour government.
The 10:10 movement has also spawned sister groups in France, Ghana, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal and Germany.

Too much coal in this coalition, but I was expecting worse

2010-05-13T08:13:00.000+01:00

New government's green policies are progressive, but onshore wind and nuclear could prove stumbling blocks for Lib Dem-Tory coalition• Read the full text of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition deal

Perhaps it's just as well that the environment was shoved to the bottom of the coalition agreement: by the time they got there, it seems, the Neanderthal wing of the Conservative party was too exhausted to oppose it. It's sketchy and covers only some of the issues the new government will have to deal with, but it could have been a lot worse.
Possibly the most important measure it contains is the commitment to create "a floor price for carbon, as well as efforts to persuade the EU to move towards full auctioning of emissions trading scheme (ETS) permits". The government can't act alone on either issue, but if it's serious about this it could help turn the ETS from a useless, nobbled programme, governed by the demands of pollutocrats, into a system that forces companies to clean up. Whether you like carbon trading or not, if we're going to have it, it's got to work.
But as if to show that they haven't really thought this through, they've decided to supplement the ETS belt with braces and suspenders: as well as creating a functioning emissions trading system, they intend to maintain feed-in tariffs and the renewables obligation system. This could be an insurance policy, in case a sensible ETS doesn't materialise. But if it does, they will end up with three separate and incompatible systems.
Sorry, make that four. Like the renewables obligation, the proposed emissions performance standard – forcing power stations to produce no more than a certain amount of carbon – is a good idea in its own right, but it would become redundant if the ETS really kicks in. Which policy do they intend to prioritise?
There's nothing in the document about the supply of fossil fuels, but judging from both parties' manifestos they'll be seeking to maximise production, even as they are trying to minimise consumption.
They say that the emissions performance standard will prevent new coal-fired power stations from being built unless they use sufficient carbon capture and storage.
But they don't tell us what the standard will be, so at the moment we don't know what proportion of their CO2 power stations will have to capture.
In either case, without a constraint on fossil fuel supply and without any mention of stopping opencast mining, it looks as if there'll be too much coal in this coalition.
None of this really distinguishes the new government from the last one. But that's the problem. You might have thought that some fresh thinking would have identified and tackled the contradictions.
Another gap is the absence of policy on onshore renewable energy. There's an intention "to increase the target for energy from renewable sources" and introduce "measures to encourage marine energy", but nothing about onshore developments.
Keep an eye on this issue: there could be some big bust-ups as the Lib Dems insist that onshore windfarms are needed to help meet the government's targets, while the shire Tories fight them tooth and nail. Expect plenty of aggro over nuclear power too, even though they have politely agreed to disagree.
The cancellation of the third runway at Heathrow and the refusal of additional runways at Gatwick and Stansted is a definite improvement.
It would have been even more cheering if the agreement had said no new airport space in the UK.
The danger is that flights are displaced from the south-east to other parts of the country. If the government is serious about this issue, why not introduce a moratorium on all new runways or runway extensions?
But the measures which might do more than any others to change environment policies aren't listed in the environment section. Who would have thought that a majority Tory government would introduce "the restoration of rights to non-violent protest"? Or, to be more accurate, that 13 years of Labour government would have made this restoration necessary?
If the coalition is serious about this, and if it repeals outrageous measures such as powers to stop peaceful protests under the Protection from Harassment Act, 2000 Terrorism Act and 2005 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, we'll be better able to make our voices heard if politicians don't protect the environment.
We must push them to get these measures repealed as quickly as possible.
So it's better than I had expected. The agreement's environmental policies are more Lib Dem than Conservative, and more progressive than most of the other proposals in the document. Let's see how it works in practice.
Monbiot.com

Mozambique: Government Remains Committed to Biofuels

2010-05-12T09:55:00.000+01:00

11 May 2010

Maputo — Mozambican Energy Minster Salvador Namburete declared in Maputo on Tuesday that the government remains committed to mobilising investment in biofuels.
Namburete was speaking at the opening of an international conference on bio-energy markets.
He noted the damaging economic effects of dependence on fossil fuels, and said that oil-importing countries would have had much higher rates of growth over the past decade, had it not been for the sharp increases in fuel prices.
To minimise the impact of rising fuel prices, the government had to diversify the sources of energy. "This situation demands a combined solution of using alternative, renewable sources of energy, and the resort to low cost technologies which will ensure that more people have access to energy, and will reduce dependence on oil", said Namburete.
He stressed that Mozambique has been promoting the use of renewable energy, including biofuels. Apart from providing alternative energy for industrial investments, biofuels also provided an opportunity to generate income and employment.
"Our determination to advance with these initiatives seeking to diversify the energy matrix also results from our commitment to joint efforts to ensure energy security and stability, and to react to the phenomenon of global warning", added the Minister.
Currently 26 biofuel projects are under way in Mozambique. Most are still at the stage of seed multiplication, and the first harvest is not scheduled until 2012.
Namburete stressed that Mozambique can produce biofuels competitively because of its favourable agro-ecological conditions, the availability of soil and water, its favourable geographical location, and the existence of port and storage facilities.
The conference, which brings together representatives of African countries and potential investors, is due to end on Thursday.

A Smashing Idea: Eco-Friendly Aggression

2010-05-12T09:51:00.001+01:00

Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times
They love the sound of breaking glass: At “Glassphemy!,” a recycling installation along the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, participants hurl bottles at one another. (No one gets hurt.)
By MELENA RYZIK

For David Belt, a developer who created a stir last summer by installing do-it-yourself swimming pools made from Dumpsters in a semi-secret location in Brooklyn, the answer was once again in trash.
His latest project, called “Glassphemy!,” is billed as a psychological recycling experiment. The idea is to make recycling a more direct, visceral experience and to purge some New York aggression simultaneously. The installation, set like the previous project in a private space along the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, is a 20-foot-by-30-foot clear box, with high walls made of steel and bulletproof glass. People stand on a high platform at one end of the box and a low platform on the other. Those on the higher platform take empty glass bottles and just chuck ’em into the box — aiming, perhaps, at their compatriots across the way, who are safely outside the onslaught zone. The bottles smash fantastically, artfully designed lights flash, and no one is harmed.
“Recycling’s so boring,” Mr. Belt said. “We tried to make it a little bit more exciting.”
He added, “People just want to smash things.”
At a preview party last week, Scott Cohen, a filmmaker, agreed. Mr. Cohen hurled bottles and had them thrown at him. “You don’t realize how much aggression you have until you get up there with a bottle in your hand,” he said. “It was deeply, deeply satisfying.”
For whom was he aiming? “Anybody that I could find,” he said. “There were a lot of faces up there that reminded me of people from my past, and I just kind of went for it. I think it could serve as a kind of therapy.”
With bottles donated by neighborhood bars, “Glassphemy!” will officially open on May 20 to invited guests. The shards of glass collected will be recycled onsite. To finish out the project, ReadyMade magazine will run a contest asking readers for their best recycling ideas, and Mr. Belt’s company, Macro Sea, will make the discarded glass into the winning design. A few potential reuses have already been explored: designers from Hecho, a Brooklyn company, developed a DIY glass polisher out of a cement mixer that is powered by a couple of bikes chained together; the smooth, colored shards created after hours of pedaling are pretty enough to become part of lamps that light the space. Another machine will pulverize the glass into sand for use in the beer garden that Mr. Belt plans for the site, the sort of add-on that helped make the Dumpster pools a must-know-about spot last summer.
The immediate and visible reuse also helps counter the widespread suspicion that recyclables are just thrown out anyway. Though for logistical reasons, “Glassphemy!” will not generally be open to the public — the lot where it sits is hidden from the street — people who send good recycling ideas to the Macro Sea Web site, macro-sea.com, may earn an invitation with the address, Mr. Belt said.
Macro Sea, the company Mr. Belt formed with Jocko Weyland, an author and social connecter, and Alix Feinkind, a creative director, has a history of turning loopy ideas into cutting-edge coolness. Their Dumpster pools caught on in unexpected ways: Hollywood party planners came calling, as did TV show hosts, Mr. Belt said. Macro Sea is now working on a mobile version of the pool, which is expected to be used as part of New York City’s Summer Streets program this year. What started out as a lark in industrial Brooklyn has gone legit.
Mr. Belt, a successful developer and construction consultant and manager — his main company, DBI, has a spacious loft office in SoHo, and works on commissions all over the world — said he viewed his Macro Sea projects as a creative mission, to help turn underused objects and areas into covetable destinations. It makes things on the cheap so people can copy and improve on them. (The Dumpster pool, a concept borrowed from a musician in Georgia, cost barely $1,000.)
Mr. Belt got the idea for “Glassphemy!” when he participated in a panel about urban renewal in Philadelphia. Some other panelists were fretting over a vacant lot that was a repository for broken glass.
“So all these architects and urban planners were, like, scratching their heads, saying, ‘What can we put there that will make people stop breaking glass?’ ” Mr. Belt said.

Then Bethany Edwards, an art director in the audience, weighed in: “She said, ‘Well, I like breaking glass; let’s just make it a place where you break glass,’ ” Mr. Belt recalled. “I thought, ‘That’s a great idea.’ ”

He sketched a design and worked with a Brooklyn firm, Vamos Architects, to refine and construct it over several months. The firm connected him with Jason Krugman, a 27-year-old interactive lighting designer — “a genius kid,” Mr. Belt said — who installed lights activated by the vibration and sound of the bottles breaking. With time and services donated by friends, the installation cost about $5,000, Mr. Belt said, with most of the money going toward the bulletproof glass and paying for Mr. Krugman’s work. (Mr. Krugman proudly called his contribution “my biggest commission.”)
Danny Tinneny, the 64-year-old owner of the industrial space, gave it to Macro Sea rent-free. “To tell you the truth, when they first came here, I thought they were nuts,” he said of Mr. Belt and his partners. But the success of the Dumpster pools and Mr. Belt’s belief in his own ideas persuaded Mr. Tinneny to welcome “Glassphemy!”
“When he gets something in his head, it’s going to happen, no matter how far-fetched it sounds,” Mr. Tinneny said. “He’s the type of guy you want to hang around with.”
At the preview party a few dozen of Mr. Belt’s friends and colleagues donned safety glasses and drank beer kept on ice not in a cooler but in the shovel of a backhoe. Heavy metal blared from a boombox, and Mr. Tinneny operated the scissor lift to get people to the top of the installation, which has a twinkling view of the city beyond. The inaugural bottle was thrown at Mr. Belt by his wife, Antonia. She really seemed to enjoy it.
Taken together, aesthetically and as an experience, “Glassphemy!” is as addictive as a video game, with the added social coup of being at least potentially eco-friendly. But it is hard to tell if it will inspire the same kind of viral reaction as the Dumpster pools.
“Ideally, people will think it’s interesting, and they’ll want to do something with the broken glass,” Mr. Belt said. “If not, it’ll be fun, and we’ll just break some glass.”

Canadian timber chief bullish on softwood lumber trade

2010-05-12T09:49:00.000+01:00

With export tax poised to disappear next month, high prices and heavy logging of cheap B.C. timber has the U.S. worried about a flood of softwood across the border

Barrie McKenna
Published on Tuesday, May. 11, 2010 6:00AM EDT Last updated on Tuesday, May. 11, 2010 1:32PM EDT
West Fraser Timber Co. (43.081.483.56%)chief executive Hank Ketcham thinks Canada is on the brink of a new era of trade peace with the United States.
No duties, no border taxes and no litigation. Within a few years Canada would be free to sell as much softwood lumber as it wants to the United States.
“It's too soon to say, but I subscribe to that notion,” Mr. Ketcham, who runs North America’s largest lumber producer, said recently.
Mr. Ketcham must be dreaming. The U.S. lumber industry and its trade arm, the Washington-based Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports, is unlikely to concede defeat any time soon. The group is a perpetual litigation machine, committed to protecting as much of the U.S. market as it can, for as long as possible.
If anything, the coalition has become more emboldened since Canada and the United States signed a six-year deal in 2006 to limit Canadian softwood exports. It has been quietly collecting a list of alleged violations by Canada, including what it says are illegal subsidies to mills in several provinces and policies in British Columbia that give away healthy tracts of timber for pennies to companies such as West Fraser under the guise of the pine beetle infestation.
Mr. Ketcham’s sunny demeanour comes as the export tax is poised to disappear in next month – at least temporarily. Under the 2006 softwood deal, the tax ratchets down as North American prices go up.
And thanks to a wave of mill closings on both sides of the border and an apparent end to the U.S. housing depression, prices have been climbing since late last year.
In May, the tax dropped to 10 per cent from 15 per cent. With prices still climbing this month, the tax will vanish altogether in June, and stay off for as long as prices remain high. Last week, the average price for 1,000 board-feet of standard lumber hit $361 (U.S.) for the period used to calculate the tax, or above the zero-tax threshold $356 per 1,000 board-feet.
Mr. Ketcham may see the removal of the tax as a sign of hope.
For the U.S. industry, it is a call to arms.
Coalition officials, who are huddling in Atlanta this week, worry that a combination of high prices, the removal of the tax and heavy logging of cheap B.C. timber will trigger a flood of Canadian softwood across the border.
And they aren’t about to stand idly by and let that happen.
The U.S. industry argues that Canadian provinces are routinely violating the softwood agreement’s anti-circumvention clause.
No. 1 on the coalition’s target list is British Columbia, Canada’s largest lumber-producing province. The U.S. industry alleges that about 40 per cent of the trees now being harvested in B.C.’s interior are being labelled “reject” timber because of a tree-destroying pine beetle infestation. So the province sell the timber for roughly 25 cents per cubic metre, compared to the normal rate of $5, providing a direct benefit to companies such as West Fraser.
“The beetle outbreak cannot obscure the government’s continuing policy to take timber pricing in the province even further away from market timber pricing, in direct violation of the terms of the U.S.-Canada accord,” coalition chairman Steve Swanson pointed out last month.
The coalition has similarly complained about proposed government loans to Miramichi Lumber Products in New Brunswick and AbitibiBowater in Quebec.
In 2008, the U.S. government fought and won a multi-million-dollar judgment from the London Court of International Arbitration related to how Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan applied their export quota.
The pattern is well established. The United States will fight anything that gives the Canadian industry a cost or volume edge in their market.
So while Canadian lumber producers are about to enjoy a break from the export tax, it would be naive to see it as a harbinger of free trade.

Education key in global green movement

2010-05-12T09:47:00.000+01:00

By Qian Yanfeng (China Daily Shanghai Bureau)Updated: 2010-05-11 17:36
SHANGHAI - Edward Guiliano, president and CEO of New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), said education - whether through its traditional role of teaching, or its role of creating knowledge through research, or simply through its role of modeling solutions - is as important as government or business in today's global discourse on sustainability and thinking green.
Speaking at a conference titled "Think Green: Energy, Education, Environmental Initiatives" - a global forum sponsored by NYIT and Nanjing University of Posts and Communications - in Nanjing in early April, Guiliano said while governments provide the necessary policy framework, bringing together business and academic communities with government "is a tested model for innovation, change, and getting things done."
Using NYIT's practice as an example, he said schools could help to stimulate and popularize new ideas by hosting energy innovation conferences, and also serving as the starting point for ideas from the classroom and the laboratory to be applied to the factory and the marketplace.
"As early as 1978, we hosted a conference on hydrogen fuel cells, which led to further development of hybrid vehicle prototypes just now coming into use. The academy, through its traditional role of teaching, scholarship and service, is particularly well positioned and compelled both by mission and compassionate imperative to play a central role in advancing solutions and policies on these vital subjects," he said.
In the battlefront against global warming, Guiliano also believes China is the right place to be.
He noted that many famous American energy and technology companies are building offices and laboratories in China, and are transferring top employees and their families here. Further, an increasing number of Chinese engineering students who studied in the U.S. are now returning to promising, rewarding, and important careers here in China.
Many of the best ideas in green technology - solar wind farms, electric cars, clean coal processing - are also being tested, applied, and brought to the market here in China, he added.
Although China also faces mounting challenges - as the world's largest car market with 2,000 cars added to its streets a day, it has surpassed the United States as the largest producer of greenhouse gases - China has made strenuous efforts to tackle those challenges.
The Chinese government, he said, has been strongly committed to developing green technology since the launch of the 863 Program as far back as 1986. The 863 Program has made it possible to take innovative ideas in wind, solar, electric, and coal energy alternatives first developed in the U.S. and Europe and apply them in China.
"We are here because Chinese and American thinkers and movers must lead along the road to a sustainable future in this century," he said.

Climate change could make half the world uninhabitable

2010-05-12T09:42:00.000+01:00

Climate change could make half of the world uninhabitable for humans as a rise in temperature makes it too hot to survive, scientists have warned.

By Louise Gray, Environment CorrespondentPublished: 7:30AM BST 12 May 2010

Researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia and Purdue University in the US said global warming will not stop after 2100, the point where most previous projections have ended.
In fact temperatures may rise by up to 12C (21.6F) within just three centuries making many countries into deserts.

The study, published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said humans will not be able to adapt or survive in such conditions.
Professor Tony McMichael, one of the authors, said if the world continues to pump out greenhouse gases at the current rate it will cause catastrophic warming.
"Under realistic scenarios out to 2300, we may be faced with temperature increases of 12 degrees or even more," he said. "If this happens, our current worries about sea level rise, occasional heatwaves and bushfires, biodiversity loss and agricultural difficulties will pale into insignificance beside a major threat - as much as half the currently inhabited globe may simply become too hot for people to live there."
Professor Steven Sherwood, a fellow author, said there was no chance of the Earth reaching such temperatures this century.
But he said there was a good chance temperatures could rise by at least 7C (12.6F) by 2300, that would also make much of the world inhabitable.
"There's something like a 50/50 chance of that over the long term," he said.
Prof Sherwood said climate change research had been "short-sighted" not to probe the long-term consequences of the impact of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.
"It needs to be looked at," he said. "There's not much we can do about climate change over the next two decades but there's still a lot we can do about the longer term changes."
::The world should shift to a low carbon economy not to stop climate change but to preserve 'human dignity', according to a report from a self-styled "eclectic" group of academics.
The UN process has failed, they argue, and a global approach concentrating on CO2 cuts will never work.
They urge instead the use of carbon tax revenue to develop technologies that can supply clean energy to everyone and provide 'human dignity'.
Their so-called Hartwell Paper is criticised by others who say the UN process has curbed carbon emissions.
The paper is named after Hartwell House, the Buckinghamshire mansion, hotel and spa where the group of 14 academics from Europe, North America and Japan gathered in February to develop their ideas.

North Korea claims nuclear fusion breakthrough

2010-05-12T09:41:00.000+01:00

Experts cast doubt on claims that scientists have succeeded in creating a nuclear fusion reaction
Associated Press in Seoul
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 12 May 2010 08.07 BST
North Korea has claimed its scientists succeeded in creating a nuclear fusion reaction, but experts doubt the isolated communist country has made the breakthrough in clean-energy technology.
Fusion nuclear reactions produce little radioactive waste – unlike fission, which powers conventional nuclear power reactors – and some hope it could one day provide an abundant supply of clean energy. US and other scientists have been experimenting with fusion for decades but it has yet to be developed into a viable energy alternative.
North Korea's main newspaper reported that its own scientists achieved the feat on the Day of the Sun – a North Korean holiday in April marking the birthday of the country's late dynastic founder, Kim Il-sung.
Often North Korea's propaganda apparatus uses the occasions of holidays honouring Kim or his son, the current leader Kim Jong-il, to make claims of great achievements. These are rarely substantiated.
North Korean scientists "solved a great many scientific and technological problems entirely by their own efforts … thus succeeding in nuclear fusion reaction at last", the Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a report carried by the north's official Korean Central News Agency.
Experts doubt the claim. "Nuclear fusion reaction is not something that can be done so simple. It's very difficult," said Hyeon Park, a physics professor at Postech, a science and technology university in South Korea.
Park, who conducts fusion research in South Korea, said the north may have succeeded in making a plasma device and produced plasma, a hot cloud of supercharged particles – only a preliminary step towards fusion.
He said outside experts needed to know the scale of the experiment and method of generating plasma to assess the details of the north's claim.
South Korea is in a seven-nation nuclear fusion consortium to build the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in Cadarache, southern France, by 2015. Other members include China, the EU, Japan, Russia, India and the US.
The aim of ITER is to demonstrate by 2030 that atoms can be fused inside a reactor to efficiently produce electricity. Current forms of nuclear power do the opposite, harnessing the energy released from splitting atoms apart.
A South Korean official handling nuclear fusion at the ministry of education, science and technology said the north appeared to have conducted only a basic experiment.
The official said the fusion has nothing to do with making nuclear bombs and he could not make any further comment. He asked not to be identified because he was not authorised to speak to the media.
All of North Korea's nuclear projects are of intense concern because of worries it is building atomic weapons. Pyongyang conducted two nuclear bomb tests in 2006 and 2009, drawing international condemnation and UN sanctions.
Energy-starved North Korea has said it will build a light water nuclear power plant, ostensibly for civilian electricity. A nuclear power plant gives North Korea a premise to enrich uranium, which at low levels can be used in reactors but at higher concentration in nuclear bombs.

Why it's worth passing an inadequate climate bill

2010-05-12T09:40:00.000+01:00

David Roberts explains why the US climate bill backed by John Kerry and Joe Lieberman is worth passing

David Roberts for Grist, part of the Guardian Environment Network
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 11 May 2010 09.38 BST
This weekend I was asked to contribute to The New York Times' Room for Debate. I was kind of under the impression that the question was, "Is the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill worth passing?" Apparently, though, it was, "Does the climate bill stand a chance?" Obviously those questions have different answers! Mine was geared to the former, everybody else's the latter, but oh well. Other answers were provided by:
Kate Sheppard, Mother Jones correspondent
Myron Ebell, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Frank O'Donnell, Clean Air Watch
Chip Jacobs, co-author of "Smogtown"
Here's mine, with some additional comments at bottom:
-----
The climate and energy bill being developed by John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and (depending on the hour) Lindsey Graham isn't very popular on the green left. Climate campaigners lament that the senators have capitulated to fossil fuel companies, proposing to subsidize the very industries that are polluting the atmosphere and, as we speak, more or less destroying the Gulf of Mexico. They say the bill won't come close to solving the problem.
And they're right. That makes those of us who still believe the bill is worth passing somewhat unpopular -- sellouts, corrupt insiders and so on. Why would someone who recognizes the scope and severity of the problem support a bill that won't solve it?
There's a complicated answer to that question, but there's also a simple one, and it's this: I am optimistic about decarbonization. Despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, reducing emissions will be relatively fast and inexpensive. There are huge opportunities for low-cost (or negative-cost) emission reductions just waiting to be exploited.
Right now, policy is being made out of fear: fear by the private sector that decarbonization will be a crushing burden; fear by consumers that their energy prices will skyrocket; fear by politicians that the project will prove electorally unpopular. Campaigners can organize marches, think tanks can put out reports, scientists can issue dire warnings, but ultimately, that fear simply can't be overcome in advance. The only way to overcome it is through experience.
Because the bill contains two crucial elements -- a declining cap on emissions and a floor on the price of carbon -- here's what will happen: the price for carbon will sit on the floor and, despite that, the U.S. will sail past its (tepid, cautious) short-term target. In 2020, buoyed by success, backed by newly powerful clean energy constituencies, the political system will revisit the issue and pass more ambitious targets. The same thing will happen in 2030. And in 2040. And 2050. Success will breed success. Oil and coal won't be able to compete and eventually politicians will get sick of subsidizing them.
If you don't share that optimism -- if you think decarbonization is going to be a grinding, difficult, expensive process -- then you have every right to be horrified by the bill's inadequacy. But then, you don't have much to be optimistic about, since the likelihood of a substantially stronger bill is vanishingly small any time in the foreseeable future.
But if you do share that optimism, you'll agree that putting a system in place and getting started is more important, in the grand scheme of things, than getting this iteration of the legislation just right. There's been more than enough talking; let's let action make the argument for us.
------
Now, I only had 300 words. Obviously things are more complicated than this. For one thing, we'd be way better off, and move way faster, if the declining cap and carbon price floor were accompanied by a strong renewable energy standard, a strong energy efficiency standard, and a massive program of public investment in clean energy RD&D. Those elements of the KGL bill are probably going to be severely lacking, and I'm sure I will do plenty of wailing and garmet-rending when I see it.
What it comes down to, though, is that lots of greens have been hoping, striving, and pushing for a long time for a Big Bill -- the one, true bill that has scientifically legitimate targets and tight, loophole-free policy mechanisms. The one that can solve the problem. But for many reasons, some valid, some not, Congress rarely passes Big Bills. They almost never solve problems in a single, grand stroke. Congress works incrementally. Ultimately we're going to have to accept some increment, some partial solution, just to get underway. There isn't another choice.

White House aims to use Deepwater disaster to win votes for US climate bill

2010-05-12T09:38:00.002+01:00

US Senators prepare to roll out legislation after oil spill 'tragedy heightens interest in energy and wanting a different plan'

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 11 May 2010 10.57 BST
Senators are set to take a last run at producing a climate and energy law tomorrow, betting on the spectre of environmental disaster raised by the BP oil spill to build support for a comprehensive overhaul of America's energy strategy.
But despite a strong push from the Obama administration, there are concerns the debate about the energy future could be lost in the wrangling about offshore oil drilling permits.
The official roll-out by Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman caps eight months of negotiations with political figures and industry executives aimed at getting broad support in Congress for shifting the economy away from coal and oil and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Climate legislation passed by the US Senate could unblock a major obstacle which prevented agreement on a binding global deal at last year's Copenhagen summit.
"We are more encouraged today that we can secure the necessary votes to pass this legislation this year in part because the last weeks have given everyone with a stake in this issue a heightened understanding that as a nation, we can no longer wait to solve this problem which threatens our economy, our security and our environment," Kerry and Lieberman said in a joint statement.
The White House is also trying to use the disaster to make a case for a bill. "This accident, this tragedy, is actually heightening people's interest in energy in this country and in wanting a different energy plan," Carol Browner, the White House climate adviser told Bloomberg television at the weekend.
Time is fast running out for climate and energy legislation, with Democrats expected to suffer heavy losses in the mid-term elections.
But the thinking in Congress is that the economic disaster in the Gulf
is more likely to hurt, than help, such efforts in large part because offshore drilling was a key part of the proposals.
The two Senators deliberately gave a boost to offshore drilling under a strategy that saw the Obama administration and the White House working to build support among Republicans and industries that stood to be affected by the new regulations.
Early drafts promised to build more nuclear power plants and expand offshore oil drilling. The pro-business message was further underlined in plans for a roll-out originally scheduled for last month, which envisaged a public show of support from big oil companies, including BP.
The proposal is expected to require a 17% cut in emissions levels from 2005 levels by 2020. Earlier versions suggested a sector-by-sector approach to emissions cuts. Electricity producers would face a cap in 2012, with heavily polluting industries such as steel and cement manufacturers winning a delay until 2012.
In addition to financial incentives for nuclear power and offshore oil and gas drilling, the proposals would have created funds for carbon capture and storage.
The proposals would also have curbed the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency to acting on emissions, and would have stopped states, such as California, from imposing more stringent environmental regulations.
Such concessions to the nuclear and oil industry, while angering environmentalists, do not appear to have created a solid bank of Republican support.
Kerry and Lieberman lost their lone Republican ally, Lindsey Graham. The South Carolina Senator, who initially withdrew his support over a dispute about immigration, now argues the spill in the Gulf has wrecked any chance of success.
"There are not nearly 60 votes today and I do not see them materialising until we deal with the uncertainty of the immigration debate and the consequences of the oil spill," he said in a statement.
The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, also cast doubt this week on the likelihood of getting a comprehensive climate and energy bill through the Sentate. He told Spanish language Univision network a limited energy-only bill — that would not cap emissions — stood a better chance.
Meanwhile, the battle lines are being drawn on offshore drilling. Some Democratic Senators are now threatening to vote against any climate bill that allows expanded drilling. "I will have a very hard time ever voting for offshore drilling again," Senator Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat told reporters.
Others, including Graham, remain adamant in their support for drilling.
Environmental organisations are also expanding their campaigns against drilling, both in the Gulf of Mexico, and new projects scheduled for Alaska.
That could force yet another revision to the proposal by the time it sees the light of day on Wednesday. "The one part we are still talking about is the offshore drilling," Lieberman told reproters. "The other parts are really in pretty solid shape."

