Environmental Economics & Sustainable Development

David Suzuki, Air, and Intelligence

2008-04-06T23:41:00.002-04:00

David Suzuki talking about air and alveoli
March 12, 2008 -- 11th Annual Commonwealth Lecture

Our lungs are made up of about 300 million capsules, or alveoli, and they are clustered around an alveolar stem like grapes. We have lots of these clusters in our lungs and we need them all to provide the surface area needed to come into contact with the air. If you flatten the alveoli of our lungs out into two dimensions, they would cover a tennis court. That is about how much surface area is wrinkled up in our lungs. Each alveolus is lined by a surfactant that reduces surface tension so that the air sticks to it. Immediately carbon dioxide rushes out of our bodies, oxygen and whatever else is in the air rushes in, and haemoglobin molecules in red blood cells grab on to the oxygen so that each beat of our heart can transfer that oxygen to every part of our bodies. And when you exhale you do not exhale all the air in your lungs. If you did that your lungs would collapse. About half of the air stays in your lungs even when you exhale.

The point I am trying to make is that you cannot draw a line that marks where the air ends and I begin. There is no line. The air is stuck to us and circulating through our bodies. We are air. It is a part of us and it is in us…

We think we are an intelligent creature, but what intelligent creature, knowing the role that air plays in our lives keeping us alive and connecting us to the past and into the future, would then proceed to use air as a garbage can and refuse to pay for putting carbon and all our pollutants into the atmosphere? We have much to reflect on the way that we use this sacred substance. It hurts me when I see young couples walking with a baby in a stroller and the baby’s nose is right at the level of the exhaust pipes of our cars. You might as well put a hose on the exhaust pipe and pump that stuff right into the baby’s body. Why are 15% of children in Canada now suffering with asthma? We are using the air as a toxic dump. We are air. Whatever we do to the air we do to ourselves.

Conscientious Investments: The Carbon Principles

2008-02-05T00:47:00.000-05:00

Banks Set Emissions Standard for U.S. Power Industry
1999 -- By Lisa Lee, Reuters via ENN

Three Wall Street banks said on Monday they will set environmental standards that factor in risks posed by carbon-emissions when lending to power companies that seek to build coal-fired power plants.

Citigroup Inc, JP Morgan Chase & Co and Morgan Stanley will form "The Carbon Principles," climate change guidelines for advisors and lenders to power companies in the United States.

The banks developed the principles in consultation with environmental organizations and power companies, including American Electric Power Co, the nation's largest consumer of coal, and Southern Co, the largest utility company in the coal-heavy Southeast.

Financing of projects with high carbon dioxide-emitting technologies will be evaluated using a new framework that factors in the potential carbon risks, they said.

State of Green Business 2008

2008-02-01T23:38:00.000-05:00

Download report

1 Megawatt Powers 778 Homes!

2008-02-01T23:33:00.000-05:00

A one-megawatt electric plant running continuously at full capacity can power 778 households each year, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. There are 1,000 kilowatts in a megawatt. Solar technology has lower capacity because its power generation is constrained by availability of the sun.

Source: Forbes

Why 80% GHG Reductions Are Necessary: Concentrations, Emissions, Stocks, and, Flows

2008-02-01T23:27:00.000-05:00

Combined Renewable Energy Powerplant

2008-01-09T00:38:00.000-05:00

AEP Settles With Government

2007-10-10T02:10:00.000-04:00

AEP Settles Long-Running U.S. Acid Rain Suit
October 9, 2007 -- Reuters via ENN

U.S. power generator American Electric Power has settled an eight-year legal battle over acid rain with the U.S. government and other plaintiffs, but the agreement will not change the company's 2007 earnings, a spokesman said on Monday.

It agreed to pay $15 million in civil penalties and $60 million in pollution cleanup costs to end the long-running dispute about whether AEP illegally modified power plants and spewed acid rain producing chemicals across the northeastern United States.

AEP's biggest expense as a result of the suit will not start until 2017, spokesman Pat Hemlepp told Reuters by telephone. The company will spend $1.6 billion, in current dollars, primarily to upgrade a major coal-fired power plant in southern Indiana...

"This ends all litigation on this," Hemlepp said, adding that the deal would be formally announced on Tuesday morning.

AEP admits no wrong in the settlement. Hemlepp said that the company decided it was best to settle the suit rather than to drag it out any further.

The suit, brought in 1999, accused AEP of expanding or modifying its older plants without installing pollution-control equipment that would have curbed emissions that cause acid rain.

The suit involved nine of the oldest coal-fired plants of the Columbus, Ohio-based power generator. Those plants are in Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia.

AEP, with 38,000 megawatts of power generating capacity, is one of the largest power producers in the United States. About two-thirds of AEP's power is made by burning coal, which creates emissions that cause acid rain, including nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide.

The eight states mainly from the U.S. Northeast involved in the suit are the ones that claim they are affected by the acid rain caused by the coal-fired AEP plants in other states. The states that joined the suit are New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Rhode Island.

There are 14 environmental groups involved in the suit. Attempts to reach the Environmental Protection Agency and other plaintiffs were not successful.

AEP is among the utilities that have long fought the Environmental Protection Agency and so-called "new source review." Set up in the 1970s by various provisions of the Clean Air Act, new source review requires new plants or substantial expansion to existing plants -- the sources of emission -- have preconstruction environmental reviews.

Environmentalists have long charged that utilities, including AEP which has one of the largest fleets of older coal-fired plants, went ahead with expansions without seeking new source reviews.

The utilities and the EPA have fought over what type of expansions are to be included in the new source reviews for three decades. The Clinton administration settled many of the battles between utilities and the EPA but President George W. Bush's administration threw out those agreements.

Hemlepp said AEP has not violated the process and is cleaning up its fleet already, without pressure from the lawsuit it has now settled.

He said that AEP would stick to its forecast of $2.90 to $3.00 ongoing earnings per share in 2007, and the agreement would not affect the 2008-2010 capital spending plan, he added.

"We still strongly feel we did not violate the new source review regulations," Hemlepp said.

PG&E Gives Away 1 Million CFLs

2007-10-03T17:36:00.000-04:00

PG&E Gives Away 1 Million Energy Efficient Light Bulbs
October 3, 2007 -- By Todd Woody, Green Wombat

In the U.S.' biggest compact fluorescent light bulb giveaway, California utility PG&E began handing out 1 million energy-efficient CFLs today. The bulbs use 75 percent less electricity than conventional incandescent lighting and they've become something of an icon in the fight against global warming given that lighting accounts for a big chunk of greenhouse gas emissions. Wal-Mart (WMT) in particular has jumped on the CFL bandwagon, announcing Tuesday it had already exceeded its goal of selling 100 million bulbs by the end of 2007.

The PG&E (PCG) giveaway is part of its efforts to push 20 million CFLs into customers' homes by the end of the year. PG&E spokesperson Keely Wachs told Green Wombat that the utility will spend $1.25 million on the freebies. Or more accurately, PG&E customers will spend that as the giveaway comes under the utility's state-mandated energy efficiency efforts whose costs regulators permit to be recouped through electricity rates. "The benefits of handing these out and the energy efficiency that will be realized far outweigh our costs to customers," Wachs says.

PG&E estimates over the lifetime of the 1 million bulbs - if they're installed in California homes - will save more 400,000 megawatts of electricity and eliminate 200,000 tons of greenhouse gases. Tomorrow PG&E will announce a deal with Safeway (SWY) grocery stores to sell CFLs at a discount.

Climate Change Agreement by 2009?

2007-10-02T17:38:00.000-04:00

Avoiding Collapse in Modern Civilization

2007-09-30T15:55:00.000-04:00

THE NATURE OF THE NEW WORLD
October 2, 2007 -- By Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

Plan B 2.0 Book Byte:

We recently entered a new century, but we are also entering a new world, one where the collisions between our demands and the earth’s capacity to satisfy them are becoming daily events. It may be another crop-withering heat wave, another village abandoned because of invading sand dunes, or another aquifer pumped dry. If we do not act quickly to reverse the trends, these seemingly isolated events will occur more and more frequently, accumulating and combining to determine our future.

Resources that accumulated over eons of geological time are being consumed in a single human lifespan. We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize. These deadlines, determined by nature, are not politically negotiable.

Nature has many thresholds that we discover only when it is too late. In our fast-forward world, we learn that we have crossed them only after the fact, leaving little time to adjust. For example, when we exceed the sustainable catch of a fishery, the stocks begin to shrink. Once this threshold is crossed, we have a limited time in which to back off and lighten the catch. If we fail to meet this deadline, breeding populations shrink to where the fishery is no longer viable, and it collapses.

We know from earlier civilizations that the lead indicators of economic decline were environmental, not economic. The trees went first, then the soil, and finally the civilization itself. To archeologists, the sequence is all too familiar.

Our situation today is far more challenging because in addition to shrinking forests and eroding soils, we must deal with falling water tables, more frequent crop-withering heat waves, collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts, deteriorating rangelands, dying coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising seas, more-powerful storms, disappearing species, and, soon, shrinking oil supplies. Although these ecologically destructive trends have been evident for some time, and some have been reversed at the national level, not one has been reversed at the global level.

The bottom line is that the world is in what ecologists call an “overshoot-and-collapse” mode. Demand has exceeded the sustainable yield of natural systems at the local level countless times in the past. Now, for the first time, it is doing so at the global level. Forests are shrinking for the world as a whole. Fishery collapses are widespread. Grasslands are deteriorating on every continent. Water tables are falling in many countries. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions exceed CO2 sequestration.

In 2002, a team of scientists led by Mathis Wackernagel, who now heads the Global Footprint Network, concluded that humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980. Their study, published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, estimated that global demands in 1999 exceeded that capacity by 20 percent. The gap, growing by 1 percent or so a year, is now much wider. We are meeting current demands by consuming the earth’s natural assets, setting the stage for decline and collapse.

In a rather ingenious approach to calculating the human physical presence on the planet, Paul MacCready, the founder and Chairman of AeroVironment and designer of the first solar-powered aircraft, has calculated the weight of all vertebrates on the land and in the air. He notes that when agriculture began, humans, their livestock, and pets together accounted for less than 0.1 percent of the total. Today, he estimates, this group accounts for 98 percent of the earth’s total vertebrate biomass, leaving only 2 percent for the wild portion, the latter including all the deer, wildebeests, elephants, great cats, birds, small mammals, and so forth.

Ecologists are intimately familiar with the overshoot-and-collapse phenomenon. One of their favorite examples began in 1944, when the Coast Guard introduced 29 reindeer on remote St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea to serve as the backup food source for the 19 men operating a station there. After World War II ended a year later, the base was closed and the men left the island. When U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist David Kline visited St. Matthew in 1957, he discovered a thriving population of 1,350 reindeer feeding on the thick mat of lichen that covered the 332-square-kilometer (128-square-mile) island. In the absence of any predators, the population was exploding. By 1963, it had reached 6,000. He returned to St. Matthew in 1966 and discovered an island strewn with reindeer skeletons and not much lichen. Only 42 of the reindeer survived: 41 females and 1 not entirely healthy male. There were no fawns. By 1980 or so, the remaining reindeer had died off.

Like the deer on St. Matthew Island, we too are overconsuming our natural resources. Overshoot leads sometimes to decline and sometimes to a complete collapse. It is not always clear which it will be. In the former, a remnant of the population or economic activity survives in a resource-depleted environment. For example, as the environmental resource base of Easter Island in the South Pacific deteriorated, its population declined from a peak of 20,000 several centuries ago to today’s population of fewer than 4,000. In contrast, the 500-year-old Norse settlement in Greenland collapsed during the 1400s, disappearing entirely in the face of environmental adversity.

Even as the global population is climbing and the economy’s environmental support systems are deteriorating, the world is pumping oil with reckless abandon. Leading geologists now think oil production may soon peak and turn downward. Although no one knows exactly when oil production will peak, supply is already lagging behind demand, driving prices upward.

Faced with a seemingly insatiable demand for automotive fuel, farmers will want to clear more and more of the remaining tropical forests to produce sugarcane, oil palms, and other high-yielding biofuel crops. Already, billions of dollars of private capital are moving into this effort. In effect, the rising price of oil is generating a massive new threat to the earth’s biological diversity.

As the demand for farm commodities climbs, it is shifting the focus of international trade concerns from the traditional goal of assured access to markets to one of assured access to supplies. Countries heavily dependent on imported grain for food are beginning to worry that buyers for fuel distilleries may outbid them for supplies. As oil security deteriorates, so, too, will food security.

As the role of oil recedes, the process of globalization will be reversed in fundamental ways. As the world turned to oil during the last century, the energy economy became increasingly globalized, with the world depending heavily on a handful of countries in the Middle East for energy supplies. Now as the world turns to wind, solar cells, and geothermal energy in this century, we are witnessing the localization of the world energy economy.

The world is facing the emergence of a geopolitics of scarcity, which is already highly visible in the efforts by China, India, and other developing countries to ensure their access to oil supplies. In the future, the issue will be who gets access to not only Middle Eastern oil but also Brazilian ethanol and North American grain. Pressures on land and water resources, already excessive in most of the world, will intensify further as the demand for biofuels climbs. This geopolitics of scarcity is an early manifestation of civilization in an overshoot-and-collapse mode, much like the one that emerged among the Mayan cities competing for food in that civilization’s waning years.

You do not need to be an ecologist to see that if recent environmental trends continue, the global economy eventually will come crashing down. It is not knowledge that we lack. At issue is whether national governments can stabilize population and restructure the economy before time runs out.

In addition, here is a synopsis of Jared Diamond's book entitled Collapse:

Diamond lists eight factors which have historically contributed to the collapse of past societies:

1. Deforestation and habitat destruction
2. Soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses)
3. Water management problems
4. Overhunting
5. Overfishing
6. Effects of introduced species on native species
7. Human population growth
8. Increased per-capita impact of people

Further he says four new factors may contribute to the weakening and collapse of present and future societies:

1. Human-caused climate change
2. Buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment
3. Energy shortages
4. Full human utilization of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity

Biofuels May Raise GHG Emissions, says Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen

2007-09-25T14:48:00.000-04:00

Biofuels could boost global warming, finds study
September 21, 2007 -- By Zoe Corbyn, Chemistry World

Growing and burning many biofuels may actually raise rather than lower greenhouse gas emissions, a new study led by Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen has shown. The findings come in the wake of a recent OECD report, which warned nations not to rush headlong into growing energy crops because they cause food shortages and damage biodiversity.

Crutzen and colleagues have calculated that growing some of the most commonly used biofuel crops releases around twice the amount of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O) than previously thought - wiping out any benefits from not using fossil fuels and, worse, probably contributing to global warming. The work appears in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and is currently subject to open review.

'The significance of it is that the supposed benefits of biofuel are even more disputable than had been thought hitherto,' Keith Smith, a co-author on the paper from the University of Edinburgh, told Chemistry World. 'What we are saying is that [growing many biofuels] is probably of no benefit and in fact is actually making the climate issue worse.'

Crutzen, famous for his work on nitrogen oxides and the ozone layer, declined to comment before the paper is officially published. But the paper suggests that microbes convert much more of the nitrogen in fertiliser to N2O than previously thought - 3 to 5 per cent or twice the widely accepted figure of 2 per cent used by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

For rapeseed biodiesel, which accounts for about 80 per cent of the biofuel production in Europe, the relative warming due to N2O emissions is estimated at 1 to 1.7 times larger than the quasi-cooling effect due to saved fossil CO2 emissions. For corn bioethanol, dominant in the US, the figure is 0.9 to 1.5. Only cane sugar bioethanol - with a relative warming of 0.5 to 0.9 - looks like a viable alternative to conventional fuels.

Some previous estimates had suggested that biofuels could cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 40 per cent.

Global picture

The IPCC's N2O conversion factor is derived using data from plant experiments. But Crutzen takes a different approach, using atmospheric measurements and ice core data to calculate the total amount of N2O in the atmosphere. He then subtracts the level of N2O in pre-industrial times - before fertilizers were available - to take account of N2O from natural processes such as leguminous plants growing in forests, lightning, and burn offs.

Assuming the rest of the N2O is attributable to newly-fixed nitrogen from fertilizer use, and knowing the amount of fertilizer applied globally, he can calculate thecontribution of fertilizers to N2O levels.

The results may well trigger a rethink by the IPCC, says Smith. 'Should we go along the road of adding up the experimental evidence for each of the processes or are we better off using the global numbers?'

Critical reception

But other experts are critical of Crutzen's approach. Simon Donner, a nitrogen researcher based at Princeton University, US, says the method is elegant but there is little evidence to show the N2O yield from fertilized plants is really as high as 3-5 per cent. Crutzen's basic assumption, that pre-industrial N2O emissions are the same as natural N2O emissions, is 'probably wrong', says Donner.

One reason he gives is that farmers plant crops in places that have nitrogen rich soils anyway. 'It is possible we are indirectly increasing the "natural" source of N2O by drawing down the soil nitrogen in the world's agricultural regions,' he explains.

Others dispute the values chosen by Crutzen to calculate his budget. Stefan Rauh, an agricultural scientist at the Instituteof Agricultural Economics and Farm Management in Munich, Germany, says some of the rates for converting crops into biofuel should be higher. 'If you use the other factors you get a little net climate cooling,' he said.

Meanwhile, a report prepared by the OECD for a recent Round Table on Sustainable Development questions the benefits of first generation biofuels and concludes that governments should scrap mandatory targets.

Richard Doornbosch, the report's author, says both the report and Crutzen's work highlights the importance of establishing correct full life-cycle assessments for biofuels. 'Without them, government policies can't distinguish between one biofuel and another - risking making problems worse,' said Doornbosch.

Carbon Tax, CAFE Standards and Cap-and-Trade: An Economist's View

2007-09-19T01:25:00.000-04:00

One Answer to Global Warming: A New Tax
September 16, 2007 -- By N. Gregory Mankiw, The New York Times

In the debate over global climate change, there is a yawning gap that needs to be bridged. The gap is not between environmentalists and industrialists, or between Democrats and Republicans. It is between policy wonks and political consultants.

Among policy wonks like me, there is a broad consensus. The scientists tell us that world temperatures are rising because humans are emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Basic economics tells us that when you tax something, you normally get less of it. So if we want to reduce global emissions of carbon, we need a global carbon tax. Q.E.D.

The idea of using taxes to fix problems, rather than merely raise government revenue, has a long history. The British economist Arthur Pigou advocated such corrective taxes to deal with pollution in the early 20th century. In his honor, economics textbooks now call them “Pigovian taxes.”

Using a Pigovian tax to address global warming is also an old idea. It was proposed as far back as 1992 by Martin S. Feldstein on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. Once chief economist to Ronald Reagan, Mr. Feldstein has devoted much of his career to studying how high tax rates distort incentives and impede economic growth. But like most other policy wonks, he appreciates that some taxes align private incentives with social costs and move us toward better outcomes.

Those vying for elected office, however, are reluctant to sign on to this agenda. Their political consultants are no fans of taxes, Pigovian or otherwise. Republican consultants advise using the word “tax” only if followed immediately by the word “cut.” Democratic consultants recommend the word “tax” be followed by “on the rich.”

Yet this natural aversion to carbon taxes can be overcome if the revenue from the tax is used to reduce other taxes. By itself, a carbon tax would raise the tax burden on anyone who drives a car or uses electricity produced with fossil fuels, which means just about everybody. Some might fear this would be particularly hard on the poor and middle class.

But Gilbert Metcalf, a professor of economics at Tufts, has shown how revenue from a carbon tax could be used to reduce payroll taxes in a way that would leave the distribution of total tax burden approximately unchanged. He proposes a tax of $15 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, together with a rebate of the federal payroll tax on the first $3,660 of earnings for each worker.

The case for a carbon tax looks even stronger after an examination of the other options on the table. Lawmakers in both political parties want to require carmakers to increase the fuel efficiency of the cars they sell. Passing the buck to auto companies has a lot of popular appeal.

Increased fuel efficiency, however, is not free. Like a tax, the cost of complying with more stringent regulation will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher car prices. But the government will not raise any revenue that it can use to cut other taxes to compensate for these higher prices. (And don’t expect savings on gas to compensate consumers in a meaningful way: Any truly cost-effective increase in fuel efficiency would already have been made.)

More important, enhancing fuel efficiency by itself is not the best way to reduce energy consumption. Fuel use depends not only on the efficiency of the car fleet but also on the daily decisions that people make — how far from work they choose to live and how often they carpool or use public transportation.

A carbon tax would provide incentives for people to use less fuel in a multitude of ways. By contrast, merely having more efficient cars encourages more driving. Increased driving not only produces more carbon, but also exacerbates other problems, like accidents and road congestion.

Another popular proposal to limit carbon emissions is a cap-and-trade system, under which carbon emissions are limited and allowances are bought and sold in the marketplace. The effect of such a system depends on how the carbon allowances are allocated. If the government auctions them off, then the price of a carbon allowance is effectively a carbon tax.

But the history of cap-and-trade systems suggests that the allowances would probably be handed out to power companies and other carbon emitters, which would then be free to use them or sell them at market prices. In this case, the prices of energy products would rise as they would under a carbon tax, but the government would collect no revenue to reduce other taxes and compensate consumers.

The international dimension of the problem also suggests the superiority of a carbon tax over cap-and-trade. Any long-term approach to global climate change will have to deal with the emerging economies of China and India. By some reports, China is now the world’s leading emitter of carbon, in large part simply because it has so many people. The failure of the Kyoto treaty to include these emerging economies is one reason that, in 1997, the United States Senate passed a resolution rejecting the Kyoto approach by a vote of 95 to zero.

Agreement on a truly global cap-and-trade system, however, is hard to imagine. China is unlikely to be persuaded to accept fewer carbon allowances per person than the United States. Using a historical baseline to allocate allowances, as is often proposed, would reward the United States for having been a leading cause of the problem.

But allocating carbon allowances based on population alone would create a system in which the United States, with its higher standard of living, would buy allowances from China. American voters are not going to embrace a system of higher energy prices, coupled with a large transfer of national income to the Chinese. It would amount to a massive foreign aid program to one of the world’s most rapidly growing economies.

A global carbon tax would be easier to negotiate. All governments require revenue for public purposes. The world’s nations could agree to use a carbon tax as one instrument to raise some of that revenue. No money needs to change hands across national borders. Each government could keep the revenue from its tax and use it to finance spending or whatever form of tax relief it considered best.

Convincing China of the virtues of a carbon tax, however, may prove to be the easy part. The first and more difficult step is to convince American voters, and therefore political consultants, that “tax” is not a four-letter word.