Connie Hedegaard seeks 30% carbon cuts target for Europe

2010-05-12T09:38:00.001+01:00

European climate commissioner says stronger target would help push up the price of carbon and kick-start green investment

David Adam, environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 11 May 2010 17.46 BST

The European commission is to formally propose stricter carbon cuts across Europe over the next decade in an effort to kick-start investment in clean technologies such as renewable energy.
The costs and benefits of increasing to 30% the EU target of a 20% cut in carbon emissions by 2020 on 1990 levels, will be discussed in a paper to be published later this month.
Connie Hedegaard, the European commissioner for climate change, told a meeting in London today that a move to strengthen the target could be the only way to boost Europe's carbon price to levels high enough to drive green investment.
"With business as usual and the 20% target we will not see a substantially higher price of carbon. That is a challenge because we need innovation," she said. "Around €30 [per tonne of carbon] people would start to do things differently." The carbon price currently sits at €15 per tonne, and is unlikely to rise without the 30% target, Hedegaard said. The EU has previously said it would only move to 30% if other countries followed suit as part of a new climate deal.
Hedegaard said the recent recession made both the 20% and 30% targets cheaper to achieve than original calculations in 2008 suggested. A European analysis leaked to the Financial Times last month claimed that the cost of cutting emissions 20% by 2020 had fallen from €70bn to €48bn. Toughening the target to 30% by 2020 would cost €81bn, a cost that would be partially offset by savings such as from improved air quality, of between €6.5bn-€10bn.
The commission's analysis comes ahead of a meeting of EU environment ministers next month. Hedegaard said it would not recommend whether or not to adopt the stricter target. "This is an invitation to have a more fact-based discussion, not an invitation to make a fast decision."
The EU is split about strengthening the target, with countries such as the UK in favour, but others such as Italy set against. Hedegaard acknowledged that economic strife in Europe could make a change more difficult. "Of course, it's not an easy time to discuss money that comes out of the public purse right now."
Hedegaard said the US Senate's delay in passing an energy bill "has been a real disappointment". EU negotiators resisted "bashing the Americans too much" last year, believing it might be counterproductive, she said. "Now the US needs to bring in the law."

Another Major Blow for Carbon Capture, This Time It Involves the "C" Word

2010-05-11T08:13:00.000+01:00

by April Streeter, Portland, Oregon on 05.10.10
Science & Technology (alternative energy)

The Norwegians have been big supporters of carbon capture and storage, and the government helped get the public to go along with building of a gas-fired plant near an existing oil refinery in Mongstad partly by promising the new facility would have carbon capture. Norwegians generally consider themselves to be environmentally friendly (over 90% of their electricity is produced from renewables, and they've pledged to be carbon neutral in 2030), so it is a significant blow that the government has decided to "postpone" deciding on carbon capture plans at Mongstad until 2014, which means the CCS itself may be as far off as 2018. Why the delay? The government says technology concerns, but there's also other reports of cancerous discharges from large-scale CCS.

The Mongstad CCS project was considered to be one of the first commercial scale carbon capture sites. Now the decision of whether to put any CCS at Monstad is being pushed to beyond 2013 when the current Norwegian Parliament is renewed. State-owned Statoil promised that an investment decision on Mongstad would be made in 2012. That means Mongstad will continue to emit 2.2 million tonnes of CO2 per year until CCS is implemented, if it ever is.
That begins to make some environmental activists in Norway see just another excuse in the continuing scandal of Mongstad. The current Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, had promised that CCS at Monstad would be a "moonlanding" for Norway. The postponement also puts pressure on the Environment Minister Eric Sollenberg to revoke Mongstad's emissions permit.
And what about the scary "C" word? Well, the mainstream press has focussed on the political scandal surrounding the "delay" of CCS at Mongstad. In the Swedish press, however, they are attributing the delay in part to a new scientific report on emissions from CCS technology. The government has always said that NOx and CO2 would be reduced from the CCS facility at Mongstad, while ammonia, amines and "reaction products of the amines" would be an air byproduct of the process, and amines, ammonia, sulfuric acid and sulfates would be discharged to water.
The environmental and health effects of amines are not very well known, but a trio of Norwegian institutes along with the University of Oslo released a report early this month according to Sweden's Processnet, in which scientists voiced their concern about nitrosamines and their possible spread into the environment.
The report is based only on theoretical modeling - further tests to susbtantiate the scientists theories are planned. Bellona, the alternative energy and environmental group in Norway that supports CCS says the health risks should be assessed soon in order to not cause any futher delays with carbon capture technology.

Warmer Climate Gives Cheer to Makers of British Bubbly

2010-05-11T08:07:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Milder Summers, England Takes Some Air Out of France's Famous Tipple
By GAUTAM NAIK
DITCHLING, England—The English invented sparkling wine in the 17th century, but failed to profit from it because their cold, dank summers yielded crummy grapes. Three decades later, a French monk named Dom Pérignon adapted the idea and devised a winning tipple, Champagne.
The Brits are starting to claw back some ground. In January, a little-known bubbly from the U.K's Nyetimber Estate was crowned "world's best sparkling wine" at a prestigious taste-off in Italy, defeating a dozen Champagnes, including Roederer, Bollinger and Pommery. Last year, when Britain hosted the G-20 meeting, another effervescent Nyetimber was served to President Barack Obama, Germany's Angela Merkel and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.
English bubbly is on the rise partly due to better winemaking techniques. But some vintners say they're being helped by another, unexpected factor: a warming climate.
Official data indicate that the past 10 years were the warmest on record globally. In England, this led to plumper and riper grapes most seasons, especially for sparkling wines. The number of vineyards in the U.K. jumped to 416 in 2008 from 363 in 2000, according the trade group English Wine Producers.

"Just 20 years ago, it was really difficult to make good wine in cooler climate areas," says Gregory Jones, who studies the effect of climate change on the global wine industry at Southern Oregon University. "Now it's not such a challenge."
With the help of warmer summers, "some of the risk of making sparkling wine here is gone," says Mike Roberts, founder and chief winemaker of the Ridgeview estate here, 45 miles south of London. "We have everything going for us to out-Champagne Champagne."
Last year, the fifth-hottest on record, Ridgeview's grapes ripened two weeks earlier than usual, allowing for the harvest to be brought in before the onset of wet October weather. Mr. Roberts and other English winemakers say 2009 was one of the best growing seasons they've seen.
Most connoisseurs insist that no sparkling wine can match the range, finesse and flavor of Champagne, made only in the Champagne region of northeastern France. Yet English fizz is bursting a bit of France's bubble.
Mr. Roberts' wines have won dozens of prizes, including a gold and silver medal at Effervescents du Monde, an international competition held in France. Another Ridgeview sparkler, blanc de blanc, was served at a 2004 bash to mark Queen Elizabeth's 80th birthday.

Many English still wines, including white and rosé varieties, have been considered thin and acidic. As the climate has warmed, they've benefited as well, becoming less acidic and more fruity. English reds still struggle, partly because those grapes need a much hotter climate to ripen well.
Sparkling wines have improved most, because England's warmer, drier summers now yield juicier grapes with more flavors—while still remaining cool enough to create the racy acidity so vital to a fizzy wine.
The Romans introduced winemaking to England after invading in 43 A.D. In the mid-1600s, English scientist Christopher Merret discovered that adding sugar to finished wine led to a second fermentation and yielded a fizzy wine. Later, Dom Pérignon came up with the idea of making sparkling wine with bubbles by blending grapes from different vineyards—a key development that gave French makers the sparkling advantage.
France's annual output of Champagne, some 320 million bottles, is much larger than the 1.4 million bottles of fizz England makes each year. Still, representatives of big Champagne houses such as Louis Roederer (maker of Cristal), Pol Roger and Duval-LeRoy have toured England, scoping out vineyard sites—and their smaller new rivals.
Roger Begault, export director of Champagne house Duval-LeRoy, founded in 1859, acknowledges that several English sparkling wines are "pleasant and well made." A few years ago, a Duval-LeRoy envoy surveyed southern England to consider starting up vineyards there. Still, he insists, "Champagne only comes from Champagne!"
Rising temperatures have helped France's Champagne makers, too. But if the trend continues, lower-end bubbly could be challenged, at least on price. English bottles today can cost anywhere from $27 to $37, roughly the same as non-vintage Champagne, and far less than the special vintages bottled in outstanding years.
The U.K. is the biggest importer of Champagne in the world, and today demand for domestic fizz is picking up. Of the 3.1 million bottles of U.K. wine produced in 2009, about 45% were of the sparkling variety, according to an estimate by English Wine Producers. In 2005, only 20% of domestic bottles produced were bubbly.
Waitrose, the grocery store chain that commands a 61% market share for English wines, has its own vineyard. A separate vine-growing project has sprung up just 12 miles from London. One local grower is planning a tiny vineyard in the heart of the city, outside Kings Cross Station.
Plumping up the market hasn't been easy. In the early 1990s, when Mr. Roberts of Ridgeview approached a bank for a loan to start his winery, he was rejected. "The bank manager said, 'You must be mad,"' recalls Mr. Roberts.
Using his own funds plus a loan, Mr. Roberts planted the first vines in 1994 and enlisted three consultants—including two from Champagne. He decided to make sparkling wine because southern England has a chalky soil similar to Champagne, and is only 88 miles to the north.
All of Ridgeview's products are named Merret, a nod to the 17th-century scientist. Since 1996, when the vineyard produced 20,000 bottles, production has grown nearly tenfold.
In an upstairs tasting room overlooking acres of now-bare vines, Mr. Roberts recently poured a 2006 sparkler. It was rich, with honey and caramel notes. "It was a good hot year," said Mr. Roberts.
Write to Gautam Naik at gautam.naik@wsj.com

I share their despair, but I'm not quite ready to climb the Dark Mountain

2010-05-11T08:06:00.000+01:00

To sit back and wait for the collapse of industrial civilisation is to conspire in the destruction of everything greens value

George Monbiot
guardian.co.uk, Monday 10 May 2010 20.30 BST
Those who defend economic growth often argue that only rich countries can afford to protect the environment. The bigger the economy, the more money will be available for stopping pollution, investing in new forms of energy, preserving wilderness. Only the wealthy can live sustainably.
Anyone who has watched the emerging horror in the Gulf of Mexico in the past few days has cause to doubt this. The world's richest country decided not to impose the rules that might have prevented the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, arguing that these would impede the pursuit of greater wealth. Economic growth, and the demand for oil that it propelled, drove companies to drill in difficult and risky places.
But we needn't rely on this event to dismiss the cornucopians' thesis as self-serving nonsense. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calculates deforestation rates between 2000 and 2005 in the countries with the largest areas of forest cover. The nation with the lowest rate was the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The nation with the highest, caused by a combination of logging and fire, was the United States. Loss of forest cover there (6% of its own forests in five years) was almost twice as fast as in Indonesia and 10 times as fast as in the DRC. Why? Because those poorer countries have less money to invest in opening up remote places and felling trees.
The wealthy nations are plundering not only their own resources. The environmental disasters caused by the oil industry in Ecuador and Nigeria are not driven by Ecuadorian or Nigerian demand, but by the thirst for oil in richer nations. Deforestation in Indonesia is driven by the rich world's demand for palm oil and timber, in Brazil by our hunger for timber and animal feed.
The Guardian's carbon calculator reveals that the UK has greatly underestimated the climate impacts of our consumption. The reason is that official figures don't count outsourced emissions: the greenhouse gases produced by other countries manufacturing goods for our markets. Another recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the UK imports a net 253m tonnes of carbon dioxide, embodied in the goods it buys. When this is taken into account, we find that far from cutting emissions since 1990, as the last government claimed, we have increased them. Wealth wrecks the environment.
So the Dark Mountain Project, whose ideas are spreading rapidly through the environment movement, is worth examining. It contends that "capitalism has absorbed the greens". Instead of seeking to protect the natural world from the impact of humans, the project claims that environmentalists now work on "sustaining human civilisation at the comfort level which the world's rich people – us – feel is their right".
Today's greens, it charges, seek to sustain the culture that knackers the planet, demanding only that we replace old, polluting technologies with new ones – wind farms, solar arrays, wave machines – that wreck even more of the world's wild places. They have lost their feelings for nature, reducing the problem to an engineering challenge. They've forgotten that they are supposed to be defending the biosphere: instead they are trying to save industrial civilisation.
That task, Paul Kingsnorth – a co-founder of Dark Mountain – believes, is futile: "The civilisation we are a part of is hitting the buffers at full speed, and it is too late to stop it." Nor can we bargain with it, as "the economic system we rely upon cannot be tamed without collapsing, for it relies upon … growth in order to function". Instead of trying to reduce the impacts of our civilisation, we should "start thinking about how we are going to live through its fall, and what we can learn from its collapse … Our task is to negotiate the coming descent as best we can, whilst creating new myths which put humanity in its proper place".
Though a fair bit of this takes aim at my writing and the ideas I champion, I recognise the truth in it. Something has been lost along the way. Among the charts and tables and technofixes, in the desperate search for green solutions that can work politically and economically, we have tended to forget the love of nature that drew us into all this.
But I cannot make the leap that Dark Mountain demands. The first problem with its vision is that industrial civilisation is much more resilient than it proposes. In the opening essay of the movement's first book, to be published this week, John Michael Greer proposes that conventional oil supplies peaked in 2005, that gas will peak by 2030, and that coal will do so by 2040.
While I'm prepared to believe that oil supplies might decline in the next few years, his coal prediction is hogwash. Energy companies in the UK, as the latest ENDS report shows, are now beginning to deploy a technology that will greatly increase available reserves. Government figures suggest that underground coal gasification – injecting oxygen into coal seams and extracting the hydrogen and methane they release – can boost the UK's land-based coal reserves 70-fold; and it opens up even more under the seabed. There are vast untapped reserves of other fossil fuels – bitumen, oil shale, methane clathrates – that energy companies will turn to if the price is right.
Like all cultures, industrial civilisation will collapse at some point. Resource depletion and climate change are likely causes. But I don't believe it will happen soon: not in this century, perhaps not even in the next. If it continues to rely on economic growth, if it doesn't reduce its reliance on primary resources, our civilisation will tank the biosphere before it goes down. To sit back and wait for what the Dark Mountain people believe will be civilisation's imminent collapse, without trying to change the way it operates, is to conspire in the destruction of everything greens are supposed to value.
Nor do I accept their undiscriminating attack on industrial technologies. There is a world of difference between the impact of windfarms and the impact of mining tar sands or drilling for oil: the turbines might spoil the view but, as the latest disaster shows, the effects of oil seep into the planet's every pore. And unless environmentalists also seek to sustain the achievements of industrial civilisation – health, education, sanitation, nutrition – the field will be left to those who rightly wish to preserve them, but don't give a stuff about the impacts.
We can accept these benefits while rejecting perpetual growth. We can embrace engineering while rejecting many of the uses to which it is put. We can defend healthcare while attacking useless consumption. This approach is boring, unromantic, uncertain of success, but a lot less ugly than the alternatives.
For all that, the debate this project has begun is worth having, which is why I'll be going to the Dark Mountain festival this month. There are no easy answers to the fix we're in. But there are no easy non-answers either.

Tar sands crude is reaching British petrol stations, Greenpeace says

2010-05-11T07:20:00.000+01:00

• Greenpeace seeks tougher rules against imports of 'dirty oil'• BP is upgrading refineries to process oil from tar sands

Terry Macalister
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 9 May 2010 17.19 BST
British motorists are unwitting users of diesel and petrol derived from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, where carbon-heavy production methods make extraction particularly damaging to the environment, Greenpeace claims.
The environmental group is calling for action by the European commission to strengthen fuel-quality directive regulations to restrict the import of petroleum products made in a carbon-intensive way.
The move comes as the tar sands producers appear to be trying to use the BP oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico as a public relations tool to promote their industry over deepwater drilling.
In a report out on Tuesday Greenpeace says that it has spent time tracking tar sands crude over 12 months and believes that considerable quantities are now being exported to Europe, via refineries in the southern states of the US.
While City investors have begun to question the role of companies such as BP and Shell in the tar sands business, British environmentalists – and consumers – have tended to believe that Alberta crude is used only in North America.
But the Greenpeace report, entitled Tar Sands in Your Tank: Exposing Europe's role in Canada's dirty oil trade, comes to different conclusions.
"The reach of tar sands crude is wider than previously thought. In fact, petroleum products derived partly from tar sands crude oil have been regularly entering the European Union's petroleum supply chain," it concludes.
The environmentalists believe this practice will become more widespread. One company claimed to be at the centre of the trade, the US refiner Valero Energy, plans to increase supplies at its Port Arthur refinery significantly via a controversial new pipeline from Canada to the US Gulf coast, where the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig sank, causing a huge oil leak.
Greenpeace also believes that BP has refined at least one consignment of tar sands crude at the Texas City plant on the same coast, which is a regular location for exporting diesel to Europe.
The rival oil producer ExxonMobil is also handling Canadian tar sands at its Baytown refinery near Houston and has exported at least one diesel shipment to Europe over the period studied, according to Greenpeace.
The green group admits that it cannot ultimately prove that any particular consignment derived from Canada ended up in Britain or Europe, given that refined diesel or petrol is of a uniform quality, but it says that the weight of evidence firmly points in this direction.
Exxon said that it could not comment on tar sands refining or exporting.
"The crude oils we process at our refineries come from a variety of sources around the world," said a spokesman. "However, what types of crude are processed at each refinery, how much, and when are all details that we do not discuss publicly as a matter of practice."
Valero confirmed that it was part of a project to expand the Keystone pipeline from western Canada down to the US Gulf Coast. "Once the Keystone pipeline expansion is complete in 2012 or 2013, Valero expects to be one of the largest recipients of heavy crude oil from the project," a company spokesman said. He added that much of that oil would be refined at Port Arthur, which is geared up to process heavy crude.
Valero also confirmed that its refineries were exporting diesel to Europe, but said that: "Exports of gasoline [petrol] from the US to Europe are rare, since Europe usually has an oversupply of gasoline."
BP, which is investing heavily in tar sand production and upgrading refineries near the Great Lakes specifically to refine this crude, had no comment to make on any existing exports.
Glen Schmidt, chief executive of Laricina Energy, part of the industry lobby group In Situ Oil Sands Alliance, told the Edmonton Journal in Canada that while there were sometimes failures with conventional oil and tar sands projects, "the damage would be much smaller and more modest than with offshore spills".
Similarly an editorial in the Calgary Herald said: "Anyone assessing the risks associated with drilling offshore versus the oil sands is going to be looking at things much differently today than he would have last week. All of a sudden it's a choice between risks that are quantifiable versus those that are unknown."

UN report warns of economic impact of biodiversity loss

2010-05-11T07:18:00.000+01:00

The 'alarming' rate of nature loss could harm food sources and industry, and exacerbate climate change, UN report warns• World fails to meet target to halt biodiversity decline• Q&A: What is biodiversity and why is it important?
Juliette Jowit
guardian.co.uk, Monday 10 May 2010 11.36 BST
The "alarming" rate at which species are being lost could have a severe effect on humanity, conservationists warned today. Targets set eight years ago by governments to reduce biodiversity loss by 2010 have not been met, experts confirmed at a UN meeting in Nairobi, Kenya.
The third Global Biodiversity Outlook report said loss of wildlife and habitats could harm food sources and industry, and exacerbate climate change through rising emissions.
Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), said: "Humanity has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without biodiversity or that it is somehow peripheral to our contemporary world: the truth is we need it more than ever on a planet of 6 billion [people], heading to over 9 billion by 2050. Business as usual is no longer an option if we are to avoid irreversible damage to the life-support systems of our planet."
The report confirms what a coalition of 40 conservation organisations said last month, when they claimed there have been "alarming biodiversity declines". The coalition said that pressures on the natural world from development, over-use and pollution have risen since the ambition to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss was set out in the 2002 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
The first formal assessment of the target, published at the end of April in the journal Science, is the basis of today's formal declaration. This week's meeting will see governments pressed to take the issues as seriously as climate change and the economic crisis.
"Since 1970 we have reduced animal populations by 30%, the area of mangroves and sea grasses by 20% and the coverage of living corals by 40%," said Prof Joseph Alcamo, chief scientist of the UNEP.
"These losses are clearly unsustainable, since biodiversity makes a key contribution to human wellbeing and sustainable development."
The Science study compiled 30 indicators of biodiversity, including changes in populations of species and their risk of extinction, the remaining areas of different habitats, and the composition of communities of plants and animals.
"Our analysis shows that governments have failed to deliver on the commitments they made in 2002: biodiversity is still being lost as fast as ever, and we have made little headway in reducing the pressures on species, habitats and ecosystems," said Stuart Butchart, the paper's lead author.
"Our data shows that 2010 will not be the year that biodiversity loss was halted, but it needs to be the year in which we start taking the issue seriously and substantially increase our efforts to take care of what is left of our planet."
The failure to meet the CBD target will not be a surprise to experts or policymakers, who have warned for years that too little progress was being made. Last month the head of the IUCN species survival commission, Simon Stuart, told the Guardian that for the first time since the dinosaurs, species were believed to be becoming extinct faster than new ones were evolving.

Gulf oil spill: plugging the leak

2010-05-11T07:17:00.000+01:00

BP engineers may try to bung up the Deepwater Horizon leak by pumping debris such as bits of tyres and golf balls into the well. It's a long shot known as a 'junk shot', but it might just work

Since the Deepwater Horizon explosion two weeks ago, it has been hard not to view as primitive the efforts to contain the oil and prevent more of it leaking.
Whether it is the containment booms drafted in to prevent the oil washing ashore or early efforts to set the oil on fire, or even the attempts to funnel the leaking oil via giant sunken towers, the somewhat low-tech containment efforts starkly contrast with the often hi-tech methods usually witnessed in deep-sea drilling.
The latest BP plan being weighed up is similarly low-tech. Engineers may try to plug the well by pumping debris into it at high pressure, a method known as a "junk shot".
"They are actually going to take a bunch of debris - some shredded up tyres, golf balls and things like that - and under very high pressure shoot it into the preventer itself and see if they can clog it up to stop the leak," the US Coast Board Admiral Thad Allen told CBS News yesterday.
Tyres, golf balls, and "things like that" do not immediately inspire confidence, However Dr Simon Boxall, oceanographer at the National Oceanography centre in Southampton, Hampshire, said the unique conditions of the Deepwater Horizon spill – there has never been an oil leak at this depth before – mean all traditional methods "go out of the window".
There have been blow outs in shallow water, but with those you're looking at 100-metre-deep tops, where you can get divers down and you can get equipment down," he said.
"It's nothing compared to doing it 1,500m [5,000ft] down – this goes beyond all our technological knowhow and experience.".
Boxall said a junk shot has been tried before, although he was only aware of one incident, which took place at a much shallower depth.
"We're working in completely new territory, but the idea is not quite as daft as it sounds," he said.
"Bear in mind the pressures at these depths are phenomenal, so what seems like an odd thing to bung a hole with at the surface can actually work quite well. Golf balls seem really quite hard but actually they're quite soft.
"Certainly if you add a tonne of pressure per square inch to a golf ball then it starts to give. So I guess what they're looking to do is use these things that are slightly plastic in their feel to bung into a hole which will help bung it up."
The main problem for engineers is how to get the debris into the well almost a mile beneath the surface. The plan is to block the well beneath the semi-operational cut-off valves – at the moment, the well is partly shut off, restricting the oil flow – without making the spill worse.
"They're planning to sort of try and insert them somehow magically before the cut off valve, but that doesn't quite make sense," Boxall said.
"All these things you can imagine are perfectly feasible on land if you had whatever technology was available to bung them in the hole.
"But when you're looking at some mechanism to fire them into a hole when you're a mile down in seawater, I can't imagine what they would use, unless they're using compressed air – but that is difficult at those depths anyway because the pressures are so great."
He added: "There are one or two engineers out there who seem to be thinking: 'This is ok as long as we don't cause more damage than we solve.'"
BP's ultimate solution to the leak is to drill a relief well, but that could take up to three months before that is completed. In the meantime, they will continue to try and position a cofferdam over one of the leaks today.