Alex's Last Words

2007-09-11T01:55:00.000-04:00

Excerpts from:
Brainy Parrot Dies, Emotive to the End
September 11, 2007 -- By Benedict Carey, The New York Times

He knew his colors and shapes, he learned more than 100 English words, and with his own brand of one-liners he established himself in television shows, scientific reports and news articles as perhaps the world’s most famous talking bird.

But last week Alex, an African gray parrot, died, apparently of natural causes, said Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at Brandeis University and Harvard who studied and worked with the parrot for most of his life and published reports of his progress in scientific journals. The parrot was 31.

Scientists have long debated whether any other species can develop the ability to learn human language. Alex’s language facility was, in some ways, more surprising than the feats of primates that have been taught American Sign Language, like Koko the gorilla, trained by Penny Patterson at the Gorilla Foundation/Koko.org in Woodside, Calif., or Washoe the chimpanzee, studied by R. Allen and Beatrice Gardner at the University of Nevada in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1977, when Dr. Pepperberg, then a doctoral student in chemistry at Harvard, bought Alex from a pet store, scientists had little expectation that any bird could learn to communicate with humans, as opposed to just mimicking words and sounds. Research in other birds had been not promising.

But by using novel methods of teaching, Dr. Pepperberg prompted Alex to learn scores of words, which he could put into categories, and to count small numbers of items, as well as recognize colors and shapes.

“The work revolutionized the way we think of bird brains,” said Diana Reiss, a psychologist at Hunter College who works with dolphins and elephants. “That used to be a pejorative, but now we look at those brains — at least Alex’s — with some awe.”

Other scientists, while praising the research, cautioned against characterizing Alex’s abilities as human. The parrot learned to communicate in basic expressions — but he did not show the sort of logic and ability to generalize that children acquire at an early age, they said.

“There’s no evidence of recursive logic, and without that you can’t work with digital numbers or more complex human grammar,” said David Premack, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Pepperberg used an innovative approach to teach Alex. African grays are social birds, and quickly pick up some group dynamics. In experiments, Dr. Pepperberg would employ one trainer to, in effect, compete with Alex for a small reward, like a grape. Alex learned to ask for the grape by observing what the trainer was doing to get it; the researchers then worked with the bird to help shape the pronunciation of the words...

Even up through last week, Alex was working with Dr. Pepperberg on compound words and hard-to-pronounce words. As she put him into his cage for the night last Thursday, she recalled, Alex looked at her and said: “You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you.”

He was found dead in his cage the next morning, Dr. Pepperberg said.

Biomimicry, Maximizing Wealth and Minimizing Materials Flow

2007-09-05T01:38:00.000-04:00

Excerpt from:
Natural Capitalism
1999 -- By Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins

Materials efficiency is just as much a lesson of biological design as the making of spider-silk: biomimicry can inform not just the design of specific manufacturing processes but also the structure and function of the entire economy. As [Janine] Benyus notes, an ecologically redesigned economy will work less like an aggressive, early-colonizer sort of ecosystem and more like a mature one. Instead of a high-throughput, relatively wasteful and undiversified ecosystem, it will resemble what ecologists call a Type Three ecosystem, like a stable oak-hickory forest. Its economy sustains a high stock of diverse forms of biological wealth while consuming relatively little input. Instead, its myriad niches are all filled with organisms busily sopping up and remaking every crumb of detritus into new life. Ecosystem succession tends in this direction. So does the evolution of sustainable economies. Benyus reminds us, "We don't need to invent a sustainable world--that's been done already." It's all around us. We need only to learn from its success in sustaining the maximum of wealth with the minimum of materials flow.

Natural Capitalism Quotes

2007-09-04T01:39:00.000-04:00

Excerpts from:
Natural Capitalism
1999 -- By Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins

Imagine giving a speech to Parliament in 1750 predicting that within seventy years human productivity would rise to the point that one person could do the work of two hundred. The speaker would have been branded as daft or worse. Imagine a similar scene today. Experts are testifying in Congress, predicting that we will increase the productivity of our resources in the next seventy years by a factor of four, ten, even one hundred. Just as it was impossible 250 years ago to conceive of an individual's doing two hundred times more work, it is equally difficult for us today to imagine a kilowatt-hour or board foot being ten or a hundred times more productive than it is now...

Resource productivity doesn't just save resources and money; it can also improve the quality of life. Listen to the din of daily existence--the city and freeway traffic, the airplanes, the garbage trucks outside urban windows--and consider this: The waste and the noise are signs of inefficiency, and they represent money being thrown away. They will disappear as surely as did manure from the nineteenth-century streets of London and New York. Inevitably, industry will redesign everything it makes and does, in order to participate in the coming productivity revolution.

The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono

2007-08-30T01:47:00.000-04:00

The Man Who Planted Trees (L'homme qui plantait des arbres)
The Story of Elzéard Bouffier
1953 -- By Jean Giono
Animated adaptation by Frédéric Back in 1987

Methane Hydrates (Clathrates) Could Power The World

2007-08-27T08:10:00.000-04:00

The great submarine burp
August 27, 2007 -- The Economist

Methane from the oceans could power the world

Much effort is quietly going into the pursuit of what is probably the world’s greatest store of fossil fuel—caches of methane, the primary component of natural gas, stored in structures called methane hydrates, or clathrates (a general term for gas molecules trapped by water molecules). Looking just like ice, they are methane molecules trapped within tiny cages of water molecules. They form where temperatures are low and pressures are high, which is to say, on the sea-floor at the continental shelves, and within the permafrost at the Earth’s poles.

As with all fossil-fuel resources, it is hard to estimate just how much methane is trapped in clathrates worldwide. But there is a lot. One litre of clathrates can hold more than 150 litres of methane. Numerous deposits have been identified off the coasts of all of the continents. Even a few of the lakes in Central Asia are just frosty enough to support clathrate formation. Some guess that clathrate methane reserves could equal twice the rest of the world’s fossil fuel supplies combined.

America's National Energy Technology Laboratory put together a consortium of other government agencies and petroleum companies to drill for clathrates with some success in the Gulf of Mexico; they were promptly hired by India to perform the trick there. A Japanese government collaboration has drilled about 30 wells, with a timeline to start production and distribution of methane from hydrates by 2016. In June China reported having pulled up some first methane-bearing samples from the South China Sea.

All of this might sound like the beginnings of the solution to the world’s energy problems. And it may yet be. But, as always, there are some daunting details to sort out first. Many deposits will yield just a fraction of the hoped-for methane, and harvesting even that will be difficult. The little cages of water around the methane are dangerously delicate, so that collection has to take place on the sea-floor. Much work is now under way on adapting conventional drilling equipment for large-scale deep-sea methane recovery.

Clathrates are suspects in a number of geo-crimes great and small. Mixed with sea-floor sediment, they can constitute vast unstable deposits prone to underwater landslides. Such a landslide 8000 years ago in the North Sea created a tsunami that flooded much of coastal Scotland and Norway.

And, given their delicate nature, clathrates tend to release their methane bounty during these landslides. Methane is the cleanest of the fossil fuels when burned; but released directly into the atmosphere, it is a “greenhouse gas” significantly more potent than carbon dioxide. Vast releases of methane from clathrates are widely thought to have played a part in two global temperature spikes that led to mass extinctions about 250m and 55m years ago.

Because the icy slush left over after methane removal is less structurally stable than the clathrates, stripping the seafloor of some of its methane might result in frequent landslides that release much more methane. Many clathrate deposits sit atop grand reservoirs of free gas, so that drilling might unleash a methane burp of enormous size, with environmental impacts to match.

One brilliant-sounding idea, now being studied, calls for pumping carbon dioxide into the clathrates. The carbon dioxide would make the clathrates more stable; and, its presence would case them to give up their methane, sequester the carbon dioxide, and let off a little heat that kept the reaction going.

The technological challenge is vast, but no more so than the potential economic rewards. The trick is to get the gas, without the pains.

Rabbit-Proof Fence Has Unintended Consequences

2007-08-15T01:39:00.000-04:00

At Australia’s Bunny Fence, Variable Cloudiness Prompts Climate Study
August 14, 2007 -- By Sonal Noticewala, The New York Times

A fence built to prevent rabbits from entering the Australian outback has unintentionally allowed scientists to study the effects of land use on regional climates.

The rabbit-proof fence — or bunny fence — in Western Australia was completed in 1907 and stretches about 2,000 miles. It acts as a boundary separating native vegetation from farmland. Within the fence area, scientists have observed a strange phenomenon: above the native vegetation, the sky is rich in rain-producing clouds. But the sky on the farmland side is clear.

Researchers led by Tom Lyons of Murdoch University in Australia and Udaysankar S. Nair of the University of Alabama in Huntsville have come up with three possible explanations for this difference in cloudiness.

One theory is that the dark native vegetation absorbs and releases more heat into the atmosphere than the light-colored crops. These native plants release heat that combines with water vapor from the lower atmosphere, resulting in cloud formation.

Another hypothesis is that the warmer air on the native scrubland rises, creating a vacuum in the lower atmosphere that is then filled by cooler air from cropland across the fence. As a result, clouds form on the scrubland side.

A third idea is that a high concentration of aerosols — particles suspended in the atmosphere — on the agricultural side results in small water droplets and a decrease in the probability of rainfall. On the native landscape, the concentration of aerosols is lower, translating into larger droplets and more rainfall.

Within the last few decades, about 32 million acres of native vegetation have been converted to croplands west of the bunny fence. On the agricultural side of the fence, rainfall has been reduced by 20 percent since the 1970s.

Dr. Nair speculates that increases in the world’s population will prompt the clearing of more land to increase food production. But he wonders whether, in the long run, “we will reach a point of land clearing that will diminish food production,” because rainfall has decreased.

Dr. Lyons said he hoped the research would help scientists “understand the relationships between the land surface and atmosphere and to provide ideas for sustainable agricultural practices.”

The bunny fence, as it turns out, failed to prevent rabbits from entering the farmland, but it has successfully blocked kangaroos and emus.

2007 Farm Bill

2007-08-13T01:39:00.000-04:00

After searching for information on the 2007 Farm Bill, I realized that I was still uncertain of all the proposals and debates. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for good articles on this topic.

In addition to the article below, I would recommend these links:
Purdue University (including overviews of Energy and Conservation proposals within the bill)
Reflections on the 2007 Farm Bill Debate (3rd article down) by Brent Sohngen of Ohio State
Panel Discussion on 2007 Farm Bill at UC Berkeley

The Year of the Farm Bill
Summer 2007 -- By Amy Kiser, Terrain (a free publication of ecology center)

The nation's Farm Bill has likely never before made it to the Top Ten—or Top Two Hundred—of your focus factors. An enormous and complex piece of legislation, the bill grinds through Congress every half-decade or so. Allocating a staggering amount of money, its effects are profound—driving land-use decisions, dietary choices, and even immigration. This year the Farm Bill may vault into your consciousness as more people than ever try to shape it to align with pressing national interests.

The Farm Bill's many elements are organized into ten "Titles." One of the most contentious is Title I, which primarily subsidizes corn, soy, wheat, rice, and cotton. The federal government pays farmers to produce as much of these crops as possible. The effects of this free-market-tweaking policy could fill a book, but the most obvious is that farmers are rewarded for growing subsidized crops as monocrops for export, animal feed, and biofuels, rather than growing non-subsidized diverse market crops that could provide food for their surrounding communities and urban centers. According to the Congressional Research Service, the top 10 percent of farm-subsidy recipients (mostly corporations and absentee landowners) take in more than two-thirds of those payments.

This represents a considerable government giveaway to already-profitable farms. Last time the Farm Bill was passed, a coalition of Senators argued to lower the cap on subsidies from a half million to a quarter of a million dollars, claiming that "millionaire farmers" were reaping all the benefits of the legislation, and that it favored the consolidation of farms by pushing the smallest farms out of business and undermining the economic development of small farming communities...

Conservation and the protection of water, air, wildlife habitat, and farmland is the concern of Title II, a category whose funding is chopped away every year by Bush's budget. One of II's provisions is the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), which rewards livestock and crop producers for making conservation and environmental improvements. Some of these improvements, however, you wouldn't wish on your best friend—and certainly not your next door neighbor's land.

Last year, the Union of Concerned Scientists submitted an excellent brief to the House Committee on Agriculture, analyzing perverse incentives in Title II and recommending remedies. The organization is particularly critical of the EQIP provisions that actually underwrite and promote the expansion of large concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which are bona-fide disasters from the standpoint of waste treatment, profligate use of antibiotics, and E. coli contamination.

Title III of the Farm Bill contains programs designed to develop and expand commercial outlets for US commodities. Unfortunately, the cheapness of the commodities subsidized by Title I gives our producers an unfair advantage over our so-called "free trade" agreement partners. Mexican corn growers, for example, cannot compete with the subsidized US corn that is dumped into their country, driving Mexican farmers out of business and indirectly creating economic refugees who may immigrate to urban centers in the US and elsewhere.

Title VII funds agricultural research and extension programs, including grants for food biosecurity and developing biotechnology crops for poor countries. In the last Farm Bill, a tiny wedge of funds was earmarked to support research and extension activities for organic agriculture. Needless to say, in Title VII and others, the federal government gives large-scale industrial agriculture and its methods a heavily weighted economic advantage over organic and small-scale family farms.

The behemoth Farm Bill of 2002 was launched with little fanfare. In the immediate wake of 9/11, Congress had little appetite for heated or prolonged debate about domestic issues, and we were about to invade Afghanistan. In the years since, skyrocketing obesity and Type II diabetes rates, E. coli scares, and books and films like Fast Food Nation, SuperSize Me, and the Omnivore's Dilemma have alerted the public that all is not right with our food and farming systems. Finally, scrutiny is turning to the role the federal government plays in this mess.

The Farm Bill can be a powerful vehicle, capable of driving entrepreneurship and research, protecting species and restoring habitat, supporting public health, and strengthening rural communities and regional food systems. With enough public input, this year's bill might just fulfill its promise.

Yangtze River Dolphin: Likely Extinct

2007-08-13T00:24:00.000-04:00

Rare Yangtze River dolphin probably extinct: study
August 7, 2007 -- By Michael Kahn, Reuters

The long-threatened Yangtze River dolphin in China is probably extinct, according to an international team of researchers who said this would mark the first whale or dolphin to be wiped out due to human activity.

The freshwater dolphin, or baiji, was last spotted several years ago and an intensive six-week search in late 2006 failed to find any evidence that one of the rarest species on earth survives, said Samuel Turvey, a conservation biologist, at the Zoological Society of London, who took part in the search.

He said the dolphin's demise -- which resulted from overfishing, pollution and lack of intervention -- might serve as a cautionary tale and should spur governments and scientists to act to save other species verging on extinction.

"Ours is the first scientific study which didn't find any," he said in a telephone interview. "Even if there are a few left we can't find them and we can't do anything to stop their extinction."

The team, which published its findings in the Journal of the Royal Society Biology Letters on Wednesday, included researchers from the United States, Britain, Japan and China. The survey was also authorized by the Chinese government, Turvey said.

The last confirmed baiji sighting was 2002, although there have been a handful of unconfirmed sightings since then. The last baiji in captivity died in 2002, Turvey said.

During the six-week search, the team carried out both visual and acoustic surveys and used two boats to twice cover the dolphin's 1,669 kilometer range stretching from the city of Yichang just downstream from the Three Gorges dam to Shanghai.

The last such survey conducted from 1997 to 1999 turned up 13 of the mammals, but Turvey said fishing, pollution and boat traffic in the busy river, home to about 10 percent of the world's population, has likely meant the baiji's end.

"We covered the whole range of the dolphin twice," Turvey said. "It is difficult to see how we could miss any animals."

The dolphins will now be classified as critically endangered and possibly extinct but Turvey said there is little chance any remaining baiji are alive.

Researchers have known for years about the dolphin's precarious situation but indecision about how best to save the species meant little was actually done, he added.

This underscores the need to act quickly to prevent the extinction of other similar shallow-water aquatic mammals like the vaquita found in the Sea of Cortez and the Yangtze finless porpoise, Turvey said.

"One really needs to learn from this to make sure future conservation efforts are more dynamic," he said. "There has always been so much focus on 'save the whale' and 'prevent whaling' that it has led to these range-restricted shallow cetaceans slipping through the crack."

AC, DC and Wind Power

2007-08-13T00:11:00.000-04:00

Where The Wind Blows
July 26, 2007 -- The Economist

Plug in your toaster—or your television or your vacuum cleaner—and the electricity that surges through it is an alternating current. The question of whether the world would be powered by direct current (DC), in which electrons flow in one direction around a circuit, or by alternating current (AC), in which they jiggle back and forth, was decided in the 1880s. Thomas Edison backed DC. George Westinghouse backed AC. Westinghouse won.

The reason was that over the short distances spanned by early power grids, AC transmission suffers lower losses than DC. It thus became the industry standard. Some people, however, question that standard because over long distances high-voltage DC lines suffer lower losses than AC. Not only does that make them better in their own right, but employing them would allow electricity grids to be restructured in ways that would make wind power more attractive. That would reduce the need for new conventional (and polluting) power stations.

AC/DC/PC

Wind power has two problems. You don't always get it where you want it and you don't always get it when you want it. According to Jürgen Schmid, the head of ISET, an alternative-energy institute at the University of Kassel, in Germany, continent-wide power distribution systems in a place like Europe would deal with both of these points.

The question of where the wind is blowing would no longer matter because it is almost always blowing somewhere. If it were windy in Spain but not in Ireland, current would flow in one direction. On a blustery day in the Emerald Isle it would flow in the other.

Dealing with when the wind blows is a subtler issue. In this context, an important part of Dr Schmid's continental grid is the branch to Norway. It is not that Norway is a huge consumer. Rather, the country is well supplied with hydroelectric plants. These are one of the few ways (but not the only way, see article) that energy from transient sources like the wind can be stored in grid-filling quantities. The power is used to pump water up into the reservoirs that feed the hydroelectric turbines. That way it is on tap when needed. The capacity of Norway's reservoirs is so large, according to Dr Schmid, that should the wind drop all over Europe—which does happen on rare occasions—the hydro plants could spring into action and fill in the gap for up to four weeks.

Put like this, a Europe-wide grid seems an obvious idea. That it has not yet been built is because AC power lines would lose too much power over such large distances. Hence the renewed interest in DC.

Westinghouse won the battle of the currents in the 1880s because it is easier to transform the voltage of an AC current than of a DC current. High voltage is the best way to transmit power (the higher the voltage, the smaller the loss), but high voltage is not usually what the user wants. Power is therefore transmitted along high-tension AC lines and then “stepped down” to usable voltages in local sub-stations.

Edison was right, however, to argue that DC is the best way to transmit electricity of any given voltage. That is because the shifting current of AC runs to earth more easily than DC does. To avoid this earthing, AC lines have to be built a long way from the ground—and the higher the voltage, the farther away they need to be. At 400 kilovolts, a standard value for long-distance transmission, an alternating current 30 metres (100 feet) from the ground has a fortieth of the loss of a similar cable at ground level. But even at this height an overhead DC line will beat an AC line at distances more than 1,000km (600 miles), while ground-level DC will beat AC at distances as short as 30km.

Dr Schmid calculates that a DC grid of the sort he envisages would allow wind to supply at least 30% of the power needed in Europe. Moreover, it could do so reliably—and that means wind power could be used for what is known in the jargon as base-load power supply.

Base-load power is the minimum required to keep things ticking over—the demands of three o'clock in the morning, or thereabouts. At the moment, this is supplied by traditional power stations. These either burn fossil fuel and thus contribute to global warming, or use uranium, which brings problems such as how to get rid of the waste, as well as political opposition.

Though wind power has its opponents, too, its environmental virtues might be enough to swing things in its favour if it were also reliable. Indeed, a group of Norwegian companies have already started building high-voltage DC lines between Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Germany, though these are intended as much to sell the country's power as to accumulate other people's. And Airtricity—an Irish wind-power company—plans even more of them. It proposes what it calls a Supergrid. This would link offshore wind farms in the Atlantic ocean and the Irish, North and Baltic seas with customers throughout northern Europe.

Airtricity reckons that the first stage of this project, a 2,000 turbine-strong farm in the North Sea, would cost about €2 billion ($2.7 billion). That farm would generate 10 gigawatts. An equivalent amount of coal-fired capacity would cost around $2.3 billion so, adding in the environmental benefits, the project seems worth examining. Such offshore farms certainly work. Airtricity already operates one in the Atlantic, and though it currently has a capacity of only 25 megawatts, increasing that merely means adding more turbines.

Nor is this the limit of some people's vision. The Global Energy Network Institute, based in San Diego, California, reckons high-voltage DC lines could be used to bring solar energy to market from places such as the Sahara. Wind and geothermal power could be gathered from as far afield as South America and Siberia. Such a globalised market has its attractions. Whether the world is ready for the Organisation of Electricity Exporting Countries to take over from OPEC, though, remains to be seen.

Compressed Air and Wind Power

2007-08-13T00:10:00.000-04:00

Trapped Wind
July 26, 2007 -- The Economist

Compressed air might help to make wind power more reliable

Pumping water into the reservoir of a hydroelectric power plant may be a good way of storing energy captured by wind farms—but what if there are no such plants to hand and no high-tension lines to reach them? One answer is to use the energy to compress air, which can be squirrelled away in hermetically sealed underground caverns. Then, when electricity is needed, the air can be released and used to turn a generator.

At the moment, however, there are only two compressed-air energy-storage plants in the world (one in America and one in Germany), and neither was built to make use of wind power. Instead, they are designed to take advantage of variations in the price of electricity. When power is cheap, it is used to run their compressors. When it is expensive, the valves are opened and the generators turn.

Compressed-air plants are inefficient, and so they are commercially viable only in places where the price of power varies dramatically. But the intermittent nature of wind power can cause just that sort of variability. At any rate, a group of municipal power companies in the American Midwest reckon that building a wind-powered compressed-air plant to take advantage of the blustery Great Plains will be worthwhile. They have just selected a site in Iowa, and hope to be operational by 2011. BP, a British energy firm, is also looking into the concept.

Meanwhile, General Compression, a small firm based in Attleboro, Massachusetts, is taking another approach. Its windmill compresses air directly. This has the advantage of eliminating two wasteful steps: the conversion of the mechanical power of a windmill into electricity and its subsequent reconversion into mechanical power in a compressor. But an air-compressing windmill, while fine for storing energy, cannot transmit electricity directly to the grid. The firm will not produce its first prototype until 2009, but sceptics already worry that what it gains on the swings, it will lose on the roundabouts—or, in this case, on the turbines.

"He not busy being born is busy dying"

2007-08-09T00:06:00.000-04:00

Via CEOs for Cities
Excerpts from:
The Living City
August 2007 -- By Jonah Lehrer, Seed Magazine

Cities act just like creatures. They obey the same metabolic laws that govern every organism. Which means that cities, just like elephants, get more economical with size.

It turns out that every city is simply a scaled version of the same city. A city can double its population without doubling its resource consumption.

President of Santa Fe Institute Geoffrey West told (the terrific science and culture magazine) Seed, "One of the basic principles of cities is that it's more efficient to bring people together. You need a little bit less of everything per person. It's the exact same way in biology."

While most of us imagine idyllic rural America as the epitome of sustainable living, conventional wisdom is exactly backward. "Cities are bastions of environmentalism," according to West and his collaborator Luis Bettencourt. "People who live in densely populated places lead environmentally friendly lives. They consume fewer resources per person and take up less space. And because efficiency scales with the size of the population, big cities are always more efficient than small cities."

Bottom line: The secret to creating a more environmentally sustainable society is making our big cities bigger. We need more metropolises.

The researchers also found that as cities got bigger, each individual got more productive. "A doubling of population led to a more than doubling of creative and economic output. A bigger population means more economic activity for each person, which encourages more people to move to the city, which results in more economic activity, and so on."

Every city runs out of resources. But that's where innovation comes into play. West told Seed, "The only way to avoid stagnation from a shortage of resources is to change something.... There's the invention of the steam engine, the car, the digital revolution... A city that isn't innovating is on the verge of collapse."

Turns out that innovation returns smaller dividends per person as the population expands. That's why the bigger the city, the faster it must innovate in order to continue its patterns of growth.

Although cities are the driving force behind accelerating innovation cycles, cities cannot take innovation for granted. West warns cities and corporations not to cut money for research and development, especially in tough times. It only reduces your ability to innovate when you need it most.

Innovation in cities is rooted in human interaction and lots of it. "Cities concentrate our social interactions and that's what leads to this explosion of knowledge creation and innovation." So West's team plans to study urban form to figure out how the social interactions of urban streets translate into new kinds of knowledge. And I can't wait to see the results.

Death Valley, Galaxies and Sailing Stones

2007-08-08T00:25:00.000-04:00

I recently found this image of Death Valley on the NASA: Astronomy Picture of the Day website. I liked it so much that it is now part of this site. Futility Closet points out that rocks, like the one in this image, 'sail' extraordinarily well at Racetrack Playa in Death Valley. Nobody has seen them move because it may only occur once every two or three years, but many assume that wind is the culprit.

Production and Consumption

2007-08-07T23:05:00.000-04:00

The revolution of production and consumption
May 29, 2006 -- By Timo Mäkelä, Sitra

Growing numbers of decision-makers, scientists and economists believe that the world economy is heading towards a crisis because of diminishing natural resources and their consequently high prices. What is more, the race after energy and natural resources will lead to ever wider and more acute environmental problems. The climate will change while storms and draughts will become commoner and the environment impoverished and polluted. The Earth simply cannot long support the accelerating rate of production and consumption.

We do not need to look far for an example. At its current growth rate, the amount of grain and paper that China would need in 25 years’ time equals 70% of all grain production in the world and 200% of paper production. More oil would be consumed than the global oil production of today put together.

The UN and the World Bank issued recently an extensive report on the state of the world. It did not make for an amusing read.

Out of the 25 natural resources sustaining life on Earth, nearly 20 are endangered. If every single person in the world consumed like Europeans do, it would take more than two Earths to sustain it. The Americans consume even more, at a rate that according to the same calculation would require four Earths.

Some companies and investors are beginning to worry. A sustainable development classification will be gradually introduced and required of companies as evidence that their ethics are high and the environmental risks under control. In fact, we are moving towards a new industrial revolution, this time directed by the limits of our planet and environmental risks.

Part of this revolution is the rapid growth of global markets for new environmental technologies and services. According to estimates, the markets have already exceeded €500 billion, which is close to those of pharmaceutical and aviation industries. The annual growth rate is 5–10%. As much as 15% of new risk investments in the world are made in the production of renewable energy sources, environmentally friendly technologies and cleaner production. Here, Japanese and American companies are striving for market leadership.

The largest corporation in the world, the American General Electric, has recently revamped its strategy and launched its “Ecomagination” programme. The company will focus in the future on producing more sustainable and environmentally friendlier technologies.

Japan, on the other hand, is ahead of Europe in the efficient use of both energy and natural resources. Japanese products and technologies are taking markets by storm.

Europe is still the leader in environmental technology markets. The German recycling industry produces technologies and innovations for global markets, and Spain is one of the leading utilisers and producers of wind and solar energy. In Denmark, wind energy has surpassed meat products as an export.

But time is running out. That is why Europe is keen to seize this new opportunity. Ecological innovations and the more efficient use of natural resources and energy are an integral part of the EU’s growth and jobs strategy, the Lisbon strategy.

EU’s new environmental technology programme promises research and risk funding for companies investing in environmental technologies. The programme also aims to improve the pull and functionality of the markets. Public procurement, financial steering mechanisms and new product regulations and standards play a key role. Many of the EU Member States, including Finland, have issued their own national environmental technology programmes.

The new and more efficient technologies and methods that save natural resources and energy are a rational choice now and in the future. More efficient production decreases environmental damage but is also financially justified, as it simply saves money.

The industrial revolution geared towards sustainable development will mean efficient recycling of natural resources, extensive use of renewable energy sources, innovative production, materials and technologies, as well as new concepts of how we should move from one place to another. Nothing less will suffice, and as long there is a will, there are plenty of ways. New companies and innovations are in great demand.

The 11th Hour

2007-08-06T22:04:00.000-04:00

Here is a trailer for the new documentary entitled The 11th Hour. It's world premiere was at the 2007 60th Annual Cannes Film Festival and will be released on August 17th 2007.

Sustainable Development: A 21st Century American Vision?

2007-08-06T00:37:00.000-04:00

As I watched E.O. Wilson speak on BookTV today I was reminded once again of how finite the world's resources are for ourselves and future generations. If every human consumed at equal rates to Americans, it would require four Earths to sustain it. This somber statistic persuaded me to post this snippet I read during a recent BART ride.

Excerpts from:
Learning from History: U.S. Environmental Politics, Policies, and the Common Good
November 2006 -- By Richard N.L. Andrews, Environment

In 2005, the United Nations commissioned Millennium Ecosystem Assessment reported that over the past 50 years, rapid and extensive change in human ecosystems has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth. More land has been converted to cropland since 1945 than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries combined, and water withdrawals from rivers and lakes have doubled since 1960. Since 1750, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, the major contributor to global warming, has increased, with 60 percent of that increase happening between 1959 and the present. Fifty percent of all the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer ever used has been applied since 1985; flows of biologically available nitrogen in terrestrial ecosystems have doubled since 1960 and may increase by two-thirds more by 2050. An estimated 10 to 30 percent of all mammal, bird, and amphibian species are currently threatened with extinction.

These changes have contributed to substantial gains in human well-being and economic development at growing costs to the essential services that ecosystems provide to human societies: providing food, water, fuel, wood, and fiber, supporting and regulating natural processes that are necessary for human life and health (nutrient cycling, soil formation, water purification, the climate system, and the control of disease organisms), and providing spiritual and recreational values. These damaging trends are substantially reducing the availability of these services for future use.

U.S. environmental policies have been prominent causes of these damaging trends and must be part of any solution. Throughout American history, the United States' dominant policies have been to promote the economic exploitation of natural resources, first nationally and now globally...

At times throughout this history, U.S. environmental policies also have included initiatives to manage and protect the natural environment...

The net effect of these policies has been to provide unprecedented levels of material comfort to many people and extraordinary affluence to a few and to reduce and even repair some environmental damage.

It would be a mistake to attribute the vast environmental changes in the United States entirely to public policies. Policies tend to lag behind economic and social trends, because government typically acts only in response to a buildup of pressure for collective action...

The enduring challenge for U.S. environmental policy is to build, maintain, and constantly renew public support for effective environmental governance, at home and worldwide. To meet that need, U.S. environmental policy today must recover an essential missing element: a broadly shared vision of the common environmental good. Such visions have emerged at several points in the past. Examples include the sanitation movement of the nineteenth century; the City Beautiful movement of the 1890s; the Progressive civic reform and conservation movements that followed it; the New Deal vision of combining ecological, social, and economic recovery; and the vision of a modern society in harmony with its natural environment that was articulated in NEPA and widely voiced by the American public on Earth Day in 1970...

The closest current approximation to such a vision is perhaps the idea of sustainable development, as articulated by the United Nations' World Commission for Environment and Development in 1987 and in the Agenda 21 document endorsed by the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The commission envisioned sustainable development as a pattern of development that would meet the needs of human communities today without jeopardizing those of the future, and its vision specifically included economic development, ecological sustainability, and social equity as essential and interdependent elements...

Barring some new defining crisis or leadership commitment, the future of U.S. environmental policy will be shaped by the reemergence--or failure to emerge--of a new broad-based national coalition for an ecologically sustainable economy and inclusive and democratic society.

Wind Energy Market Outpacing Manufacturing Capacity

2007-08-02T00:23:00.000-04:00

Via Peak Energy
Excerpt from:
Despite Rising Costs, Wind Industry Thriving Worldwide
July 26, 2007 -- By Stephen Lacey, Renewable Energy Access

The wind industry is undergoing temporary growing pains similar to the silicon shortage experienced by the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry: there are simply not enough materials or manufacturing capacity to keep up with the increasing demand for wind turbines. The need for steel, copper, concrete and other materials has driven up project costs, restricted turbine supplies and created a difficult market for smaller wind developers.

But despite a two-and-a-half year stretch of materials shortages and rising costs, the global wind industry is experiencing steady growth worldwide and increased acceptance by utilities, governments and citizens.

"Between 2004 and 2005, the global wind turbine market experienced a rapid period of escalation...Within the span of just that year the global demand for wind turbine components and supply jumped to a new plateau and a new rate of growth," says Joshua Magee, senior analyst for Emerging Energy Research's (EER) North American Wind Advisory Group.

Much of that new demand was caused by the two-year extension of the production tax credit (PTC) in the U.S., which provided certainty for wind developers and encouraged a slew of new projects. In addition, China and India emerged as major players in the wind market, further straining supply of materials.

As the global market expanded rapidly starting at the end of 2004, the manufacturing capacity was not in place to handle demand. Since 2005, manufacturers have been playing catch-up and pumping out turbines as quickly as developers can put them into the ground. However, because it takes about 20 months to ramp up manufacturing capabilities, the cost increase and turbine shortage is not expected to level out until sometime in 2009, says Magee.

"Given that the global wind turbine industry is an inherently capital intensive industry, manufacturers have spent the last two years making the necessary investments to begin to regain parity with this new level of global demand," Magee says.

The point of parity couldn't come soon enough for some developers. Over the last two years, project costs have risen 50% in some cases, according to American Wind Energy Association Executive Director Randall Swisher. But the industry shouldn't be worried, says Swisher. The long-term economics of wind energy are still very attractive to utilities and their customers. While the price of fossil energies continues to rise, the cost of wind will always stay the same—free.

Energy Efficiency Index from Merrill Lynch

2007-08-01T00:16:00.000-04:00

Merrill's Efficiency Index
July 30, 2007 -- By Cassandra Vinograd, WSJ: Energy Roundup

Merrill Lynch announced a new Energy Efficiency Index, currently comprised of 40 companies, to identify industry sectors that it says should benefit from the growing drive to improve energy efficiency.

“While there has been a clear shift of resources and investor attention into renewable energy, energy efficiency remains an area that is relatively under-explored,” said Asari Efiong, Merrill Lynch SRI/ Renewable Energy equity analyst. “We believe that energy efficiency represents a significant market opportunity for investors, as policy changes look set to force a structural shift in demand.”

Merrill analysts say they think the global manufacturing industry could improve its energy efficiency by between 18% to 26% overall, while cutting the sector’s CO2 emissions by 19-32%. The four sectors most exposed to this theme, according to Merrill, are the automotive industry, capital goods, semi-conductors and building materials.

Among the companies in the index are those with technologies that boost automotive fuel efficiency; building-insulation companies; power-semiconductor makers and efficient-lighting companies.

Climate Change and Energy: 2008 Presidential Policy Directors

2007-07-30T02:17:00.000-04:00

Campaign 2008
May 24, 2007 -- Environment & Energy TV

Click here for the video.

Panelists include, James Kvaal of John Edwards for America, Denis McDonough of Obama for America, John Raidt of McCain 2008 and Todd Stern of the Hillary Clinton for President Exploratory Committee. They discuss the candidates’ goals for climate and energy, whether nuclear and coal to liquids will play a part in future energy policy and whether or not the United States should wait for an international agreement on climate policy.

Global Fresh Water Supplies in Peril

2007-07-26T16:25:00.000-04:00

Water Tables Falling and Rivers Running Dry
July 24, 2007 -- By Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

PLAN B 2.0 BOOK BYTE:
As the world’s demand for water has tripled over the last half-century and as the demand for hydroelectric power has grown even faster, dams and diversions of river water have drained many rivers dry. As water tables fall, the springs that feed rivers go dry, reducing river flows.

Scores of countries are overpumping aquifers as they struggle to satisfy their growing water needs, including each of the big three grain producers—China, India, and the United States. More than half the world’s people live in countries where water tables are falling.

There are two types of aquifers: replenishable and nonreplenishable (or fossil) aquifers. Most of the aquifers in India and the shallow aquifer under the North China Plain are replenishable. When these are depleted, the maximum rate of pumping is automatically reduced to the rate of recharge.

For fossil aquifers, such as the vast U.S. Ogallala aquifer, the deep aquifer under the North China Plain, or the Saudi aquifer, depletion brings pumping to an end. Farmers who lose their irrigation water have the option of returning to lower-yield dryland farming if rainfall permits. In more arid regions, however, such as in the southwestern United States or the Middle East, the loss of irrigation water means the end of agriculture.

The U.S. embassy in Beijing reports that Chinese wheat farmers in some areas are now pumping from a depth of 300 meters, or nearly 1,000 feet. Pumping water from this far down raises pumping costs so high that farmers are often forced to abandon irrigation and return to less productive dryland farming. A World Bank study indicates that China is overpumping three river basins in the north—the Hai, which flows through Beijing and Tianjin; the Yellow; and the Huai, the next river south of the Yellow. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce one ton of grain, the shortfall in the Hai basin of nearly 40 billion tons of water per year (1 ton equals 1 cubic meter) means that when the aquifer is depleted, the grain harvest will drop by 40 million tons—enough to feed 120 million Chinese.

In India, water shortages are particularly serious simply because the margin between actual food consumption and survival is so precarious. In a survey of India’s water situation, Fred Pearce reported in New Scientist that the 21 million wells drilled are lowering water tables in most of the country. In North Gujarat, the water table is falling by 6 meters (20 feet) per year. In Tamil Nadu, a state with more than 62 million people in southern India, wells are going dry almost everywhere and falling water tables have dried up 95 percent of the wells owned by small farmers, reducing the irrigated area in the state by half over the last decade.

As water tables fall, well drillers are using modified oil-drilling technology to reach water, going as deep as 1,000 meters in some locations. In communities where underground water sources have dried up entirely, all agriculture is rain-fed and drinking water is trucked in. Tushaar Shah, who heads the International Water Management Institute’s groundwater station in Gujarat, says of India’s water situation, “When the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural India.”

In the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that in parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas—three leading grain-producing states—the underground water table has dropped by more than 30 meters (100 feet). As a result, wells have gone dry on thousands of farms in the southern Great Plains. Although this mining of underground water is taking a toll on U.S. grain production, irrigated land accounts for only one fifth of the U.S. grain harvest, compared with close to three fifths of the harvest in India and four fifths in China.

Pakistan, a country with 158 million people that is growing by 3 million per year, is also mining its underground water. In the Pakistani part of the fertile Punjab plain, the drop in water tables appears to be similar to that in India. Observation wells near the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi show a fall in the water table between 1982 and 2000 that ranges from 1 to nearly 2 meters a year.

In the province of Baluchistan, water tables around the capital, Quetta, are falling by 3.5 meters per year. Richard Garstang, a water expert with the World Wildlife Fund and a participant in a study of Pakistan’s water situation, said in 2001 that “within 15 years Quetta will run out of water if the current consumption rate continues.”

Iran, a country of 70 million people, is overpumping its aquifers by an average of 5 billion tons of water per year, the water equivalent of one third of its annual grain harvest. Under the small but agriculturally rich Chenaran Plain in northeastern Iran, the water table was falling by 2.8 meters a year in the late 1990s. New wells being drilled both for irrigation and to supply the nearby city of Mashad are responsible. Villages in eastern Iran are being abandoned as wells go dry, generating a flow of “water refugees.”

Saudi Arabia, a country of 25 million people, is as water-poor as it is oil-rich. Relying heavily on subsidies, it developed an extensive irrigated agriculture based largely on its deep fossil aquifer. After several years of using oil money to support wheat prices at five times the world market level, the government was forced to face fiscal reality and cut the subsidies. Its wheat harvest dropped from a high of 4 million tons in 1992 to some 2 million tons in 2005. Some Saudi farmers are now pumping water from wells that are 1,200 meters deep (nearly four fifths of a mile).

In neighboring Yemen, a nation of 21 million, the water table under most of the country is falling by roughly 2 meters a year as water use outstrips the sustainable yield of aquifers. In western Yemen’s Sana’a Basin, the estimated annual water extraction of 224 million tons exceeds the annual recharge of 42 million tons by a factor of five, dropping the water table 6 meters per year. World Bank projections indicate the Sana’a Basin—site of the national capital, Sana’a, and home to 2 million people—will be pumped dry by 2010.

In the search for water, the Yemeni government has drilled test wells in the basin that are 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) deep—depths normally associated with the oil industry—but they have failed to find water. Yemen must soon decide whether to bring water to Sana’a, possibly by pipeline from coastal desalting plants, if it can afford it, or to relocate the capital. Either alternative will be costly and potentially traumatic.

Israel, even though it is a pioneer in raising irrigation water productivity, is depleting both of its principal aquifers—the coastal aquifer and the mountain aquifer that it shares with Palestinians. Israel’s population, whose growth is fueled by both natural increase and immigration, is outgrowing its water supply. Conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians over the allocation of water in the latter area are ongoing. Because of severe water shortages, Israel has banned the irrigation of wheat.

In Mexico—home to a population of 107 million that is projected to reach 140 million by 2050—the demand for water is outstripping supply. Mexico City’s water problems are well known. Rural areas are also suffering. For example, in the agricultural state of Guanajuato, the water table is falling by 2 meters or more a year. At the national level, 51 percent of all the water extracted from underground is from aquifers that are being overpumped.

Since the overpumping of aquifers is occurring in many countries more or less simultaneously, the depletion of aquifers and the resulting harvest cutbacks could come at roughly the same time. And the accelerating depletion of aquifers means this day may come soon, creating potentially unmanageable food scarcity.

While falling water tables are largely hidden, rivers that are drained dry before they reach the sea are highly visible. Two rivers where this phenomenon can be seen are the Colorado, the major river in the southwestern United States, and the Yellow, the largest river in northern China. Other large rivers that either run dry or are reduced to a mere trickle during the dry season are the Nile, the lifeline of Egypt; the Indus, which supplies most of Pakistan’s irrigation water; and the Ganges in India’s densely populated Gangetic basin. Many smaller rivers have disappeared entirely.

Since 1950, the number of large dams, those over 15 meters high, has increased from 5,000 to 45,000. Each dam deprives a river of some of its flow. Engineers like to say that dams built to generate electricity do not take water from the river, only its energy, but this is not entirely true since reservoirs increase evaporation. The annual loss of water from a reservoir in arid or semiarid regions, where evaporation rates are high, is typically equal to 10 percent of its storage capacity.

The Colorado River now rarely makes it to the sea. With the states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and, most important, California depending heavily on the Colorado’s water, the river is simply drained dry before it reaches the Gulf of California. This excessive demand for water is destroying the river’s ecosystem, including its fisheries.

A similar situation exists in Central Asia. The Amu Darya—which, along with the Syr Darya, feeds the Aral Sea—is diverted to irrigate the cotton fields of Central Asia. In the late 1980s, water levels dropped so low that the sea split in two. While recent efforts to revitalize the North Aral Sea have raised the water level somewhat, the South Aral Sea will likely never recover.

China’s Yellow River, which flows some 4,000 kilometers through five provinces before it reaches the Yellow Sea, has been under mounting pressure for several decades. It first ran dry in 1972. Since 1985 it has often failed to reach the sea, although better management and greater reservoir capacity have facilitated year-round flow in recent years.

The Nile, site of another ancient civilization, now barely makes it to the sea. Water analyst Sandra Postel, in Pillar of Sand, notes that before the Aswan Dam was built, some 32 billion cubic meters of water reached the Mediterranean each year. After the dam was completed, however, increasing irrigation, evaporation, and other demands reduced its discharge to less than 2 billion cubic meters.

Pakistan, like Egypt, is essentially a river-based civilization, heavily dependent on the Indus. This river, originating in the Himalayas and flowing westward to the Indian Ocean, not only provides surface water, it also recharges aquifers that supply the irrigation wells dotting the Pakistani countryside. In the face of growing water demand, it too is starting to run dry in its lower reaches. Pakistan, with a population projected to reach 305 million by 2050, is in trouble.

In Southeast Asia, the flow of the Mekong is being reduced by the dams being built on its upper reaches by the Chinese. The downstream countries, including Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Viet Nam—countries with 168 million people—complain about the reduced flow of the Mekong, but this has done little to curb China’s efforts to exploit the power and the water in the river.

The same problem exists with the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which originate in Turkey and flow through Syria and Iraq en route to the Persian Gulf. This river system, the site of Sumer and other early civilizations, is being overused. Large dams erected in Turkey and Iraq have reduced water flow to the once “fertile crescent,” helping to destroy more than 90 percent of the formerly vast wetlands that enriched the delta region.

In the river systems just mentioned, virtually all the water in the basin is being used. Inevitably, if people upstream use more water, those downstream will get less. As demands continue to grow, balancing water demand and supply is imperative. Failure to do so means that water tables will continue to fall, more rivers will run dry, and more lakes and wetlands will disappear.