Rising cost of carbon capture is killing the great green hope

2010-05-10T08:15:00.000+01:00

Longannet in Fife is earmarked for a pioneering CCS scheme
Rob Edwards, Environment Editor

9 May 2010
Rising costs have prompted new fears for one of the central planks of the Scottish Government’s strategy for cutting climate pollution.
Scottish ministers want to keep burning coal in power stations by developing technology to capture and store the carbon dioxide they belch out. But new evidence from Norway suggests that this could cost nearly three times more than expected.
This comes on top of recent expert reports casting doubt on the feasibility of carbon capture and storage (CCS) – the great green hope of the energy industry. But technology is strongly defended by its backers in Scotland.
One of Norway’s flagship CCS projects is run by the state-owned gas company, Gassco. But it has revealed that the estimated costs have rocketed from £0.4 billion in 2007 to £1.2bn now.
“The CCS costs are big and higher than we initially thought,” said Sigve Apeland from Gassco. The company is trying to capture, transport and store 1.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from the Naturkraft gas-fired power plant at Kårstø.
This is only one example, but these kind of cost increases could kill off the prospect of having full-scale carbon capture working any time soon Dr Richard Dixon, director, WWF Scotland
Gassco told the environment company, ENDS, that the escalating costs were mostly due to the difficulties of actually capturing the carbon. It is a process that absorbs a lot of energy, which makes it expensive.
“This is only one example, but these kind of cost increases could kill off the prospect of having full-scale carbon capture working any time soon,” said Dr Richard Dixon, director of WWF Scotland.
There is a pioneering scheme aimed at developing CCS at the Longannet coal-fired power station in Fife, run by ScottishPower. Both the Conservative and Labour parties have promised four CCS plants, but neither has said when.
A report from two universities in Texas has argued that the difficulties in storing carbon deep underground have been hugely underestimated. It concluded that burial was “a profoundly non-feasible option for the management of carbon dioxide emissions”.
Patrick Harvie, the Green MSP, said: “The doubts about carbon capture and storage are growing week by week, and it looks increasingly like an impractical and unaffordable technology.
“It is wildly irresponsible to use the mere hope of a viable CCS option as an excuse for new coal plants, as both Labour and SNP governments have been doing.”
The Scottish Government has backed plans to build a new coal-fired power station at Hunterston in north Ayrshire. But it is insisting that the plant starts up with one-fifth of its carbon being captured and stored.
Stuart Haszeldine, the ScottishPower CCS professor at the University of Edinburgh, pointed out that costs in Norway were always high. As CCS projects were developed, they would benefit from the economics of scale, he argued.
“It’s entirely to be expected that the cost of capture will be extremely high for the first 10 or so projects in Europe,” he said. “That is why these need support by national governments, as commercial companies cannot afford such expensive experiments.”
According to Professor Haszeldine, the experience gained from experimental plants would as much as half the cost of subsequent plants.
For ScottishPower, which is owned by the Spanish energy company Iberdrola, the point of its prototype CCS plant at Longannet was to find ways of reducing costs. “That is key to the future of CCS, being able to capture CO2 effectively and efficiently without it being cost-prohibitive to ourselves or consumers,” said a company spokesman

Lufthansa to use biofuel on flights by 2012

2010-05-10T08:12:00.000+01:00

Hamburg: Sun, 9 May 2010
Lufthansa is set to become one of the world's first airlines to mix biofuel with traditional kerosene on commercial flights as carriers seek ways to cut soaring fuel costs, its chief executive said.
The German flag carrier will start running its engines on some flights on a mix of biofuel and kerosene within two years, Wolfgang Mayrhuber told reporters on the sidelines of an event late on Saturday.
A spokesman for Lufthansa added the airline will likely decide on a more precise schedule by the end of this year.
Aircraft account for an estimated 2-4 per cent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which scientists say could cause global temperatures to rise, triggering widespread disease, famine, flooding and drought.
Experts say global aviation emissions could reach 2.4 billion tonnes in 2050, which would be 15-20 per cent of all CO2 permitted under a global agreement and a nearly four-fold increase on current levels.
Lufthansa rival KLM, part of Franco-Dutch Air France, last year became the first airline to test biofuel in a passenger airplane, filling one of four engines on a Boeing 747 with biofuel for a 1.5 hour test flight.
The carrier has said it aims to make commercial flights which use biofuel from 2011.
Continental Airlines, the US airline that is set to create the world's largest carrier by merging with United Airlines parent UAL, had already used a mix of biologically derived fuel and jet fuel on a test flight.
Mayrhuber said Lufthansa had no plans to run individual test flights at this point. Instead, the carrier would wait until it could start using biofuel regularly on some routes to gather reliable data over a longer period of time.
In the long run, the use of biofuel is expected to save airlines money.
'First, we are hoping to get some resource security, and second, we hope that we will have some advantages in our costs for emissions trading,' Mayrhuber said at the event, which celebrates 50 years of Boeing planes at Lufthansa.
The European Union is set to extend its Emissions Trading System (ETS) to airlines from 2012, and the less traditional kerosene airlines use every year, the fewer certificates they have to buy permitting them to pollute the air.
Lufthansa has estimated its annual costs from the ETS at 150-350 million euros ($201-470 million) once airlines join the scheme.-Reuters

Wave Hello to Tidal Power

2010-05-10T08:08:00.000+01:00

Analysis by Emily Laut Sat May 8, 2010 11:14 PM ET
“Deep Green” looks like someone’s flying kites from the sea floor. With its 12-meter (39-foot) wingspan and 100-meter (328-foot) cable tethering it to the ocean floor, all it’s missing is a colorful tail.
Though its wingspan seems big, the kites are small compared to other tidal energy designs. That’s one of the big advantages to Deep Green. The kite’s small size lets its turbine operate at greater depths, where currents are slower, boldly going where no tidal turbine has gone before.
When anchored, Deep Green can be steered into a figure-eight like a sport kite, its turbine capturing tidal energy at ten times the speed of the actual stream velocity, according to Minesto, the Swedish developers of Deep Green. When operational, one Deep Green sea kite is expected to generate 500 kilowatts of power.
But hold on to your Pop Tarts. It will be a few years before sea kites power your toaster. Testing is scheduled to start in Northern Ireland in 2011. Minesto hopes to have a commercial model of Deep Green out in four years.
As fossil fuels dwindle, the need for renewable energy sources becomes clear; scientists have even drawn up plans to power the planet with purely renewable energy. More and more companies are working with solar, wind, and tidal power. Tidal turbines’ main drawback is their cost, but the predictability of the tides makes up for it. When wind farms and solar panels get skunked on calm, cloudy days, the tides still come in like clockwork.

Save the planet on the low-carbon diet

2010-05-10T07:19:00.000+01:00

At Otarian, menus have a feelgood global-warming index. A gimmick, or the next step in ethical eating?
By Jonathan Owen
It was only a matter of time. We've had organic vegan restaurants; eateries that only have raw uncooked food and Fairtrade bistros. Now comes a restaurant offering a menu aimed at saving the planet from climate change.
Otarian claims to be the first restaurant where each item on the all-vegetarian menu has its carbon footprint published alongside the price and carbon cost of the meat equivalent.
The brainchild of one of the world's richest women, Indian billionaire Radhika Oswal, it opens in London next month, hoping to capitalise on a burgeoning consumer demand for all things green.
Sales of low-carbon and environmental goods and services are now worth an estimated £106.5bn in Britain alone – part of a global market worth an estimated £3,046bn. Unsurprisingly, companies are rushing to cash in. But just last month, Which?, formerly the Consumers' Association, condemned what it called "greenwash", where companies make misleading claims about the environmental friendliness of products.
The owners of Otarian are one of India's wealthiest families whose business interests include Burrup Fertlisers, one of the world's biggest producers of liquid ammonium, a pollutant that can kill if ingested and is used primarily as a base ingredient for the production of fertilisers and explosives.
Dan Welch, co-editor of Ethical Consumer magazine, said: "Highlighting the climate change impact of our unsustainable diet, especially meat eating, is laudable. But there's a deep irony in the link to Burrup, one of the world's major manufacturers of the feedstock of chemical fertilisers."
Scientists have warned that nature can't cope with the million tons of chemical fertiliser used annually – acidifying soils, killing vulnerable species and creating what he called "dead zones in the sea".
This inconvenient truth is brushed aside by Radhika Oswal, a billionaire and lifelong vegetarian. "It doesn't mean that if you are doing something good that all parts of you have got to be good. I believe the world needs fertilisers to feed the population there is today," she said.
Instead, the Otarian founder is on a crusade to educate people about the carbon savings they can make by cutting meat out of their diet. She has invested millions in what she admits is more of a personal passion than a business venture.
Celebrity chefs including Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver are among those who have pursued the green pound, with their enthusiastic promotion of home-grown ingredients and locally sourced produce paying handsome dividends in book sales. Raymond Blanc and Antonio Carluccio are among those who have signed up to the Sustainable Restaurant Association (SRA) which was launched last March in a bid to make restaurants more environmentally friendly, and, of course, as a marketing tool.

Shale Gas Will Rock the World

2010-05-10T07:14:00.001+01:00

Huge discoveries of natural gas promise to shake up the energy markets and geopolitics. And that's just for starters.
By AMY MYERS JAFFE
There's an energy revolution brewing right under our feet.
Over the past decade, a wave of drilling around the world has uncovered giant supplies of natural gas in shale rock. By some estimates, there's 1,000 trillion cubic feet recoverable in North America alone—enough to supply the nation's natural-gas needs for the next 45 years. Europe may have nearly 200 trillion cubic feet of its own.
We've always known the potential of shale; we just didn't have the technology to get to it at a low enough cost. Now new techniques have driven down the price tag—and set the stage for shale gas to become what will be the game-changing resource of the decade.
I have been studying the energy markets for 30 years, and I am convinced that shale gas will revolutionize the industry—and change the world—in the coming decades. It will prevent the rise of any new cartels. It will alter geopolitics. And it will slow the transition to renewable energy.
To understand why, you have to consider that even before the shale discoveries, natural gas was destined to play a big role in our future. As environmental concerns have grown, nations have leaned more heavily on the fuel, which gives off just half the carbon dioxide of coal. But the rise of gas power seemed likely to doom the world's consumers to a repeat of OPEC, with gas producers like Russia, Iran and Venezuela coming together in a cartel and dictating terms to the rest of the world.
John Gould/The Wall Street Journal
The advent of abundant, low-cost gas will throw all that out the window—so long as the recent drilling catastrophe doesn't curtail offshore oil and gas activity and push up the price of oil and eventually other forms of energy. Not only will the shale discoveries prevent a cartel from forming, but the petro-states will lose lots of the muscle they now have in world affairs, as customers over time cut them loose and turn to cheap fuel produced closer to home.
The shale boom also is likely to upend the economics of renewable energy. It may be a lot harder to persuade people to adopt green power that needs heavy subsidies when there's a cheap, plentiful fuel out there that's a lot cleaner than coal, even if gas isn't as politically popular as wind or solar.
But that's not the end of the story: I also believe this offers a tremendous new longer-term opportunity for alternative fuels. Since there's no longer an urgent need to make them competitive immediately through subsidies, since we can use natural gas now, we can pour that money into R&D—so renewables will be ready to compete without lots of help when shale supplies run low, decades from now.
To be sure, plenty of people (including Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and many Wall Street energy analysts) aren't convinced that shale gas has the potential to be such a game changer. Their arguments revolve around two main points: that shale-gas exploration is too expensive and that it carries environmental risks.
I'd argue they are wrong on both counts.
Take costs first. Over the past decade, new techniques have been developed that drastically cut the price tag of production. The Haynesville shale, which extends from Texas into Louisiana, is seeing costs as low as $3 per million British thermal units, down from $5 or more in the Barnett shale in the 1990s. And more cost-cutting developments are likely on the way as major oil companies get into the game. If they need to do shale for $2, I am willing to bet they can, in the next five years.
When it comes to environmental risks, critics do have a point: They say drilling for shale gas runs a risk to ground water, even though shale is generally found thousands of feet below the water table. If a well casing fails, they argue, drilling fluids can seep into aquifers.
They're overplaying the danger of such a failure. For drilling on land, where most shale-gas deposits are, the casings have been around for decades with a good track record. But water pollution can occur if drilling fluids are disposed of improperly. So, regulations and enforcement must be tightened to ensure safety. More rules will raise costs—but, given the abundance of supply, producers can likely absorb the hit. Already, some are moving to nontoxic drilling fluids, even without imposed bans.

But the skeptics aren't just overstating the obstacles. They're missing two much bigger points. For one thing, they're ignoring history: The reserves and production of new energy resources tend to increase over time, not decrease. They're also not taking into account how quickly public opinion can change. The country can turn on a dime and embrace a cheaper energy source, casting aside political or environmental reservations. This has happened before, with the rapid spread of liquefied-natural-gas terminals over the past few years.
In short, the skeptics are missing the bigger picture—the picture I think is the much more likely one. Here's a closer look at what I'm talking about, and how I believe the boom in shale gas will shake up the world.
One of the biggest effects of the shale boom will be to give Western and Chinese consumers fuel supplies close to home—thus scuttling a potential natural-gas cartel. Remember: Prior to the discovery of shale gas, huge declines were expected in domestic production in U.S., Canada and the North Sea. That meant an increasing reliance on foreign supplies—at a time when natural gas was becoming more important as a source of energy.
Even more troubling, most of those gas supplies were located in unstable regions. Two countries in particular had a stranglehold over supply: Russia and Iran. Before the shale discoveries, these nations were expected to account for more than half the world's known gas resources.
Russia made no secret about its desire to leverage its position and create a cartel of gas producers—a kind of latter-day OPEC. That seemed to set the stage for a repeat of the oil issues that have worried the world over the past 40 years.
As far as I'm concerned, you can now forget all that. Shale gas will breed competition among energy companies and exporting countries—which in turn will help economic stability in industrial countries, and thwart petro-suppliers that try to empower themselves at our expense. Market competition is the best kryptonite for cartel power.
For one measure of the coming change, consider the prospects for liquefied natural gas, which has been converted to a liquid so it can be carried in a supertanker like oil. It's the easiest way to move natural gas very long distances, so it gives a good picture of how much countries are relying on foreign supplies.

Before the shale discoveries, experts expected liquefied natural gas, or LNG, to account for half of the international gas trade by 2025, up from 5% in the 1990s. With the shale boom, that share will be more like one-third.
In the U.S., the impact of shale gas and deep-water drilling is already apparent. Import terminals for LNG sit virtually empty, and the prospects that the U.S. will become even more dependent on foreign imports are receding. Also, soaring shale-gas production in the U.S. has meant that cargoes of LNG from Qatar and elsewhere are going to European buyers, easing their dependence on Russia. So, Russia has had to accept far lower prices from formerly captive customers, slashing prices to Ukraine by 30%, for instance.
But the political fallout from shale gas will do a lot more than stifle natural-gas cartels. It will throw world politics for a loop—putting some longtime troublemakers in their place and possibly bringing some rivals into the Western fold.
Again, remember that as their energy-producing influence grew, nations like Russia, Venezuela and Iran became more successful in resisting Western interference in their affairs—and exporting their ideologies and strategic agendas through energy-linked deal-making and threats of cutoffs.
In 2006 and 2007, disputes with Ukraine led Russia to cut off supplies, leaving customers in Kiev and Western Europe briefly without fuel in the dead of winter. That cutoff effectively shifted Ukraine's internal politics: The country turned away from the pro-NATO, anti-Moscow candidate and toward a coalition more to Moscow's liking.
It looked like the U.S. and Europe would see their global power eclipse as they kowtowed to their energy suppliers. But shale gas is going to defang the energy diplomacy of petro-nations. Consuming nations throughout Europe and Asia will be able to turn to major U.S. oil companies and their own shale rock for cheap natural gas, and tell the Chavezes and Putins of the world where to stick their supplies—back in the ground.

Europe, for instance, receives 25% of its natural-gas supply via pipelines from Russia, with some consumers almost completely dependent on the big supplier. In the wake of Russia's strong-arming of Ukraine, Europe has been actively diversifying its supply, and shale gas will make that task cheaper and easier.
Shale-gas resources are believed to extend into countries such as Poland, Romania, Sweden, Austria, Germany—and Ukraine. Once European shale gas comes, the Kremlin will be hard-pressed to use its energy exports as a political lever.
I would also argue that greater shale-gas production in Europe will make it harder for Iran to profit from exporting natural gas. Iran is currently hampered by Western sanctions against investment in its energy sector, so by the time it can get its natural gas ready for export, the marketing window to Europe will likely be closed by the availability of inexpensive shale gas.
And that may lead Tehran to tone down its nuclear efforts. Look at it this way: If Iran can't sell its gas in Europe, what options does it have? Piping to the Indian subcontinent is impractical, and LNG markets will be crowded with lower-cost, competing supplies.
It's admittedly a long shot, but if the regime acts rationally, it will realize it has a chance to win some global goodwill by shifting away from nuclear-power efforts—and using its cheap natural-gas supplies to generate electricity at home.
Overall, the Middle East might get a bit poorer as gas eats into the market for oil. If the drop in revenue is severe enough, it could bring instability.
Shale-gas development could also mean big changes for China. The need for energy imports has taken China to problematic nations such as Iran, Sudan and Burma, making it harder for the West to forge global policies to address the problems those countries create. But with newly accessible natural gas available at home, China could well turn away from imports—and the hot spots that produce them.
The less vulnerable China is to imported oil and gas, the more likely it would be to support sanctions or other measures against petro-states with human-rights problems or aggressive agendas. Moreover, the less Beijing worries about U.S. control of sea lanes, the easier it will be for the U.S. and China to build trust. So, domestic shale gas for China may help integrate Beijing into a Pax Americana global system.
With natural gas cheap and abundant, the prospects for renewable energy will change just as drastically. I have been a big believer that renewable energy was about to see its time. Prior to the shale-gas revolution, I thought rising hydrocarbon prices would propel renewables and nuclear power into the marketplace easily—albeit with a little shove from a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system.
But the shale discoveries complicate the issue, making it harder for wind, solar and biomass energy, as well as nuclear, to compete on economic grounds. Subsidies that made renewables competitive with shale gas would get more expensive, as would loan guarantees and incentives for new nuclear plants. Shale gas also hurts the energy-independence argument for renewables: Shale gas is domestic, just like wind and solar, so we won't be shipping those dollars to the Middle East.
But that doesn't mean we should stop investing in renewables. As large as our shale-gas resources are, they're still exhaustible, and eventually we will still need to transition to energy that is cleaner and more plentiful. So, what should we do?
First, avoid the urge to protect coal states and let cheaper natural gas displace coal, which accounts for about half of all power generated in the U.S. Ample natural gas for electricity generation could also make it easier to shift to electric vehicles—once again helping the environment and lessening our dependence on the Middle East.
Then, I think we still need to invest in renewables—but smartly. States with renewable-energy potential, such as windy Texas or sunny California, should keep their mandates that a fixed percentage of electricity must be generated by alternative sources. That will give companies incentives and opportunities to bring renewables to market and lower costs over time through experience and innovation. Yes, renewables may seem relatively more expensive in those states as shale gas hits the market. And, yes, that may mean getting more help from government subsidies. But I don't think the cost would be prohibitive, and the long-term benefits are worth it.
Still, I don't believe we should set national mandates—which would get prohibitively expensive in states without abundant renewable resources. Instead of pouring money into subsidies to make such a plan work, the federal government should invest in R&D to make renewables competitive down the road without big subsidies.
***
In the end, what's important to understand is that shale gas may be the key to solving some of our most pressing short-term crises, a way to bridge the gap to a more-secure energy and economic future.
The trade deficit has crippled our economy and shows no signs of abating as long as we remain tethered to imported energy. Why ship dollars abroad where they can destabilize global financial markets—and then hit us back in lost jobs and savings—when we can develop the resources we have here in our own country? Shall we pay Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to develop our natural gas—or the citizens of Pennsylvania and Louisiana?
Ms. Jaffe is the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow for Energy Studies at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University and co-author of "Oil, Dollars, Debt and Crises: The Global Curse of Black Gold." She can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

Electric car drivers fear being stranded with flat battery

2010-05-10T07:12:00.000+01:00

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

The era of carefree motoring may soon be over, according to a study which reveals that drivers of the new generation of electric cars are plagued by nagging fears of being left stranded by a flat battery.
They narrow their horizons and rarely venture far from home, abandoning the old notion of the freedom of the open road.
A six-month trial involving 264 drivers found that almost all experienced “range anxiety” and travelled only short distances.
They were over cautious when planning journeys and allowed themselves a generous safety margin to avoid the need to recharge en route. They tended to avoid using their cars if the battery indicator showed that the charge level was less than 50 per cent.

Even though electric cars such as the Mitsubishi i-MiEV are theoretically capable of travelling 100 miles between charges the drivers appeared not to trust the official figures. The maximum journey undertaken was only a quarter of the official range.
The suitcase-sized batteries take at least six hours to recharge and Britain has only about 300 public charging points, most of which are in London.
The Government-funded trial, involving drivers working for local authorities, private companies and universities in the North East of England, found that the maximum journey length undertaken was only a quarter of the car’s official range.
Cenex, the Centre of Excellence for low carbon vehicle technologies which conducted the trial, concluded: “Range anxiety effects were significant throughout the trial with 93 per cent of journeys commencing with over 50 per cent battery state of charge.
“The under-utilisation of range is undesirable in terms of efficient deployment and acceptance of electric vehicles and highlights a need for more sophisticated on-board range prediction aids.”
The trial also found that drivers altered their driving style, slowing down and avoiding unnecessary acceleration or braking when the charge indicator dropped below 50 per cent.
Neil Butcher, who is leading a Government-sponsored trial of 25 electric cars in the West Midlands, said that drivers tended to think much more carefully about their journeys before setting out.
However, he said that only one family so far had drained the battery and been forced to make an unscheduled stop.
“They were driving at high speed down the motorway on the first day they had the car and they ran out of charge about four miles from home. They stopped at a pub which let them plug in while they sat there for a couple of hours until there was enough to make it home.”
Mr Butcher said that range anxiety increased in cold weather because the battery capacity fell by up to a third. Using the heater also caused the range shown on the dashboard instrument to drop by up to 20 miles.
“It encourages you to wear a coat and gloves in the car,” said Mr Butcher.
He said that drivers would be confident about making long trips once a network of fast-charge points was deployed. These give an 80 per cent charge in as little as 20 minutes. However, these points cost up to £25,000 each to install and using them reduces the life of the battery.
David Jackson, electric vehicle project manager for Nissan UK, said that drivers of the Nissan Leaf, a small family electric car due to go on sale in March next year, would be able to use a mobile phone to monitor the battery level as it was recharging. They would also be able to send the car a message to warm itself up using mains electricity so that they could start at a comfortable temperature without shortening the car’s range.
From January drivers will be able to obtain Government grants of up to £5,000 towards the purchase of an electric car.
The Department for Transport has also given London, Milton Keynes and the North East a total of £8 million for the installation of 11,000 charging points by the end of 2013. The points will mainly be installed in car parks and at leisure centres, railway stations and supermarkets.
However, only 2,000 points will be installed next year and only 79 of those will be fast-charge points.

Browne’s legacy of cost cutting stored up barrels of trouble

2010-05-10T07:10:00.000+01:00

Tom Bower
EVEN before taking over BP from Lord Browne, Tony Hayward admitted to a group of employees in America in 2006 that the group needed to restore the company’s core skills in engineering to reverse his predecessor’s drastic cuts.
Hayward knew that Browne’s legacy had made the company vulnerable to costly disasters. Four successive accidents in America in 2005 and 2006 had shredded BP’s reputation and, without insurance cover, had cost the company billions of pounds in repairs, compensation and lost revenue.
The explosion at the Texas City refinery that killed 15 people, the dangerous list of the $1 billion Thunder Horse oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and two oil spills from pipelines in Alaska had aroused outrage across America. In Hayward’s opinion, Browne’s strategy had been short-sighted.
“We have a management style that has made a virtue of doing more for less,” said Hayward. To increase BP’s profitability and share price, Browne had encouraged the departure of hundreds of BP’s skilled engineers. To save money, Browne believed BP should use subcontractors to drill for oil, maintain refineries, monitor corrosion in pipelines and supervise the construction of oil platforms. Investigations of the accidents blamed cost savings and the inadequate skills of BP’s own personnel for poor supervision of the subcontractors.
Opprobrium was heaped on BP in Washington. In 2006, a report on Texas City by the US Chemical Safety Board, a federal agency, warned that BP’s managers, scarred by “a cultural issue”, posed “an imminent hazard”.
In the aftermath of the Alaskan spills, congressional investigators unearthed testimony by a former BP engineer in Alaska who had complained: “There is no doubt that cost-cutting and profits have taken precedence over safety and the environment.”
Congressman Joe Barton accused BP managers in 2006 of dishonesty in their testimony on safety and expressed concern “about BP’s corporate culture of seeming indifference to safety and environmental issues”.
He added: “This comes from a company that prides itself in its ads on protecting the environment. Shame, shame, shame.”
Severe corrosion caused by BP’s cost-cutting and poor maintenance of the pipelines was responsible, according to the US Department of Transportation’s inspectors, for the leak of 270,000 gallons of crude oil from the Trans Alaska pipeline system.
BP’s investigation of the Thunder Horse disaster revealed that its subcontractors in South Korea had failed to detect the installation of faulty valves.
On becoming chief executive in 2007, Hayward knew that Browne’s cuts had denuded BP of the skills to prevent similar incidents. His model for near-perfection was Exxon Mobil’s practices.
Every oil man acknowledges that Exxon Mobil’s method of operations is the industry’s gold standard. Since the Exxon Valdez tanker polluted Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989, the group’s executives had imposed demanding requirements.
Around the clock, its engineers on the oil rigs second-guess everything planned and done by every subcontractor. BP lacks the staff to replicate such rigour.
Despite acknowledging the criticisms of “systemic lapses” for its sins in 2005, Hayward’s recruitment of engineers has been too slow to remedy his inheritance from Browne.
Since the latest accident in the Gulf of Mexico, Hayward has laid the blame on Trans- ocean and other contractors on whose expertise BP relied.
“It was not appropriate to second-guess Transocean,” said Robert Wine, of BP in London. BP had six supervisors on the rig at the time of the explosion, but Wine admitted that it did not have an engineer there to oversee the regular checks of the blow-out preventor or the concreting.
He also said that BP had been recruiting more skilled engineers. Hayward knows that BP is incapable of monitoring its subcontractors and that this lapse will make BP more vulnerable in the forthcoming litigation.
Hayward may be lamenting that he failed to hire more engineers. In America, critics of the oil giants have restated their former criticism of the company by quipping that BP stand for “Beyond the Pale”, “Bloated Profits” and “Broken Pipelines”.
Tom Bower is the author of The Squeeze: Oil, Money and Greed in the 21st Century

Greenhouse effects: Turf

2010-05-10T07:03:00.000+01:00

Tony Juniper

Not all grass is as green as it looks. Some of the most productive farmland in England, in the Fens near where we live in Cambridge, is used to produce turf, rather than food; and, each time another batch is ready and dug up, about 1in of topsoil comes away with it. Turf also has to be transported, usually by road, to where it is to be laid.
That said, it’s an attractive option. Laying it may be heavy work, but turf gives a sense of achievement, as bare areas are almost instantly converted into green space. It can also be put down at pretty much any time of year.
There are, however, advantages in repairing or starting a lawn from seed. First of all, it’s a lot cheaper. You can also decide on the combination of grass varieties that will most suit your needs. For example, you can get mixes that are hard-wearing or do better in shade. You can also make it more wildlife-friendly by adding clover. Clover is a member of the pea family and its roots fix atmospheric nitrogen, fertilising the soil in a way that helps grass grow. The flowers produce food for nectar-feeding insects such as bumblebees. Some turf suppliers offer different mixes, too, but doing it yourself gives more satisfaction.
Get the grass going from seed, then oversow it with clover seed at the rate of about 5g per sq metre. Use the variety ‘Kent Wild White’ and plant during the spring. You can add other wild-flower seeds as well.
We replanted an area of grass destroyed by building works, and itis shaping up nicely. The weeds needto be kept under control, but it isgreen and lush, and we hope it canbe turned into a wildlife-friendly lawn by the time summer is properly under way. (See page 24 for more tips on attracting animals to your garden.)
If you are in any doubt as to the viability of growing grass from seed, take inspiration from Chelsea football club. I visited their training ground in Cobham, Surrey, to learn about the efforts they are making there to go green, and discovered they had decided not to use turf so as to cut down on pollution and save land.
Tony Juniper is an environmental campaigner and former director of Friends of the Earth

Cameron stresses Tory-Lib Dem agreement on low carbon economy

2010-05-09T09:47:00.000+01:00

Conservative leader David Cameron has flagged up the desire to build a low carbon economy as one of the areas of common ground between his party and the Liberal Democrats as he seeks to woo them in an attempt to form an effective coalition Government. The environmental industries might take hard from the nod in their direction, though will be cautious until it is seen how rhetoric translates into policy. In the UK's general election on Thursday, the Conservatives won the most seats in Parliament, but failed to gain an outright majority, resulting in a hung parliament. As the results became apparent, the horse trading began with the leaders of the two largest parties both attempting to persuade the third that they would be best off siding with them. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg said it was for the Conservatives, as the largest party, to have the first shot at 'proving it's capable of seeking to govern in the national interest'. David Cameron said he would make an 'open and comprehensive offer' to the Lib Dems while Labour's Gordon Brown, still technically Prime Minister until the new Government is formed, said it was right and proper that the other two parties were given all the time they needed to see if they could reach a deal, but that he would be happy to speak to either leader about common ground should they fail toform a coalition.
Sam Bond
Source: edie newsroom