A Brief Look at Corn Ethanol

2007-07-25T13:26:00.000-04:00

May 9, 2007 -- By Brad Ewing

From the moment we entered this world, many of us have lived in societies powered almost entirely by fossil fuels. We are at the cusp of changing this, but the tradeoffs we face provide no perfect solution. The world supply of fossil fuels such as petroleum cannot sustain projected consumption levels for the rest of this century. The U.S. Government Accountability Office recently observed that world oil production will peak sometime between now and 2040, and that U.S. production peaked in 1970. Weaning Americans from petroleum will require diversification of supply and conservation to reduce demand.

One potential solution to diversify supply of passenger vehicle fuel is ethanol made from cornstarch. Investment in fuel ethanol has risen rapidly since the 2005 oil price hikes, the passage of the Energy Policy Act and replacing the fuel additive MTBE with ethanol. Most studies show that corn ethanol greenhouse gas emissions are slightly lower in comparison to gasoline. In addition, corn ethanol is not a total loss to the food economy because 30 percent of the corn is recovered in a protein rich livestock feed called distillers dried grains. Farmers will also benefit from increased value of their land and crops. The corn ethanol industry stands the best chance to prosper throughout the Corn Belt.

The benefits of corn ethanol are accompanied by difficult problems for both Midwestern and coastal Americans. The use of corn makes ethanol a Midwest issue as the U.S. lacks the infrastructure to efficiently transport the fuel through current pipelines. Complicating the issue further, smog-causing pollutants are higher when consuming corn ethanol rather than gasoline. In fact, the largest producer of corn ethanol in the U.S., Archers Daniel Midland, was ranked the tenth worst corporate air polluter on the University of Massachusetts Toxic 100 list. What is more, some researchers question whether corn ethanol can even provide a net energy gain.

Beyond logistical concerns, corn ethanol is ethically worrisome. Converting the entire U.S. corn harvest to ethanol would satisfy approximately 12.3 percent of the U.S. household vehicle needs or feed 100 million people. In smaller terms, the corn required to produce 25-gallons of ethanol is enough to feed one person for an entire year. In a world of 6.59 billion people with 18,000 children dying every day from hunger and malnutrition, food used as fuel seems unethical--especially when there are other options.

Corn ethanol production will come at a very high price in comparison to energy conservation. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that reducing gasoline consumption 10 percent through fuel economy standards would cost nearly $3.6 billion a year. Achieving the same result by expanding ethanol production would cost taxpayers at least $10 billion a year. As we transition towards a diversified energy portfolio, all forms of energy should face market prices that reflect the costs they impose on society. And with these real costs, we must also recognize the inherent struggles that exist when food and energy markets intertwine.

Who Cares About Climate Change?

2007-07-23T02:44:00.000-04:00

Losing sleep over climate change
July 16, 2007 -- The Economist (Subscription)

Poor countries may be more worried than rich ones

The biggest problem in the fight against climate change is the issue of how to involve poor countries. Developing-country governments are reluctant to bear the costs of averting climate change. Two reasons are generally given: first, that rich countries are largely responsible for global warming, and second, that people in developing countries have more immediate problems to worry about.

The first point is indisputable. Industrialisation in the rich world started long before that in the poor world; carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for around 200 years, so developed countries have contributed far more of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than developing ones have.

The second point sounds likely also to be correct. People in developing countries have immediate personal needs—such as health, education, clean water, decent food—which are largely satisfied in developed countries. Surely they would want governments to invest in those areas, rather than in averting the distant risk of climate change?

But if a report by HSBC published on July 12th is right, that assumption seems to be wrong. HSBC asked people in both rich and poor countries not just about their level of concern about climate change, but also what should be done about it and whether the world was likely to avert it.

The highest levels of concern were not in the developed countries, but in the developing ones. Only 22% of Britons thought climate change was one of the biggest issues the world faces, whereas 60% of Indians and 47% of Chinese did. And the countries with the largest proportions of people ranking climate change as the world’s most worrying issue were Mexico, Brazil and China.

Attitudes in Europe in particular were marked by pessimism. In Britain, 5% of respondents thought people and organisations (and according to most, that means governments) were doing what was needed to combat climate change. The figures were similar in France and Germany. In China, an extraordinary 41% did—which may say more about the Chinese people’s faith in government than about effective action against climate change.

Some 41% of Germans thought it was not even worth trying to do anything about climate change, mostly on the grounds that nothing can be done. Such fatalism was far less prevalent in poorer countries. Almost nobody in Mexico and Brazil took that view. Confidence that climate change can be stopped was much higher in developing countries than in developed ones.

Perhaps it is not surprising that people in the developing world are worried. Rich countries are in the temperate parts of the globe; it is the world’s hotter, drier nations that will feel the effect of climate change first. Indeed, they may already be affected: rainfall patterns are going awry in China, and the earlier melting of Himalayan snow is damaging agricultural productivity in bits of the Indian subcontinent. Concern about climate change may also be bound up with broader environmental worries, which are mounting in China in particular.

Still, these findings certainly overturn previous assumptions about attitudes around the world. Does that matter? For those who think that governments should be taking stronger measures to avert climate change, it probably does. The interesting implications are not so much for Europe and America. People in those regions don’t think climate change is the most important problem in the world; but nor are their governments behaving as though it is.

What these data change is the debate about involving poorer countries. When developing-country governments resist pressure from Europe and America for action, they can still use the argument that climate change is mostly the rich world’s fault. But the argument that their people have other priorities for government action looks harder to sustain. Whether they choose to listen to their people’s concerns is, of course, another matter.

Banning Incandescent Light Bulbs: Economic Rationality

2007-07-21T12:06:00.000-04:00

BAN THE BULB
May 9, 2007 -- By Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

ECO-ECONOMY UPDATE:
BAN THE BULB: Worldwide Shift from Incandescents to Compact Fluorescents Could Close 270 Coal-Fired Power Plants

On February 20, 2007, Australia announced it would phase out the sale of inefficient incandescent light bulbs by 2010, replacing them with highly efficient compact fluorescent bulbs that use one fourth as much electricity. If the rest of the world joins Australia in this simple step to sharply cut carbon emissions, the worldwide drop in electricity use would permit the closing of more than 270 coal-fired (500 megawatt) power plants. For the United States, this bulb switch would facilitate shutting down 80 coal-fired plants.

The good news is that the world may be approaching a social tipping point in this shift to efficient light bulbs. On April 25, 2007, just two months after Australia’s announcement, the Canadian government announced it would phase out sales of incandescents by 2012. Mounting concerns about climate change are driving the bulb replacement movement.

In mid-March, a U.S. coalition of environmental groups—including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Alliance to Save Energy, the American Coalition for an Energy-Efficient Economy, and the Earth Day Network—along with Philips Lighting launched an initiative to shift to the more-efficient bulbs in all of the country’s estimated 4 billion sockets by 2016.

In California, the most populous state, Assemblyman Lloyd Levine is proposing that his state phase out the sale of incandescent light bulbs by 2012, four years ahead of the coalition’s deadline. Levine calls his proposed law the “How Many Legislators Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb Act.” On the East Coast, the New Jersey legislature is on the verge of requiring state government buildings to replace all incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents by 2010 as part of a broader statewide effort to promote the shift to more-efficient lighting. (See additional initiatives.)

The European Union, now numbering 27 countries, announced in March 2007 that it plans to cut carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2020. Part of this cut will be achieved by replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents. In the United Kingdom, a nongovernmental group called Ban the Bulb has been vigorously pushing for a ban on incandescents since early 2006. Further east, Moscow is urging residents to switch to compact fluorescents. In New Zealand, Climate Change Minister, David Parker, has announced that his country may take similar measures to those adopted by Australia.

In April, Greenpeace urged the government of India to ban incandescents in order to cut carbon emissions. Since roughly 640 million of the 650 million bulbs sold each year in this fast-growing economy are incandescents, the potential for cutting carbon emissions, reducing air pollution, and saving consumers money is huge.

At the industry level, Philips, the world’s largest lighting manufacturer, has announced plans to discontinue marketing incandescents in Europe and the United States by 2016. More broadly, the European Lamp Companies Federation (the bulb manufacturers’ trade association) is supporting a rise in EU lighting efficiency standards that would lead to a phase-out of incandescent bulbs.

At the commercial level, Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, announced a marketing campaign in November 2006 to boost its sales of compact fluorescents to 100 million by the end of 2007, more than doubling its annual sales. In the U.K., Currys, Britain’s largest electrical retail chain, has announced that it will discontinue selling incandescent light bulbs.

Switching light bulbs is an easy way of realizing large immediate gains in energy efficiency. A study for the U.S. government calculated that the gasoline equivalent of the energy saved over the lifetime of one 24 watt compact fluorescent bulb is sufficient to drive a Prius from New York to San Francisco. While a worldwide phase out of the inefficient incandescents would reduce world electricity use by more than 3 percent, shifting to more-efficient street lighting and replacing older fluorescent tubes with newer, more-efficient ones might double this reduction in power use.

Although highly efficient compact fluorescent bulbs have been around for a generation, they have until recently been on the fringe, used only by environmentally-minded consumers and typically sold in hardware stores, but not in supermarkets. One reason consumers lacked interest was that the new bulbs can cost five times as much as incandescents. Only the more knowledgeable consumers knew that a compact fluorescent bulb uses only one fourth as much electricity as an incandescent bulb, lasts 10 times as long, and easily saves $50 during its lifetime.

One disadvantage of compact fluorescents is that each bulb contains a small amount of mercury, roughly one fifth the amount in a watch battery. This mercury is only a small fraction of that released into the atmosphere by the additional coal burned to power an incandescent.

Mercury released by coal-fired power plants is the principal reason why 44 of the 50 states in the United States have issued mercury intake advisories limiting the consumption of fish from freshwater streams and lakes. Nonetheless, worn-out compact fluorescents, watch batteries, and other items that contain mercury still need to be recycled properly. Fortunately, this is possible, whereas the mercury spewing from coal smokestacks blankets the countryside, ending up in the water and food supply.

Shifting to the highly efficient bulbs sharply reduces monthly electricity bills and cuts carbon emissions, since each standard (13 watt) compact fluorescent over its lifetime reduces coal use by more than 210 pounds. Such a shift also substantially reduces air pollution, making it obviously attractive for fast-growing economies plagued with bad air like China and India.

In the United States, an ingenious website called 18seconds.org (the name derives from the time it takes to change a light bulb), provides a running tally of compact fluorescents sold nationwide since January 1, 2007. As of early May, it totaled nearly 37 million bulbs, yielding a reduction in carbon emissions comparable to taking 260,000 cars off the road. Sponsored by Yahoo! and Nielson, the site also provides data on how many dollars are being saved and how much less coal is burned. Data are available on the website for each state, providing a convenient way of monitoring local progress in replacing incandescents.

The challenge for each of us, of course, is to shift to compact fluorescents in our own homes if we have not already. But far more important, we need to contact our elected representatives at the city, provincial, or state level and at the national level to introduce legislation to raise lighting efficiency standards, in effect phasing out inefficient incandescent light bulbs. Few things can cut carbon emissions faster than this simple step.

In a world facing almost daily new evidence of global warming and its consequences, there is a need for a quick decisive victory in the effort to cut carbon emissions and stabilize climate. If we can engineer a rapid phase-out of incandescent light bulbs it would provide just such a victory, generating momentum for even greater advances in climate stabilization.

Economic Irrationality

2007-07-19T13:18:00.000-04:00

Irrational Incandescence
May 31, 2007 -- By The Economist via Energy Bulletin

Some ways of cutting carbon are cheaper than others. So, at different carbon prices, different sorts of methods of abatement become worthwhile. Vattenfall, a Swedish power utility, has tried to quantify which ones would be worth undertaking at what price (see chart 3).

The result is a testament to economic irrationality. The measures below the horizontal line have a negative abatement cost—in other words, by carrying them out, people and companies could both cut emissions and save money. At a macroeconomic level they would boost, rather than reduce, economic growth.Lighting, for instance, accounts for some 19% of the world's electricity use. A standard incandescent light bulb costs around €1, says Theo van Deursen, chief executive of Philips Lighting, and uses €15-worth of electricity a year. A low-energy one costs €5-6 and uses €3-worth. The payback on investing in a compact fluorescent bulb, therefore, is less than a year. Yet low-energy lighting makes up only 30% of Philips's sales. Mr van Deursen admits to being disappointed. Sales are rising faster in the developing world: there, people pay more attention to electricity bills than they do in the rich world.

Economists trying to explain this apparent irrationality suggest that the savings are too small and the effort involved in change too large. People find their electricity bills too boring to think about; within companies, those responsible for keeping bills down may not have the authority to spend the necessary capital. Another explanation is the agency problem: that the developer who would have to pay higher capital costs up front will not be forking out for the electricity bills. Besides, people buy houses not because they have good insulation but because they have pretty views.

Compared with pursuing greater energy efficiency, the abatement measures into which so much money is now being poured look rather expensive. Carbon capture and storage and wind and solar power, for instance, all have positive, and relatively high, abatement costs.

But the cheapest sources of abatement are difficult for policymakers to get at. Billions of different actors are involved. They cannot be targeted in the way that a few hundred factories can. What is more, a moderate carbon price is not likely to be effective, since people clearly do not care enough about cost.

One policy option is to decouple the utilities' revenues from the amount of electricity they sell. That gives them an incentive to increase the efficiency of power usage rather than to produce and sell extra power. California is already doing this, which is presumably why electricity prices there are among the highest in America, while consumption is relatively low.

Energy-efficiency standards, such as building regulations, are another option. Economists generally prefer to avoid rules that specify what companies can produce and how, because they require governments, rather than markets, to allocate resources, and markets tend to do a better job. But if, as in this case, a public as well as a private good is involved, and the market does not seem to be doing its job properly, there is an argument for governments giving it a nudge.

There are lots of energy-efficiency regulations in place already, and they are being tightened. Incandescent light bulbs are the top target at the moment. Both the European Union and Australia said earlier this year that they are planning to ban them. But the man in the vanguard of this green revolution is Fidel Castro, who started phasing them out two years ago.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes (Energy Bulletin) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Nice piece by The Economist (UK). Another good one from the Economist: The truth about recycling. Conservatives and libertarians in search of an intelligent way to approach environmentalism might have a good role model in the (conservative) Economist...

The Vattenfall website has a big section on climate change.

The chief executive of Vattenfall, Lars Josefsson, was recently profiled: Hero or villain? A carbon critic relies on coal (International Herald Tribune).

Europe seems to be further along than the USA in its sense of urgency about conservation. Der Spiegel had a long series about it: Why Conservation Is the World's Best Energy Source.

UPDATE (June 13)
Two posters at The Oil Drum found source documents for the striking graphic in the article. The graphics in those documents are more readable and more complete than the graphic in the above article.

Marco located a bigger and better version of the figure on page 7 or 8 of Vattenfall’s Global Climate Impact Abatement Map (25-page PDF).

Peaknik located another version of the graphic on page 10 or 11 of Global Mapping of Greenhouse Gas Abatement Opportunities (54-page PDF).

David Jeffery's response to Irrational Incandescence:
Cheap ways to reduce greenhouse emissions
June 28, 2007 -- By David Jeffery, Oikos

An interesting article in The Economist last month took a look at the cost of various options for reducing greenhouse emissions (summarised in the graph above).

Two things are particularly notable:

* There are a number of options that have a negative cost. In other words, not only would they reduce emissions, they’d also save us money. The biggest one is insulation and low-energy lighting is also up there.

* The solutions we hear a lot about – such as wind, solar and carbon capture – are among the most expensive options.

So why are we not voluntarily making decisions that would not only reduce emissions but also save us money?

The Economist identifies a couple of possible reasons, the most compelling to my mind is that the people who make the choices are not the people who pay the costs of those decisions. For example, property developers have to pay for insulation but they won’t get the benefits of lower electricity bills, so their incentive is to go cheap on insulation. If the property is to be rented out, it’s not even the buyer who pay those bills – it’s a tenant.

How to solve this? In theory, awareness of the issue should be enough: if tenants and buyers of new houses (or other buildings) are aware that good insulation can save them substantial amounts of money, they should demand it and be prepared to pay more for it – in the same way they’d be prepared to pay more for a good bathroom or kitchen.

So why isn't this happening? And seeing as it doesn’t seem to be happening, is there a role for government in mandating it in building standards or requiring developers and sellers to at least provide understandable information (eg, energy efficiency ratings)?

Genotypes, Phenotypes, Beavers, Birds and Fungi

2007-07-18T21:30:00.000-04:00

Wild Neighbors: Requiem for the Hat Creek Beavers
July 17, 2007 -- By Joe Eaton, Berkeley Daily Planet

The week before the Fourth of July we were up at Lassen Volcanic National Park watching the traffic at Hat Lake. The place was jumping.

A male western tanager, resplendent in red and yellow, came down to the lake’s edge to drink. Audubon’s and Wilson’s warblers flashed in and out of the young lodgepole pines. A dipper made repeated shuttle flights from its nest below the highway bridge, alternately ducking underwater to forage or swimming like a little duck as it retrieved insects—mayflies?—from the lake’s surface. Another hard-working parent, a male white-headed woodpecker, commuted between its tree-cavity nest and some beetle-rich dead snag nearby. Tree swallows skimmed low over the lake, and noisy young spotted sandpipers chased each other around the beaver lodge.

No beavers, though. The last time we were there, we watched them late into the buggy twilight as they cruised the lake they had made, or at least augmented. This time the dam was in poor repair, and the lodge was surrounded by mud. We blamed that on the dry winter, but were still worried about the beavers. Later a ranger-naturalist told us they were gone. One had been found dead on the highway last year; another on a hiking trail—disease, old age, who knows.

Maybe another pair will wander up from the Warner Valley and take over the franchise. If not, the lake will inexorably change, and the results of all that dedicated beavering will be gone. And everything in and around it—the tanagers, the woodpeckers, the mayflies, the pines—will be affected, one way or another.

Some years back, before he took on organized religion, Richard Dawkins wrote a book called The Extended Phenotype. A phenotype is the physical manifestation of a genotype—the ensemble of physical traits that the genome codes for. Dawkins’ point was that you have to think of behavior as part of that ensemble, which is fair enough with beavers. Their dam-building drive is so hard-wired that if you play the sound of running water for captives, they’ll pile up sticks and brush in front of the speaker.

Beyond that, Dawkins’ notion of the phenotype also includes the built environment that results from an organism’s behavior—the dam, the pond, the lodge.

We tend to think of our species as the only one that leaves a significant mark on the world, for better or worse. Far from it: beyond the engineering of beavers, consider the cities of the termites or the coral polyps, the soil moved by pocket gophers. All of us, man to microorganism, shape our various environments.

And our environments shape us back. Another book from the ’80s, Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin’s The Dialectical Biologist, tried to make that point, albeit with too much Marxist jargon for most tastes. (With us, there’s another layer when culture feeds back into the genome, as when Northern European and East African cattle herders independently—by separate genetic pathways—evolved adult lactose tolerance.)

Woodpeckers—to pick just one of the cast of characters at Hat Lake—are builders and shapers in their own right. Their nesting cavities provide housing for a whole community of hole-nesting birds: chickadees, nuthatches, flycatchers, swallows, wrens. A woodpecker neighborhood tends to have high avian diversity. Small mammals like flying squirrels also adopt old woodpecker nests.

But it doesn’t stop there. Working in Lassen National Forest, not far from where we were, Kerry Farris and Steve Zack of the Wildlife Conservation Society and Martin Huss of Arkansas State University made an interesting discovery about woodpeckers. They mist-netted white-headed, hairy, and black-backed woodpeckers, swabbed their beaks, and cultured the contents of the swab in a petri dish. Half a dozen species of filamentous fungi, some known wood-decayers, were identified in the culture.

The woodpeckers seem to be carrying around little fungus colonies, inoculating the ponderosa pine snags where they feed with organisms that hasten the decay of the dead wood, making the birds’ foraging routines a little easier. Other cavity nesters like red-breasted nuthatches and mountain chickadees had their own fungus cultures; a control group of non-cavity-nesters—warblers, kinglets, tanagers, finches—did not.

The jury is still out on whether what’s going on with the woodpeckers and the fungi is dedicated mutualism or opportunistic hitchhiking, and who is part of whose extended phenotype. The more you look at the interface of ecology and evolution, the more complicated it seems to get.

-------------

Update (July 19)
The study by Kerry Farris, Martin Huss and Steve Zack entitled "The Role of Foraging Woodpeckers in the Decomposition of Ponderosa Pine Snags" can be found here. The entire article requires access from a library or someone with BioOne Journal online access.

Gasoline Is Still Less Expensive Than Scorpion Venom!

2007-05-24T00:46:00.000-04:00

Excerpt from:
Think Gas Is Expensive? Try Scorpion Venom
May 16, 2007 -- WSJ Energy Roundup Blog

In Energy Roundup’s post yesterday on a national gasoline boycott, some readers noted that Americans complain about paying more than $3 a gallon for gasoline, but will gladly pony up a lot more than that for a latte at Starbucks.

“Tomorrow, I recommend that we boycott Starbucks. They are charging outrageous sums of money for coffee drinks — from about $18 to $36 per gallon,” commented one reader, Jeffrey Brown. “It is kind of funny when you think about it. Americans will gladly pay up to $36 per gallon for water, some flavoring, a little sugar and some milk, but they are outraged over paying $3 for one gallon of gasoline that will transport them and three or four other people for up to 50 miles in safety and comfort."

On a page called "The Price of a Gallon," Cockeyed ranks 47 products from the least-expensive (tap water, $0 per gallon) to the most-expensive (scorpion venom, $38,858,507.46) and everything in between, including Budweiser ($8.88), Red Bull ($30.69), Tabasco sauce ($94.46), Penicillin ($301.49), human blood ($1,514.79) and Chanel No. 5 perfume ($25,600)...

Is There A Green Business Bubble?

2007-05-23T10:57:00.000-04:00

Excerpt from:
Is There A Green Business Bubble?
May 2, 2007 -- By Joel Makower, Two Steps Forward

Here, in no particular order, are ten reasons why I think the greening of business will be an enduring issue for years to come, regardless of the media's attention span:

1. The problems aren't getting any better. This is fairly obvious, especially if you've seen The Movie. The environmental movement, it's been said, is rapidly morphing into the climate movement, and there's a parallel shift taking place on the business side. The motivations may be different -- for activists, climate has become a rallying cry that gives disparate groups a singular focus; for companies, it's about the need to squeeze efficiency out of every operational nook and cranny while reducing risk and enhancing image -- but the upshot is the same: Until the climate problem is under control, it will be Job One, environmentally speaking, inside most companies. And as concern, regulation, and market-based mechanisms to address climate change ramp up, this will be a key business focus for a long, long time.