'Building Green' for Environmental Sustainability

2010-05-09T09:46:00.000+01:00

~ Frost & Sullivan Green Building Congress Malaysia 2010 will be held on June 9, 2010 at Kuala Lumpur ~

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, May 7 /PRNewswire/ -- "Green building" is a term which refers to a better way of designing and constructing buildings in an environmental friendly way. Green buildings consume less energy and resources. With lower operating costs they provide opportunity for better return on investment. There is growing confidence that investment in Green Building and sustainable construction technologies not only make environmental sense but economic sense too.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081117/FSLOGO)
Realizing this early, Malaysia launched its Green Building Mission three years ago and more recently the Green Building Index. It is important that the industry responds to these initiatives. With a focus on green design, materials, construction, retrofit and maintenance of buildings, Frost & Sullivan will host the Green Building Congress Malaysia 2010. The summit will be held on June 9, 2010 at the Sime Darby Convention Center.
The summit will bring together the best minds, technologies and practices in the industry to share knowledge on latest trends and technologies of green buildings, while offering a glimpse into the assessment methods of green buildings by regulators.
Elaborating on the growing importance of green sustainability in building construction, Satish Lele, vice-president for the Industrial Technologies practice at Frost & Sullivan says, "Energy efficiency and demand from customers are seen as the topmost drivers for green solutions in Malaysia. There is now growing confidence that investment in green building and sustainable construction technologies will bring about not only environmental benefits but economic benefits too. By announcing the RM1.5 billion fund for green technology adoption in its 2010 budget and tax reliefs for owners and buyers of GBI certified buildings, Malaysia has already taken a leap in positioning itself as a regional leader in green buildings. It is thus ideal that this congress on Green Buildings is to be held in Malaysia."
The summit will be graced by the Minister of Energy, Green Technology and Water, Y.B. Dato' Sri Peter Chin Fah Kui. Delivering the opening address, he will discuss the Malaysian government's vision and role in promoting the Green Building Mission, which was launched to raise awareness and promote efforts in achieving sustainable building and construction in the country. He will elaborate on the success to-date that the initiative has seen since its launch in March 2007.
The summit is supported by Nippon Paint Malaysia, a strong advocate of environmental sustainability and leader in environmentally friendly paint products. Dr Richard Seow, CTO of Nippon SEA Group will present the keynote address titled, "Building Green for Environmental Sustainability". In his keynote he will outline the benefits that organizations can reap through embracing sustainable building solutions and share the numerous methods in providing solutions to the industry and government in addressing climate change.
Other topics of discussion at the congress will include, tapping the market potential in green buildings, Green Building Certification – policies, guidelines and benefits along with a success story that demonstrates, successfully tapping green initiatives to attain financial gains.
Aside from these stand-alone presentations, the congress will break into three concurrent tracks - Green Buildings Design, Smart Energy Buildings and Green Buildings Material – post lunch. Each of these tracks will carry four separate sessions that will discuss the relevant sub-topics via presentations from builders, construction luminaries and Frost & Sullivan senior analysts. The choice tracks are open for delegate registration along with the main congress registration.
For a detailed program agenda / to register for the congress, please visit http://www.frost-green.com/ or e-mail your requests to neethiya.sadagopal@frost.com.
BASF is the bronze sponsor for this congress. The Malaysian Reserve is the official business newspaper, ZDNet Asia is the official online media partner, while PRNewswire is the official newswire. Pertubuhan Akitek Malaysia (PAM) and Green Building Index (GBI) are the supporting associations for this congress.
About Frost & Sullivan
Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, partners with clients to accelerate their growth. The company's TEAM Research, Growth Consulting and Growth Team Membership empower clients to create a growth-focused culture that generates, evaluates and implements effective growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan employs over 45 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses and the investment community from 40 offices on six continents. For more information about Frost & Sullivan's Growth Partnerships, visit http://www.frost.com
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House, Senate Advance Energy Efficiency Legislation

2010-05-09T09:21:00.000+01:00

SustainableBusiness.com News
Both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate on Thursday moved forward on legislation to improve energy efficiency in the United States.
The House passed a new program called "Home Star" that will help homeowners reduce their energy bills through energy efficiency investments and at the same time help provide sustainable jobs for construction workers.
The House bill establishes a new program that provides grants to homeowners for weatherizing their homes. Two paths are provided:
a "silver star" path that has $250-$1,500 incentives for a variety of specific energy saving measures, up to a maximum of $3,000 per home, and
a "gold star" path that provides incentives of $3,000-$8,000 per home for comprehensive packages of energy-saving measures (incentives increase as energy savings increase).
The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) estimates that this bill will generate over 160,000 sustainable jobs and reduce consumer energy bills by more than $1 billion annually.
On the Senate side, the Energy and Natural Resources Committee reported out a set of amendments that adopt new consensus minimum efficiency standards on a variety of products.
The Senate bill adopts consensus minimum efficiency standards on residential air conditioners, furnaces and heat pumps, pole-mounted outdoor lights (e.g., street lights), drinking water dispensers, hot food holding cabinets (used to serve food in hospitals), and hot tubs. ACEEE estimates that after these standards have been fully implemented, they will save about as much energy annually as is now consumed by the state of Nebraska.
"Recent events at the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico and the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia show some of the significant human and environmental costs associated with our traditional energy sources," noted Steven Nadel, Executive Director of ACEEE. "We are happy to see both the House and Senate advancing legislation that will reduce the need for these traditional energy sources by promoting our cheapest and cleanest energy resource--energy efficiency," he continued.
The House effort has been led by Representatives Peter Welch (D-VT), Edward Markey (D-MA), and Vern Ehlers (R-MI). The Senate effort has been led by Senators Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Robert Menendez (D-NJ).

Bill Gates pays for ‘artificial’ clouds to beat greenhouse gases

2010-05-09T09:20:00.000+01:00

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

The first trials of controversial sunshielding technology are being planned after the United Nations failed to secure agreement on cutting greenhouse gases.
Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire, is funding research into machines to suck up ten tonnes of seawater every second and spray it upwards. This would seed vast banks of white clouds to reflect the Sun’s rays away from Earth.
The British and American scientists involved do not intend to wait for international rules on technology that deliberately alters the climate. They believe that the weak outcome of December’s climate summit in Copenhagen means that emissions will continue to rise unchecked and that the world urgently needs an alternative strategy to protect itself from global warming.
Many methods of cooling the planet, collectively known as geoengineering, have been proposed. They include rockets to deploy millions of mirrors in the stratosphere and artificial trees to suck carbon dioxide from the air. Most would be prohibitively expensive and could not be deployed for decades.

However, a study last year calculated that a fleet of 1,900 ships costing £5 billion could arrest the rise in temperature by criss-crossing the oceans and spraying seawater from tall funnels to whiten clouds and increase their reflectivity.
Silver Lining, a research body in San Francisco, has received $300,000 (£204,000) from Mr Gates. It will develop machines to convert seawater into microscopic particles capable of being blown up to the cloud level of 1,000 metres. This would whiten clouds by increasing the number of nuclei.
The trial would involve ten ships and 10,000sq km (3,800sq miles) of ocean. Armand Neukermanns, who is leading the research, said that whitening clouds was “the most benign form of engineering” because, while it might alter rainfall, the effects would cease soon after the machines were switched off.
Other types of geoengineering, such as mimicking volcanoes by using aircraft to spray reflective sulphate particles in the stratosphere, would have much longer effects on weather patterns.
Stephen Salter, Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design at the University of Edinburgh, said that there was no need to wait for regulations because the trials would not add chemicals to the atmosphere. But Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the Government, said that experiments with potential consequences beyond national borders needed international regulations. He told The Times: “I do not see any geoengineering solution which does not have unintended consequences or is not far too expensive.”

Presses roll for cheaper solar panels

2010-05-09T09:18:00.000+01:00

Ben Marlow

THE solar power industry could be saved ... by printing presses.
British scientists claim to have invented an electrical material that can be used like an ink and printed on to panels by the presses that produce newspapers.
Omar Cheema, co-founder and chief executive of Solar Press, the company behind the technology, claims the breakthrough could be the key to getting round the industry’s notoriously high costs and make clean, cheap power available to billions of the world’s poorest people.
“Existing solar technologies are very expensive because they require huge investment of hundreds of millions of pounds,” he said. “Many people cannot afford it." So what is the secret that Cheema and his colleagues from Imperial College London have unlocked?

Their “ink” is made from three electrical materials, which are dissolved in a solvent. It can be deposited on to panels by a high-speed printing machine. When passed through an oven, the solvents evaporate, leaving behind circuits that react with sunlight to generate electrical currents. The result is a much cheaper solar cell that is more durable and has a similar density to water.
“Most printing factories have idle time when the presses aren’t being used. All we need to do is rent the spare capacity for an hourly fee,” said Cheema. “This means we can produce the cells almost anywhere in the world at short notice, and distribution costs will be minimal.”
If it works, the technology could be a shot in the arm for the solar industry. Today it costs about 12p per kilowatt hour to generate power from conventional solar technology — three times more than coal.
Cheema estimates that his solar ink could reduce costs by as much as 80%, opening up the solar energy market to billions of people in the developing world.
It seems hard to believe that the firm has succeeded where so many others have failed.
Solar Press certainly has ambitious plans. Cheema claims that the firm will be able to produce between 200 and 400 square metres of solar cells in one hour and 24,000 square metres of solar panels in 12 days.
That puts it on course to produce nine to ten gigawatts a year, roughly equal to the current output of the solar power industry.
The solar photovoltaic and thin-film technologies that today dominate the market rely on expensive raw materials that must be prepared in a vacuum at high temperature.
The Carbon Trust, the state-backed investment group, invested £1.5m in Solar Press a year ago to fund its spinout from Imperial College. Cheema is looking for several million more to ramp up production.
“We believe we can be profitable by the end of next year,” he said. “Other solar producers require hundreds of millions investment, but we need only $10m [£6.8m] in total before investors start to see a return. That’s because there is no capital outlay.”
The company will start by selling solar lights to the 800m households worldwide that have no electricity.

Five easy ways to make your company greener

2010-05-09T09:17:00.000+01:00

Tom Bawden

IT’s fashionable these days for big companies to talk about how “green” they are. Small firms do it less. Indeed some are only now waking up to the demands from clients, the public and the government.
The Institute of Directors estimates that small and medium-sized businesses can slash energy bills by 20%, and save more than £1 billion a year, by taking a range of fairly mundane steps. Below are five examples from real businesses.
The law firm
The office coffee machine is a source of refreshment, gathering point for gossip and, in the case of one London law firm, an extraordinary fount of rubbish.

Shelley Rowley of Speechly Bircham worked out that the firm went through 317,500 paper and plastic cups in a year, which is equivalent to 738 for each of its 430 workers.
“I couldn’t believe how many disposable cups we were getting through,” she said. “I took my findings to the finance director and said I’d like to remove disposable cups and ask people to use their own mugs.”
Staff have been extremely responsive and the bring-your-mug-to-work scheme cut the group’s annual £14,355 bill for cups.
The climbing centre
Staff at the Castle Climbing Centre in Stoke Newington, north London, do not just scale walls — they also do dumpsterdiving.
Sorting through rubbish to pick out recyclable items was one of several initiatives that workers suggested when Audrey Seguy, the managing director, asked how they could be better corporate citizens — and save some money.
“We found we were recycling tons of milk cartons and plastic bottles,” said Seguy. “Now we get our milk delivered in glass bottles and we have stopped selling bottled water in our café. Instead we sell reuseable bottles and provide water fountains. We have also provided recycling bins, with clear labels about what you put in them.”
These changes have helped the Castle, which has 40 full-time staff, cut its rubbish disposal bill by nearly £1,000 a year.
The architects
Workers at Heath Avery Architects have had to stock up on jumpers. Sarah Daly, managing director of the firm in Cheltenham, estimates that she has halved energy bills in the past 18 months with several simple measures, such as turning down the heating.
In the summer, she opens the windows rather than using the air-conditioning. The number of printers has been cut from six to two, and computers and lights are shut off at the end of every day.
The results have been dramatic. “We have made significant financial savings by reducing our energy use, but the benefits in terms of productivity are much greater,” said Daly. “Natural ventilation and daylight are much healthier than artificial light and air-conditioning, which is bad for the skin and can give you headaches.”
She added: “If people are walking round in their shirts in the winter, the office temperature is too high.”
The office supply fIrm
Every few days a lorryload of paper, pens and printers was delivered to Commercial Group, an office-supplies company, in Cheltenham. The products were unwrapped and the bubble wrap and foam packing they came in went straight into the skip.
Jason Hawkins, one of the firm’s employees, said: “We were unpacking stuff and throwing away the mountains of bubble wrap, shrinkwrap and boxes that it came in — then we were wrapping it back up in new packaging and shipping it out. It seemed a huge waste.
“So we asked the management if we could look into a way of reusing the packaging and we have been recycling most of it ever since.”
These days 98% of the packaging used by the company comes from incoming materials. The initiative is part of a broader green drive, which has allowed the company to reduce landfill rubbish from 100 skips a year to eight.

Green pioneers: Jungle millionaire Pedro Moura Costa in bid to save the Amazon

2010-05-09T09:15:00.000+01:00

Danny Fortson

PEDRO MOURA COSTA’s journey from plant scientist to eco-millionaire began on the end of a shovel in Borneo.
It was 1991 and the recent Oxford PhD had followed his wife to the island, where she had gone to study for her doctorate. It was there that he fell into what, at the time, was an unheard-of project.
The Dutch electricity board felt bad about a fossil-fuell power plant it had built in the Netherlands. To compensate, it bought a patch of rainforest in Sabah, Borneo, and put Moura Costa, a biotechnologist, in charge of rehabilitating it.
He was hooked on the idea. “It was a great experience, like living in the heart of darkness. There were elephants and orangutans in the garden,” he said.

“This was the time of the build-up to the 1992 Rio summit, where the idea that companies and countries should reduce emissions was officially launched. It seemed to me then that environmental finance was the best way to combat climate change.”
The experience was the inspiration for Eco Securities, the developer of low-carbon energy projects that he started not long after his return to Britain in 1997 with partner Marc Stuart. Seven months ago, JP Morgan, the American investment bank, bought the company for £122m. Moura Costa pocketed £12m for his 10% stake.
At 46, he is not sitting back to count his millions. He already has the next project in his sights: saving the Amazon.
Moura Costa has clubbed together with a handful of prominent Brazilians to launch Guardiam, a group that will invest in sustainable businesses in the Amazon. It is not a typical investment firm. The aim is to apply “private equity rigour but devote part of the proceeds to non-profit activities”.
In the past decade, 67,000 square miles of virgin Amazon forest, equal to Wales eight times over, has disappeared, gobbled up by logging, cattle-ranching and agriculture.
Deforestation is hugely damaging because it not only releases carbon dioxide locked in plants and soils, but also removes plant life that sucks CO2 out of the air. It accounts for 60% of Brazil’s pollution.
Moura Costa said: “It’s a daunting task, but this is a unique moment. Some of our founders have been directly involved with slowing deforestation. The Amazon is an enormous asset that could be exploited sustainably.”
Guardiam hopes to raise $300m (£202m) for its first fund later this year. Other partners include Henri Philippe Reichstul, former chief executive of Petrobras, the state oil giant, Ricardo Semler, a prominent Brazilian entrepreneur, and Joao Paulo Capobianco, the former environment minister who led the crackdown that has slowed the disappearance of the rainforest. In the next five years they aim to invest $5 billion in the Amazon.
It is a big ambition but Moura Costa is undeterred. He has had practice at going where others would not.
When he started Eco Securities, it was selling a product nobody thought they needed. The idea was to act as a facilitator, helping Western companies and governments find and fund clean-energy projects in the developing world. Poor countries would benefit from new low-carbon projects. Aside from the feelgood factor, though, there was nothing in it for Western backers.
That’s because the scheme that allows backers to claim “carbon credits” from the projects they fund abroad to offset the pollution they produce at home didn’t come into effect until 2000. Since then, 2,100 projects — two-thirds in China — have been certified under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
Eco Securities — under JP Morgan — is the biggest player in the market. The ride to the top wasn’t without controversy. Environmentalists claim the CDM is fatally flawed, allowing the rich world to delay costly measures at home by throwing money at a few dubious foreign projects.
In the past 18 months, the top two agencies that verify CDM projects have been suspended by the UN after being unable to prove they had vetted the projects they approved.
The fits and starts played havoc with Eco Securities’ business. Moura Costa left a year ago after a disagreement with the board. His attempt to buy back the company led to an auction that was ultimately won by JP Morgan.
He is sanguine about the outcome, an attitude surely helped by the £12m windfall. “I would have liked still to be running it, but I was also happy to sell out at that price,” said Moura Costa, who now has a vehicle called E2 to invest in new projects.
“When I started out I would knock on the doors of institutions and have to explain what emission reductions and carbon sequestration were. Nobody knew. Now most of them have teams of guys making a living out of this.”

Roadmap 2050 by Rem Koolhaas's OMA

2010-05-09T09:14:00.000+01:00

Rem Koolhaas has helped come up with a daring plan to run Europe on a grid of shared renewable energy – and redraw the map of the continent at the same time
Rowan Moore
The Observer, Sunday 9 May 2010
I well remember my interview for a place at architecture school. As a kindly tutor leafed through my cobbled-together portfolio, on the wall I noticed a photo of a trapezoidal cabin with a whirly helical thing on top. It was, I was told, a prototype of an energy-efficient house, a concept of which I was then only dimly conscious.
That was more decades ago than I care to think, and it goes to show that green architecture is nothing new. It goes to the heart of the paradox most architects face: they tend to be hopeful, liberal types who want to change things for the better, but construction requires money and power, which are not always in the hands of the nicest people. So nice architects find themselves working for not-nice clients. Similarly with environmental matters: buildings gobble energy and resources in their construction and use, so the most ecological thing might be not to build them at all, but that would put architects out of work. So they are drawn to that conscience-salving potential oxymoron, the green building.
Just as what was once called health food has gone from muddy lentils to crisp Ottolenghi sophistication, so green architecture has been through many phases. For a while, it wore its ecology on its sleeve, sticking conspicuous turbines and ventilators on roofs, as in the large bronze chimneys over Portcullis House, the MPs' office building next to Big Ben. Now it tends to be a more technical matter, governed by the calculations of the engineering consultancies that have grown up to make buildings sustainable.
There has also been a shift in scale since my tutor's cabin. Now architects design green cities, such as Dongtan in China, or Foster and Partners' $22bn Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, which is currently on show at the Sustainable Futures exhibition at the Design Museum. But none have gone as far as the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the practice created by Rem Koolhaas. It is proposing to redesign an entire continent – ours, Europe – along energy-saving lines. In fact, they would like to include North Africa as well. As Reinier de Graaf, the partner in charge of the proposal, says: "Megalomania is a standard part of our repertoire."
Called Roadmap 2050, it is a plan calculated to make the Ukip-ians of this world bubble and froth with rage, as it combines the belief that drastic intervention is required to mitigate climate change, with a desire to give meaning and power to the European Union. It has been commissioned by the European Climate Foundation, a philanthropic body dedicated to promoting policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and it aims to show how the EU can achieve an incredible-seeming target of an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. The proposal is being considered by the EU Council of Ministers, for their possible endorsement.
The proposal's starting point is the fact that renewable energy sources such as wind and sunshine are erratic and unreliable, which means they have to be supported by other forms of power. But they are also available in different quantities in different places – wind is abundant in Britain, sun in Spain – and in different seasons. The big idea is to create a power network across the continent linking all these sources, which could then compensate for each other. If it was windless in Britain but sunny in Spain, power could travel from them to us, and vice versa.
This is a political, as well as a technical proposal. "You can use this project to create integration. It creates a very pragmatic reason to integrate," says De Graaf. It coincides with work the OMA has been doing for several years on the ways that the European Union represents itself, through their design and research subsidiary AMO, which "operates in areas beyond the traditional boundaries of architecture". Koolhaas is a member of the EU's Reflection Group, whose job is to think about what might happen a decade or two hence.
With a cheeky, provocative tone typical of OMA, they even show a map of Europe redrawn as "Eneropa", with regions defined by their energy source. Ireland and the western half of Britain become the "tidal states", while the eastern half forms part of the "isles of wind". Former Yugoslavia is miraculously reunited as "Biomassburg". Most of Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece become "Solaria". OMA shows images of these places, like postcards from the future, with batteries of turbines, or plumes of geothermal steam.
OMA insists that its plan makes sense, even if you exclude climate issues. It has produced figures to show that the scheme would not cost all that much per head, especially when compared with road-building, war in Iraq, or bailing out bankers. They point out the benefit of reducing reliance on Middle Eastern oil and Russian gas. They argue that the economic benefits would outweigh the costs. They say that a reduction of even more than 80% could be achieved if North Africa, with all its sunshine, could be included in the grid. Their plan, they say, is "not rooted in apocalyptic hysteria", but is eminently practical.
It's a seductive proposition: go green and get richer. It is also refreshing and unusual to hear architects proposing environmental strategies that do not require the future commissioning of architects to design buildings. It also raises an obvious question: what on earth qualifies architects who spend most of their time designing museums or office buildings or Prada stores to pronounce on these subjects? This is partly answered by the fact that OMA is not acting alone, but is part of a team that includes management consultants McKinsey, energy consultants Kema and Imperial College London. But OMA still takes responsibility for the "overarching vision".
The other question is whether to believe them. OMA has over the years shown me new cities on islands off Korea, the transposition of Amsterdam Schiphol airport into the North Sea, and the redesign of the European flag of gold stars on blue into a multicoloured barcode derived from the flags of its different nations. So far all these ideas have remained on paper. Is there any reason to think the Roadmap would be different?
It is plain that their plan would need will and cohesion that has not been evident in, for example, the EU's attempts to solve the Greek debt crisis. Reinier de Graaf cites as a model President Kennedy's declaration that, before the 1960s were out, America would put men on the moon, but Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Union, is no Jack Kennedy. However, De Graaf argues that European countries cooperate better at a practical level than an ideological one. He also stresses that the Roadmap "doesn't require member states to give up their identities. It allows states to be themselves."
I have, frankly, no idea if by 2050 anything like this network will exist, or whether it will join the ranks of the fantastical and doomed, along with the cities teeming with autogyros imagined in the 1930s, or the 1960s' faith in the future ubiquity of hovercrafts. I doubt if anyone else knows, either. But, of all the abstract speculations about what sustainable futures might look like, there has not previously been one so tangible or engaging. Its value at the very least is to get people thinking about what, actually, we do want. OMA's Roadmap is either prophecy or provocation, but whichever way it's worth having.

The innovator: Hermione Taylor

2010-05-09T09:13:00.000+01:00

The green sponsorship campaigner, 26, is asking people to pledge not money but a promise to minimise their carbon footprint
Lucy Siegle
The Observer, Sunday 9 May 2010

"I get referred to as an entrepreneur now," says Hermione Taylor, sounding more than a little freaked out. "It's strange – I never thought I'd set my own thing up." With a masters in environmental studies, Taylor assumed she'd just work for an environmental organisation and chip away at policy and global law. But then she became convinced that not only were individual actions key to scaling down emissions but that there was a way of encouraging a broader audience to make behavioural changes without lecturing them or boring them into defiance.
After finishing her studies last year, Taylor and a friend cycled to Morocco. "I wasn't comfortable asking for money, but people like to invest in other people's crazy trips, so I asked them to pledge to change to low-carbon behaviours instead."
She'd hit upon a new sponsorship model that replaces cash with action. The action is geared towards cutting greenhouse gas emissions. On her first trip to Morocco she saved 16 tonnes of carbon, which amounts to "1,600 balloons full", or the equivalent of 80 flights. Now in receipt of her first grant, she hopes to have a version of justsaving.org up and running by the end of this summer. Anyone taking part in a challenging event, from a marathon to a sponsored silence, can register. Their supporters will then pick from 30-40 green actions, ranging from simple commitments like cutting down on meat and washing their clothes at 30C to installing solar thermal heating. Taylor has high hopes: "In the first year I hope to remove 8,000 tonnes of carbon through the action of 120,000 sponsors. The main reason I think it will work is that it's a powerful way of giving people that incentive to do things that they've ignored or kept putting it off."

How to sell green energy

2010-05-09T09:11:00.000+01:00

Linking oil dependency with US national security is an effective tactic to win public support for clean energy reform

Sahil Kapur
guardian.co.uk, Friday 7 May 2010 22.00 BST
Fox News has revealingly declined to air an ad that emphasizes the national security perils of remaining dependent on oil in a call for clean energy reform. The decision by the network – primarily a communications arm for the Republican party's right flank – underlies an important lesson for proponents of energy legislation as they unveil their legislation this Wednesday: it's wiser to sell reform on the basis of national security and jobs, rather than the environment or climate change.
"Every day Congress doesn't pass a clean energy climate plan our enemies get stronger," says the ad, which uses menacing imagery of Iran and urges lawmakers to enact legislation to "cut our dependence on foreign oil" and "cut oil profits for hostile nations." The spot, created by the veterans group VoteVets, is airing on CNN and MSNBC, but was deemed "too confusing" by America's top-rated cable news network, reported Ben Smith of Politico. Fox didn't elaborate.
The link between oil dependence and national security isn't a new concept, but it's one that makes Republicans – and by extension Fox News – uncomfortable. They delight in their image as safety hawks but hope to scuttle President Obama's energy bill, so they don't want this to become a battle over security. Thus Democrats would be wise to get behind this narrative if they want America to face up to the energy realities of the 21st century.For the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, far from invigorating the fight for energy and climate change reform, has weakened its prospects in Congress – a clear sign that environmental concerns alone, no matter how grave, won't spur Washington into action. Times have really changed, because this wasn't always the case.
The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill brought us Earth Day and the National Environmental Policy Act. The 1989 Exxon Valdez tragedy paved the way for a stronger Clean Air Act. Today, the BP spill, shaping up to be the worst ecological disaster in US history, hasn't induced opponents of stronger environmental regulations to concede an inch. President Obama remains committed to lifting a longstanding moratorium on offshore oil drilling in vast swaths of coastal areas. What gives?
For starters, the belief that humans are contributing to global warming has consistently been declining nationally. Chalk that up to a relentless and extravagant campaign by the fossil fuel industry and conservatives, whose agendas are threatened by the realities of the climate change, to manufacture doubts about universally accepted science. Second, the recession has dampened the appeal of environmental action, which most perceive as less immediate and a threat to their bank accounts.
The policy priorities of Americans shine a light on this. A Pew Research Centre survey in January found that the top three issues on voters' minds are the "economy," "jobs," and "terrorism." "Energy" came in 11th, the "environment" 16th and "global warming" 21st. This is in spite of the fact that, as the Associated Press reported last November, "climate change has worsened and accelerated beyond some of the grimmest of warnings" in 1997, the year of the Kyoto Treaty.
Thus Republicans and right-wing Democrats aren't fazed by the spill. In fact, House Republican leader John Boehner and Democratic senator Mary Landrieu said it emphasizes the need for more oil drilling. The clean energy industry can't meaningfully compete with fossil fuels absent a price on carbon (something economists might call "internalising an externality"), which special interest-backed lawmakers won't easily support.
The best chance, then, for progressives to break the gridlock and launch a serious debate in Washington about alternative energy – in which the rest of the Western world and even China is racing ahead – is to streamline their messaging and make sure Americans know it would produce enormous long-term benefits in the way of green jobs and domestic security – by ending reliance on hostile foreign regimes.
Democratic Senator John Kerry and independent Joe Lieberman will unveil a comprehensive energy bill on Wednesday, likely without the support of Republican Lindsey Graham, who backed out on Friday. As proponents of reform work to drive their message home, they would be smart to heed the political lesson of the Gulf spill, and focus on the energy-related concerns that capture the attention and support of Americans.

Ultra-Efficient Bladeless Wind Turbine Inspired by Nikolai Tesla

2010-05-07T08:26:00.000+01:00

by Philip Proefrock, 05/06/10
SolarAero recently unveiled a new bladeless wind turbine that offers several advantages over current wind turbines — it emits hardly any noise in operation, has few moving parts, and since it doesn’t use spinning blades it’s much less of a hazard to bats and birds. The whole assembly is inside an enclosed housing, with screened inlets and outlets to keep animals safely out. It also can be installed on sensitive locations such as radar installations or sites under surveillance where the rotating blades cause detrimental effects. Read on to learn what makes it work.

Whether they are vertical axis or horizontal axis, typical wind turbines work by catching moving air with blades, and using that force to rotate the axle, which turns a generator to produce electricity. Instead of pushing on blades, SolarAero’s turbine is based on the Tesla turbine originally developed by Nikolai Tesla. The principle of the Tesla turbine is to set up an array of closely-spaced, very thin, and extremely smooth metal disks. The viscous flow of air moving in parallel to the disks is what propels the turbine, instead of buffeting blades with moving air. This makes for a more compact mechanism with only one moving part: the turbine-driveshaft assembly.
According to the company, this turbine should cost around $1.50 per watt of rated output, and have a lifetime operating cost of about 12 cents per kilowatt-hour — comparable to, or even better than, current retail electrical rates in many parts of the country. This would make the SolarAero turbine about 2/3 the price of a comparable bladed unit, and because of the significantly lower operating costs, lifetime maintenance could be just 1/4 the cost. At this point the project is still under development, and no manufacturer has been lined up as of yet.
+ SolarAeroRead more: Ultra Efficient Bladeless Wind Turbine Inspired by Nikolai Tesla Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World

Enerkem Awarded $3.35 Million For Biofuel Facility

2010-05-07T08:22:00.000+01:00

Transforming residential waste into biofuel is a step closer to becoming a reality as Enerkem received $3.35 million today from the Biorefining Commercialization and Market Development Program sponsored by Alberta Energy to develop a plant in Edmontion.Today’s award brings Enerkem’s total funding for the plant to $23.5 million as the company has already received $20 million from the City of Edmonton and Alberta.Groundbreaking on the Enerkam GreenField Alberta Biofuels (EGAB) will take place this summer. When completed, the plant will use residential waste that was headed for landfills to produce a green transportation fuel. The plant will also produce enough ethanol to fuel 400,000 cars per year running on a 5 percent ethanol blend.
“Our Edmonton waste-to-biofuels facility will influence cities in North America, and around the world, in how they manage their waste and it promises to revolutionize the fuels market,” said Vincent Chornet, president and chief executive officer at Enerkem.
In December 2009 Enerkem received $50 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Enerty to construct and operate a waste-to-biofuels facility to be located in Pontotoc, Mississippi. That plant is expected to produce 20 million gallons of biofuel per year.
Based in Montreal, Canada, Enerkem is a private company that has received funding from U.S venture capital firms Rho Ventures and Braemar Energy Ventures

Underwater Ocean Kites To Harvest Tidal Energy

2010-05-07T08:20:00.000+01:00

Thursday May 06, @02:40PM
eldavojohn writes "A Swedish startup has acquired funding for beginning scale model trials of underwater kites, which would be secured to a turbine to harness tidal energy for power. The company reports that the kite device allows the attached turbine to harvest energy at 10 times the speed of the actual tidal current. With a 12-meter wingspan on the kite, the company says they could harvest 500 kilowatts while it's operational. This novel new design is one of many in which a startup or university hope to turn the ocean into a renewable energy source."

Gulf of Mexico oil spill: fears over impact of 'untested' dispersant

2010-05-07T08:19:00.000+01:00

A US environmental group has raised concerns over the use of a dispersant being used to tackle the oil leak threatening disaster along the Gulf Coast, saying its impact on marine life was unclear.

Published: 7:00AM BST 07 May 2010

Larry Schweiger, National Wildlife Federation head, said the method of using underwater dispersant at the source of the leak was untested and could have devastating effects.
"The problem with putting the underwater dispersant where they're putting them is that they've never done that before," said Mr Schweiger.

He said concerns included how the chemical would migrate after being deployed and whether it would severely harm marine life since it was already deep underwater, unlike when it is deployed on the surface.
"The increasing use of dispersant has left a number of questions about where this material is moving to," said Mr Schweiger.
The US Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged in a statement that the ramifications of the underwater dispersant were unclear and said it had only authorized two tests of the method for that reason.
"The tests were done to determine if the dispersant would be effective in breaking up the oil and helping to control the leaks," the EPA said.
"No further use of dispersants underwater is planned until BP provides the results of these tests for our review."
The agency said "the effects of underwater dispersant use on the environment are still widely unknown, which is why we are testing to determine its effectiveness first and foremost."
It noted that BP remains authorised to use the dispersant on the water's surface.
An organisation representing Gulf Coast shrimp fishermen has also raised concerns about the use of dispersants.
An official from US oceans and weather agency NOAA, Doug Helton, said dispersant was one tool to fight the oil leak and "any response technique is a tradeoff."
He stressed the importance of fighting the slick offshore, before it enters fragile wetlands on the Gulf Coast.
The leak from a British Petroleum well in the Gulf is spewing out oil at a rate of some 5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons, a day.

Gulf of Mexico oil slick: Sarah Palin fuels anti-British sentiment

2010-05-07T07:17:00.000+01:00

Sarah Palin has fuelled growing anti-British sentiment over the Gulf of Mexico oil rig disaster by saying "foreign" oil companies like BP were not to be trusted.

Nick Allen in Louisiana Published: 5:37PM BST 06 May 2010

Visitors fear that oil may wash up on their holiday beaches Photo: AP
The former Alaska governor and potential 2012 presidential candidate attacked the British oil giant over the recent Deepwater Horizon spill and a previous one in her state in 2006.
Her comments came despite the fact her husband Todd Palin worked for BP for 18 years, as a production supervisor, and only left the company last year to spend more time with his family.

Mrs Palin urged those in the Gulf of Mexico to "learn from Alaska's lesson with foreign oil companies." She added: "Don't naively trust – verify." As an oil slick the size of Luxembourg loomed off the US coast her intervention added to growing anger at BP among environmentalists and those who face losing their livelihoods.
Kristina Johnson, of the Sierra Club, America's largest grassroots environmental group, said: "They're the ones who have profited from oil and from our oceans. They're the ones who put the Gulf Coast at risk so that they could rake in record profits."
Captain Damon McKnight, a fishing boat captain in Venice, Louisiana, said: "If I was to go and cause a problem I would be expected to clean it up. My biggest beef is BP is really falling behind in the clean up process.
"There's all this oil out there and virtually nobody cleaning it. It's not getting done."
A 100-ton "containment dome" has arrived at the spot where the Deepwater Horizon rig sank 50 miles (80km) off the Louisiana coast on April 22.
BP hopes that by lowering the 40ft high concrete and steel contraption over the leaks, nearly a mile down, it will be able to capture 200,000 gallons of oil a day which is spewing out. The tactic has never been tried before at such a depth.
Mrs Palin, who promoted the slogan "Drill, baby, drill," said she continues to support offshore drilling but the US should not rely on foreign countries for oil.
In 2006, shortly before she became governor, a BP pipeline in Alaska spilt 200,000 gallons of oil at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.
Investigators blamed the spill on corrosion and BP was eventually ordered to pay $20 million (£12 million) in fines and restitution.
Months before the Deepwater Horizon spill two congressmen raised concerns about BP's operations in Alaska. They said there had been four "significant" incidents in two years and warned proposed budget cuts might compromise safety.

Global IT brands urged to be more accountable for pollution in China supply chain

2010-05-07T07:16:00.000+01:00

Investigation by coalition of Chinese environmental groups accuses global IT brands of supply chain links to heavy metal poisoning cases in China

Jonathan Watts, Asia environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 May 2010 16.03 BST
Vodafone, BT and 27 other leading technology companies must do more to come clean about the potentially dirty and dangerous side of their manufacturing operations in China, according to a new investigation into heavy metal poisoning in the supply chains of global IT brands.
The investigation – carried out by a coalition of 34 Chinese environmental groups – traced a link between lead and cadmium contamination cases and the production of materials for mobile phone batteries and computer circuit boards for foreign companies.
Their findings suggest corporate promises at home of clean production, transparency and accountability can be lost overseas in the complex myriad of supply chains.
More than 4,000 people – mostly children – have been found to have unsafe levels of lead in their blood over the past year in a widening heavy metal poisoning case across several Chinese provinces.
Several of the cases have been widely reported but, until now, the focus of coverage has been on the Chinese factories involved and the weak oversight of environmental authorities. The new report adds a global context by highlighting the responsibility of the big IT firms higher up the supply chain to provide more information to the public and to ensure that low-cost production is not carried out at the expense of local people's health.
Following the supply trail, the investigators found that Shanghang Huaqiang Battery – which was implicated in the lead poisoning of 121 children in Fujian province last year – was a key equipment manufacturer for Narada Power Source. A screen grab of the latter's website claims it is a supplier for Vodafone, BT, and other leading global mobile telecoms brands. They also discovered several other violations, including the discharge of pollution into a Dongguan sewer by a Hong Kong-listed supplier of two multinational computer manufacturers.
The coalition of Chinese NGOs, which include Friends of Nature, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs and Green Earth Volunteers, have contacted the named firms to ask for clarification, but the response has been mixed.
They say they have received prompt replies from some. But other firms, such as Vodafone and BT have not returned their calls and messages.
The NGOs have called on the foreign firms to be more accountable to the public.
"If a brand calls itself environmentally friendly and in favour of sustainable development, they should be concerned if their supply chains violate environment regulations," said Zhang Boju of Friends of Nature. "The least they should do is to reply to our request for information."
BT said it would reply after an internal investigation into the allegations. "To the best of our knowledge and belief, BT isn't procuring Shanghang Huaqiang Battery Company products via third-party suppliers. However, as part of our ethical and sustainable procurement policy, we are now reviewing this with supply chain partners to ensure that this is the case on a 100% basis," a spokesman wrote in an email reply to the Guardian.
Vodafone said it was unaware of the approach by the NGOs, but that it had a stringent code for ethical purchasing.
In an email response by the press office, the UK company said it had not been aware of the environment problems until last September, when its supplier - Narada - stopped all business with Shanghang after the lead poisoning came to light. Vodafone continues to source batteries from Narada, which it says "has extensive environmental, health and safety, and labour standard management systems in place."
But in a reflection of the problems that have emerged, the UK firm said it had updated its ethical purchasing code this year and was in the process of publishing a set of environmental principles for suppliers of mobile devices.
"These include a clause to reduce overall environmental impacts and hazardous materials in batteries," the company said.
The authors of the report expressed disappointment at the lack of a direct reply from the two UK companies and warned of complacency, particularly on the part of Vodafone.
"Their statement suggests everything is now in place. How can they say that after such a serious case in their supply chain?" said Ma Jun, the founder of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs and a key figure in the NGO's study. "They demonstrated not a slim sense of sympathy or regret that the product it sourced was made by a factory that contributed to such a serious damage to the health of local communities."
It was not good enough, he said, for the firm to simply switch away from a supplier after it was found to have caused an environmental problem.
"I hope British companies like Vodafone and BT, known for their environmental commitment, could take the lead in greening the globalised manufacturing and sourcing. Not only is it essential in fulfilling their own environmental commitment, but it will be the single biggest help they could make in pollution control efforts in China and other developing countries."

South African tourism minister favourite to replace Yvo de Boer

2010-05-07T07:15:00.000+01:00

Marthinus van Schalkwyk tipped as likely successor as UN looks to developing country with rising influence in UN climate talks
Reuters
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 May 2010 16.00 BST

South Africa's minister of tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk is front-runner to replace Yvo de Boer as UN climate chief, sources familiar with the selection process told Reuters on Thursday.
The run-off is between developing country candidates, reflecting their rising status in stalled UN climate talks to agree a successor to the existing Kyoto protocol. De Boer, of the Netherlands, steps down on July 1 after almost four years.
An interview panel had selected a final shortlist of van Schalkwyk and Costa Rica's Christiana Figueres, one source said, adding van Schalkwyk had the support of key countries. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon would make the final decision.
A western diplomat based in New York agreed those two were the favoured candidates.
"The front runner is Marthinus," said a third source, also on condition of anonymity.
"The positive arguments are that he is a minister and so can talk to ministers, and has been a governor of a state so knows how to manage. You need a politician to deal with politicians."
Van Schalkwyk was premier of Western Cape Province from 2002 to 2004. Figueres has been a member of the Costa Rican climate negotiating team since 1995. Her father, Jose Figueres Ferrer, was president of Costa Rica three times.
Norwegian environment minister Erik Solheim praised van Schalkwyk. "He is a very strong candidate, as he was the South African minister of the environment (before taking his present post), but there are other strong candidates," he told Reuters.
"It's very likely that Secretary-General Ban will appoint someone from a developing nation. That would mean a move from Europe to the developing nations and I think that's very sound."
South Africa has proposed some of the most ambitious curbs on carbon emissions among developing countries. However, it recently courted criticism from environmentalists by pushing ahead with plans for one of the world's largest coal power plants.
De Boer announced in February he would step down, saying a new era of diplomacy was starting after the Copenhagen climate summit last December fell short of agreeing a new treaty to replace the Kyoto protocol which comes to an end after 2012.

Leading scientists condemn 'political assaults' on climate researchers

2010-05-07T07:13:00.000+01:00

Open letter defends the integrity of climate science and hits out at recent attacks driven by 'special interests or dogma' •
Celia Cole
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 May 2010 19.00 BST
A group of 255 of the world's top scientists today written an open letter aimed at restoring public faith in the integrity of climate science.
In a strongly worded reproof of the recent escalation of political assaults on climatologists, the letter, published in the US Journal Science and signed by 11 Nobel laureates, attacks critics driven by "special interests or dogma" and "McCarthy-like" threats against researchers. It also attempts to set the record straight on the process of rigorous scientific research.
The letter is a response to negative publicity following the release of thousands of hacked emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and two mistakes makes by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN climate body.
The letter sets out some basic features of the scientific method. "Like all human beings, scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designed to find and correct them. But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeply tested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of 'well-established theories' and are often spoken of as 'facts'," it says.
The document, citing theories including the age and origin of the Earth, the Big Bang and Darwin's evolution by natural selection, says that anthropogenic climate change is now so well-supported by evidence that it has achieved the same status. It adds that owing to science's adversarial nature, "fame" awaits any scientists who can prove the theory wrong.
"There is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change," the letter says.
The authors – who are all members of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the country's premier scientific institution – include some of the academic community's most distinguished climate researchers. But the list also includes top anthropologists, biochemistists and physicists who have felt the need to defend climate science in the wake of what they regard as politically motivated attacks. Three senior scientists from the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Manchester have also added their endorsement. All of the scientists signed up in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the National Academy or on behalf of their institution.
"Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence," the letter says.
Its call for an end to "McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association" appears to be jibe at Republican senator, James Inhofe, who has called for a criminal investigation into US and British climatologists whose email exchanges were stolen from UEA. The letter also condemns the "harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them."
The letter's co-ordinator, Peter Gleick, of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Oakland, California, said: "[It] originated with a number of NAS members who were frustrated at the misinformation being spread by climate deniers and the assaults on scientists by some policy-makers who hope to delay or avoid making policy decisions and are hiding behind the recent controversy around emails and minor errors in the IPCC."

First zero-carbon super-yacht to ease conscience of world's billionaires

2010-05-07T07:11:00.000+01:00

British designer says £40m solar-powered vessel will appeal to clients searching for eco-luxury•

Robert Booth
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 May 2010 15.16 BST

It is the super-yacht for the carbon-conscious billionaire. Instead of polluting the Caribbean and Mediterranean with clouds of diesel smoke, oligarchs and sheikhs are being offered the chance to sail zero-carbon, with everything from their on-board plasma televisions and champagne fridges to the main propellor being powered by the sun.
A 24-year-old British boat designer has drawn up plans for what is thought to be the world's first carbon-neutral super-yacht, and has received inquiries from wealthy potential clients after unveiling the designs at recent yacht shows in Monaco and Abu Dhabi.
Alistair Callender, from Chichester in West Sussex, is promoting the idea of "eco-luxury" with plans for Soliloquy, an electricity-powered craft covered in photovoltaic film that harnesses the power of the sun. Fixed sails will double as solar panels to produce enough energy to propel the 58-metre-long boat at a cruising speed of eight knots, and even the hull will be made of sustainable timber instead of the usual more energy-intensive aluminium.
According to Hein Velema, one of the most prominent yacht brokers based in Monaco, his richest clients are intrigued by the idea of that their next floating mansion could be zero-carbon.
"I was sceptical at first, but I have spoken to a few clients who are willing to spend a serious amount extra to go green," he said. "In the current climate we are unlikely to see as many yachts as large as the Eclipse, but people will want to be first in other ways, such as being the first with a green yacht."
Last June, the world's largest private yacht, the 163-metre Eclipse, owned by Roman Abramovich, was launched complete with a military-grade missile defence system and an escape submarine. Callender said he intends his £40m vessel to appeal to the super-rich who until the global economic crisis competed to own ever larger, and often more polluting, yachts.
The global craze peaked in 2008 when 260 yachts longer than 30 metres were launched. The royal families of the UAE and Oman have spent hundreds of millions of pounds on yachts that look more like cruise ships and burn thousands of litres of diesel an hour.
A conventional yacht of the same size as Soliloquy powered on the usual marine diesel can burn up to 2,000 litres an hour travelling at 35 knots, according to Yacht Carbon Offset, a company that provides carbon offsetting for clients including Sir Philip Green, the retail magnate. A two-hour journey at that speed creates 12 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Such a craft can use a further 1,000 litres a day just to power the air-conditioning and electrical systems.
"These giant gin palaces use a huge amount of fuel and produce so much pollution, I wanted to prove the point that eco-luxury no longer needs to be an oxymoron," Callender said. "Even if billionaires don't want to be green, they can save money. There are at least 100 families around the world worth £200m or more who have invested in green technologies and businesses or made hefty financial commitments to the environment." That list includes the likes of Sir Richard Branson and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Soliloquy will feature three fixed sails rising up to 17 metres. They have been designed with solar panels built in by Solar Sailor, which has built solar-powered ferries operating in Sydney and Hong Kong and is currently helping the US navy develop unmanned solar-powered boats. The sails will be able to power the boat in winds up to 40 knots.
The superstructure of the boat above the waterline will be clad in energy-gathering photovoltaic cells, giving it a sleek, black appearance. Together with the sails, the solar panels will fuel four cells that will work in conjunction with diesel engines beneath deck when there is not enough solar power. Callender predicts the engines will only need to be fired on rare occasions, because super-yachts are mostly used in sunny climes.
The interior is likely to feature recycled leather, natural fibre upholstery and wood only from sustainable forests.

Bluechip Energy To Provide 25kW Solar Photovoltaic System For Abio Corporation

2010-05-06T08:10:00.000+01:00

Expected To Be One Of The Largest Private Commercial Solar Energy Installations In Central Florida
By Lawrence Hefler
Lake Mary, FL
BlueChip Energy™, a provider of complete solar energy solutions for residential, commercial, and utility applications, today announced that it has started the installation of a 25kW solar generator system to provide renewable energy for Abio Corporation in Orlando.
"Abio Corporation now has a solar electric system that will help reduce their long term energy costs. Should electricity rates increase in the coming years, the dollar value of the energy produced by the system will increase proportionately"
The system is ideally suited for a small business and is expected to help offset the electric bills of the company by over $7000 per year. The Fusion™ 25kW Solar Generator was developed specifically for commercial applications. The system will produce 25,000 watts of electricity from Florida sunlight. 25,000 watts of electricity can power light commercial office buildings and warehouses with 100% green energy that does not create any carbon emissions. It’s the equivalent of preventing 18 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from being released.
Abio Corporation invents products and manufactures them in the United States. Their goal is to make the best innovative products that will help people live a better life. “We chose alternative energy because we want to reduce our manufacturing costs and remain competitive in the new and ever changing international business community. We selected BlueChip because they are a local company that helps with local employment and advances technical skills for its employees”, said Phillip Mark, Owner and President of Abio Corporation.
The Fusion 25kW Solar Generator System will consist of 110 mono-crystalline solar modules rated at 230 watts, and five 5kW inverters. BlueChip Energy will provide the design and installation. Monocrystalline solar modules are the most efficient available, minimizing the footprint of the system. The system will be mounted on the rooftop of the Abio location on Kingspointe Parkway in Orlando. The solar modules carry a 25 year limited power warranty guaranteeing energy production for 25 years.
“Abio Corporation now has a solar electric system that will help reduce their long term energy costs. Should electricity rates increase in the coming years, the dollar value of the energy produced by the system will increase proportionately” said Tom Cernera, Vice President, Commercial Sales for BlueChip Energy.
With the Federal Tax Credit and the State of Florida solar energy rebate, the cost of the Fusion 25kW system has been dramatically reduced for small companies like Abio Corporation. The Florida solar rebate expires on June 30th, 2010.

On the Radar: Evergreen Solar, Solarfun Power, and Suntech Power

2010-05-06T08:06:00.000+01:00

5/5/2010 12:30 PM

So, it seems that the concept of the solar-stock trifecta is a recurring theme this week. Thanks to a total dud of an earnings report and the work of one very industrious equities analyst, a trio of solar stocks appeared on my radar bright and early today. Read on to find out what's happening with Evergreen Solar, Inc. (ESLR), Solarfun Power Holdings Co., Ltd. (SOLF), and Suntech Power Holdings Co., Ltd. (STP).
Evergreen Solar, Inc. (ESLR) has backpedaled nearly 3% this afternoon as traders react to the company's earnings report. ESLR swung to a wider-than-expected first-quarter loss, and warned that it expects price declines during the second half of the year. As a result, the shares are now testing short-term technical support at the $1.10 level.
On the heels of this news, call volume on ESLR has surged to 17 times the norm, with more than 5,000 contracts changing hands. The stock's June 1 call has seen 5,010 contracts trade on open interest of 2,314, revealing that new positions are being added at this strike today.
Meanwhile, Solarfun Power Holdings Co., Ltd. (SOLF) has battled back from an early dip to gain 1.4% this afternoon. Wells Fargo started coverage of the stock with an "outperform" rating, with analyst Sam Dubinsky observing that SOLF is "leaving the penalty box" due to management changes and an improved cost structure. (The prolific Dubinsky initiated coverage of no fewer than six solar stocks today.)
The bullish note could be prompting short sellers to hit the exits, as 10.3% of the equity's float is dedicated to short interest. At SOLF's average daily trading volume, this translates to about 2.4 days' worth of pent-up buying pressure.
Finally, Suntech Power Holdings Co., Ltd. (STP) is off 2.8% as we enter the second half of the session, as traders seem none too impressed by the stock's new "market perform" rating from Wells Fargo. The stock has now gapped below short-term resistance from its 10-day and 20-day moving average, and it's testing support in the $12.50 region.
In today's session, the most active STP option is the June 15 put, with 873 contracts crossing the tape. About 79% of these contracts have traded at the ask price, and implied volatility is up 4.1% at last check. In other words, it looks as though traders are adding new bearish bets at this strike today.-posted by Elizabeth Harrow (eharrow@sir-inc.com)5/5/2010 12:30 PM

Solar panels: a tax-free return of 10pc pa

2010-05-06T07:23:00.000+01:00

A tax-free, index-linked return of 10 per cent a year, guaranteed for 25 years may sound too good to be true.

By John GreenwoodPublished: 7:59AM BST 06 May 2010
A tax-free, index-linked return of 10pc a year, guaranteed for 25 years may sound too good to be true. But this is the level of return the Government claims you could receive by investing in a solar panel system for your home.
If you think installing solar panels is only for those committed to ecological issues, a new government scheme designed to increase uptake of renewable energy may make you think again.

The Department for Energy and Climate Change's (DECC) Clean Energy Cashback Scheme is offering big financial incentives to anyone installing solar panels in a bid to make doing so stack up as an investment to even committed climate-sceptics.
The cashback scheme, also known as the Feed-in tariff, has been going since April. Grants for solar panels have been abolished and replaced with a system where people who install them are rewarded for every unit of energy generated by their system. Energy companies are also required by law to buy back any excess they generate.
To qualify for the scheme you have to install solar photovoltaic panels, known as solar PV.
This type of panel generates electricity from sunlight. The scheme currently does not cover the other main type of solar panel, solar thermal, which warms the water in your boiler system, although the DECC aims to bring thermal systems on board from April 2011, albeit with lower cash rebates.
Wind-generated electricity is now covered under the scheme, however.
The scheme promises to reward investors in three ways. Firstly, you are paid the ''generation tariff'', which is a direct payment from your energy supplier for each unit of electricity you generate.
This starts at 41.3p per kilowatt/hour (kWh), and is fixed by statute to increase in line with the retail price index for the next 25 years. The second saving is under the ''export tariff'', which is a payment made for energy you export back into the electricity grid rather than use on site.
This pays an extra 3p per kWh. Finally, you also make savings on your electricity bills, now saving you about 13p per kWh.
"The biggest financial savings through solar go to those who use all or most of the electricity they generate. This means the retired or those who work from home get the best return on investment because they get the saving on their electricity bill as well as the feed-in payment," says Charlotte Webster, public relations manager at Solar Century, a solar panel provider.
Systems cost between £8,000 and £14,000, but the Energy Saving Trust says a 2kWp panel will supply about 40pc of the energy used each year by the average gas-heated home.
This would typically give a total saving of about £830 a year, and could also reduce your carbon footprint to the tune of almost one tonne of CO2.
The Government says systems should pay for themselves within about 12 years and should give real returns of 5 to 8pc or 7 to 10pc when allowing for inflation. These returns are based on electricity inflation continuing at 6pc a year, its average level for the past 10 years.
If energy costs rise higher, savings will be greater, but they will be less if they fall. The scheme is being funded by a levy on the bills of everybody else, with British households each paying on average £6.50 a year more to subsidise the Feed-in tariff payments.
Some environmentalists have criticised the scheme as a cash giveaway to wealthier people who have the money to invest and who own the property in which a system is installed.
But not everybody is convinced that solar panels are a one-way financial bet. Mark Dampier, head of investment at Hargreaves Lansdown, an IFA, points out that while Feed-in tariff payments are tax-free now, there is nothing to stop a future chancellor changing this.
Nor is it impossible for future ministers to cut tariffs.
"A return of 8pc a year sounds fantastic, but I am suspicious of anything backed by the Government," says Mr Dampier. "The idea of politicians guaranteeing anything for 25 years seems fanciful to me – you have just got to look at what they have done to pensions.
"What's more, the technology is still in its infancy. You could spend a lot of money putting a system on your roof that in a few years time will seem dated and inefficient."
Ken Rumph, a financial analyst at Nomura Code, a subsidiary of the Japanese bank, is, however, positive about solar panels as an investment.
He has written a report on the viability of solar generation for the bank, which concluded that the investment opportunity currently on offer will prove so favourable that the scheme will achieve its target of signing up 12,000 home owners faster than predicted.
Mr Rumph has spent £14,000 installing a system on his house in Berwick-upon-Tweed and believes it is money well invested: "I am expecting a 10pc return and although my capital is now tied up, I am getting income from a reliable source that is index-linked and tax-free.
"I expect the cost of electricity to go up, and I also anticipate that in five or 10 years, people will regard the system as an asset on the house. It has been an exceptionally sunny April, and I made £100 in the first two weeks of the month, having generated 240 kWhs."
A further concern, however, is the reliability of the claims made about the returns on the systems. Last month The Telegraph reported that consumer group Which? had found 10 out of 14 salesmen offering solar thermal systems were exaggerating the benefits and pressuring people into sales.
Solar Century said that report covered thermal and not PV panels, and that to get hooked up to the cashback system your panels must be installed by an operator who is an approved member of the Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS) watchdog. You can find an MCS installer through the organisation's website.
Mr Rumph also suggests using common sense. "When looking to take on an installer, treat it as you would any building project – get several quotes and look for personal recommendations."
Which? also suggests that because solar technology is a new industry, companies come and go, so it is worth paying with a credit card if possible to ensure protection under the Consumer Credit Act, provided, that is, you clear the debt immediately to avoid high interest payments.