2. The political will is finally emerging. Again, climate is the reason. In the U.S. and elsewhere, political leaders are realizing that this isn't a topic that will go away; indeed, it is gaining steam and could even be a focus of the 2008 U.S. election. That could increase public scrutiny of how company lobbyists are pressing for favorable treatment, and some of this pressure could come from companies otherwise seen as "leaders" in corporate climate action, leading to activist charges of greenwashing or worse. If there's evidence of a parade of public concern over climate change, politicians will certainly want to get in front of it, and companies may end up finding that there's simply no longer enough lobbying money to buy their way out of the problem -- or, better still, not enough politicians willing to be bought.

3. Consumers are waking up. This remains to be seen, of course, but there are encouraging signs that the American public is finally ready to vote with their pocketbooks, choosing greener products, or products from companies perceived to be green leaders. One thing is certain: the pipeline of greener products from household brands is filling up. We'll see a new wave of green product introductions starting later this year, including some from companies that haven't previously been in the green marketplace. If their products catch on, that pipeline could become a gusher.

4. The supply chain is gaining power. Wal-Mart, which is pushing its 60,000 suppliers to perform all sorts of sustainability somersaults, is one big reason, but they're hardly alone. Corporate and institutional buyers of everything from carpets to car parts are looking upstream for solutions, asking suppliers to, variously, reduce packaging, eliminate hazardous materials, use more organic or biobased ingredients, and take other measures to "green up" their products and operations. That's moving some markets toward cleaner production methods far faster than any mass consumer movement could.

5. The environment has become a fiduciary issue. The past twelve months has seen an almost weekly stream of stories and reports from large financial institutions -- banks, insurance companies, and investment houses -- talking about the risks of climate change, toxics, and other environmental issues to shareholders. And shareholders, especially pension funds and large faith-based institutional investors, are starting to hammer hard on companies to acknowledge, reduce, and report on their risk profiles in these areas.

6. The bar keeps moving. One theme of my presentations lately is the question, "How good is good enough?" Simply put, it bemoans the lack of standards or general agreement on what constitutes a "green business." That lack of standards frustrates many companies' efforts to be seen as "good guys"; instead, they never seem to be good enough. But there may be an upside to the lack of definitions: With no standards, the bar is free to drift continually higher. And that seems to be what is happening. For example, as more companies claim some form of carbon neutrality, the value of carbon neutral as a marketing claim becomes increasingly devalued. And as the bar rises, laggard companies, even if fully compliant on the regulatory front, are finding themselves further and further behind, from a reputational perspective.

7. Companies are moving beyond "sustainability." Given the rising bar, it would follow that companies are continually innovating, and that the cutting edge moves increasingly farther out. Within the next two years, it would not surprise me if being a "sustainable" company was no longer seen as a leadership goal. The real leaders will have focused their sights on being restorative -- for example, not being merely carbon neutral, but being carbon negative, taking more carbon out of the atmosphere than they put in.

8. More companies are telling their stories. It's no longer good enough for companies to be quiet and humble on things green. That doesn't necessarily mean they should be needlessly boastful, especially if it's not in their nature to do so. But doing the right thing and keeping it quiet is less of an option these days. Customers -- both consumers and business customers -- want green heroes, companies they feel are setting the pace. Companies holding on to the belief that walking more than talking can insulate them from criticism will find that the risks of being overly exposed may be outweighed by the risks of being seen as a laggard. Expect green advertising and marketing campaigns to mushroom in the coming months.

9. Clean technology is changing the game. The clean-tech boom (which, indeed, may be a bubble unto itself) is making it easier and cheaper for companies to transform their products, processes, and performance to use more renewable energy, biobased or lightweight materials, and fewer toxic ingredients. Given that some of the most promising, game-changing technologies are only just now reaching their intended markets, we are on the cusp of a new generation of clean-tech products and services. As they roll out, whether from startups or mega-conglomerates, they'll enable a wide range of new green products, services, and business opportunities.

10. There's money to be made. That's the real bottom line: The environment is now being seen increasingly as a potential value-add, not merely a cost to be minimized. Hence, green leaders are emerging throughout companies, not just in the environmental departments, as forward-thinking entrepreneurs (and intrapreneurs) identify and exploit new ways to leverage green thinking into new products and markets. As the number of success stories moves beyond hybrid automobiles and organic foods to include other categories products and services, green will be seen as a more "normal" part of the marketplace.

A response can be found at Clean Tech For A Better World

Lead or Step Aside, EPA

2007-05-23T00:58:00.000-04:00

Excerpt from:
Lead or Step Aside, EPA: States Can't Wait on Global Warming
May 21, 2007 -- By Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jodi Rell, The Washington Post via Economist's View

It's bad enough that the federal government has yet to take the threat of global warming seriously, but it borders on malfeasance for it to block the efforts of states such as California and Connecticut that are trying to protect the public's health and welfare.

California, Connecticut and 10 other states are poised to enact tailpipe emissions standards -- tougher than existing federal requirements -- that would cut greenhouse gas emissions from cars, light trucks and sport-utility vehicles by 392 million metric tons by the year 2020, the equivalent to taking 74 million of today's cars off the road for an entire year.

Since transportation accounts for one-third of America's greenhouse gas emissions, enacting these standards would be a huge step forward... Yet for the past 16 months, the Environmental Protection Agency has refused to give us permission to do so.

Even after the Supreme Court ruled in our favor last month, the federal government continues to stand in our way.

Another discouraging sign came just last week, when President Bush issued an executive order to give federal agencies until the end of 2008 to continue studying the threat of greenhouse gas emissions and determine what can be done about them.

To us, that again sounds like more of the same inaction and denial, and it is unconscionable. ... By continuing to stonewall California's request, the federal government is blocking the will of tens of millions of people in California, Connecticut and other states who want their government to take real action on global warming.

The EPA is finally holding the first of two hearings on the waiver request tomorrow... But we are far from convinced that the agency intends to follow the law and grant us our waiver.

If it fails to do so, we have an obligation to take legal action and settle this issue once and for all. ... The federal government should not stand in the way of dealing with the most serious environmental challenge facing the world. ...

California, Connecticut and a host of like-minded states are proving that you can protect the environment and the economy simultaneously. It's high time the federal government becomes our partner or gets out of the way.

The Road To Clean Energy Starts Here, by Jeffrey D. Sachs

2007-05-21T01:38:00.000-04:00

The Road to Clean Energy Starts Here
May 2007 Issue -- By Jeffrey D. Sachs, Scientific American

Realizing crucial energy technologies will take more than just research and development

The key to solving the climate change crisis is technology. To accommodate the economic aspirations of the more than five billion people in the developing countries, the size of the world economy should increase by a factor of four to six by 2050; at the same time, global emissions of greenhouse gases will have to remain steady or decline to prevent dangerous changes to the climate. After 2050, emissions will have to drop further, nearly to zero, for greenhouse gas concentrations to stabilize.

The overarching challenge is to make that transition at minimum cost and without economic disruption. Energy-saving technologies will play a pivotal role. Buildings can save energy at low capital cost, and often net overall savings, through improved insulation, efficient illumination and the use of heat pumps rather than home furnaces. Automobiles could, over time, reach 100 miles per gallon by a shift to plug-in hybrids, better batteries, lighter frames and other strategies. Of course, technologies such as heat pumps and plug-in hybrids partly reduce direct emissions by shifting from on-site combustion to electricity, so that low-emission power plants become paramount.

Low-emission electricity generation will be achieved in part through niche sources such as wind and biofuels. Larger-scale solutions will come from nuclear and solar power. Yet clean coal will be essential. New combustion techniques, combined with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), offer the prospect of low- or zero-emission coal-fired thermal plants. The incremental costs of ccs may well be as low as one to three cents per kilowatt-hour.

All these technologies are achievable. Some will impose real added costs; others will pay for themselves as lower energy bills offset higher capital outlays. Some estimates suggest that, as of 2050, the world will have to negate around 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year at a cost of roughly $25 per ton, or $750 billion annually. But with a world economy by then of perhaps $200 trillion, the cost would be well under 1 percent of world income and perhaps under 0.5 percent, a true bargain compared with the costs of inaction.

Achieving these technological solutions on a large scale, however, will require an aggressive global technology policy. First, there will have to be market incentives to avoid emissions, in the form of either tradable permits or levies. A reasonable levy might be $25 per ton of emitted carbon dioxide, introduced gradually over the next 10 to 20 years. Second, there will have to be ample government support for rapid technological change. Patents can help spur private market research and development (R&D), but public funding is required for basic science as well as for the public demonstration and the global diffusion of new technologies. In sum, we need a strategy sometimes described as RDD&D.

In the past two years, the Earth Institute at Columbia University has hosted a Global Roundtable on Climate Change, involving leading corporations from around the world. These companies, including many of the largest power producers, are ready to reduce carbon emissions. They know that CCS must be a high priority. A new Global Roundtable Task Force on CCS seeks to promote the required RDD&D. Fortunately, the European Union has already pledged to build at least a dozen CCS demonstration projects in Europe by 2015. But we will also need such centers in the U.S., China, India, Australia, Indonesia and other highly significant coal-power producers. In the low-income countries, this will require a few billion dollars; that is where the RDD&D investments of the high-income countries will be essential. The CCS Task Force aims to break ground on one or more demonstration plants by 2010 in every major coal region. By 2015 this crucial technology can be proved and added to the bid to avert climate disaster. This model of RDD&D won't stop there. Harnessing technology to achieve sustainable energy will involve much of the global economy for decades.

Carbon Footprint Labels Are Expensive

2007-05-19T00:59:00.000-04:00

Not on the label
May 17, 2007 -- The Economist (Subscription)

Why adding “carbon footprint” labels to foods and other products is tricky

Would you like a footprint on your food? Labels already show fat, salt and sugar content, among other things. But now several British food companies and retailers plan to add “carbon footprint” labels showing the quantity (in grams) of carbon-dioxide emissions associated with making and transporting foods and other goods. The first such labels appeared on packets of Walkers crisps in April. Boots, a British pharmacy chain, will add carbon labels to some of its own-brand shampoos in July. These labels were produced in conjunction with the Carbon Trust, an environmental consultancy funded by the British government, as part of a trial scheme. Tesco, Britain's biggest retailer, has also announced plans to apply carbon labels across its product range and many other firms plan to do the same.

If the idea can be made to work, carbon labels will allow shoppers to choose the products with the smallest carbon footprints and make it possible for them to compare locally produced and imported foods, as well as conventionally farmed and organic products. Claims that some kinds of food are more energy-efficient than others and worries about “food miles” would give way to “a much more rounded, inclusive picture,” says Euan Murray of the Carbon Trust.

But calculating the carbon footprint of a product is far from easy. Unlike the fat or sugar content, it cannot be measured directly. For a start, how far back up the supply chain do you go? Academic “life-cycle analyses” go into painstaking detail, factoring in the emissions associated with building factories in which food is produced, for example. But doing this for thousands of products would be a mammoth undertaking. The trick, says Mr Murray, is to find the right trade-off between rigour and a methodology that works across thousands of items. The Carbon Trust's approach is to include carbon dioxide produced in the manufacturing but not, say, that from employees commuting to work.

How far down the supply chain do you go? The Carbon Trust's labels aim to show the carbon emissions associated with making something, packaging it, getting it to the store and disposing of it. Because bags of crisps delivered to far-flung shops will have travelled farther from the factory, the auditors use an average figure for transport emissions. Similarly, national averages feed into calculations of whether a product or its packaging are recycled, incinerated or put into landfill.

The labels do not count the energy needed for refrigeration, lighting and heating in shops. Nor do they include the emissions that come from using a product. The carbon footprint of boiled potatoes, for example, is dominated by the emissions associated with cooking them. Whether you put a lid on the pan can make more of a difference than how they were farmed, or whether they were produced locally or not. Similarly, the emissions of shampoo depend on how long you spend in the shower, how hot the water is and the quality of your boiler. Such things cannot be captured in a carbon label, so they are not included, says Mr Murray.

A particularly difficult area is agricultural modelling. Some sources of farm emissions, such as the electricity consumption of a milking shed, can be measured directly. Others, such as nitrous-oxide emissions from soils and methane emissions from animals, cannot. For the latter, mathematical models are used instead, says Adrian Williams, an agri-environmental scientist at Cranfield University in England. Such models contain assumptions that not everyone may agree with, however. A recent report funded by DEFRA, Britain's environment agency, found that some organic foods had larger carbon footprints than conventional ones. It was criticised by the Soil Association, Britain's main organic lobby, which took issue with the models used for the calculations.

To complicate matters further, nitrous-oxide and methane emissions from farms far outweigh carbon-dioxide emissions in global-warming potential. Methane and nitrous oxide are taken into account by converting them into “carbon-dioxide equivalent” emissions using conversion factors provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the quantification of nitrous-oxide emissions is still not well understood, says Dr Williams, so it is not clear which model to use.

Getting agreement on how best to calculate carbon footprints depends on debate between scientists, retailers, farmers, lobbyists and others. The Carbon Trust has begun a year-long consultation and this month a meeting took place at the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University, which is looking into carbon labelling for Tesco. Agreement is vital because the labels will be useful only if there is a common standard. Otherwise consumers will not be able to compare apples with apples, as it were.

Polysilicon Costs and Solar Companies

2007-05-18T01:18:00.000-04:00

Global warming sparks polysilicon crunch
May 14, 2007 -- By Matt Andrejczak, Marketwatch

Raw-material price spikes, leaving solar-panel makers scrambling

Global warming is juicing the price of a key ingredient used to make solar panels, raising questions about what the longer-term impact of the current shortage will be.

Polysilicon is an essential raw material in the production of solar cells for panels that convert sunlight to electricity for homes, businesses and farms.

Since 2004, average contract prices for securing long-term supplies of polysilicon have skyrocketed, more than doubling to $70 per kilogram.

Not lucky enough to have a long-term contract? Spot-market prices for polysilicon are daunting: Expect to pay $200 per kilogram on the spot market, compared with the $150 paid in 2006, according to industry watchers.

The supply crunch has thrust the polysilicon business -- once the all but exclusive territory of semiconductor makers -- into high gear. Novel financing deals and new partnerships are afoot, with solar-module makers scrambling to secure long-term deals and chemical manufacturers scrambling to boost factory output by 2008 and beyond.

To ensure a steady supply of polysilicon, JA Solar Holdings (JASO) , SunTech Power Holdings (STP) , Canadian Solar Inc. (CSIQ) and others have dedicated much of their IPO proceeds to purchases of the raw material.

The deals, called "pre-payments," are being used by polysilicon makers to boost production.

The situation is more acute for some solar companies than others.

Faced with escalating prices and tight supplies, two companies have swapped equity for polysilicon in pacts to help future sales. Those deals have raised eyebrows.

South Korea-based DC Chemical Co. acquired a 15% stake in Massachusetts-based Evergreen Solar Inc. (ESLR) in a supply pact that runs through 2014. In another deal, China-based SunTech Power inked a 10-year supply pact with MEMC Electronics Materials Inc. (WFR) , which received a warrant equal to a 4.9% stake in SunTech.

The Evergreen-DC Chemical deal, in particular, carried a "steep price to pay for polysilicon supply," said Jeff Osborne, an analyst at CIBC World Markets, which has helped take a number of solar companies public.

In mid-April, Evergreen agreed to issue 4.5 million shares of restricted common stock and 625 shares of restricted preferred stock to DC Chemical, which bought 3 million shares of Evergreen at $12.07 each. Under the supply deal, Evergreen is to receive enough polysilicon to make roughly one gigawatt of photovoltaic solar panels through 2014.

Supply crunch

The supply crunch is exerting collatetal pressure on the semiconductor industry, which has long been the primary buyer of polysilicon, the chief material used to make the wafers onto which microchips are stamped.

"Global warming is not good for the semiconductor industry. The solar industry is growing very rapidly. ... It's really created demand in past several years that wasn't there before," said Tom Linton, who negotiates polysilicon deals for Freescale Semiconductor, one of the world's larger chip manufacturers.

This has changed the chip-making business's mindset

Before the solar companies came onto the scene in a big way, chip firms usually inked three- to six-month supply contracts with polysilicon producers. Now "you've started to see that elongate towards one- or multi-year contracts," said CIBC's Osborne.

The solar market's big polysilicon push came in 2006. For the first time ever, solar-panel makers consumed as much polysilicon as did the chip manufacturers, purchasing more than 50% of the silicon wafers produced in 2006 -- up from 10% in 2000, according to industry sources.

Polysilicon prices weigh more heavily on solar-panel makers, with the raw material making up 40% to 45% of the cost of goods per solar cell, compared with just 3% to 7% for a microchip. For that reason, solar-panel makers typically seek six- to 10-year supply contracts, Osborne reported.

On the solar horizon

The polysilicon shortage has stunted the growth of the solar industry, keeping it from expanding faster than the 20% pace it set in 2006, based on the number of installations worldwide. Yet a long-running supply-demand imbalance cannot be assumed, with forecasting polysilicon-market dynamics tricky and growing trickier.

For solar-panel manufacturers, future needs hinge on a number of questions:

How fast will solar take off in the U.S., Spain and other countries beyond Germany and Japan, the world's two biggest solar-installation markets?

How fast will solar-panel prices drop versus the price of electricity?

Will other solar technologies challenge the primacy of polysilicon?

"You have some questions there," said Jesse Pichel, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, which has helped raise money for solar-panel makers. "No one is really sure how it will play out."

Such factors and others make it "difficult to accurately estimate polysilicon demand for photovoltaic production," agreed Gartner Inc. analyst Takashi Ogawa, who forecasts worldwide polysilicon demand.

Alternatives in alternative energy

MEMC, Hemlock Semiconductor, Renewable Energy Corp. and DC Chemical are all building or expanding manufacturing sites in a bid to relieve supply pressure. Meanwhile, new entrants are also moving into the market, as 88% of the polysilicon supply is currently controlled by five players.

It takes at least two years to construct a polysilicon factory, which cost between $500 million and $1 billion. "The reality is [that] some of these plants may be significantly delayed, and some of the polysilicon makers maybe overstating their plans," Pichel said.

By 2010, global polysilicon available for sale is expected to reach 99,500 metric tons, up from 35,400 metric tons in 2006, according to CIBC's latest forecast, issued in late April, which estimates 25% more polysilicon will be available in 2010 than its prior projection.

CIBC estimated an "acute shortage" through 2008. Relief could come in 2009 at the earliest, in CIBC's view.

But the supply shortage has inspired exploration of alternative solar technologies that don't rely on polysilicon, such as thin-film panels. Whether such alternatives demonstrate efficacy and whether the most ambitious polysilicon-capacity buildouts come to fruition will ultimately have a great deal to do with whether the polysilicon crunch tightens or turns into a glut.

We Need to Bring Climate Idealism Down to Earth

2007-05-16T09:02:00.000-04:00

Excerpts from:
We Need to Bring Climate Idealism Down to Earth
April 30, 2007 -- By Larry Summers, commentary, Financial Times via Economist's View

With the accumulation of scientific evidence and its persuasive presentation to the public, the global warming debate has reached a new stage. ...

The real question for debate is not whether something should be done – that debate is over among the rational. The crucial question now is what should be done so as to leave our descendants with the highest possible quality of life. ...

There is a very real danger that the global cap and trade approach ... enshrined in the Kyoto protocol – now favoured by most European governments – could be ineffective or even counterproductive by substituting for more realistic approaches to the problem. Kyoto is now the only game in town for those who do not want to be ostriches with respect to global climate change and so one has to hope for its ultimate success. But it is surely useful to try to be clear about the potential pitfalls...

First, the Kyoto approach depends on the questionable premise that nations will, in fact, be bound by binding targets or penalties for not meeting them. It is instructive in this regard to consider the history of the Maastricht Treaty within the European Union. It addressed fiscal targets ... within a group of countries that had already achieved a high degree of cohesion. It broke down almost immediately when it looked like the targets would not be binding for big countries, with the goals abandoned and no payment of even the modest penalties.

There is to date little evidence that Kyoto is driving behaviour. Whatever evidence there is of impressive emissions reductions comes from countries such as the UK, Germany and the former communist states, where coal use was being phased out for other reasons. The limited impact of Kyoto is evinced by the fact that carbon permits are now selling in the range of a negligible one euro a ton.

Second, carbon markets are invitations to engage in pork-barrel corporate subsidy politics on a massive scale. If greenhouse gas emissions are to be substantially reduced, the value of the associated emissions rights will be in the tens of billions of dollars. While in principle emission permits could be auctioned, in practice they are always allocated administratively. ...[In addition]..., the clean development mechanism has resulted in substantial payments for emissions reductions that would have occurred anyway or could have been achieved at negligible cost. There is even reason to think that certain industrial gas emissions may have been increased so that credit could be claimed for their abatement.

Third, the most serious problem with the Kyoto framework is that it is unlikely to generate substantial changes in developing country policies. ...[D]eveloping country policymakers are not likely to accept binding targets ... that fall way short on a per-capita basis of emissions levels in the industrial world. ...

The truth about climate change policy is that developing countries are where most of the future action has to be. They will account for 75 per cent of the increase in emissions over the next quarter century and are now making the infrastructure investments that will shape their future economies. ... The 1997 vote cast by all the Democrats in the Senate suggests that approaches that do not involve the developing world are unlikely to command political support in at least some parts of the industrialised world.

Perhaps these problems and others, like the difficulty of establishing emissions targets given the magnitude of economic uncertainties, can be overcome with goodwill and extensive thought. But next month I shall suggest approaches that, while less dramatic in their immediate claims for emissions reductions, may over time provide a more secure foundation for the progress that the world must have.

Living Wage Redux

2007-05-16T08:50:00.000-04:00

Living Wage Redux
May 7, 2007 -- By Greg Mankiw, Greg Mankiw's Blog

A group of ec 10 students asked me today about the hunger strike that some students have recently begun to protest the wages of Harvard security guards. A similar issue arose in 2001. Here is what I wrote back then in Harvard Magazine.

The Case against the Living Wage

When a group of students took over an administration building last spring to protest Harvard's wage policy, many people found it easy to sympathize with them. Without doubt, life is hard for workers getting by on $8 or $9 an hour. Moreover, the protest was a welcome relief from the relentless careerism that infects too many students today. The protesters were admirable in their desire to reach beyond their own fortunate cocoons and help those who are less lucky.