Heated Exchange Over Climate

2010-05-06T07:20:00.000+01:00

By PAUL GLADER
Linda Keyes
The placement of the brass rain gauge at the end of a boat dock at Mohonk Preserve in New Paltz has been criticized.
Weather experts are tangling over a 114-year-old thermometer at the Mohonk Preserve, New York's largest nonprofit nature preserve.
Set on a rocky spot near the Mohonk Mountain House close by the Hudson River in New Paltz, the white thermometer box has been visited by weather observers every day between 4 and 5 p.m. since 1896. While there, the observers record the high and low temperatures for the past 24 hours.
In an article appearing in the current issue of the "Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology," academics from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory say that the century-old weather station at the preserve offers a powerful commentary on climate change. "The site is optimal for daily climate analysis," write Ben Cook and his co-authors, noting that the station has been in the same spot and has had methodical recording over the years.
The Mohonk Preserve regularly invites research scientists to analyze its meticulously collected historical data on weather, plant life and wildlife for patterns related to climate change and other factors.
Self-described climate-change critic Anthony Watts of Chico, Calif., questions such claims following a 2009 investigation of the Mohonk site by surfacestations.org, a website that researches and challenges climate station records and surveys. The former TV weather forecaster and weather equipment entrepreneur notes that the thermometer box is wind-sheltered and is situated near artificial heat sources, such as a building with a chimney, and that there are trees nearby, the shade and reflections from which can influence temperature readings.

He also notes the thermometer box is 29 inches from the ground; 59 inches is the standard. "They err in saying that site is optimal," said Mr. Watts. "The lower the thermometer and closer to the surface of the earth it is, the warmer the temperature."
Mohonk botanist Paul C. Huth, who has taken weather records for 36 years, agrees the site has flaws but said it can't be changed. "We're trying to maintain a standard of method and observation."
Mr. Watts also criticizes the placement of the brass rain gauge at the end of a boat dock. "It makes me wonder how many kids dump Pepsi in there or peed," he said.
Mr. Huth also shrugs off that criticism. "We're out there all the time," he said. "Attendants are well-trained to keep their eyes on the facilities."
Write to Paul Glader at paul.glader@wsj.com

The chance discovery that averted ecological disaster

2010-05-06T07:18:00.000+01:00

Steve Connor on how the hole in the ozone layer was discovered by UK scientists a quarter of a century ago
Thursday, 6 May 2010
It was perceived as one of the greatest environmental threats of the late-20th century. Twenty-five years ago this month, a hole in the ozone layer was detected high in the atmosphere over the frozen wastes of Antarctica; scientists warned it might spread to other parts of the world, leading to dangerous increases in cancer-causing radiation from the Sun.
The Earth's protective layer of ozone shields all life from the damaging effects of ultraviolet (UV) rays, and its gradual depletion by the release of man-made chemicals into the atmosphere threatened a dramatic increase in lethal skin cancers and blinding cataracts – a threat so serious it forced politicians to act.
Just two years after the discovery was publicised in 1985 by a team of three British scientists, the international community had drafted the Montreal Protocol, designed to curb and eventually ban the use and manufacture of ozone-destroying chemicals, such as the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in products ranging from fridges to aerosol sprays.
The protocol soon led to CFCs being phased out in many countries. Britain ceased production and consumption of CFCs in 1995, followed five years later by other developed nations. By 2009, all UN member states had signed the basic protocol, which was seen as one of the most successful international agreements on the environment.
Now, a quarter of a century after the publication of the key scientific paper documenting the ozone hole, one of the members of the scientific team has said the discovery might not have been made so soon had it not been for a combination of dogged perseverance and good luck.
"My perspective is that luck played its part, as in many other scientific discoveries," said Jonathan Shanklin, who, along with colleagues Joe Farman and Brian Gardiner of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, gathered the key field data.
At that time, in the early 1980s, British science was being squeezed by the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. Long-term scientific monitoring programmes were especially threatened. Among them was the one responsible for the annual ozone measurements that had been carried out at the British Antarctic Survey's Halley research station since the late 1950s.
"In the 1980s, the British Antarctic Survey was looking at ways to economise, and the ozone monitoring at Halley was in the frame to be cut. Nothing seemed to be changing and there seemed little reason to keep it going. But it is programmes such as these that provide the crucial evidence for political decisions governing the future of our planet," Dr Shanklin said.
In fact, the measurements at Halley were not originally intended to monitor long-term changes to ozone but to help improve weather forecasting and to verify theories about atmospheric circulation. However, it gradually became obvious that ozone levels in the Antarctic spring – which occurs in October and September – were falling significantly after each southern winter, and were only partly recovering each summer.
There was already scientific speculation, backed up by serious theoretical work, about how the ozone layer might be affected by man-made pollutants such as CFCs in the stratosphere, where the ozone layer is found. Studies into ozone depletion in the 1970s by scientists Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina and Frank Sherwood Rowland led eventually to a Nobel prize in chemistry.
However, in the early 1980s nobody had noticed that the ozone layer above the South Pole was being depleted significantly at the end of each Antarctic winter, when the first rays of sunlight penetrate the darkness of the austral sky to cause ozone-destroying photochemical reactions with the chlorine of CFCs. The 1985 study showed that the lowest values of ozone seen in mid-October had fallen by 40 per cent between 1975 and 1984 – not quite a "hole" but worrying nonetheless.
"As I remember it, there was no real eureka moment in the discovery, more a combination of pieces falling into place," said Dr Shanklin, whose reflections are published in the current issue of Nature. The data was gathered from the ground using relatively simple instruments that looked up through the sky to measure the differences in UV light wavelengths known to be influenced by stratospheric ozone.
"What convinced the team was a graph plotting the minimum 11-day mean, which clearly showed that the spring decline was systematic. Farman crucially developed a chemical theory to explain the observations, linking them to rises in CFCs, and Gardiner carried out the essential quality control on the data," he said.
The study caused consternation, and some disbelief, among scientists in the US who were monitoring the ozone layer by sophisticated satellites. Their initial analysis had shown no such depletion but when they reanalysed the satellite data, they too detected the springtime depletion.
"I don't know what happened behind the scenes with the satellite teams, but I do know that they were overwhelmed by large amounts of data," Dr Shanklin recalled.
More than 20 years after the Montreal Protocol, there are signs that the ozone layer is beginning to recover. It could still take decades for it to return to the state it was in 50 years ago, but had it not been for three scientists who persevered with a seemingly irrelevant, long-term experiment, it would take longer still.

Marine paradise in peril as BP oil disaster threatens to become worst ever

2010-05-06T07:16:00.000+01:00

Jacqui Goddard, Catfish Pass

Fish are leaping, a dolphin is cruising behind the boat and six brown pelicans have just flown overhead in a perfect V-formation like a display team. When Captain Sam Elliott cuts the engine, the only sound is the water lapping against the hull and the cry of gulls.
On the outer reaches of Louisiana’s marshlands, a 75-minute high-speed boat ride from the last inhabited community, it appears that the only powers at work are the forces of Nature. Yet just a few miles away, the forces of Man are leaving their mark.
Now gushing from the seabed at what BP admits may be as much as 210,000 gallons a day, crude oil is slicking its way through an area described by President Obama after a flyover last weekend as “one of the richest and most beautiful ecosystems on the planet”.
This corner of the ecosystem has its future pinned on protective booms being assembled here — a thin orange line of plastic barriers that snakes through the waters of Catfish Pass on the edge of Breton Sound, across hummocks of grass and earthy outcrops, into the distance.

If the line holds, thousands of acres of wetlands, valuable fishing grounds and oyster beds may be spared. But progress is unavoidably slow, the area yet to be covered is vast, the booms may be overlapped by the waves or pushed away by the winds, and thousands of square miles of ocean beyond are already contaminated.
“A needle in a haystack, that’s all this is,” says Captain Elliott, as Champion, his 21ft sports fishing vessel rocks gently beside the boom. “It still hasn’t sunk in yet that what’s happening out there is real. All that oil coming at us. If it gets through here, we won’t be able to fish here again for a few years. It’s like going to a funeral.”
All morning a fleet of vessels has been working to lay the barriers. First a length is dropped from one of the 12 oyster-dredging boats that BP has hired from fishermen; then helpers on smaller vessels anchor it in place.
On Tuesday conditions were challenging — 25mph (40km/h) winds, lashing rain and strong currents — and the frustrated cursing of the boom teams, led by professional oil spill handlers, could be heard over the radio.
Yesterday, weather and tempers were calmer, and progress was swift enough that by early afternoon there was no more boom left to lay, and the flotilla was wending its way back through the bayous to home base in Hopedale, on a sliver of land one hour east of New Orleans.
Captain C. T. Williams, a charter fishing skipper based at Hopedale, has known these backwaters for 30 years.
“It’s a waterman’s paradise. If you are here long enough, it’s very hard not to become addicted to it,” he says. “We have something very rare here — it’s not just like a mom saying, ‘My baby is pretty’. There’s something about it that’s just unique and compelling and humbling.”
Resident animals include racoons, rabbits, deer, feral hogs, coyotes, snakes, alligators, grey heron, blue heron, osprey and nutria — a semi-aquatic rodent known as a pest because of its destructive burrowing habits.
“The nutria is an outlaw, it’s a kill-on-sight thing, and yet I swear we’re going to see it at some animal rescue place getting a bath if that oil comes in,” Captain Williams jokes.
The slick, now believed to have overtaken the scale of the Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska 21 years ago, has been meandering around the Gulf of Mexico for two weeks, growing bigger by the day, after an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.
Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida are all in emergency mode, laying defences and planning for a coastal catastrophe as changing winds and currents make the slick’s path uncertain.
Captain Williams refuses to let the gloom set in as the world’s worst oil disaster threatens this treasured wilderness. “There’s a lot at stake here and everyone talks about the potential devastation: being put out of business; not having an oyster industry for ten years.
“But as it is today, we have a prayer. I’ll roll the dice if I think there’s a good chance of something, and in this case I believe we can make things happen, I really do.
“I am an optimist. I still have great hope even though it’s a monster that’s still being born out there.”

New cod? Quick-growing tropical cobia could replace dwindling species

2010-05-06T07:15:00.000+01:00

Species has high oil content, white flesh, and grows three times as fast salmon, and 'could be next big farmed fish'
Alexandra Topping
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 5 May 2010 20.06 BST
A new fast-growing tropical fish that could provide an alternative to popular species for environmentally-conscious fish-lovers is being imported to the UK.
With recent studies revealing that UK's fish stocks have fallen by 94% in the past 100 years, Marine Farms argues that cobia, which has white flesh and a high oil content, could be the next big farmed fish species. The fish grows three times faster than Atlantic salmon and has good taste and consistency according to Bjørn Myrseth, the chief executive of Marine Farms, based in Norway.
"For us it is a very attractive fish because of the rate of growth. It can grow from about 1g to 5kg -6kg in a year, when it takes salmon around 30 to 36 months to reach the same size. It also has good eating qualities with very firm flesh and high oil content. It is easy to prepare and has a nice mild flavour," he said.
In the wild, cobia can grow up to 60kg, but it is very uncommon for the fish to be caught commercially, he said.
Marine Farms expects to produce 1,500 tonnes of the fish this year for export. There are plans to expand the site, which has the capacity to produce up to 6,000 tonnes a year, depending on demand.
"The challenge will be to introduce the fish and convince people to eat it – we have to make it known to people," he said.
The fish could also provide a viable alternative for other fish species that are under strain.
Said Myrseth: "With a high oil content, it is also great raw for sushi or sashimi. It can also be used as a replacement for fish such as tuna, if people are looking for an environmentally sustainable alternative, as the texture and flavour are quite similar."
The fish is currently placed at the more expensive end of the market and costs slightly more than Atlantic salmon, said Myrseth. "But we hope that as demand grows the cost of the fish will go down, and if demand is high enough it could become a relatively inexpensive fish in the future," he said.
Cobia has been commercially produced in Asia, particularly in Taiwan where it is stocked in about 80% of ocean cages, according to the Marine Farms website.
It has operated a cobia farm in Florida since 2002 and has opened operations in Belize and Vietnam.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch, which publishes guides for sustainable seafood purchasing, recommends US-farmed cobia as it is farmed inland with closed recirculating systems that help prevent diseases and pollutants.
However, it advises against buying cobia from outside the US as it is often farmed in floating or submerged cages and pens in nearshore and open ocean waters. "This creates a risk of disease transfer, escapes and pollution impacts on surrounding ecosystems and species," according to the Seafood Watch website.
Myrseth said all Marine Farm cobia was sustainably farmed in low-density ocean cages with site rotation to prevent disease and damage to the environment. "This is very important to us, because if the environment is impacted we are the first to feel that," he said. The company's cobia is fed on fish oil, fishmeal and vegetable protein but it aims to feed the fish on vegetable protein in the future, he added.
Dawn Purchase, aquaculture officer at the Marine Conservation Society, said: "With 50% of global seafood now being farmed it is essential that all current and new farmed species coming into the UK market is produced in the most environmentally sustainable way possible, which ensures the health and diversity of the environment on which it depends."
Charles Clover, creator of The End of the Line – an exposé of the fishing industry – declined to comment on cobia specifically but said the farming of carnivorous fish posed significant environmental problems because of the shortage of smaller fish to provide food.
"Without that it is difficult to see how the aquaculture industry is going to continue to grow, unless they find some way of creating synthetic fish food," he said. "And as fish have been eating other fish for millions of years, that is not going to be easy."

Don't let disputes over data get in the way of safe water for billions

2010-05-06T07:13:00.000+01:00

Sanitation for all is an achievable goal. But we can't risk distractions and lose the political will
Jon Lane
The Guardian, Thursday 6 May 2010
Your article reported criticism of the UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets for water supply and sanitation (Doubt cast on claim that UN clean water targets will be met, 26 April). This concerned me because it fell into the trap of focusing on a narrow argument about data.
"The World Health Organisation said that since 1990 1.3 billion people had gained improved drinking water and 500 million better sanitation," you report; whereas Professor Asit Biswas, president of the Third World Centre for Water Management, "said official figures showing that many cities and countries had met their targets were 'baloney'". However, I believe the bigger picture is that "even if the MDG goals were reached in full, billions of people would still live with very poor water and sanitation".
Solving the problem is more important than arguing about numbers and definitions. The climate change debate has demonstrated how dangerously disputes about methodology can distract attention, public support and political will, from the big issue.
Moreover, Biswas was misleading when he said that if, in the developing world, "we put concrete around [a] well – nothing else – it becomes an 'improved source of water'; the quality is the same but you have 'improved' the physical structure, which has no impact." But there is an impact. Such a simple measure, if accompanied by hygiene education and environmental improvements, protects the well against faecal contamination or other pollutants.
For water and sanitation, there are numerous low-cost but highly effective technologies and interventions. To dismiss them unilaterally is unwise. During my 20 years in water supply and sanitation, I have seen a sufficient number of successful projects, in many of the least developed countries, to convince me that safe sanitation and drinking water for all is not merely a dream.
Biswas is also wrong in "calling for politicians to be removed from water management" and replaced by technical experts. Rather, both are necessary. There are many proven technologies: what is most lacking is political commitment. A large part of our efforts should be dedicated to persuading decision-makers of the economic and social benefits to be gained from investing in drinking water and sanitation.
Despite the article's basic premise, more people are gaining access to clean drinking water. There is increasing recognition of the business opportunities associated with sanitation. People should be persuaded to demand sanitation and to have this demand met by local entrepreneurs. In this way, toilets could become like mobile phones: everyone will want one, and affordability will improve. Human faeces (properly composted) should also be recognised as an economic commodity and not a waste product. The Chinese have known this for centuries, and only now are other nations catching up.
A few years ago talking about toilets was still a taboo; today, more politicians recognise its importance and are leading the sanitation revolution. The data from Unicef and the WHO should be used as a means to help us measure progress, not be dismissed for its shortcomings.

Offices raided and 21 held as EU probe into carbon trading fraud intensifies

2010-05-06T07:09:00.000+01:00

Denmark criticised for slow reaction after apparently being targeted in alleged 'carousel' scam
Felicity Carus
The Guardian, Saturday 1 May 2010
British tax authorities have arrested 21 people after raiding homes and offices across Europe as part of a crackdown on alleged carbon-trading fraud, HM Revenue & Customs confirmed today .
Some 450 staff took part in raids on Wednesday as tax authorities across the continent intensified an ongoing investigation into alleged carbon-trading fraud, which is estimated to have cost €5bn in unpaid taxes.
Deutsche Bank and energy company RWE were among 230 offices and homes raided this week by German authorities. Four arrests followed, including one in the UK under a European arrest warrant.
In a linked operation in the UK, eight people were arrested in Scotland and 13 in England, said the HMRC spokesman.
Pressure to stamp out suspected fraudulent activity on the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS) has increased in recent months. Denmark appears to have been particularly vulnerable to so-called carousel fraud and has had to slash the number of accounts on its carbon registry, which allows traders to buy and sell pollution permits within the ETS from 1,200 to 140. Most of the remaining accounts are barred from trading as the investigation continues.
An interim carbon register, seen by the Guardian, reveals that at least 172 UK-registered accounts have been removed from what had been Europe's largest registry after the Danish authorities imposed tight new registration requirements. The final figure of UK-registered accounts removed from the registry may be much higher.
Denmark's climate minister Lykke Friis admitted that British authorities had contacted Denmark last autumn to request closure of UK-registered accounts. But the Danish Energy Agency, which runs the registry and climate ministry, previously led by the EU's new climate chief Connie Hedegaard, have been criticised for a slow response which allowed alleged fraudulent trades to continue.
A total of 58 people across Europe have now either been arrested or charged in connection with alleged carbon-trading fraud in the last nine months.
Carousel fraud, also called missing-trader fraud, involves bogus traders buying pollution permits in the EU emissions trading scheme in one country without paying VAT. They sell them on in another country with VAT added, but pocket the difference, rather than pay the VAT to the relevant tax authorities. With the profit made, the trader goes missing.
At least three of the British nationals have been charged so far. On 29 December last year three British men who cannot be named for legal reasons were arrested at a hotel in Brussels in connection with trades worth €2.11m.
The Belgian prosecutor of Tournai, Jean Bernard Cambier, confirmed that the last of the three men was released on bail in February. The men have so far been charged with money laundering and falsifying documents, and a third charge of VAT fraud is still subject to an investigation. Under Belgian law the names of the accused are not usually released since the men denied the charges. A court date has yet to be set, but if convicted, the men face up to five years in prison.
The Danish authorities were asked to change their registration procedures by the European commission in July last year. In an email seen by the Guardian, Istvan-Laszlo Bart, an official from the commission's directorate-general of environment, demanded that the Danish Energy Authority change its procedures to include documentation such as a copy of ID or a passport. "If you are not requesting [proof of identity] it is not a surprise that everyone opens accounts in the DK registry," he wrote to a member of staff at the Danish carbon registry.
In addition, an internal climate ministry document from last August, obtained by the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet, said that Danish tax authorities had notified the ministry that "especially Denmark is now the target for VAT fraud".
At around the same time, Britain, France and the Netherlands scrapped VAT on carbon trading after concerns about carousel fraud on the carbon markets. Soon after, on 19 August, seven arrests were made in Gravesend and Greater London A further two people handed themselves into police at Heathrow later that day. No formal charges have been made. HM Revenue & Customs announced at the time of the arrests that the suspected fraud could be worth £38m.
But the authorities in Denmark were slower to respond, and had to rush through legislation just before the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen in December, which was chaired by Hedegaard, who denies knowing about the suspected fraud until the newspaper reports. "I was never informed about this until last autumn when Ekstra Bladet looked into the fraud," she told the Guardian.
The Danish Energy Agency tightened registration procedures for new accounts, requesting passport ID and VAT numbers, from last summer. But existing account holders were not required to provide the documents, despite the European commission's request in July that they "retroactively request this from all operators". In December last year, the DEA finally began to request this information, setting a deadline for compliance of 1 February. The Guardian's enquiries have now revealed that almost 90% of the accounts have been deleted.
Richard Gledhill, head of carbon markets and climate change services at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said: "This is tried and tested financial fraud, applied to a green market. Carbon trading was a US$125bn (£81.9bn) market last year, so it's no surprise that it has attracted this sort of highly organised crime.
"Fraudsters have arbitraged differences in national rules and processes, and taken advantage of the relative inexperience of some market participants. What's needed is harmonised systems and procedures across the EU. and rigorous compliance. Market players have to be more vigilant, to stay one step ahead of the fraudsters."

Carbon calculator reveals Labour and Tory policy as science fiction

2010-05-06T07:08:00.000+01:00

Economic growth is incompatible with cutting carbon emissions, most of which are produced by manufacturing and consumption• National Carbon Calculator: Can you cut UK emissions?• See how the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives and Labour would cut emissions

It's not surprising that neither Labour nor the Tories wanted to run the Guardian's National Carbon Calculator. Had they done so, they would have had to acknowledge that the figures on which they base their climate change policies are a work of science fiction. The government claims that our total emissions amount to 627 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2e). The Tories have never disputed this figure. It's convenient for both sides to accept this falsehood, and to pretend that the challenge is far smaller than it is.
As the figures pulled together by the calculator team show, the real total (using 2007 figures) should be 950Mt. The government artificially excludes the greenhouse gas emissions caused by the goods we import and the international travel we commission. It's not hard to see why ministers choose to overlook these figures. If just the outsourced emissions (gases released in producing goods we import) are counted, all the cuts the UK claims to have made since 1990 would be cancelled out – and then some.
According to the government's provisional figures for 2009, the UK has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 198MtCO2e since 1990. But the Carnegie Institution for Science estimates that we have outsourced 253Mt. The sad and shocking truth is that the apparent success of the UK's carbon-cutting programme, on which the government bases its boast that we're a world leader in reducing pollution, results from the collapse of our manufacturing base and its re-establishment overseas.
So throw in 253Mt for outsourced emissions, 7Mt for the international shipping we use, 67Mt for international aviation plus the 2Mt the government has failed to include for extra greenhouse warming (not CO2) caused by domestic flights, and you discover that the UK has left 329Mt of carbon off its national accounts, or very nearly 50% of the 2007 total (636Mt). The figure would have been even higher had the team included the net 40Mt of emissions which Professor Dieter Helm of the University of Oxford calculates [PDF, see figure 7, page 18] is caused by UK citizens holidaying abroad (net means that the emissions from foreign tourists holidaying here have been subtracted).
Even if the calculator achieves nothing else, highlighting this massive discrepancy should shake up the debate and change our view of what the UK has achieved.
Just as striking are the figures for manufacturing and consumption. When I started playing with the calculator, at first I skipped over the top category. This is because, like many environmentalists, most of my work has been focused on efforts to tackle our direct consumption of energy: the heat and electricity we use at home and in offices, and the fuel we use for transport. I immediately ran into trouble. However many wind turbines and nuclear power plants I commissioned, however many drivers I shoved on to the railways and businessmen I dragged kicking and screaming out of aeroplanes, I couldn't get the totals down by anything like the required amount. Only then did I notice how great a proportion of our emissions come from manufacturing and consumption.
Consulting my book Heat, first published in 2006, I now realise that I used to be half-aware of the scale of this issue, but somehow, in the midst of all the excited debates about how our electricity should be generated, our homes improved and our transport networks run, I had managed to forget it. So it was a shock to discover that manufacturing and consumption (if you include the construction industry) accounts for 541Mt of our emissions, or 57% of the true total. This is a good bit higher than I thought in 2006, because the sector's impact is massively boosted by the outsourced emissions the official figures don't count. The great majority of the UK's offshore total results from our consumption of foreign goods. The exclusion of these figures from official accounts is one of the reasons why we have neglected this sector.
Of the 541Mt caused by manufacturing and consumption, 223Mt is embodied in the imported goods (minus food) we consume; 141Mt arises from the energy used by UK industries; 87Mt from all food production and consumption (onshore and offshore); 19Mt from industrial process emissions (the CO2 released by chemical processes like cement manufacture); 23Mt from the waste we create and 48Mt from the freight vehicles (some of them excluded from official figures) required to move our stuff around.
Like most people in the environment movement, I spend my time talking vaguely about the need to reduce the consumption of goods, but specifically – with figures attached – about the need to reduce the direct consumption of energy. But however well we insulate our homes, change our travel habits, alter the electricity supply and switch to more efficient appliances, however much the public sector cleans up its act and the efficiency of commercial buildings is improved, we'll still be only scratching the surface of the problem. The real issue is not our direct consumption of energy but the greenhouse gases embodied in the goods we buy. It strikes me that in focusing on direct consumption I've helped to give both the government and business an unduly easy ride.
So here we bump into the second probable reason why Labour and the Conservatives have chosen not to try out the calculator (Simon Hughes of the Lib Dems did run the calculator and shared the result). It highlights the glaring contradiction in the manifestos of all three main parties: they all seek to boost economic growth by raising consumption, but consumption has already pushed greenhouse gas levels way beyond the point that they consider sustainable. You can pursue a policy of economic growth and reduced carbon emissions only by engineering a fudge of the kind the calculator exposes: offshoring one third of our emissions, most of which arise from the goods we consume. The impacts of rising consumption are hidden by excluding them from national accounts.
Only the Green party has approached this issue honestly, by accepting upfront that economic growth is the problem and that current levels of consumption cannot be sustained. It's time we called out the other parties on their failure to acknowledge, let alone tackle, this contradiction. And it's time we all recognised that consumption is the big issue.
monbiot.com

SBY buys Chinese photovoltaic panels

2010-05-05T06:06:00.000+01:00

The $35 million order is one of the largest deals of its kind to date in the Israeli solar energy market.
Amiram Barkat3 May 10 14:29
Israel's solar power integrator SBY Solutions Ltd. (formerly Solar by Yourself) will buy $35 million worth of photovoltaic panels from China's Suntech Power Holdings Co. Ltd. (NYSE: STP). This is one of the largest deals of its kind to date in the Israeli solar energy market. The panels will be able to produce 18 megawatts of electricity in Israel and in Italy, where SBY recently began operations. The panels will be delivered during the second half of 2010.
Suntech is China's largest photovoltaic panel manufacturer, and one of the largest in the world.
Yesterday, the Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) (TASE: ELEC.B22) reported that 800 small solar power installations currently produce 26 megawatts of electricity in Israel.
SBY, based at Moshav Nitzanei Oz in the Negev, has installed 220 rooftop solar power facilities to date. SBY CEO Tamir Kaplinsky founded the company in 2008, and it has about 60 employees.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on May 3, 2010
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2010

Germany: Climate Meeting 'Broke the Ice'

2010-05-05T06:05:00.000+01:00

Associated Press
KÖNIGSWINTER, Germany—Some 40 nations at a high-level climate meeting have made headway toward a pact to curb global warming, but the most important issues remain unresolved, Germany's environment minister said Tuesday.
Many delegates agreed that "this meeting has broken the ice and one cannot overestimate the importance of this," Norbert Röttgen said as the three-day Petersberg Dialogue co-hosted by Germany and Mexico, wrapped up. "This is a contribution to making success possible again."
The toughest issues—cutting greenhouse gas emissions, financial aid from rich to poor nations, and a method of measuring both — still need consideration, he said. However, progress was made on several fronts, including saving the planet's forests and transferring climate technology from rich to poor countries, he said.
Chancellor Angela Merkel initiated this meeting of ministers from nations representing all regions of the world at the U.N. climate conference of more than 190 countries in Copenhagen in December. Copenhagen was originally set to produce an international climate treaty, but it came up only with a political declaration—the so-called Copenhagen Accord.
However, the Copenhagen conference ended with a deep rift between industrialized nations, new economic powers China and India, and developing countries—with considerable differences also within each group.
Mr. Röttgen said the Petersberg Dialogue, in a mansion high above Königswinter near Bonn, had worked to overcome some of the distrust.
"This has proved to be a platform of constructive discussions," he said.
However, a Greenpeace official said the international fight against global warming is still deeply troubled.
"Fundamentally, the difficult situation we had in Copenhagen has not changed," Greenpeace climate specialist Martin Kaiser said. "The United States still has no climate law, President Obama's climate policies have failed, and therefore there is no basis for an ambitious international treaty that could bring India and China on board."
Mr. Kaiser said the Petersberg Dialogue demonstrated a pragmatic approach, with participants seeking to finalize individual projects to reduce greenhouse gases or help poor countries deal with the consequences of climate change such as droughts, floods, or heavy storms.
Outgoing United Nations climate chief Yvo de Boer had said Monday he didn't expect the international treaty to be agreed when U.N. negotiators meet in Cancun, Mexico, in December.
Mr. Röttgen said Tuesday it remains to be seen how the negotiations will be organized for the rest of the year and if at least parts of the treaty can be agreed upon in Cancun.
Mr. Röttgen also said Germany doesn't rule out continuing the Kyoto Protocol after 2012, when its current obligations under the treaty expire.
In that case, the U.S. and China also "have to deliver" as they are the globe's greatest polluters, he said.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol obliges industrialized countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The U.S. has not ratified it, and China and other up-and-coming economic powers are not covered by it.
—Copyright 2010 Associated Press

EPA Proposes Competing Approaches to Regulate Coal-Ash Waste

2010-05-05T06:03:00.000+01:00

By MARK PETERS
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it would pursue tighter controls on the disposal of coal ash from power plants, following a December 2008 spill that sent a billion gallons of wet ash slopping over 300 acres in Tennessee.
But the agency stopped short of declaring coal ash a hazardous waste, in a temporary victory for the utility industry.
The regulation of coal-ash disposal has pitted utility companies concerned over the cost and complexity of eliminating wet-ash storage against health and environmental advocates who say arsenic, selenium and other contaminants in coal ash are a threat to human health and the environment. The two sides disagree on whether the waste material should be considered hazardous.
The EPA didn't take a stance on whether to regulate coal ash as hazardous waste, instead offering that approach as one of two possibilities. The hazardous-waste approach would put enforcement powers in the hands of federal and state officials, creating disposal restrictions and effectively phasing out the use of ash ponds. The second proposal would put in place new restrictions, but enforcement would come through lawsuits by states and individuals, the EPA said.
"In the course of developing these proposals, it became clear that there are people who feel very strongly about one or the other," said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson during a press briefing.
The EPA estimates the cost of the hazardous-waste and nonhazardous-waste approaches at $20 billion and $8 billion, respectively. The EPA won't actually refer to coal ash as hazardous under either approach. That's because industry groups have raised concerns the terminology could hurt the reuse of the waste material in such products as cement and drywall.
The issue of coal-ash waste was the subject of 48 meetings since last fall between the staff of President Barack Obama's regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein, and industry groups, environmental advocates and others. The EPA's announcement Tuesday fueled the ongoing divide. A utility-industry group in a statement said regulation of coal ash as a nonhazardous waste alongside new federal standards for ash pond safety would be the only "prudent" course for the EPA.
"Adoption of more stringent regulation—including regulating coal combustion byproducts as hazardous waste or mandating closure of certain types of ash-management facilities—will drive up costs for our customers without providing a commensurate health or environmental benefit," said Jim Roewer, executive director of the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group, in a statement.
Environmental and health groups say hazardous-waste regulations are essential to ensure federal officials can track and enforce standards for coal-ash facilities.
The EPA's "inclusion of an option to regulate coal ash as hazardous waste is an important first step," said Trip Van Noppen, executive director of Earthjustice, in a statement. "The next important step will be to maintain this position in the face of inevitably misguided claims by polluters that the sky will fall."
The federal agency will take public comment on how to handle the waste from coal-fired generators and eventually issue final rules. —Siobhan Hughes contributed to this article.
Write to Mark Peters at mark.peters@dowjones.com

Disaster Dims Odds of Energy Bill Compromise

2010-05-05T05:58:00.000+01:00

By JONATHAN WEISMAN
The oil slick spreading through the Gulf of Mexico will prompt Congress to establish new regulatory, safety and technological requirements that could impede further off-shore oil drilling, the White House's top energy official said Tuesday.
But lawmakers said the catastrophic spill could further dim the White House's hopes for securing legislation aimed at reducing U.S. consumption of oil and other fossil fuels, by making it impossible to forge a compromise that includes expanded undersea drilling.
White House energy and environment adviser Carol Browner, in an interview, didn't say whether President Barack Obama would modify his own proposal to expand oil exploration on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Specific policy changes will have to await results of a 30-day review of the unfolding disaster due by the end of May, Ms. Browner said.
Two weeks after BP PLC's Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in flames before sinking and leaving a well gushing into the sea, Washington has begun grappling with the oil spill's implications beyond the Gulf.
Key Democrats said the spill should drive Congress forward on legislation to address climate change and promote alternative energy sources and electric cars. They also have called for regulations that would require more-robust safety technology on offshore rigs, such as remote-control acoustic shut-off switches.
Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said "congressional overreaction" on the regulatory front could make oil exploration in some areas economically prohibitive. "What's most important is that we get the facts before we move. We should not legislate in a vacuum based on speculation."
But some Democratic and Republican senators said the incident makes progress on energy and climate legislation less likely. Coastal senators, such as Democrats Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Bill Nelson of Florida, vowed to block expanded drilling in any bill. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.) said legislation can't move forward without three "pillars": expanded oil and gas exploration, more nuclear power and a price on carbon-emissions in exchange for the first two.
"At least temporarily, this has knocked one of the legs of the stool off to the side, so my guess is that nothing proceeds at the moment," Mr. Kyl said.
Mr. Nelson agreed, saying, "It makes it more difficult to get 60 votes," the number to break a Senate filibuster. "You're not going to get offshore drilling in an energy bill."
White House officials were careful not to antagonize Republicans. "Oil is going to be a part of our energy mix for some time to come," Ms. Browner said, a position backed Tuesday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), a frequent critic of the oil industry. Ms. Browner said the spill is likely to pull Republicans to the negotiating table who otherwise wouldn't be there.
Progress on energy has been stymied for months because only one Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, has been willing to negotiate on legislation designed to promote alternative sources, in part by raising the cost of fossil fuels.
As the White House pressed for a policy response, Democrats were pushing a political one. Both the Florida Democratic Party and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee began organizing and fund-raising around the oil blowout.
Mr. Kyl suggested a different response: drill in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a proposal long blocked by Democrats. "You're not in 5,000 feet of water. You've got a pipeline nearby, and you've got experience drilling in that area just a few miles away," Mr. Kyl said.
The White House, meanwhile, continued its efforts to detail the steps officials are taking to head off environmental catastrophe in the Gulf region and hold BP financially and legally liable for clean-up costs and economic damages. Cabinet officers fanned out on Capitol Hill Tuesday to brief lawmakers.
In Louisiana, the president's Sunday visit buoyed support among some locals.
"I'm a lifelong Republican…I've met with many presidents over the years, and this one wants to get things done. I've never seen anyone come in and take charge like that before," Plaquemines Parish president Billy Nungesser said of Mr. Obama's meeting with him and other Louisiana officials.—Corey Dade contributed to this article.
Write to Jonathan Weisman at jonathan.weisman@wsj.com

Fears for crops as shock figures from America show scale of bee catastrophe

2010-05-05T05:57:00.000+01:00

The world may be on the brink of biological disaster after news that a third of US bee colonies did not survive the winter• Alison Benjamin on the prospect of a bee-less world• In pictures: Why the decline in bees matters

Alison Benjamin
The Observer, Sunday 2 May 2010

Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.
The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.
The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government's Agricultural Research Service (ARS).
The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.
Potential causes range from parasites, such as the bloodsucking varroa mite, to viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods. The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed "Mary Celeste syndrome" due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives.
US scientists have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and pollen, lending credence to the notion that pesticides are a key problem. "We believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies," said Jeffery Pettis, of the ARS's bee research laboratory.
A global review of honeybee deaths by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) reported last week that there was no one single cause, but pointed the finger at the "irresponsible use" of pesticides that may damage bee health and make them more susceptible to diseases. Bernard Vallat, the OIE's director-general, warned: "Bees contribute to global food security, and their extinction would represent a terrible biological disaster."
Dave Hackenberg of Hackenberg Apiaries, the Pennsylvania-based commercial beekeeper who first raised the alarm about CCD, said that last year had been the worst yet for bee losses, with 62% of his 2,600 hives dying between May 2009 and April 2010. "It's getting worse," he said. "The AIA survey doesn't give you the full picture because it is only measuring losses through the winter. In the summer the bees are exposed to lots of pesticides. Farmers mix them together and no one has any idea what the effects might be."
Pettis agreed that losses in some commercial operations are running at 50% or greater. "Continued losses of this magnitude are not economically sustainable for commercial beekeepers," he said, adding that a solution may be years away. "Look at Aids, they have billions in research dollars and a causative agent and still no cure. Research takes time and beehives are complex organisms."
In the UK it is still too early to judge how Britain's estimated 250,000 honeybee colonies have fared during the long winter. Tim Lovett, president of the British Beekeepers' Association, said: "Anecdotally, it is hugely variable. There are reports of some beekeepers losing almost a third of their hives and others losing none." Results from a survey of the association's 15,000 members are expected this month.
John Chapple, chairman of the London Beekeepers' Association, put losses among his 150 members at between a fifth and a quarter. Eight of his 36 hives across the capital did not survive. "There are still a lot of mysterious disappearances," he said. "We are no nearer to knowing what is causing them."
Bee farmers in Scotland have reported losses on the American scale for the past three years. Andrew Scarlett, a Perthshire-based bee farmer and honey packer, lost 80% of his 1,200 hives this winter. But he attributed the massive decline to a virulent bacterial infection that quickly spread because of a lack of bee inspectors, coupled with sustained poor weather that prevented honeybees from building up sufficient pollen and nectar stores.
The government's National Bee Unit has always denied the existence of CCD in Britain, despite honeybee losses of 20% during the winter of 2008-09 and close to a third the previous year. It attributes the demise to the varroa mite – which is found in almost every UK hive – and rainy summers that stop bees foraging for food.
In a hard-hitting report last year, the National Audit Office suggested that amateur beekeepers who failed to spot diseases in bees were a threat to honeybees' survival and called for the National Bee Unit to carry out more inspections and train more beekeepers. Last summer MPs on the influential cross-party public accounts committee called on the government to fund more research into what it called the "alarming" decline of honeybees.
The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has contributed £2.5m towards a £10m fund for research on pollinators. The public accounts committee has called for a significant proportion of this funding to be "ring-fenced" for honeybees. Decisions on which research projects to back are expected this month.
WHY BEES MATTER
Flowering plants require insects for pollination. The most effective is the honeybee, which pollinates 90 commercial crops worldwide. As well as most fruits and vegetables – including apples, oranges, strawberries, onions and carrots – they pollinate nuts, sunflowers and oil-seed rape. Coffee, soya beans, clovers – like alfafa, which is used for cattle feed – and even cotton are all dependent on honeybee pollination to increase yields.
In the UK alone, honeybee pollination is valued at £200m. Mankind has been managing and transporting bees for centuries to pollinate food and produce honey, nature's natural sweetener and antiseptic. Their extinction would mean not only a colourless, meatless diet of cereals and rice, and cottonless clothes, but a landscape without orchards, allotments and meadows of wildflowers – and the collapse of the food chain that sustains wild birds and animals.

States prepare to rise to CO2 challenge as Senate climate bill collapses

2010-05-05T05:56:00.000+01:00

Climate proposals due to be unveiled before the Senate would strip 23 US states of their power to act on climate change

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 4 May 2010 13.28 BST
The collapse of an energy reform proposal in Congress last week could return power to north America's historic actors on climate change: the regions.
In Washington, even Barack Obama's fellow Democrats are reluctant to take up proposals in Congress that would put a cap on greenhouse gas emissions — prompting the sole Republican ally to withdraw his support.
In Ottawa, Canada's prime minister, Stephen Harper, has adopted an action plan on climate change that would lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade.
By default, that leaves regional governments as the drivers for tougher action on climate change in what is now becoming a familiar role, the White House admits.
"If the states hadn't taken the positions they have in the last four or five years we wouldn't have any programmes in place," Carol Browner, the White House climate adviser, told reporters recently.
The power of regional governments to deal with climate change is coming into sharper focus because of the lack of progress on national and international agreements to deal with climate change – and because it is under threat. The climate proposals due to be unveiled before the Senate would strip state authorities of their power to act on climate change.
In a recent conference call with reporters, environmental authorities from a number of states argued their policies had helped set the pace for reform on a national stage, prodding the federal government forward and serving as a test lab for new policies.
Though Washington and Ottawa have yet to pass cap-and-trade legislation, 23 US states and four Canadian provinces have already put a price on carbon. Between them, the carbon cutting regimes will eventually cover half of America's population and about a third of its emissions and about three-quarters of Canada's population and half of its emissions.
"The bottom line here is that the federal government needs to explicitly recognise the value of state programmes," Mary Nichols, who heads California's air resources board, told reporters.
After leading the way on emissions cuts and vehicle exhaust standards, California is now looking at measures to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from the plastic components used in car interiors. The state has also set high energy efficiency standards for flatscreen TVs.
Even some of the states that have not formally signed on to cap and trade are also moving away from fossil fuels. Colorado this month adopted a plan to meet 30% of its energy needs from renewable sources like wind and solar power by 2020. Arizona has put restrictions on wood burning fireplaces.
State authorities say such forward-looking policies simply make economic sense. Nichols said California's climate law, which called for 25% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, had led to the creation of 500,000 new green jobs in the state.
The same incentives hold true north of the border. Quebec, for example, has been relentlessly talking up its green credentials to help market its zero emissions hydro-electric power to north-eastern states. The provincial premier, Jean Charest, argues that the decentralised nature of authority in Canada and the US established regional governments as natural leaders.
"Regional governments everywhere account for 50% to 80% of what will be done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," he said. "We are the ones that are going to be the operating arm."
Quebec, thanks to its riches in emissions-free hydro, already had a head start in reducing its carbon footprint. Its per capita emissions of carbon dioxide are 11 tonnes – about half of the Canadian average.
For the last few years, Quebec has levied a small tax on petrol to help fund public transit and is facing pressure to raise the charge in the next budget.
The province raised the bar even further at the Copenhagen summit by setting the most ambitious targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in North America, a 20% cut from 1990 levels by 2020. A month later, Quebec signed on to California's stringent car standards raising fuel efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions in exhaust.
Montreal, whose greater metropolitan area is home to about 5 million people, is also playing a leading role. Its motorists have long boycotted big gas guzzlers in favour of smaller more economical cars, and Montreal is one of a handful of north American cities with an efficient public transit system. The city has a 30km/h speed limit and has banned idling cars, unless the temperature drops far below zero. It will outlaw dumping paper and other recyclables or organic waste in landfill sites from 2013. It pioneered the Bixi bike sharing scheme, which it is now exporting to London, Melbourne, Boston and Minneapolis.
Charest and others say the division of powers in America and Canada lends itself to regional initiative. "It makes a lot of sense for provinces and states to act because they do have most of the jurisdiction to action on climate change. They have exclusive jurisdiction over energy, on transportation, on urban sprawl, on agriculture — basically over everything that emits C02," Ribaux said.
Cities are even keener. San Francisco now requires all new buildings to be fitted with charging outlets for electric cars. Chicago now has 88 LEED standard green buildings, and the small city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, has 44. London, Ontario, has banned bottled water. Montreal's mayor Gerald Tremblay wanders the historic city hall building switching off the chandeliers. "I'm always telling them, you don't need them on. It's light outside," he says.
Are such regional initiatives enough on their own to compensate for the lack of action by federal government? Quebec's Charest, who has put the green economy at the core of his premiership, won't go quite that far. "Keeping to 2C [rise in global temperatures] through regional arrangements would be pretty tough," he said.
But while they will not, on their own, prevent the most dangerous effects of climate change, the three regional cap-and-trade regimes would manage to stabilise US emissions, said Franz Litz who heads the state climate programme at the World Resources Institute.
"It is a significant amount of reduction, but it is not enough to get us where we want to go," said Litz. "It is not the answer, but it is the start."
He said the regional initiatives suggested states would continue pressing for action on climate change. Such efforts slowed over the last year with states looking to Congress to take the lead on energy reform. "If it becomes clear that [as we are] not going to get something in this Congress I think we will see states evaluating their next moves," he said.
And in staking its leadership on climate, regional players could help pull other parts of Canada and the US in a greener direction. "The states are the ones with boots on the ground," said Vicki Arroyo, director of the Georgetown University climate centre.

Climatologist Ellen Mosley-Thompson on warming in Antarctica

2010-05-05T05:54:00.000+01:00

Earlier this year, climatologist Ellen Mosley-Thompson led an expedition to drill into glacial ice on the Antarctic Peninsula, one of the world's fastest-warming regions. Here, she describes what it's like working in the world's swiftly melting ice zones

From Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 4 May 2010 14.18 BST
Ellen Mosley-Thompson and her husband, Lonnie Thompson, are two of the world's most respected climatologists and glaciologists, traveling around the globe to bore holes in shrinking glaciers and ice sheets. Mosley-Thompson works mainly at the poles, in Greenland and Antarctica, while her husband has done more ice corings of low-latitude glaciers — in the Andes, Africa, and the Himalayas — than any other person alive. Their work, taken together, paints a sobering portrait of the rapid retreat of most of the world's glaciers and ice caps in the face of the buildup of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
Several months ago, during the Antarctic summer, Mosley-Thompson — the director of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University — returned to Antarctica for the ninth time to head a six-person expedition to the Bruce Plateau on the Antarctic Peninsula. The peninsula has warmed faster than almost any other place on Earth, with winter temperatures increasing by 11 degrees F over the past 60 years and year-round temperatures rising by 5 degrees F. As a result, sea ice now covers the western Antarctic Peninsula three months less a year than three decades ago, 90 percent of glaciers along the western Antarctic Peninsula are in retreat, and large floating ice shelves are crumbling.
The most famous of those ice shelves is the Larsen B, a slab of ice — once the size of Connecticut — that disintegrated spectacularly in 2002 in the Weddell Sea. Mosley-Thompson's expedition was part of a larger study to research the collapse of the Larsen A & B ice shelves and to place this major event in the context of previous eras of climate change.
Working for 42 days in frigid temperatures at 6,500 feet, Mosley-Thompson and her team encountered numerous hardships and difficulties, including the loss of ice drills. Thanks to the ingenuity and engineering skills of her team members, the group finally succeeded in drilling 1,462 feet to the bedrock atop the Bruce Plateau. When the ice cores return to Ohio State in June, Mosley-Thompson and her colleagues hope to analyze the ice to track the history of climate change for thousands of years, perhaps to the last glacial period and beyond.
But even before she analyzes her latest drilling samples, Mosley-Thompson tells Yale Environment 360 senior editor Fen Montaigne, one thing is clear: the retreat of the world's glaciers, coupled with evidence from other Antarctic ice cores showing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at their highest levels in more than 800,000 years, "tells us very clearly that we have a serious problem."
Yale Environment 360: I wondered if you could describe for our readers the purpose of this ice coring expedition.
Helen Mosley-Thompson: We were part of a much larger International Polar Year project sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The name of the big project is LARISSA. This was a very large, multidisciplinary international effort to get a better understanding of the interaction of the various systems operating in the Larsen B embayment — for example, the oceanographic system, the ice system, the ecological system, the atmosphere.
e360: And [the Bruce Plateau] is basically a big ice cap or glacier in the midst of these beautiful mountains that run the length of the Antarctic Peninsula?
Mosley-Thompson: Yes, that's correct. Actually, the Bruce Plateau itself is relatively narrow at the spot where we were drilling. So on our six clear days — we were there 42 days — we had excellent horizon. We could see mountains and we could look out into the distance where we knew the remaining part of the Larsen B Ice Shelf and the Larsen C Ice Shelf were out to the east.
e360: Was [this project] basically an attempt to understand the warming behind the break up of the Larsen B [Ice Shelf] and how it fits into a climate history record?
Mosley-Thompson: Yes. Of course the break up of the ice essentially makes an area available that has not been available for five to ten thousand years. So the idea is that the ecologists could actually look at an ecosystem on the ocean bottom in an area that, eight or nine years ago, was covered by ice – and [had been] for thousands of years — [compared] to one that is now open water. And of course the ecosystems in that area will be adjusting to the new normal. So the idea for the ecologists was that they would be
The question is how much additional ice is being dumped through those major glaciers?"
able to look at the potentially rapid changes in a disturbed ecosystem.
For the glaciologists, one of the critical things that they wanted to examine closely was — and still is — since the 2002 break up, how much more rapidly are the land-based glaciers discharging ice out into the ocean. Some measurements back in 2004 based upon satellite imagery suggested some of those glaciers increased their flow speed by four to eight times. Because if the ice shelf is gone, then you've lost that buttressing effect. And so the question really is how much additional ice is being dumped through those major glaciers?
e360: And, the glaciers whose motion to the sea is being accelerated because the ice shelf isn't holding them back, that leads to direct sea level rises?
Mosley-Thompson: That's correct. Any ice that's on land that you put in the water will raise sea level. And so then the marine group had people who were looking at changes in marine geochemistry. They have chemical measurements of the ocean, they have drilled cores in the ocean bottom along the outer margins of the Larsen B, when it was in place. And the idea is that they could now come into the area that was ice covered very recently and collect new cores. So then [we] integrate those records, [and] where appropriate, where the time scales overlap, compare with the records that we'll be getting from the cores that we drilled.
You know one of the things we don't really know for that region is how extensive the ice cover on the peninsula was during the last glacial stage, when North America, from Canada and the northern part of the U.S., and the Finnish/Scandinavian area, was covered by these large ice sheets during the last glaciation. The perception is that you would have had more extensive ice cover in the Antarctic Peninsula, but there's no evidence to either support or refute that. Those records [are] not in hand yet. And so one of the big questions for the ice core that we drilled was, does the basal or bottom ice contain ice that was deposited during the last glacial stage, or has all of the ice that exists on the spine of the peninsula been deposited since the beginning of Holocene.
e360: Which is what, ten, twelve thousand years ago?
Mosley-Thompson: Exactly. And so we don't have those answers yet. The ice cores that we drilled won't even arrive in Columbus, Ohio [until] June 18th. So they're still in transit.
e360: What are you hoping to find out about the climate records of the recent thousands of years?
Mosley-Thompson: Well we want as many details as we possibly can. So we'll be looking at the oxygen and hydrogen isotopic ratios that tell us something about the temperatures in the area. We'll be measuring particulates. We'll be looking at the sulfate — that, we already know, gives us an excellent record of the volcanic activity. We're going to look at something called methane sulfonic acid, MSA. If you have more MSA, the thinking is that you probably then have more open water because the primary source for that would be from phytoplankton. So we're going to be looking at this to see if it might be consistent with other evidence that would tell us whether the sea ice was more extensive, less extensive, or absent.
e360: MSA, from the photosynthetic process that involves phytoplankton's growth, would put compounds into the atmosphere that you could actually find in the [glacial] ice?
Mosley-Thompson: Right. They convert to dimethyl sulfide, DMS. DMS is actually what is put in the atmosphere and then that converts to this MSA. That's what we can measure in the ice. We also have a facility here that we've just implemented or installed in the last few months that can do what's called trace element analysis. So if there are specific areas of the core that are of interest — I mean once we have constructed a robust time scale for the core, there will be periods in the past that are of specific interest to the climatological community. We can then go into those parts of the core and measure very, very tiny concentrations.
e360: What do you think is the minimum age that you'll be able to go back to?
Mosley-Thompson: We picked up 100 percent of the ice [down to the bedrock], contained in 445 meters of core. So what that means is that as we
Our intent is to analyze the [ice] core in the highest possible time resolution."
get lower and lower in the core, time is going to become very compressed. We do not know at what point we will lose our ability to pick up annual variation. Our intent is to analyze the core in the highest possible time resolution, so that we don't lose any valuable information. But there will be a point beyond which we will not be able to look at the seasonally varying parameters and count those years.
e360: And that's because the weight of the snow and ice just compresses those years so tightly that you can't distinguish them.
Mosley-Thompson: That's right... But we should know pretty quickly whether or not that bottom ice was deposited during a warm period, like the Holocene, or during a somewhat [colder] or much colder period, like the end of the last glacial stage. And we'll know that from the oxygen and hydrogen isotopic ratios. There's a very clear signature in the depletion of oxygen 18 [indicating cooling] in the glacial stage ice... We anticipate that this ice probably did build up in the latter part of the last glaciation. Knowing that answer will provide some really interesting constraints on what the climate must have been like at the end of the last glacial and in the early Holocene period.
Another thing that our team here at Ohio State is intently studying is a fairly large abrupt climate event around 5,200 years ago that seems to be very widespread, and no driving mechanism has yet been identified for that. We do not know whether there's any signature of it in Antarctica. But since this event was most strongly expressed in mid- to low- latitudes, if it is in Antarctica you would expect it's going to be in the peninsula for sure, because of the [Antarctic Peninsula's] tighter connection to the mid-latitudes of the southern hemisphere.
e360: Is this the same signal that your husband, Lonnie Thompson, picked up in some Andean glaciers?
Mosley-Thompson: Exactly. The Quelccaya ice cap in the southern Andes of Peru is rapidly retreating, and as it has retreated the plant deposits are exposed and they're very fresh, which means that they've never been exposed before. They literally dry out in the course of a year and so these are fresh plant deposits, but they're all 5,200 years old. Which means that that ice cap advanced over those plants and that ice cap has never been smaller for 5,200 years. But there is evidence for this abrupt shift all the way from logs that are now coming out of glaciers in Alaska as they retreat, [to] very rapid changes in bogs in Patagonia. All throughout the tropical regions there are different types of evidence suggesting a very rapid change. And the change wasn't consistent. In some areas the change was to cold and dry and in other areas it was to cold and wet. So is it evident in the [Antarctic] Peninsula? That's one of the key things we want to answer.
e360: Out of your core atop the Bruce Plateau, do you expect that for quite a few hundred or more than a thousand years back you will have a good CO2 and temperature record?
Mosley-Thompson: There is no reason to expect that we will not.
e360: As some of our readers may know, there have been some extremely deep ice cores taken in Antarctica at Dome C that go back 800,000 or 900,000 years.
Mosley-Thompson: Right.
e360: I understand that the Dome C record shows very clearly that we've got more CO2 in our atmosphere now than at any time in 800,000 years.
Mosley-Thompson: Oh yeah. Very clearly. If you look back over the eight glacial/interglacial cycles, you essentially see that CO2 never rises above 300 parts per million and we're at about 389 now. Methane never
It's like these glaciers are just literally being decapitated. And it's very frightening."
rises above about 800 parts per billion, and I think we're at about 1,700 parts per billion. So we're clearly outside the range of natural variability. I personally think that graph simply showing the natural fluctuations in those two important greenhouse gases, over almost a million years of Earth history — and then you see the two dots [today] that are so much higher than anything that we see in that near-million history — tells us very clearly that we have a serious problem.
e360: I know you have done a lot of ice coring in Greenland and Antarctica and I know your husband has done groundbreaking work in low-latitude glaciated areas like the Andes and the Himalaya. What does this cumulative ice coring work show about what we're experiencing in the last century or so in terms of the warming of the planet?
Mosley-Thompson: Well, from the tropical work, the cores in the Andes and the Himalaya, the oxygen isotopic ratio in those cores, when you stack those cores together, show very clearly that the last 50 or 60 years have been the warmest in the last 2,000 years. There's a lot of regional variability. So for example, we'll often hear that the Medieval Warm Period, roughly 1,000 years ago, was as warm as today. And it's interesting if we look at the three ice cores from the Andes, we do see a Medieval Warm Period signature and a very, very distinct Little Ice Age cool signature. That's not surprising because both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age are expressed most strongly around the Atlantic Basin. And the moisture that builds the glaciers in the Andes of Peru actually comes from the southern part of the North Atlantic and the equatorial Atlantic, and not from the Pacific, as people might think. So these Andean cores showed a very distinct Atlantic signature.
But the four cores from the Tibetan Himalaya show virtually no signature of medieval warming or Little Ice Age cooling. They're sampling a totally different region, and so when we put these records together, the medieval warming is very modest and the Little Ice Age signature is strongly muted as well. And what really stands out when you put these all together and into the composite, is the last 60 years. The oxygen isotopic enrichment in the tops of the cores [indicating warming] is very striking.
The other thing that we are now seeing, particularly with the tropical ice fields — and it's not something that we really were looking for when we started going to the high mountains — is that these glaciers are retreating very rapidly. And, in fact, several of the ice fields, particularly one that we recently published the results [for] in the southwestern Himalaya, it has not gained mass or has no ice that was deposited after 1950. It's like these glaciers are just literally being decapitated. And it's very frightening.
e360: When you see global warming skeptics seize on a bit of sloppy work in the IPCC report that predicted the end of Himalayan glaciers in 2035, the skeptics then say, "Well, see, the glaciers aren't melting." It must be extremely frustrating to you that this kind of misinformation gets out to the public when in fact you and your husband see that the world's glaciers are disappearing at a very rapid rate.
Mosley-Thompson: Of course it is frustrating, but you know any time that a system, a human system, shows change and people may have to make changes and there are clearly economic consequences, you get into these debates. The unfortunate thing is that scientists generally operate by one set of rules, and the way that we debate and the words that we use and the standards to which we try to hold ourselves are quite different for political debate. In political debate you can use quite different language, things don't have to be precise, you can virtually lie if you want to and then apologize later. But a scientist, if you speak untruthfully, then what's on the line for you as a scientist is your credibility and your reputation. But frankly, I'd like to turn that around and say that when you look at the breadth of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, and how much information is in there, the fact that this must be the most egregious error, otherwise they would be making more of something else — I think it's astounding that the IPCC got as much right as they did because there was just tremendous potential for error.
e360: You and your husband work in the world's ice zones, and so you're getting a first-hand and almost shocking look at the rate of melt. Do you sometimes wish that if the general public could somehow accompany you on your work they would have a much greater sense of urgency about doing something about global warming?
Mosley-Thompson: Well, you know, a picture is worth a thousand words. Generally when we go and give talks and we show that the loss of ice is occurring in virtually every environment that has ice, people walk out and say, "Wow, I just didn't realize the scope of this."
e360: And if we don't begin to rein in CO2 emissions, where do you think the cryosphere, the Earth's ice zone, is heading?
Mosley-Thompson: To the oceans. Ultimately that's where all water goes, to the lowest level.