Despite the students' good intentions, I cannot support their cause. If any institution should think with its head as well as its heart, it is a university. In my view, there are compelling reasons to reject the students' pleas.

Like most of the prices in our economy, wages move to balance supply and demand. A high minimum wage set by fiat, either through legislation or student pressure, prevents this natural adjustment and hurts some of the people it is designed to help. It is a timeless economic lesson that when the price of something goes up, buyers usually buy less of it. If Harvard has to pay its unskilled workers a higher wage, it will hire fewer of them. Some workers earn more, but others end up unemployed.

Living-wage advocates say that Harvard with its huge endowment can afford to pay higher wages. That's true, but it misses the point. Like all employers, Harvard faces trade-offs. Should extra money be spent hiring more professors to reduce class sizes, or should it be spent hiring more janitors to vacuum classrooms more often? It's a judgment call. If the cost of unskilled labor rises, Harvard faces a new set of trade-offs. Over time, it will respond by hiring fewer of those workers.

A higher wage would also change the composition of Harvard's work force, for wages play a role in supply as well as demand. If the University posts a job opening at $10 an hour, it gets a larger and better mix of applicants than if it posts the same opening at $8 an hour. The person who would have gotten the job at the lower wage is now displaced by a more skilled worker. In the short run, a living wage might benefit those at the bottom of the economic ladder. In the long run, they would be replaced by those who are already a rung or two higher.

Finally, the living-wage protest raises the issue of Harvard's mission in society. The benefactors who give to the University do so to support education, not income redistribution. (And if Harvard were to take up the cause of income redistribution, it would have to acknowledge that even the poorest workers in Cambridge are rich by world standards.) Harvard needs to pay its workers--janitors and professors alike--enough to attract and motivate them. But it shouldn't pay more than it needs to, given the competitive labor markets in which it hires. To do so would compromise the University's commitment to the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

Costs Shrinking For Solar Thermal

2007-05-15T01:05:00.000-04:00

Shrinking the costs for solar power
May 11, 2007 -- By Michael Kanellos, CNET News via Peak Energy

One of the big problems with solar power has been that it costs more than electricity generated by conventional means. But some experts think that, under certain circumstances, the premium for solar power can be erased, without subsidies or dramatic technical breakthroughs. A sufficiently large solar thermal power plant (also called concentrated solar power, or CSP) could potentially generate electricity at about the same cost as electricity from a conventional gas-burning power plant, experts say.

It's not easy. The plant would also have to come with a large energy storage system, be built next to others and be located close to users. To date, no one has completed a facility that comports to all of these parameters, said Fred Morse, an energy analyst who has studied the issue. "Solar thermal is available at much more attractive prices than solar photovoltaic. The land mass isn't huge, but it does take a while to build these," said Stephan Dolezalek, a managing partner and co-head of the clean tech practice at venture firm Vantage Point Venture Partners, an investor in Bright Source Energy, which builds solar thermal plants and components.

Both Dolezalek and Jiang Lin, who heads up the China Energy Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said that solar thermal is likely the most promising technology in the entire alternative-energy field right now. When asked when solar thermal can hit parity, Lin responded "now." Conventionally generated electricity ranges between 5 and 18 cents per kilowatt hour (the amount of money to get a kilowatt of power for an hour) but in most places it's below 10 cents, according to the Energy Information Agency. Solar thermal costs around 15 to 17 cents a kilowatt hour, according to statistics from Schott, a German company that makes solar thermal equipment.

A solar thermal plant would need a facility to store the heat harvested in the day by its sunlight-concentrating mirrors so that the heat could be used to generate electricity at night. "You need the kind of system that can run in the evening," Morse said. At some sites, such as Nevada Solar One, excess heat is stored in molten salt and released at night to run the turbine. The plant, ideally, should be capable of generating about 300 megawatts of electricity. Those plants can churn out electricity at about 13 cents a kilowatt.

That's still a relatively high price, so utilities would need to group two, three or more 300-megawatt plants together to share operational resources, Morse said. "They could share control rooms or spare parts," he said. That would knock the price closer to 11 cents a kilowatt hour. "Under 10 cents is sort of the magic line," he said.

Dolezalek puts it another way: the plants need to be around 500 megawatts in size. Most solar thermal plants right now aren't that big. The 22-year-old thermal plant in California's Mojave Desert is 354 megawatts. Utility company Southern California Edison is erecting a 500-megawatt plant scheduled to open in 2009. By 2014, solar thermal plants located in the Southwest could crank out nearly 3 gigawatts of power, estimated Travis Bradford of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development, a nonprofit based in Cambridge, Mass. That's enough for about 1 million homes.

Costs can then be reduced further by building the plants close to consumers. It costs about $1.5 million per mile for transmission lines, according to statistics from Acciona Solar Power, which owns solar thermal plants. Solar thermal plants work best in arid deserts that get little rainfall. Since some of the fastest-growing cities in the world are located in sun belts, that's less of a problem than it used to be. ...

Even if all of these factors could be completely optimized, solar thermal power plants would likely not produce electricity at a level that would compete with coal plants. Coal plants, however, will likely be hit with carbon taxes in the near future, which will make solar thermal more competitive. Still, at less than 10 cents a kilowatt, solar thermal would be competitive with electricity from gas-powered plants.

Utilities will also likely work hard to lower the costs of solar thermal in the coming decades, Morse added. Utilities are under mandates to increase their renewable energy sources. Citizen groups often complain about wind turbines and the wind doesn't blow at a constant, predictable rate. Several companies are intent on tapping heat from under the surface of the earth to generate power. Geothermal power, however, works best only in certain locations.

"There is an enough flat, unproductive land in the U.S. to power the U.S.," Morse said. "We just don't have the wires to get there. Eisenhower built the national highway system. Some president will build the national grid."

Alberta's Oil Sands Face Water Shortages

2007-05-15T00:52:00.000-04:00

Excerpt from:
Choke point for oil sands may be water shortage
May 11, 2007 -- By Martin Mittelstaedt, The Globe and Mail via Peak Energy

The amount of water available in Northern Alberta isn't sufficient to accommodate both the needs of burgeoning oil sands development and preserve the Athabasca River, contends a study issued jointly yesterday by the University of Toronto and the University of Alberta.

The study, written in part by Dr. David Schindler, a University of Alberta biologist considered Canada's top water expert, suggests that the choke point for the province's oil sands expansion may not be the huge carbon dioxide emissions arising from mining and processing the sticky, bitumen containing tar sands, as is widely assumed, but a lack of water.

Oil sands plants typically use two to four barrels of water to extract a barrel of oil from the tar sands, a resource that has given the Northern Alberta region the world's largest petroleum reserves but made it a global centre of environmental controversy.

The problem of water availability is expected to become acute in the decades ahead because climate change is likely to cause much more arid conditions, reducing stream flows on the Athabasca River, the source of the industry's water, to critically low levels during parts of each year.

Forest Ethics: Paper Campaign Facts

2007-05-14T08:44:00.000-04:00

Here are some slightly dated, but interesting, facts on forests and paper consumption:

Paper Campaign Facts
Forest Ethics

- Old growth forests make up 16% of the virgin tree fiber used each year to make paper products. (Abromovitz & Mattoon, Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1999, p21))

- Nearly 80% of the world's original old growth forests have been logged or severely degraded already and in the US we have lost 95% of our old growth forests. (source: Bryant et al., The Last Frontier Forests: Ecosystems and Economies on the Edge (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute 1997; US Forest Service, 1997 Resources Planning Act Assessment, Final Statistics, July 2000))

- 77% of the pulpwood harvested in the US is harvested in the South. (Smith & Sheffield 2000, A Brief Overview of the Forest Resources of the United States, USDA Forest Service, Washington DC and Asheville, NC).

- More than 90% of the printing and writing paper made in the US is from virgin tree fiber. (Abromovitz & Mattoon, Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1999))

- 40% of the world's industrial logging goes into making paper and this is expected to reach 50% in the near future. (Abromovitz, Taking a Stand: Cultivating a New Relationship with the World's Forests (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1998))

- Nearly a ton of new recycled paper can be made from a ton of recycled stock compared to the 2-3.5 tons of trees required to make a ton of virgin paper. This is one of the reasons recycled paper results in lower solid waste byproducts and uses less energy, water and chemicals. (Abromovitz & Mattoon, Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1999))

- Worldwide, the pulp and paper industry is the 5th largest industrial consumer of energy - in the US it is the 2nd largest industrial user of energy. (Abromovitz & Mattoon, Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1999))

- Paper comprises roughly 40% of the municipal solid waste burden in many industrial countries (Abromovitz & Mattoon, Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1999))

Encyclopedia of Life

2007-05-11T00:07:00.000-04:00

Encyclopedia of Life (Press Release)
May 9, 2007 -- EOL

"We intend to make key components of the Encyclopedia available to the general public starting some time in 2008. As a ballpark estimate, we believe that we can produce the full encyclopedia in about 10 years."

A Leap for All Life: World’s Leading Scientists Announce Creation of “Encyclopedia of Life”
Biodiversity, Science Communities Unite Behind Epic Effort To Promote Biodiversity, Document All 1.8 Million Named Species on Planet

Many of the world’s leading scientific institutions today announced the launch of the Encyclopedia of Life, an unprecedented global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants, and other forms of life on Earth. For the first time in the history of the planet, scientists, students, and citizens will have multi-media access to all known living species, even those that have just been discovered.

The Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, Marine Biological Laboratory, Smithsonian Institution, and Biodiversity Heritage Library joined together to initiate the project, bringing together species and software experts from across the world. The Missouri Botanical Garden has become a full partner, and discussions are taking place this week with leaders of the new Atlas of Living Australia. The Encyclopedia today also announced the initial membership of its Institutional Council, which spans the globe, and whose members will play key roles in realizing this immense project. An international advisory board of distinguished individuals will also help guide the Encyclopedia.

The effort is spurred by a $10 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and $2.5 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and will ultimately serve as a global beacon for biodiversity and conservation.

“The Encyclopedia of Life will provide valuable biodiversity and conservation information to anyone, anywhere, at any time,” said Dr. James Edwards, currently Executive Secretary of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility who today was officially named Executive Director of the Encyclopedia of Life. “Through collaboration, we all can increase our appreciation of the immense variety of life, the challenges to it, and ways to conserve biodiversity. The Encyclopedia of Life will ultimately make high-quality, well-organized information available on an unprecedented level. Even five years ago, we could not create such a resource, but advances in technology for searching, annotating, and visualizing information now permit us, indeed mandate us to build the Encyclopedia of Life.”

Over the next 10 years, the Encyclopedia of Life will create Internet pages for all 1.8 million species currently named. It will expedite the classification of the millions of species yet to be discovered and catalogued as well. The pages, housed at http://www.eol.org, will provide written information and, when available, photographs, video, sound, location maps, and other multimedia information on each species. Built on the scientific integrity of thousands of experts around the globe, the Encyclopedia will be a moderated wiki-style environment, freely available to all users everywhere.

“The Encyclopedia of Life will be a vital tool for scientists, researchers, and educators across the globe, providing easy access to the latest and best information on all known species,” said Jonathan F. Fanton, President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. “Technology is allowing science to grasp the immense complexity of life on this planet. Sharing what we know, we can protect Earth's biodiversity and better conserve our natural heritage.”

“For more than 250 years, scientists have catalogued life, and our traditional catalogues have become unwieldy,” said Ralph E. Gomory, President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “The Encyclopedia of Life will provide the citizens of the world a ‘macroscope’ of almost unimaginable power to find and create understanding of biodiversity across the globe. It will enable us to map and discover things so numerous or vast they overwhelm our normal vision.”

Scientists began creating individual web pages for species in the 1990s. However, Internet technology needed to mature to allow fast and efficient creation of a comprehensive Encyclopedia. While specific Encyclopedia of Life efforts, including the scanning of key research publications and data, have been underway since January 2006, work has accelerated due to the support provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the recent discussion of the Encyclopedia of Life by renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson at the March 2007 Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Conference.

One of the world’s foremost scientists and environmentalists, Wilson, professor emeritus at Harvard University, “wished” for the establishment of the Encyclopedia of Life during his TED Conference address. Noting that “our knowledge of biodiversity is so incomplete that we are at risk of losing a great deal of it before it is ever discovered,” Wilson called for a contemporary, dynamic portrait of the living Earth.

“I wish that we will work together to help create the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity: the Encyclopedia of Life,” Wilson said at TED. “What excites me is that since I first put forward this idea, science has advanced, technology has moved forward. Today, the practicalities of making this encyclopedia real are within reach as never before.”

Ultimately, the Encyclopedia of Life will provide users the opportunity to personalize the learning experience through its “my eol” feature. The site can be made available in all major languages and will connect scientific communities concerned with ants to apples to zebras. As part of its work, the Encyclopedia of Life will collaborate and partner with a wide range of organizations, individuals, and experts to help strengthen the Encyclopedia and its impact on communities throughout the world.

“The solidarity of the U.S. and global communities for the Encyclopedia of Life is tremendously exciting and lifts my confidence that this vast, romantic global effort will succeed,” Edwards said. “We are also encouraged by the declaration in March 2007 by the environment ministers of the G8 nations to foster a global species information system.”

While initial work will emphasize species of animals, plants, and fungi, the design can be extended to encompass microbial life.

To provide depth behind the portal page for each species, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), a consortium that holds most of the relevant scientific literature, will scan and digitize tens of millions of pages of the scientific literature that will offer open access to detailed knowledge. In fact, the BHL now has scanning centers operating in London, Boston, and Washington DC, and has scanned the first 1.25 million pages for the Encyclopedia.

“I dream that in a few years wherever a reference to a species occurs on the Internet, there will be a hyperlink to its page in the Encyclopedia of Life,” concluded Edwards.

ABOUT THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LIFE
The Encyclopedia of Life is a collaborative scientific effort led by the Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, Marine Biological Laboratory, Missouri Botanical Garden, Smithsonian Institution, and Biodiversity Heritage Library, a consortium including the core institutions and also the American Museum of Natural History (New York), Natural History Museum (London), New York Botanical Garden, and Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew). Ultimately, the Encyclopedia of Life will provide an online database for all 1.8 million species now known to live on Earth. When completed, http://www.eol.org will serve as a global biodiversity tool, providing scientists, policymakers, students, and citizens information they need to discover and protect the planet and encourage learning and conservation.

Carbon Currency: Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative

2007-05-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

When Carbon Is Currency
May 6, 2007 -- By Hannah Fairfield, The New York Times

Amid steadily increasing carbon emissions, and a federal government hesitant to take the lead on climate legislation, 10 states have joined to create the first mandatory carbon cap-and-trade program in the United States. They aim to reduce emissions from power plants by 10 percent in 10 years.

Leaders of state environmental and energy regulatory agencies hammered out the detailed model for the program, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, over the course of three years. The program sets a cap on the total amount of carbon that the 10 states — as a whole — can emit. Starting in 2009, each state will receive a set amount of carbon credits for its power plants, and each plant must have enough allowances to cover its total emissions at the end of three-year compliance periods.

In 2003, George E. Pataki, then New York’s governor, invited governors of 10 other states from Maine to Maryland to discuss a program to cut power plant emissions. All but one of the states joined the program; Pennsylvania has observer status.

Officials have closely watched the European Union, which started its carbon trading market in 2005; analysts say the Europeans have stumbled on some fronts. “We’ve learned a lot from the Europeans,” said Judith Enck, adviser on environment issues to Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York. “The way we distribute the allowances will be vastly different than the European experience.”

To build a carbon market, its originators must create a currency of carbon credits that participants can trade. In Europe, power companies received these credits directly and could buy or sell from one another as needed. But most companies passed the cost of the credits on to consumers even though they received them free — giving the companies windfall profits. Power companies in Britain alone made about $1 billion from free credits in 2005, according to a study by the British government.

Participants in the United States want to avoid that problem by selling some or all of the credits at auction, with the proceeds going to state energy efficiency programs.

In Europe, power companies were not the only businesses to profit from the new carbon market. Because power plants there can use credits earned from offset projects that take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere (or put less of them into it), businesses wanting to earn offset credits inundated the Europeans with proposals — many of which would have a negligible effect on emissions or were for reductions that would have taken place anyway.

To sidestep that problem, the program here limits offsets to five categories: capture of landfill gas, curbs on sulfur hexafluoride leaks, planting of trees, reductions in methane from manure, and increased energy efficiency in buildings. Power companies can offset 3.3 percent of a plant’s total emissions from any combination of the five categories.

“We saw what happened in Europe, so we limited the categories and set our criteria upfront,” said Christopher Sherry, chairman of the regional program’s staff working group and a research scientist at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. “We did that so we would have assurance that the reductions actually take place.”

Although Northeastern states have taken the lead in inaugurating a mandatory carbon market, California and some of its neighbors are not far behind. Those states are watching closely; Mr. Sherry and others involved in the 10-state effort are already helping California figure out how best to accomplish its climate plan.

“The idea is to see what everyone else has done, and learn from it,” said Dale Bryk, a lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council who has been involved with the Northeastern regional program and California’s advisory committee. “Let’s not start from scratch.”

Voluntary Restrictions Protect Quarter of World's High Seas from Trawling

2007-05-08T01:12:00.000-04:00

Nations seek end to trawling seas
May 5, 2007 -- Associated Press via CNN

More than 20 nations agreed Friday to discourage unregulated and destructive bottom trawling on the South Pacific high seas, a victory for environmental groups.

The agreement, which takes effect September 30, is intended to protect about a quarter of the world's high seas, a vast area extending roughly from the Equator to the Antarctic Circle and from Australia and New Zealand to the west coast of South America.

Observers and ship locator monitoring systems are to be used, and vessels must remain at least five nautical miles (9,260 meters) from deep-water corals and other vulnerable marine ecosystems.

The agreement reached in Renaca, Chile, follows a U.N. General Assembly resolution in December aimed at getting tough on high-seas bottom trawling, which involves fishing boats that drag giant nets along the sea floor.

Enormously effective at catching fish, the nets also wipe out almost everything in their path, smash coral and stir clouds of sediment that smother sea life, marine experts say.

Orange roughy is the main commercial fish in the South Pacific high seas, mainly caught by New Zealand fishing vessels. Estimates of the fishing trade range up to about $10 million (euro7.4 million).

New Zealand officials agreed to the voluntary restrictions in the South Pacific high seas, but they said the restrictions could "severely constrain" its fishing vessels. The ecological costs of the huge nets are far higher, environmental groups said.

"This area contains thousands of these underwater sea mountains, or seamounts, that are considered to be some of the most ecologically rich habitats in the world," said Joshua Reichert, director of the private Pew Charitable Trusts' environment division, which coordinated the groups' campaign. "For all of us, this really represents a major step forward for marine conservation."

A U.N. report last year called bottom trawling a danger to unique and unexplored ecological systems. It said slightly more than half the underwater mountain and coral ecosystems in the world can be found beyond the protection of national boundaries.

The new agreement is among members of the fledgling South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization: Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Cook Islands, Ecuador, the European Commission, Federated States of Micronesia, France, Japan, New Zealand, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Russia, South Korea, Ukraine, the United States and Vanuatu.

Tackling Climate Change: A bargain

2007-05-07T01:29:00.000-04:00

Tackling Climate Change: A bargain
May 4, 2007 -- The Economist (Subscription)

About 0.1% of world GDP would do it

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up under the auspices of the United Nations to establish a consensus on global warming and what to do about it, has now completed its fourth assessment report. The first two parts, published earlier this year, about the science and the impacts of climate change, were designed to spread gloom. Change was happening, they said; it was mankind’s fault; and it was going to be damaging. The third part, released on Friday May 4th in Bangkok, is about mitigating climate change, and is designed to spread hope. Just as mankind caused the problem, it says, so mankind can stop it—and at a reasonable cost.

In some areas of economic activity, emissions could be cut with no cost to consumers or taxpayers. The heating and lighting systems of many buildings, for instance, are startlingly inefficient. Improving this would cut both emissions and bills. Economists are troubled by this, for it implies that people and businesses are not maximising their economic self-interest; yet the low take-up of energy-efficient lightbulbs suggests this is indeed the case. Governments are therefore beginning to tighten regulations on the energy efficiency of buildings, and to talk about, for instance, banning incandescent lightbulbs. The IPCC reckons that such measures could cut 30% of projected emissions from this sector at no extra cost.

Transport is trickier, because car ownership is rocketing and the demand for fuel is fairly inelastic. If people want to drive they are going to drive, unless governments jack up petrol prices to levels that are politically unacceptable. So for emissions to fall in the transport sector, new technologies, such as more efficient biofuels or electric cars, are needed. Given a big R&D effort in this sector, there is a good chance that those will be forthcoming.

Similarly, in power generation, there is scope for cutting emissions. The cost of renewable energy, such as wind and solar, has been falling. Nuclear generating technology has improved. Carbon capture and storage, which involves taking the carbon dioxide (or C02) out of power station flue gases and injecting it back into the earth, is also a possibility, though that technology is at an early stage.

Technological solutions to climate change, then, are available. But most of those on offer in the power and transport sectors cost more than fossil-fuel generated energy. Fortunately, economics comes to the rescue. Burning fossil fuels imposes a cost to society that is not reflected in their price. Economics says that it should be; and if it were, the price of using fossil fuels would rise in relation to the price of using renewable energy.

Unfortunately, the social cost of carbon is hard to calculate. Plenty of economists have tried, with unconvincing results. It requires estimating the impact of climate change on economic growth, which involves too many unknowns. So the IPCC report starts from the other end. Rather than trying to work out the social cost of carbon, and letting it feed through to reduce greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere, it starts from a manageable greenhouse-gas concentration and works backwards to a carbon price. Conveniently, it says the “social cost of carbon is at least comparable to, and possibly higher than carbon prices for even the most stringent scenarios assessed by the IPCC”.

And what is the right price? The report says that to stabilise greenhouse-gas concentrations at 550 parts per million (a level most scientists think safeish) would require a price of $20-50 per tonne of carbon by 2020-30. That is along the lines of the carbon price established the European Emissions-Trading Scheme, which varied between $6 and $40 in 2005-06. It has not bankrupted the European economy so far. The IPCC’s economic models reckon, on average, that if the world adopted such a price the global economy would be 1.3% smaller than it otherwise would have been by 2050; or, put another way, global economic growth would be 0.1% a year lower than it otherwise would have been.