SNP and Plaid Cymru champion a green revolution

2010-05-05T05:52:00.000+01:00

Both the Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties are passionate advocates of action against climate change, writes Martin Robbins, but other areas of their science policies are sketchy
Read Plaid Cymru's responses in full here

Martin Robbins
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 4 May 2010 17.53 BST

So far I've covered the major UK parties, but in Scotland and Wales elections are contested between a different set of players, with the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Plaid Cymru representing nationalist voters in their respective countries. Discussion of these parties' policies is often centred around devolution, but how do they perform on science?
I also take a brief look at the BNP and the Christian Party towards the end of this article.
Plaid Cymru's manifesto shows a business-minded attitude to science and technology, with pledges to upgrade Wales' IT infrastructure. On the environment it calls for nothing less than a 'green revolution', emphasising job creation and initiatives that enable communities to take part in projects suchs as small-scale energy production and community-based farming. Some leaders promise a Ferrari in every garage, Plaid Cymru promises a goat – and I highlight that as a compliment, although given the lack of efficiency of small farms I'm not sure how viable a strategy they are for curbing emissions.
The SNP makes little mention of science in its manifesto, but has some interesting ideas on the environment, including a focus on preserving marine ecosystems, and an initiative to become a world leader in carbon storage. Unfortunately, the SNP did not respond to our questions, so where possible its views have been inferred from its manifesto, website and policy statements.
Brian Cox: Science funding
Do you plan to maintain Britain's science budget below the European average?
Plaid Cymru's response continues the business-oriented theme evident in its manifesto, bringing the party surprisingly close to the Conservative and Labour positions, which seem to view science as primarily a tool for innovation in the economy. It's difficult to tell whether the lack of blue-sky thinking has ideological roots, or if it's simply the consequence of dealing with the needs of a much smaller nation with fewer resources to speculate with. The creation of a national academy is an interesting but slightly vague proposal.
The centrepiece of the SNP's campaign is a pledge to protect Scotland from cuts to public services, including an attack on wasteful schemes such as ID cards. Having preserved Scotland's budget, it would then invest considerably in research, with the ambitious aim of creating 60,000 green jobs.
Alternative medicine
If the balance of evidence suggests that a treatment does not perform any better than placebo, should it be supported by the NHS?
The SNP supported patient access to alternative medicine in its 2007 manifesto. I couldn't find any similar mention in the 2010 campaign, so it's unclear whether the party still supports it. Plaid Cymru, meanwhile, has no specific policies on alternative medicine.
Simon Singh: Libel
What will your party do to reduce the chilling effect of our libel laws on science?
Plaid Cymru has joined the cross-party consensus on the need to change libel laws. The Libel Reform campaign is focused on laws that apply in England and Wales, and so the question is less relevant to the SNP.
Climate change/Energy
Should nuclear power be part of our country's strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions? How soon can we bring new plants online?
Both Plaid Cymru and the SNP are passionate advocates of action against climate change, and both adopt a range of very similar policies in this area, rejecting the need for nuclear power stations in their countries, preferring to draw on their natural resources to develop renewable energy supplies. Plaid Cymru's objection to nuclear appears slightly more ideological, whereas the SNP points to a lack of any need for it for the relatively small Scottish population.
Both parties put a lot of faith in the potential of a green revolution to create jobs, with the SNP aiming for 60,000 new jobs, and Plaid Cymru planning a massive expansion of the renewable energy industry. The differences lie in the details, with the Scottish exploring the possibility of becoming a world-leading carbon importer, and the Welsh seeking to construct local, sustainable communities self-reliant in energy where possible.
How feasible these plans are given the investment available is unclear, and it's interesting that the SNP's policies seem more centralised than the local initiatives outlined by Plaid Cymru. But clearly both parties have a very passionate commitment to this area.
David Nutt: Drug policy
To what extent should drug policy be based on scientific evidence? What evidence, if any, would you require to declassify a drug?
"We believe drug policy should be entirely based on scientific evidence."
It's a bold and welcome statement. Plaid Cymru also clearly sees drug harm as a public health issue rather than a criminal problem, with the party's policies focusing on rehabilitation and education. Its call for "a public debate over drugs laws" is admirable, but given the poor state of media reporting on the issue it would probably backfire. Notably, Plaid is the first party responding to these questions to explicitly state that it would decriminalise a drug – cannabis.
The SNP adopts a similar public health focus, with an emphasis on treatment and rehabilitation. However, the rhetoric on its website still falls into the trap of suggesting that drug use is automatically a problem.
Other parties
The BNP bravely joins Ukip in the fight against the fight against climate change, although it does still take environmental protection and green belts seriously. There appears to be a lack of understanding when it comes to climate change, which the party believes to be a theory "which holds that all western nations need to be stripped of their manufacturing base and pay untold billions to the Third World to build up their industries".
Its ideal of libel reform also bucks the trend, with plans to introduce laws which "will hold journalists and their media outlets criminally liable for knowingly publishing falsehoods".
From the desk of the party's sci-fi spokesman we have uncosted proposals for a 200mph intercity maglev network. Under the BNP, soil would be "reinvigorated", GM produce would be banned, and the family farm would become the basic unit of British agriculture. If you want to keep reading the 84 pages I couldn't be bothered to look at, be my guest.
The Christian Party has an innovative approach to policy-making that can be summed up as "what does the Bible say?" This is taken to such extremes that all taxes – VAT, income tax, corporation tax, and so on – would be set at 20%, apparently because this is what the pharaohs of Egypt were told to set their taxes at in Genesis.
Abortion is obviously a big fat no, while the party adopts a zero-tolerance policy on drug abuse (though not, presumably, on the drug that is in Communion wine). Having teased the Jeremy Clarkson vote with promises of raising the speed limit to 90mph, the Christian Party brushes it aside with a surprising focus on the environment.
In terms of education, under the Christian Party children would be taught chastity until marriage, and creationism would be restored to its rightful place in the national curriculum. If that all sounds good to you, then you're probably reading the wrong column. Shoo!
Conclusions
The less said about the BNP and the Christian Party, the better. One MP from either party would be one too many, and many of their policies fall foul of Poe's Law – so absurd as to be indistinguishable from parody.
For Plaid Cymru and the SNP the results are mixed, as you would expect from smaller parties. It's hard not to admire both for their commitment to environmental issues, an area in which they provide glimpses of the sort of thinking that English greens might achieve if they were more willing to engage with real science. That said, while their plans are ambitious, it's difficult to assess how feasible they might be.
Both parties take a very practical view of science funding, placing it at the heart of their economic plans, something on which your mileage may vary.
Where the regional parties falter is in fringe areas – neither party seems particularly strong on alternative medicine, and little thought has been given to areas like stem cell research or GM crops. Plaid Cymru has an excellent policy on drugs, while the SNP doesn't seem to go far enough, and doesn't appear to quite grasp the root causes of the problems it wants to tackle.
In summary, while I wouldn't rush out to cast my vote for these parties on the basis of their science policies, I don't see many problems here either.

Transition to low-carbon economy will reshape biz opportunities

2010-05-04T06:10:00.000+01:00

India ranks second after China in terms of value and volume in generating emission reductions under the CDM

Mumbai: Climate Change Capital Ltd (CCC), the world’s largest private sector carbon fund, is betting big on the transition to a low-carbon economy. CCC’s investment portfolio focuses on carbon finance, private equity, and property and energy infrastructure. In India, it invests from the €750 million (Rs4,425 crore) fund focused on carbon and clean energy markets. In an interview, senior investment officer Nakul Zaveri speaks about its investment strategy, focus areas and expansion plans for the country. Edited excerpts:
What kind of capital are you looking to invest in India?
Investments into India flow from our carbon fund. We are the largest private sector carbon fund, managing €750 million focused on clean energy markets. Our investors include some of the world’s largest pension funds. CCC does not have a specific allocation for different markets. India is a key focus area for us given its huge growth and very supportive policy environment, and the group considers investing in India as an integral part of its strategy for its present and future funds.
What will be the size of your investments? What is your differential investment strategy here?
CCC has committed significant capital in numerous deals and through various structures in India. Our present strategy in India is to engage in emission reduction projects in the municipal solid waste (MSW) and energy-efficiency sectors. In addition, CCC is also targeting renewable projects, including mini-hydro, wind and biomass. CCC has contracted with four of India’s leading MSW companies for a number of methane abatement projects. One of them is Nature and Waste Management (P) Ltd based in New Delhi and dedicated to converting the organic component of MSW to compost. CCC has committed substantial capital...with all the above companies.
What are you betting on in the clean development mechanism (CDM) space?
Clean energy: Nakul Zaveri
India has the largest number of service providers in the carbon markets. However, most of these players are either consultants or aggregators. CCC is one of the very few buyers with a large pool of committed capital for the carbon markets. In addition to capital, the carbon finance group has expertise in carbon finance, project finance, private equity, power project development, portfolio management, environmental and technical consulting and policy.
What is India’s place in the global CDM landscape?
India ranks second after China in terms of value and volume in generating emission reductions under the CDM. India’s share is 33% by number of projects and 20% by volume of CERs (certified emission reductions) in the Asian region. In 2009, India ranked first in number of CDM projects submitted for prior consideration to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The Indian government has also been progressive in the CDM space and is accelerating various policies for the adoption of clean energy.
What does it mean to invest in carbon as a private equity strategy?
Until recently, carbon credits were usually contracted under a pay-on-delivery contract. Now, the low-hanging fruits are gone and there are various structures evolving such as upfront advance against potential future CERs generation, debt and investing private equity into projects with carbon-embedded assets. All investments in clean energy will become mainstream and the future for all private equity investors will be to focus on sustainability.
How do you mitigate the risk of CERs accruing from a project?
CDM projects carry a number of risks, including validation, registration, verification and impacts from continuous evolution of the UNFCCC’s CDM policies. In addition, all CDM projects are exposed to regular project risks such as financial closure, implementation delays, regulatory and compliance issues. We do strict due diligence before taking up any project. We cover CDM, financial and legal risks and closely monitor financial closure, implementation and any development at the policy level, which may impact the project.
What do you make of the opportunity available in mapping a company’s carbon footprint, reducing emissions and encashing credits?
We are seeing signs that Indian corporates are increasingly appreciating the fact that the transition to a low carbon economy will reshape business opportunities and risks and will have far and broad implications for businesses. Some large corporate houses have already voluntarily started creating inventories of their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and are mapping their carbon footprint and taking part in global initiatives such as the carbon disclosure project. In addition, there may be compliance requirements in the near future, which will create additional opportunities to reduce emissions and encash credits.
From a private equity perspective, how do you unlock value in the Indian carbon market?
There are certain sectors which may give better returns than the others largely driven by the GHG global warming potential combined with the aligning of the project with the UNFCCC process. The investment approach needs to incorporate carbon due diligence and inherent mitigation to risks associated with innovative investment structuring. The volume may become very critical due to the high transaction costs associated with it.
Content from VCCircle

Boy, 12, patents wind turbine car plan

2010-05-04T06:07:00.000+01:00

ALLENTOWN, PA (NBC) - A 12-year-old student in Pennsylvania is being praised for his inventive design for a product that could conceivably revolutionize auto making. "There's this new idea about solar panels they're thinking about putting it on a car! And I thought if it doesn't work at night how would you work it? So then one time I came over here and I saw the windmill!" said young inventor Billy Schopf. That wind turbine sits outside the Da Vinci Science Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania. And it's where Billy met Dr. Frank Schweighardt and the sketches began of a windmill that attaches to a car to charge a solar battery at night. And that's when Billy conceived the idea of using a circulating liquid that changes thickness to keep the fan blades at the best angle but what kind? "I looked on the internet and one of the fluids was ketchup and I said, 'I know what that is! And I said, Billy, use the ketchup 'cause I know that's a thixotropic fluid! And he's, like, mom!'" said mom Karen Schopf. The Da Vinci Center applied for and got a provisional patent. "We did a patent search and we found nothing! Billy's concept of using the thixotropic solution, the ketchup type idea wasn't used to turn a blade!" said Dr. Schweighardt. "I was very excited! I'm, like, yes! And they explained how I had to make a working model! I was even more excited! I always wanted to create something! So I almost freaked out!" said Billy. So the Da Vinci Science Center unveiled Billy's car turbine and it got congrats from Senators and featured in the center's fundraising campaign.

Offshore windfarms to be used for air defence

2010-05-04T06:05:00.000+01:00

Ministry of Defence had previously opposed the erection of almost 1,000 wind turbines off the UK's eastern seaboard because of radar fears

Owen Bowcott
guardian.co.uk, Monday 3 May 2010 22.45 BST

Offshore windfarms will double as radar defence systems in a pioneering deal involving the Ministry of Defence, which previously opposed the erection of almost 1,000 wind turbines off the UK's eastern seaboard because of fears over their ability to scramble defensive radar.
Wind energy projects across Britain have been held up for years because of planning disagreements, some concerned with interference from turbines that can baffle air-traffic control and defence systems, creating blind spots or "blackout zones" in coverage.
The wind-driven turbine blades can rotate at up to 200mph, mimicking on-screen the appearance of slow-moving aircraft and showing up as a blur of images. Simply discounting the clutter is dangerous because the images obscure patches from which planes could suddenly emerge; there are fears that hijacked airliners or bombers could evade detection.
But now the wind farm industry will spend at least £16m on advanced radar defence systems to be integrated into new offshore windfarms, clearing the way for a significant boost in the UK's supply of renewable energy.
The agreement involves a consortium of windpower firms purchasing US-manufactured Lockheed Martin radar equipment so that Britain's eastern airspace approaches can be protected after turbines are erected around the Wash.
In return, the MoD has lifted planning objections to five new offshore windfarms that will include almost a 1,000 wind turbines. The deal is expected to trigger a fresh wave of applications to install windfarms.
The RAF and the renewable energy industry have been negotiating for years over the problem. A number of technical fixes are being explored, including applying radar-absorbing material to turbine blades to render them invisible to radar.
The defence contractor Raytheon has been commissioned by the UK's National Air Traffic Services (NATS) to develop improved radar systems that can discriminate between aircraft and wind turbines.
The new spirit of co-operation between the MoD and windfarm developers follows adoption of the government's aviation plan in 2008. Release of military research reports has helped generate some common understanding.
"There now seems to be quite a degree of momentum," said Nicola Vaughan, head of aviation at RenewableUK, the industry body that represents wind, wave and tidal power firms.
"The MoD have started to lift their objections, particularly to offshore turbines, [following] this solution … There's around 1,000 new turbines – 3.2 gigawatts of power [on the Wash] – which now stand a chance of being built, because the MoD objection was the last significant [hurdle]."
The Lockheed Martin Air Defence Radar TPS 77 system, which cost about £20m, will be paid for by the windfarm developers, the Crown Estate on whose submerged land the turbines will be built, and the Department of Energy and Climate Change, which is contributing £4m. The Crown and the developers, which include Scira Offshore Energy, Centrica, NPower and Warwick Energy, have paid the rest.
The Sheringham Shoal offshore windfarm, with 88 wind turbines and already under construction, will be the first to be completed. There are applications for about 3,000 further turbines, equivalent to 6GW, now going through the planning process, according to RenewableUK. Proposals for an additional 3,000 turbines are at earlier stages of development.
The MoD said it needed to ensure aircraft safety, adding: "By installing an additional radar in Norfolk we will significantly reduce the negative impact of the turbines on MoD business."

The dark side of cloud computing: soaring carbon emissions

2010-05-04T06:03:00.000+01:00

Experts warn the electricity consumption and carbon footprint of cloud computing will more than double from 2007 levels by 2020

Stephan Schmidt for OurWorld 2.0, part of the Guardian Environment Network
guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 April 2010 15.22 BST
While the ash cloud from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano expanded for a relatively short time over Europe and then slowly disappeared, another cloud, this one unseen, is rising steadily over the entire world.
Digital waste has grown exponentially over the last decade as storage of data — such as e-mails, pictures, audio and video files, etc. — has shifted to the online sphere.
The advent of web services that allow users to upload files has made it possible to leave behind (most likely in landfills) tapes and discs and instead throw all of our recorded information into one big digital cloud of computers.
Cloud computing refers to today's predominant infrastructure and business model whereby information, software and other resources are delivered on-demand to users via the Internet. An ever-scalable collection of energy sucking data centres and server farms is required to deliver these services.
But the Internet saves energy, right?
According to Joseph Romm's 1999 seminal work, The Internet Economy and Global Warming, direct sales to consumers and decentralized digital inventories of goods could lead to dramatic reductions in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by 2010.
However, things turned out differently. Each day we generate more and more data — your digital footprint, so to speak, requires huge amounts of server space and energy. A part of that digital footprint may be described as digital waste — just think about all the data that you have created online that you no longer use.
Almost everything we do online increases our carbon footprint. As a perverse example, Antivirus Company MacAffee reports that the electricity needed just to transmit the trillions of spam e-mails sent every year is equivalent to powering two million homes in the United States and generates the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as that produced by three million cars.
According to a recent Greenpeace report, Make IT Green: Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change, the electricity consumed by cloud computing globally will increase from 632 billion kilowatt hours in 2007 to 1,963 billion kWh by 2020 and the associated CO2 equivalent emissions would reach 1,034 metric tons.
Keen on energy saving
Quite clearly we cannot continue on this path and thankfully there are opportunities available to large IT companies to grow responsibly without fuelling climate change.
Google was among the first Internet companies to take action to reduce energy consumption at its data centres. It is trying to promote efficient computing and seeking to increase its use of renewable energy. Along with many of the leading IT firms, Google is a member of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.
Over in Europe, some server operators, like the German web-space provider Strato (one of Europe's largest), have done their calculations and recognized that they could reduce energy use by adopting high performance energy efficient hardware and software, as well as precise cooling systems that use sensors and special "cool corridors" to moderate temperature.
In 2008, Strato began reducing their CO2 emissions by switching to renewable energy to power their servers. They are now members of the Green Grid, a consortium of IT companies and professionals who want to improve energy efficiency in data centres and business computing worldwide. The organization wants to green the IT world by uniting "global industry efforts to standardize on a common set of metrics, processes, methods and new technologies to further its common goals".
And if CO2 reduction and saving energy is not enough incentive for more companies to plug into the initiative, no doubt peaking oil supplies and rising oil prices will spur the Green Grid's growth.
Hardware is only part of the problem
Most of the solutions on offer involve buying ever more efficient servers and enhancing the infrastructure. However, software developers also face the challenge of creating software that runs 'greenly' — i.e., sleekly and ultra-efficiently. A program is considered to be highly efficient when the software code is written in a short, effective way, thereby avoiding redundant calculations that waste CPU power.
A related issue is that of proprietary formats for documents, such as those for Mircrosoft Word or PDFs, as examples. If you have been working with computers for years, you probably have lots of documents on media that you can no longer open any more since your current software is not backward compatible. Jan Wildeboer, an open source evangelist, describes proprietary formats as "digital waste". He is most concerned about all the documents maintained by public bodies in proprietary formats and worries that unless we move to open standards all that data will be locked up forever and potentially inaccessible in the future if formats continue to evolve.
At the personal level we also need to be aware. Today, we are all simply so excited about being part of the virtual revolution in the digital age that few have stopped to think about the questions of e-waste and digital waste — the topics we have addressed in this 'waste week' series of articles.
We may not worry about what happens to our old computers or hand held devices like mobile phones and iPods. We probably too easily throw out those old ink cartridges with our regular trash, when we could take them to be recycled. We rarely, if ever, spare a thought for our digital footprints.
But maybe we should. It is interesting to ponder whether when we close down our online accounts, we could request that our files be removed, so as to free up server space for others? Could we specify that our digital waste be automatically removed after a certain period of non-use? That will probably never be possible, but we do need to think more carefully about the ramifications of this ever-growing computing cloud and the question of its long-term sustainability.
Just how much server space will humanity need in 2050?

Massive capacity for CO2 storage exists in the UK

2010-05-04T06:02:00.000+01:00

We are sure that carbon capture and storage can stall the effects of climate change

Stuart Haszeldine and Martin Blunt
The Guardian, Tuesday 4 May 2010
Your article reported Houston University research which claims that "governments wanting to use carbon capture and storage have overestimated its value" (US paper raises doubts over viability of carbon capture, 26 April).
The carbon dioxide storage method injects the gas into the microscopic pores of reservoir sediments below 800 metres underground, in order to reduce atmospheric levels of this greenhouse gas. Scientists internationally are attempting to evaluate it. The argument you report is derived from a notorious pair of articles by Michael Economides and Christine Ehlig-Economides.
Economides says: "It would be hard to inject CO2 into a closed system without eventually producing so much pressure that it fractured the rock and allowed the carbon to migrate to other zones and possibly escape to the surface." That proposition is clearly wrong. The largest storage site in the world has injected 12m tonnes of CO2 over the last 13 years, not "a million tonnes over three years" as they asserted.
Consider the oil trapped in subsurface reservoirs. It is well understood that oil is not generated where it is discovered, but has moved many kilometres vertically and laterally through layers of sediment. That informs petroleum geologists (such as us) and should inform petroleum engineers (such as Economides and his co-author) that a reservoir is not a "closed system", but transmits fluids to its surroundings. The pressure spreads into a large subsurface volume (like a leaky car tyre) and does not increase in the reservoir rocks as they suggest.
The Economides calculations rely on bizarre assumptions, leading to the erroneous claim that "it would take a reservoir the size of a small US state to hold the CO2 produced by one power station". Their argument is, literally, full of holes. Firstly, storage capacity estimates differ between the first and second of their articles by a factor of 10, with no explanation and no change in their conclusions. Secondly, the calculation assumes that the "small US state" is underlain by just one reservoir, just 10 metres thick.
Economides professes that "geologists [do] not understand flow and the laws of physics", but he clearly fails to understand the geology. Multiple porous sandstones often exist below ground, with cumulative thicknesses of many hundreds of metres. Thirdly, there have been some 20 experiments of CO2 injection over the past decade. Only one has experienced the alleged pressure problem of "a bicycle pump against the wall".
By contrast, detailed work on six continents has convinced hundreds of impartial geoscientists that massive capacity for CO2 storage exists. The UK is especially fortunate as rocks similar to those which host our oil are anticipated to store 100 years of CO2 from all north-west Europe's power plants. This can buy us time while truly sustainable energy sources develop to limit climate change. But climate change is something else Economides and his co-author don't believe in.