The world would barely notice such figures; so one might think that climate change can be easily sorted. The problem, of course, is that the numbers work only if they are applied globally. If a few countries—even a few big countries—adopt a carbon price, it will make little difference. All the world’s big emitters need to do it. Which brings the world straight back to the problem that sank Kyoto. No country alone can make a difference, and it is in every country’s interest to ensure that everybody else bears the burden. As the IPCC report convincingly argues, the technology and the economics of this problem are easily soluble. It is the politics that is so difficult.

Congestion Pricing

2007-05-04T00:18:00.000-04:00

Excerpt from:
Don't Drive, He Said
May 7, 2007 -- By Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker via Greg Mankiw's Blog

The case against congestion pricing is often posed in egalitarian terms. “The middle class and the poor will not be able to pay these fees and the rich will,” State Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, of Westchester County, declared after listening to the Mayor’s speech. In fact, the poor don’t, as a rule, drive in and out of Manhattan: compare the cost of buying, insuring, and parking a car with the seventy-six dollars a month the M.T.A. charges for an unlimited-ride MetroCard. For those who do use cars to commute, eight dollars a day would, it’s true, quickly add up. And that is precisely the point. Congestion pricing works only to the extent that it makes other choices—changing the hours of one’s daily drive or, better yet, using mass transit—more attractive.

Designing Cities For People

2007-05-01T16:04:00.000-04:00

Designing Cities For People
May 1, 2007 -- By Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

As I was being driven through Tel Aviv from my hotel to a conference center a few years ago, I could not help but note the overwhelming presence of cars and parking lots. Tel Aviv, expanding from a small settlement a half-century ago to a city of some 3 million today, evolved during the automobile era. It occurred to me that the ratio of parks to parking lots may be the best single indicator of the livability of a city--whether a city is designed for people or for cars.

The world's cities are in trouble. In Mexico City, Tehran, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the quality of daily life is deteriorating. Breathing the air in some cities is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. In the United States, the number of hours commuters spend sitting in traffic going nowhere climbs higher each year.

In response to these conditions, we are seeing the emergence of a new urbanism. One of the most remarkable modern urban transformations has occurred in Bogotá, Colombia, where Enrique Peñalosa served as Mayor for three years, beginning in 1998. When he took office he did not ask how life could be improved for the 30 percent who owned cars; he wanted to know what could be done for the 70 percent--the majority--who did not own cars.

Peñalosa realized that a city that is a pleasant environment for children and the elderly would work for everyone. In just a few years, he transformed the quality of urban life with his vision of a city designed for people. Under his leadership, the city banned the parking of cars on sidewalks, created or renovated 1,200 parks, introduced a highly successful bus-based rapid transit system, built hundreds of kilometers of bicycle paths and pedestrian streets, reduced rush hour traffic by 40 percent, planted 100,000 trees, and involved local citizens directly in the improvement of their neighborhoods. In doing this, he created a sense of civic pride among the city's 8 million residents, making the streets of Bogotá in strife-torn Colombia safer than those in Washington, D.C.

Enrique Peñalosa observes that "high quality public pedestrian space in general and parks in particular are evidence of a true democracy at work." He further observes: "Parks and public space are also important to a democratic society because they are the only places where people meet as equals. In a city, parks are as essential to the physical and emotional health of a city as the water supply." He notes this is not obvious from most city budgets, where parks are deemed a luxury. By contrast, roads, the public space for cars, receive infinitely more resources and less budget cuts than parks, the public space for children. Why, he asks, are the public spaces for cars deemed more important than the public spaces for children?

Now government planners everywhere are experimenting, seeking ways to design cities for people not cars. Cars promise mobility, and they provide it in a largely rural setting. But in an urbanizing world there is an inherent conflict between the automobile and the city. After a point, as their numbers multiply, automobiles provide not mobility but immobility. Congestion also takes a direct economic toll in rising costs in time and gasoline. And urban air pollution, often from automobiles, claims millions of lives.

Another cost of cities that are devoted to cars is a psychological one, a deprivation of contact with the natural world--an "asphalt complex." There is a growing body of evidence that there is an innate human need for contact with nature. Both ecologists and psychologists have been aware of this for some time. Ecologists, led by Harvard University biologist E.O. Wilson, have formulated the "biophilia hypothesis," which argues that those who are deprived of contact with nature suffer psychologically and that this deprivation leads to a measurable decline in well-being.

Throughout the modern era, budget allocations for transportation in most countries--and in the United States, in particular--have been heavily biased toward the construction and maintenance of highways and streets. Creating more livable cities and the mobility that people desire depends on reallocating budgets to emphasize the development of rail- or bus-based public transport and bicycle support facilities.

The exciting news is that there are signs of change, daily indications of an interest in redesigning cities for people, not for cars. One encouraging trend comes from the United States. Public transit ridership nationwide rising by 2.1 percent a year since 1996 indicates that people are gradually abandoning their cars for buses, subways, and light rail. Rising gasoline prices are encouraging still more commuters to abandon their cars and take the bus or subway or get on a bicycle.

When Beijing decided to promote an automobile-centered transportation system, a group of eminent scientists in China protested. They pointed out that the country does not have enough land to accommodate the automobile and to feed its people. What is true for China is also true for India and dozens of other densely populated developing countries.
Some cities are far better at planning their growth than others. They plan transport systems that provide mobility, clean air, and exercise--a sharp contrast to cities that offer congestion, unhealthy air, and little opportunity for exercise. When 95 percent of a city's workers depend on the automobile for commuting, as in Atlanta, Georgia, the city is in trouble.

By contrast, in Amsterdam only 40 percent of workers commute by car; 35 percent bike or walk, while 25 percent use public transit. Copenhagen's commuting patterns are almost identical to Amsterdam's. In Paris, just under half of commuters rely on cars. Even though these European cities are older, with narrow streets, they have far less congestion than Atlanta.

Not surprisingly, car-dependent cities have more congestion and less mobility than those that offer a wider range of commuting options. The very vehicle whose great promise was personal mobility is in fact virtually immobilizing entire urban populations, making it difficult for rich and poor alike to move about.

Existing long-term transportation strategies in many developing countries assume that everyone will one day be able to own a car. Unfortunately, given the constraints of land available for cars, not to mention those imposed by oil reserves, this is simply not realistic. These countries will provide more mobility if they support public transportation and the bicycle.

Big Oil on Peak Oil

2007-04-23T00:01:00.000-04:00

Big Oil on Peak Oil
April 19, 2007 -- The Wall Street Journal Energy Roundup Blog

Energy Roundup and several other energy bloggers participated in a conference call yesterday with Red Cavaney, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute. Topics included peak oil, ethanol, the Canadian tar sands, refinery capacity and greenhouse-gas emissions caps.

Some highlights:

Cavaney is sanguine about the prospect of peak oil. He believes that, even after the world’s oil production hits its peak — whenever that happens — the downward slope of production will likely be gradual, rather than sharp. He also thinks much of the world is “under-explored,” suggesting the peak can be put off a little while longer with more exploration overseas. He also thinks hydrocarbons will always be with us, in one capacity or another. “Man left the Stone Age not because he ran out of stone. We’ll leave the age of oil, but it won’t be because we ran out of oil. It will be because other technologies have come in that will be more reliable and cost-effective.”

He claimed his industry is agnostic about the controversies surrounding global warming. “We’re not scientists or experts in that area,” he said. “But we have concluded there are sufficient signals that it’s important we get on with trying to mitigate the outcomes that may flow from path we’re on.”

He also expressed no preference for any of several potential congressional actions to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. But he also said he doubted a carbon tax would be imposed any time soon. “Most economists…say a carbon tax would be the most efficient way to maximize reductions,” he said. “But…if you talk to political advisors, that’s the last vote they’ll take.”

He was a little more heated in defending his industry against charges that it is standing in the way of a broader rollout of ethanol in the U.S. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that oil-company policies make it harder for many service stations to stock a fuel called E85, a blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. And earlier this year, representatives of auto makers and the Clean Fuel Development Coalition told the Journal that oil companies weren’t doing their part to make ethanol more widely available.

Cavaney said such critics “have their own agenda.” The auto industry, he implied, has not taken ethanol use seriously, using flex-fuel vehicles and E85 primarily as marketing tools. He said his industry is doing everything it can to encourage ethanol use, but that corn-based ethanol will never be a widespread substitute for gasoline and cellulosic ethanol is still years away from commercial viability.

He also warned against relying on any one substitute for fossil fuels. “There is no one silver bullet,” he said. “Anybody that focuses that way will miss a lot of opportunities.”

Cold Turkey, by Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)

2007-04-20T15:12:00.000-04:00

Excerpt from:
Cold Turkey
May 10, 2004 -- By Kurt Vonnegut

I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s license! Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut.

And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused and addictive and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.

When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any more of those. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it?

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

What Economists Can Learn From Evolutionary Theorists

2007-04-19T01:09:00.000-04:00

What Economists Can Learn From Evolutionary Theorists
November 1996 -- By Paul Krugman
(From a talk given to the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy)

To read the real thing in evolution - to read, say, John Maynard Smith's Evolution and the Theory of Games, or William Hamilton's new book of collected papers, Narrow Roads in Gene Land, is a startling experience to someone whose previous idea of evolution comes from magazine articles and popular books. The field does not look at all like the stories. What it does look like, to a remarkable degree, is - dare I say it? - neoclassical economics. And it offers very little comfort to those who want a refuge from the harsh discipline of maximization and equilibrium.[...]

Personally, I consider myself a proud neoclassicist. By this I clearly don't mean that I believe in perfect competition all the way. What I mean is that I prefer, when I can, to make sense of the world using models in which individuals maximize and the interaction of these individuals can be summarized by some concept of equilibrium. The reason I like that kind of model is not that I believe it to be literally true, but that I am intensely aware of the power of maximization-and-equilibrium to organize one's thinking - and I have seen the propensity of those who try to do economics without those organizing devices to produce sheer nonsense when they imagine they are freeing themselves from some confining orthodoxy.

Fuel taxes: An important instrument for climate policy

2007-04-18T00:17:00.000-04:00

Fuel taxes: An important instrument for climate policy
July 14, 2006 -- By Thomas Sterner, Energy Policy, Vol. 35, Issue 6, June 2007 via Greg Mankiw

Abstract

This article shows that fuel taxes serve a very important role for the environment and that we risk a backlash of increased emissions if they are abolished. Fuel taxes have restrained growth in fuel demand and associated carbon emissions. Although fuel demand is large and growing, our analysis shows that it would have been much higher in the absence of domestic fuel taxes. People often assert that fuel demand is inelastic but there is strong research evidence showing the opposite. The price elasticity is in fact quite high but only in the long-run: in the short run it may be quite inelastic which has important implications for policy makers. Had Europe not followed a policy of high fuel taxation but had low US taxes, then fuel demand would have been twice as large. Hypothetical transport demand in the whole OECD area is calculated for various tax scenarios and the results show that fuel taxes are the single most powerful climate policy instrument implemented to date—yet this fact is not usually given due attention in the debate.

Gore, Gandhi, and Dioum

2007-04-16T18:59:00.000-04:00

Al Gore at TED
March, 2008

Here is an excellent presentation on issues pertaining to the new environmental movement--global climatic disruption and resource constraints (in comparison to the previous environmental movement--biodiversity, toxins, air/water quality, and population). In the past, I have been skeptical towards Al Gore for a few reasons. The most prevalent being that he flies around the world, after leaving one of his mansions, to tell the general public to reduce emissions.

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
-Mohandas Gandhi

However, I am beginning to think less about his vanity and more about his ability to promote ideas in a compelling way.

"For in the end, we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught."
-Baba Dioum

He is one of many voices that need to be listened to as humanity attempts to reduce the tragedy of the commons and improve the living conditions for all of life.

ConocoPhillips First Major U.S.-Based Oil Company To Call For Emissions Cap

2007-04-13T00:01:00.000-04:00

Conoco Calls for Emissions Cap (Subscription)
April 11, 2007 -- By Jeffrey Ball, The Wall Street Journal

Oil Producer Joins Effort To Shape New U.S. Policy On Greenhouse-Gas Limits

ConocoPhillips became the first major U.S.-based oil company to add its voice to the call for a federal global-warming-emission cap, in the latest sign that U.S. companies are jockeying to shape any legislation.

ConocoPhillips said it was joining the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a group of corporations that have called for a U.S. emissions cap and have outlined broad principles that they want any cap to include. The group formed earlier this year, following the takeover of Congress by Democrats, whose leaders have said they want to legislate an emissions cap.

"We believe that the science is quite compelling and that climate change is certainly attributed to human activity and to the substantial use of fossil fuels," Jim Mulva, chairman and chief executive of Houston-based ConocoPhillips, said in announcing the company's position.

Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's biggest publicly traded oil company by market value, also has begun talking about what it wants any global-warming constraint to include, including market flexibility. But Exxon isn't saying it either endorses or opposes a federal cap. Said Dave Gardner, an Exxon spokesman: "The devil's in the details."

European-based oil giant BP PLC has endorsed a U.S. global-warming emissions cap. It is the only other oil company in USCAP.

ConocoPhillips's announcement comes amid mounting political and consumer concern about global warming and rising gasoline prices. The U.S. Energy Information Administration said yesterday that the global oil market is likely to remain tight -- and pump prices volatile -- during the summer driving season. Regular-grade gasoline should average $2.81 per gallon this summer, it said, compared with $2.84 per gallon last summer.

Companies like ConocoPhillips that are endorsing a federal global-warming cap are doing so largely in the belief that they can shape it to minimize the cost to them. Many companies, eyeing the proliferation of differing global-warming rules in places such as California and the Northeast, are concluding that a single nationwide cap will be less onerous than a patchwork of state rules.

A U.S. policy, they figure, would be easier to integrate into global-warming regulations being implemented in other countries where U.S.-based multinationals like ConocoPhillips also do business. That integration would make it easier for companies to satisfy any U.S. obligation by buying cheaper emission "credits" from the developing world, where the cost of projects to reduce or offset fossil-fuel emissions is lower. ConocoPhillips's Mr. Mulva stressed that his company wants a U.S. cap to "have linkages" to policies in other countries.

Mr. Mulva also said he wants to ensure than any federal emissions cap doesn't "create winners and losers" in the economy. But companies already are ratcheting up their lobbying push in Washington to influence the details of whatever cap emerges. That scramble is particularly intense among the industries likeliest to be hit: electric utilities, heavy manufacturers, auto makers and oil producers.

Transportation isn't likely to be hit as hard as the utility sector. That is because it is cheaper for the economy to curb a ton of emissions of carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas, by targeting utilities than by targeting cars and trucks. Still, the transport sector is likely to be hit. The bulk of that burden could fall either on fuel producers, which might be required to produce fuel that contains less carbon, or on auto makers, which might be required to engineer their vehicles so they burn less fuel.

In an indication of that tension, Mr. Mulva all but blessed a toughening of a policy the auto industry reviles: the federal government's decades-old requirement that each auto maker's fleet of new vehicles each year meets a minimum average fuel economy. "We need to do everything we can to just have more energy efficiency," he said, adding: "If that leads to higher requirements -- more miles per gallon in terms of the automobiles we drive -- that all does help in the more efficient use of energy."

The auto industry, for its part, is trying to push much of the burden onto others. It, too, has begun talking favorably about an economy-wide cap on global-warming emissions, which it figures is likely to go easier on the auto industry than would a significant toughening of the federal automotive-fuel-economy requirements.

Crop Prices Pushing Up Cost Of Food Globally

2007-04-12T01:58:00.000-04:00

Crop Prices Soar, Pushing Up Cost Of Food Globally (Subscription)
April 9, 2007 -- By Patrick Barta, The Wall Street Journal

Soaring prices for farm goods, driven in part by demand for crop-based fuels, are pushing up the price of food world-wide and unleashing a new source of inflationary pressure.

The rise in food prices is already causing distress among consumers in some parts of the world -- especially relatively poor nations like India and China. If the trend gathers momentum, it could contribute to slower global growth by forcing consumers to spend less on other items or spurring central banks to fight inflation by raising interest rates.

Politicians in markets where food costs are a particularly sensitive matter are moving to counter rising prices before they take a bigger economic toll or fuel unrest. But it remains unclear whether those policies will be enough to contain the current pressures, or whether a longer-term bout of food-price inflation -- similar in ways to the recent climb in prices for oil and other commodities -- is in the offing.

One of the chief causes of food-price inflation is new demand for ethanol and biodiesel, which can be made from corn, palm oil, sugar and other crops. That demand has driven up the price of those commodities, leading to higher costs for producers of everything from beef to eggs to soft drinks. In some cases, producers are passing the costs along to consumers. Several years of global economic growth -- led by China and India -- is also raising food consumption, further fanning the inflationary pressures.

Food-price inflation has been climbing -- in some cases sharply -- in India, China, Europe, and even smaller economies like Turkey, South Africa and Poland. In Hungary, it is running at more than 13% a year, compared with less than 3% in 2005. In China, food prices are climbing at a 6% pace, more than three times the speed of a year ago. Prices are also up in Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. They may even be picking up in Japan, the world's second-largest national economy, though the signs are tentative since overall prices there are only just starting to rise after a prolonged economic downturn.

The U.S., too, is seeing some stirrings, with food costs rising 3.1% in February from the year before -- a rate one percentage point higher than in mid-2005. Economists say U.S. food prices are expected to rise faster than the general rate of inflation this year. Wholesale prices of meat, poultry and eggs have already increased.

If the trend continues, U.S. consumers are likely to see higher prices at the supermarket for everything from milk to cereal to soda pop, since corn is used to feed livestock and make high-fructose corn syrup, a key ingredient in many soft drinks. A spokesman for the National Chicken Council, a poultry-industry group, recently testified to a congressional subcommittee that Americans should expect higher chicken prices because of what the group described as "the ethanol crisis."

Doomsday predictions of a major food shortage in China and elsewhere have circulated for years but haven't materialized. And some economists believe the recent increase in crop demand probably can be met without severely straining the global economy. They think prices could come back down over time, especially if some countries that have more land that could be put under cultivation -- particularly Brazil -- can greatly increase production. Technological advances, such as better seed varieties, could also help boost production to keep up with demand.

In the meantime, higher farm prices aren't bad for everyone. They could help boost incomes for the rural poor in developing nations, who have been bypassed by gains in the manufacturing and service sectors. In some cases, the rising demand for food also reflects the growing wealth of once-destitute populations around the globe.

So far, higher prices haven't sparked a major rise in overall global inflation, which remains relatively low and stable by historical standards. Moreover, food prices are notoriously volatile, and some of the increases are due to short-term or local factors that could reverse in time.

But many economists believe the forces causing the current bout of food inflation will persist, or recur in years ahead. Many countries are facing shortages of land and water that didn't exist during past food-price spikes, so they can't easily plant more to ease the strain.

Researchers at Swiss bank UBS AG note that average food prices in China have grown faster in the past five years than in the previous five, as more agricultural land is taken up for factories or high-rise condominiums. Changes in diets are also exacerbating the problem, as rising incomes allow the Chinese and consumers in many other places to eat more.

Some economists contend that China and India appear to be reaching a point at which nothing short of a bumper crop of key commodities will be enough to meet local needs and prevent further surges in food prices. In fact, China and India have achieved historically high production of some crops in recent years, only to see prices continue to climb.

Global grain stocks are at their lowest level in 30 years, after several years of strong global economic growth, and could become even tighter if farmers divert more crops to make ethanol or other fuels. By some estimates, about 30% of the U.S. grain harvest is likely to be devoted to ethanol production by 2008, up from 16% in 2006.

All of this puts the world's central banks in a bind. Although they have confronted spurts in energy prices, many of them haven't had to cope with prolonged increases in food prices since the 1970s. Since then, food-price inflation has remained relatively benign, even as incomes world-wide have climbed, allowing consumers to beef up their diets.

In more recent years, central banks have tried to ignore surges in food prices as long as they didn't get too out of hand, mostly because they tended to be short-lived. A change in weather, for example, could quickly turn a food shortage into a glut, sending prices tumbling.

But a more sustained bout of food-price inflation, if it emerges, could force banks to keep interest rates higher than they would otherwise be. India, for one, has increased interest rates several times over the past year in part to combat food-price inflation.

"In 1972, the last time grain stocks were this low, the story didn't end well in terms of inflation," says Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y. In those days, inflation soared not just because of higher oil costs but also because of a global jump in food costs, all of which helped trigger a major U.S. recession and a global slowdown. "Food prices were an important part of what started [inflation] rolling" in the 1970s, Mr. Weinberg says.

But since the 1970s, the Federal Reserve and some other central banks have come to believe that they can avoid raising interest rates in the face of transitory increases in food and energy prices if they have established enough credibility as inflation fighters to keep such price increases from spilling over to the rest of the economy.

Today, the inflation risks may be greatest in developing economies. In the Philippines, food accounts for 50% of the basket of goods included in the consumer-price index, an inflation benchmark. In Thailand, it's about 35%, according to data from Macquarie Bank Ltd. In the U.S., food makes up only about 15% of the CPI.

In one bustling open-air market in downtown Shanghai, shoppers say they are paying as much as two times the price they paid last year for green vegetables, and the cost of meat and vegetable oils have also soared.

Such blows to the pocketbook "give us more pressure for daily life," says Xu Wen, a 53-year-old retiree who was purchasing some rolled noodles in a small shop last week. Already, she says, she and her husband are spending almost half their monthly income on food -- a percentage that continues to increase over time. "We ordinary people have no way out," she says. "This is something the government needs to be concerned about."

Government officials are taking pains to show they are addressing the problem. In December, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao toured a Beijing supermarket to check up on prices, and China has begun limiting the construction of corn-based ethanol plants to ensure there is enough corn for humans and livestock. Chinese officials have even banned new golf courses on farm land and have been unwinding subsidies they once paid to grain distributors to sell excess corn overseas.

Still, analysts estimate Chinese stockpiles of surplus corn now stand at only about 30 million metric tons, down from more than 100 million tons at the end of the past decade, as demand picks up. (The Chinese government doesn't provide official estimates of its stockpiles).

That would imply that China only has two to three months of surplus supply based on current consumption trends, making the country highly vulnerable if it has a bad crop. Although China remains a net exporter of corn now, analysts believe it will become a net importer sometime in the next few years.

Some economists say China will have to take more aggressive steps to prevent future food problems. These changes could include allowing the proliferation of large -- but more efficient -- corporate farms similar to the ones that drove many small growers out of business in the U.S. in recent decades. Such a push would be extremely difficult for China because it needs to preserve jobs for the tens of millions of people who live in rural areas.

Pressures are also building in India. Monika Katyal, a 32-year-old homemaker, complains that she has had to cut back on purchases of many luxuries, such as cosmetics, as her family's monthly bill for groceries has climbed as much as 50% in recent months.

"I came here to do some shopping for myself, but now it doesn't look like I will be able to do that," she said recently, as she studied the price on a bottle of ketchup in a New Delhi grocery.

In addition to raising interest rates, Indian officials have also lifted import duties on corn and barred exports of wheat, to make sure supplies are available for domestic consumption.

But it isn't clear whether those and other moves will be enough to make a big difference in the long run. The main problem is that yields of some crops aren't growing fast enough to keep up with India's rapidly increasing food demand. India's corn production, for example, has climbed about 4% a year since 2001, says Amit Sachdev, a New Delhi-area agriculture-industry analyst, while demand has been increasing nearly 5.5% a year.

"If I look at the trend line, [it] indicates to me that the requirements are going up much faster than what you can produce" in India, he says.

Mexico Tries to Save A Big, Fading Oil Field

2007-04-10T00:01:00.000-04:00

Mexico Tries to Save A Big, Fading Oil Field (Subscription)
April 5, 2007 -- By David Luhnow, The Wall Street Journal

Cantarell's Drop-Off Faster Than Expected; Turning to Technology

In March 1971, a Mexican fisherman named Rudesindo Cantarell took a few geologists from state-run oil company Petróleos Mexicanos to this spot, where he had seen oil slicks. Mr. Cantarell didn't know it, but he had stumbled across one of the largest offshore oil fields ever found.

A few decades and 12 billion barrels of oil later, the field that bears Mr. Cantarell's name is dying, and Pemex, as the state-owned company is known, is struggling to stave off the field's demise. From January 2006 though February 2007, Cantarell lost a staggering one-fifth of its production, with daily output falling to 1.6 million barrels from two million.

The oil industry was stunned. Cantarell, which currently produces one of every 50 barrels of oil on the world market, is fading so fast analysts believe Mexico may become an oil importer in eight years. That would batter Mexico's economy, which depends on oil exports to fund 40% of its government spending.

The continued deterioration of the world's second-biggest field by output would also put pressure on prices on the global oil market, where supplies are barely keeping up with growing demand as it is. And it would leave the U.S. even more dependent on Middle Eastern supplies -- and that much more vulnerable to political tumult in that region.

The demise of Cantarell highlights a global issue: Nearly a quarter of the world's daily oil output of 85 million barrels is pumped from the biggest 20 fields, according to estimates from Wood Mackenzie, a Scotland-based oil consulting firm. And many of those fields, discovered decades ago, could soon follow in Cantarell's footsteps.

It's widely believed that the world's biggest oil fields have already been found. In the decades leading up to the 1970s, the world discovered eight big fields that produced between 500,000 to one million barrels a day, according to Matthew Simmons, a veteran oil industry banker. During the 1970s and 1980s, only two were found. Since then, only one -- the Kashagan field in Kazakhstan -- has the potential to easily top the 500,000 barrel-a-day mark.

Two decades ago, about a dozen fields produced more than a million barrels a day. Now there are only four, one of which is Cantarell. The future of two others, discovered more than 50 years ago, remains in question. Some analysts speculate Saudi Arabia's Ghawar, the biggest field by far, could begin a gradual decline within a decade or so. Another, Kuwait's Burgan, is showing signs of maturity. In November of 2005, Kuwait Oil Co. lowered its estimate of the field's sustainable production level to 1.7 million barrels a day from 1.9 million a day.

Replacing big gushers is difficult. Industrialized countries, which tapped out their big fields years earlier, haven't been able to maintain output despite finding large numbers of smaller fields and investing heavily in technology. Alaska production, hurt by declines at the giant Prudhoe Bay field, dropped from 2 million barrels a day in 1988 to a current rate of about 900,000 a day.

'On a Treadmill'

"The world faces a situation where we have production from smaller and smaller fields trying to keep up with declines from the big fields like Cantarell," says Mike Rodgers, a partner at industry consulting firm PFC Energy in Houston. "You're on a treadmill trying to keep up, and you get to a point where you can't make any more forward progress."

Some industry veterans are more sanguine. They argue that technology and high prices are helping tap vast sources of so-called "unconventional" crude oil, such as Canada's tar sands. Plus, they say technologies will also delay any decline in big fields by dislodging billions of barrels of additional oil that used to be too costly or difficult to reach. In Texas and California, fields discovered in the late 19th century are still productive. "The world has managed depending on giant oil fields for the last several decades," says Khalid Al-Roldan, a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, based in Washington, D.C.

But even if there is enough oil under the ground, the politics above the ground get in the way. The vast majority of the world's remaining big fields are in developing countries and run by government-owned oil companies, which are often less efficient than their investor-owned counterparts. State-owned companies in many countries, like those in Venezuela and Iran, are milked by their government for taxes, which reduces their ability to invest in new oil technology. Legal restrictions make it hard for national oil companies to work with foreign firms, cutting them off from techniques used in the rest of the industry.

Mexico's Pemex suffers many of these limitations. Its last two chief executives failed to persuade Mexico's Congress to remove foreign investment restrictions, which are embedded in Mexico's constitution and viewed as an embodiment of Mexican nationalism. Mexico's new president, Felipe Calderón, is expected to try to end the investment restrictions, but he too faces long odds.

Cantarell, like all giant oil fields, boasts an unusual geological history. Geologists say it may have been formed thanks to the asteroid that slammed into the Yucatán peninsula some 65 million years ago -- the same event that is believed to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. The impact caused giant cracks underground that allowed oil from previous millennia to accumulate in a single spot.

The field lay unnoticed until Mr. Cantarell, the fisherman, kept getting his nets smeared with oil as he trawled for shrimp in the 1960s. Assuming that the oil came from Pemex operations, he regularly hauled his oil-stained nets hundreds of miles to the nearest Pemex offices in neighboring Veracruz state to seek compensation. Finally, local Pemex officials say, the oil giant grew so exasperated with Mr. Cantarell that it went to check out his story.

The find was spectacular. Unlike most oil fields, which have a thin band of oil-rich rock that stretches for miles in every direction, Cantarell is shaped like a massive underground volcano, with huge amounts of oil in a relatively small place. While Saudi Arabia's Ghawar takes up about 2,700 square miles, Cantarell is just 70 square miles. From one platform, one can see the entire field.

Cantarell's formation made the field easy to exploit. It had so much initial pressure that Pemex's first well at the field produced 36,000 barrels of oil a day, compared with a few hundred barrels at most wells. The field is also in relatively shallow waters -- it is 50 yards deep. The water is so calm one can spot barracuda swimming between the platforms and there is no need for expensive deep-sea platforms. Today, Cantarell needs just 208 wells to produce the equivalent of one-fourth the entire U.S.'s oil output, while the U.S. needs hundreds of thousands of wells for a similar haul.

But the field's abundance also bred a sense of complacency. As is the case in many oil-rich countries, Mexico relied on oil to foot its current spending but gave little thought to what happens when the oil runs out. Last year, Cantarell was responsible for some $25 billion of the $53 billion that Pemex handed over to the government. The steep tax bill has left Pemex chronically short of cash to invest in finding new fields to replace its aging giant.

Cantarell produced about one million barrels a day from 1980 to the mid-1990s, when the field began to slowly lose pressure. This happens to all fields: They begin with enormous natural pressure because they are buried deeply beneath layers of heavy rock. But from the moment a well pricks a field and the oil is taken out, the pressure eases, like letting air out of a balloon.

Squeezing a Balloon

So in 1998, Pemex began injecting massive amounts of nitrogen into the field, which was the oil-field equivalent of squeezing a balloon from the bottom. Output more than doubled to a peak of 2.3 million barrels a day in 2004. That decision was hailed as a technical success, but it was just a temporary fix: It only sucked the field dry faster and set the stage for a steeper decline.

Now, Pemex's lack of money and technology is a handicap in managing the decline. The company didn't have any machinery on its Cantarell platforms to separate water from oil -- standard equipment for most of the rest of the industry. So when water from an underground aquifer began to creep into wells, a common occurrence in an older field, Pemex had to shut down the wells. The company closed any well where the water content rose to between 3% and 5% of the oil. By contrast, there are wells in Texas that are able to produce with 99% water.

"The water problem took us by surprise, but we are handling it," says Gustavo Hernández, Pemex's head of planning at the field. Standing atop an oil platform in the Gulf, Mr. Hernández says the company has overhauled platforms to handle water content of between 8% and 9% and is installing an additional water separation plant this year, allowing it to reopen more wells.

Last year, Pemex drilled its first horizontal wells at the field, something investor-owned oil companies have been using since the early 1980s. Horizontal wells bore down into a field like a traditional vertical well, but then spread out horizontally, extending for miles and allowing a single platform to suck up oil from a much larger area. Pemex plans to drill more such wells this year.

Pemex says steps like these, part of $2.4 billion in investment in the field this year, will slow the field's decline by about half of last year's pace. Instead of a decrease of 400,000 barrels a day, Pemex hopes Cantarell will lose some 200,000 barrels of daily output by year's end. After that, the company says Cantarell will probably continue to decline by roughly 10% a year, down to a daily average of 600,000 in 2013.

Pemex hopes to largely offset Cantarell's decline in the next three years by doing the same kind of nitrogen injection at its second-biggest producer, Ku-Maloob-Zaap, a collection of three fields within eyeshot of Cantarell's platform. (Its Mayan names translate to "nest," "good," and "charcoal.") But Ku-Maloob-Zaap, which is also ranked in the world's top 20 fields, will start its own decline in 2011, according to Pemex.

Pockets of Oil

That leaves Chicontepec, a massive onshore field in eastern Mexico that was discovered in the 1920s, but hasn't been fully developed because it is broken up into tiny pockets of oil that spread out over thousands of square miles in rocky terrain. Pemex says it will need more than 15,000 wells to fully tap the field -- a big stretch for a company that has drilled about 23,000 wells since it was formed in 1938. Developing Chicontepec is also difficult politically; there are scores of nearby towns that may take a dim view of oil production in their backyard.

For now, Pemex is doing what it can to keep Cantarell going as long as possible. A narrowing band of oil means that wells that are drilled at lesser depths have started to hit gas, which is less valuable than oil. Wells that are too deep hit greater amounts of water, which must be extracted from the oil before sale.

"It's a constant game of adjustment," says Mr. Hernández, the field's top planner. In most cases, Pemex tries to replace the production by re-drilling the same well either higher or lower. Still, Mr. Hernandez expects to lose 30 wells this year.

Benjamin Melo, manager of the Akal C platform, tries to assess the future by looking out across the field: "This has been a generous field. And there is still a lot of oil down there. But it won't last forever."

Biological Look At Marmosets And Chimerism

2007-04-08T15:48:00.000-04:00

Funky monkeys (Subscription)
March 29, 2007 -- The Economist

Marmosets give birth to their genetic nieces and nephews.

It does not take a biologist to tell that there are two sorts of twins. Twins can be genetically identical or they can be as different as siblings that were born at different times. Most marmosets, though, fall somewhere in between. These small New World monkeys may be cute, but they are chimeras nonetheless. Like the monster from Greek mythology, many marmosets are a mixture of more than one individual. They are, genetically, both themselves and their sibling at the same time.

There are two other odd (and indeed cute) things about marmosets. One is that they are always conceived as twins. The other is that they are unusually caring towards one another. Fathers are particularly and peculiarly doting. Now Corinna Ross and her colleagues at the University of Nebraska have found evidence to suggest the former oddity explains the latter. They have done so by showing that chimerism extends to all sorts of tissues, including marmoset sex cells.

That insight arose when Dr Ross DNA-fingerprinted 12 types of tissue from 39 dead marmosets, in order to work out how frequently cells containing a twin's genome occurred in different parts of the body. Marmosets are not equal mixtures of two genetic individuals. They become chimeras not because their embryos merge but because more often than not their placentas do. They thus share their embryonic blood supplies. That allows them to exchange stem cells, which then develop into more specialised sorts of cell in their new bodies.

Chimeric cells were scattered everywhere, including the sex cells. This means that, in principle, a marmoset can either father (if male) or give birth to (if female) a baby that is its niece or nephew rather than its son or daughter.

To find out if this actually happens, Dr Ross turned her attention to living marmosets. She used hair, blood and saliva samples to identify chimeric animals among the 36 sets of twins in her colony. First, as she reports in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she proved the marmosets made babies from their chimeric sex cells. This happened even when the twins were brother and sister rather than being of the same sex.

That is bizarre, because female mammals have two copies of the X chromosome, and males have one X and one Y. Any chimeric female that passed on her twin brother's genes must have developed eggs from an XY stem cell instead of the normal XX. Conversely, a chimeric male that passed on his twin sister's genes grew sperm from an XX stem cell, rather than XY. Dr Ross found examples of both.

This done, she tried to work out whether chimerism influenced parental care in marmosets. Zoologists think of caring for others as selfish behaviour, which animals only bother with to improve the chances of their genes being passed on to future generations. Creatures therefore help to bring up babies only to the extent that they believe they are related to them. In marmosets, caring means carrying, so Dr Ross recorded the time each baby marmoset was carried by its mother and by its father during the first fortnight of life. Mothers spent less time carrying those of their offspring who were chimeras than they did carrying those that were non-chimeric. Fathers, however, behaved in the opposite way.

Why that happened is not clear. But one possibility is that, in a species in which females routinely mate with several males, chimerism evolved as a way of duping males into looking after offspring that are not their own. Chimerism, in other words, might confuse a male who fathered one twin into thinking he is dad to both.

This could happen because a chimeric twin that grew from an egg which his sperm did not fertilise would nonetheless have some skin cells containing his genes. The scent-producing cells of that skin would give off pheromones signalling his paternity. Thus by mixing two fathers' genes between two infants, a female creates a situation in which both males consider it in their interest to care for both offspring—a double bonus.

Green shoots of growth

2007-04-06T01:01:00.001-04:00

Green shoots of growth (Subscription)
December 7, 2006 -- Editorial, Nature

Energy from biomass is an idea whose time has returned.

Until the twentieth century, biomass was humanity's principal source of energy, heating our stoves and feeding our draught animals. Even today, roughly 10% of all our energy comes from biomass — far more than from any other renewable energy source or, for that matter, from nuclear fission.

But this use of biomass for energy supply is accompanied by many challenges. For one thing, it is often not all that renewable — the biomass sources that provide firewood to the world's poor, for example, are not being replanted. For another, it is very inefficient: gathering firewood takes a long time. The history of the past couple of centuries has been in large part one of people moving away from biomass as soon as they can afford to do so.

Three recent developments have spurred renewed interest in biomass, however. One is the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The requirement for other external energy inputs during biomass processing means that it often involves some net carbon emissions — but the amount of carbon dioxide given off by burning biomass is the same as that taken from the atmosphere by photosynthesis in the first place. If biomass projects could sequester carbon, either by enriching the soil beneath plantations or by storing any carbon dioxide produced in combustion, they could even be carbon negative — a unique selling point for this energy source.

The other two developments are the upward movement in the prices of oil and natural gas, and the related revival of concerns about the security of their supply. Most nations are seeking home-based energy sources that do not rely on political stability in the Middle East or Russia.

It seems unlikely that these factors will provide sufficient impetus to propel biomass energy to the very front rank of possible alternatives to fossil fuels. But biomass clearly has a potential role as part of a portfolio of energy sources for the twenty-first century.

If that role is to be fulfilled, two things need to happen. Nations have to build regulatory mechanisms that recognize the carbon benefits of technologies such as biomass — through emissions pricing, a carbon tax or a combination of the two. And intensive research needs to be conducted into both the efficient production of biomass and its conversion into useable energy.

One focal point for such research should be finding ways to grow biomass quickly and in an easily processed form while minimizing external inputs, such as fertilizer and pesticides. Another is the systems engineering of farms and ecosystems, finding ways to fit biomass projects into and around present land use and possible changes in farming practice.

A major attraction of biomass is that it is likely to benefit poorer countries, which tend to be in tropical regions where plants grow quickly. There is plenty of scope for more collaboration between developing countries on biomass research and development, both to meet local needs and for export.

But this requires consideration of the local and global ecological impact of biomass expansion. Vast tropical monocultures eating away at primary forests — as exemplified by the production of palm oil in Indonesia — will benefit no one, except those who profit from selling the fuel. In effect, such approaches take green subsidies from richer countries, and use them to despoil the tropics.

Similar problems afflict existing biomass programmes in the United States, where ethanol refineries often burn fossil fuel and are reliant on subsidized corn monoculture. More innovative approaches would include firing the refineries with agricultural waste, and feeding them with plants of many different species. Biomass energy should be developed energetically, but within the context of appropriate environmental policies, and using approaches that are both sustainable and cost-effective.

US biofuels: A field in ferment

2007-04-06T01:01:00.000-04:00

US biofuels: A field in ferment (Subscription)
December 7, 2006 -- By Katharine Sanderson, Nature

To move US biofuels beyond subsidized corn will be a challenge, reports Katharine Sanderson.

Critics of the US ethanol industry have long derided it as an environmentally questionable subsidy to Mid-western farmers that simply serves a transparently political purpose. Voters in Iowa, the buckle in the US corn belt, get first say in the process of choosing presidential candidates. All such candidates are in favour of turning corn (maize), which the state produces in abundance, into ethanol. This pre-presidential support is good for the Iowan economy, but not necessarily that great for the environment.

Studies that compare the energy that goes into making ethanol — expended during the harvesting, fertilizing and transporting of the corn to refineries, and then refining it — with the energy that is released when it is burned routinely show that the net gain is at best small. The American Coalition for Ethanol says that ethanol contains twice the amount of energy that is used to make it; critics see no net gain whatsoever.

This criticism has had little effect, and since 1980, US ethanol production has risen from an average of 6,500 barrels (1 million litres) a day to 260,000 barrels a day. Federal mandates call for a further doubling by 2012. But it is increasingly clear to many in the industry that the criticisms of corn-based ethanol have merit, and in 2006, the need for an alternative was given the highest profile it could get when President George W. Bush brought it up in his state of the union address. In order to improve US energy security, he said, his government intended to make cellulosic ethanol (ethanol made from the rougher and woodier parts of plants) a competitive biofuel within six years.

Corn stores
The advantage of an ear of corn as a source of ethanol (or for that matter as a bit of food) is that it is mainly starch, which is made up of sugars linked in a regular way with bonds that can be broken easily. Breaking the bonds between sugars and using yeast in the fermentation to produce ethanol is a straightforward task for the biorefineries. The disadvantage is that corn is a crop that needs a lot of inputs — fertilizers, water and pesticides — and that doesn't put as much of the sugar it creates through photosynthesis into its ears as one might wish. A lot of the sugar is instead turned into stalks and 'stover' — structural material rich in cellulose and considerably more difficult to break down.

Plants that store up a significant amount of energy in easily usable forms such as starch or sugar are exceptions, encouraged in their oddities by millennia of selective breeding — and of them all, only sugar cane grown in the tropics puts enough energy into its easily purified products to make bioethanol obviously attractive. Most plants put the bulk of the energy they store up from the sun into cellulose and a related polymer, hemicellulose, and woody plants add another substance, lignin, to the mix. Cellulose makes up the plant's cell walls and, like starch, it is a polymer of sugars containing six carbon atoms linked one to the next. Hemicellulose, on the other hand, is based on a five-carbon sugar, xylose, although it contains many other sugars as well; its various components are thrown together in messy looking chains with many branches. Lignins are huge crosslinked jumbles of organic molecules which reinforce cellulose and hemicellulose to turn them into wood.

The energy that the plants put in to making the bonds in these various substances could, in principle, be extracted by fuel makers. And these molecules — particularly cellulose, which is both the most abundant and the easiest to dismantle — are much more plentiful than starches and sugars. But they are also much harder for microbes to break down; if they weren't, there'd be no trees, just pools of green goo. As yet, there are no cellulosic ethanol refineries operating at full commercial capacity, and assessments of the technology's readiness for market vary a great deal, as do opinions on how to get there from here. Government incentives and tax breaks might be one solution, but big energy companies also have a role to play, as do the smaller companies that have already worked on developing the technology, but have not yet found the best ways of spreading and licensing it.

The most expensive part of making ethanol from cellulose is pretreating the biomass to make it accessible to the enzymes that will then cut the sugars from the polymers so that they can be fermented. Typical pretreatments reduce the feedstock's volume chemically using acids, peroxides and ammonia, often along with some form of mechanical pressing or shredding. Unfortunately, this is not a step that can be skipped to cut costs, says Charles Wyman of the University of California, Riverside, because high sugar yields are essential, and untreated biomass gives very low yields. "The only step more expensive than pretreatment is no pretreatment," he says. Instead, the hunt is on for pre-treatment technologies that involve fewer chemicals, require less energy and don't degrade the sugars that are set free in the process.

After the pre-treatment stage comes the snipping out of the sugars, which is the point at which biotechnologists think they can greatly improve on the current process. Abengoa Bioenergy of St Louis, Missouri, a subsidiary of the Spanish engineering group Abengoa, recently invested $10 million in Dyadic International, a biotechnology company that is concentrating on enzymes for degrading cellulose.

Based in Jupiter, Florida, Dyadic didn't start out as an energy company — in the 1970s it was a leading supplier of pumice for stonewashing jeans. But the enzymatic expertise it developed for distressing denim was then turned to a number of other ends. One of those was breaking down wood, a job that in nature largely falls to fungi. The company's research has centred on a filamentous mess of a fungus discovered by accident in a Russian forest that now, after ten years of processing and genetic engineering, makes up Dyadic's patented C1 fungal cell system. The fungus has been fully sequenced and encouraged to overexpress the genes that then make cellulases and xylanases — the proteins that break up cellulose and hemicellulose to produce fermentable sugars. "We have the world's most prolific filamentous fungus," boasts Dyadic's chief executive Mark Emalfarb.

Cellulose solutions
Emalfarb believes that the cellulosic ethanol market could eventually be worth $20 billion a year in the United States, and suggests that there is enough raw material available in the United States to produce 2.4 billion barrels of cellulosic ethanol a year. This is a bit more than half of what some estimates claim is needed to completely replace petrol as a fuel — the United States gets through some 3.3 billion barrels a year, but the energy content of ethanol is lower than that of petroleum.

The current leader in the cellulosic ethanol market, Iogen, also uses fungal enzymes. The company makes small commercial quantities of ethanol from straw at its pioneering cellulosic ethanol facility in Ottawa, Canada. As the first of its kind, this is an undoubted achievement. But even when it reaches its full capacity, which it is taking quite some time to do, it will be capable of producing only 2.5 million litres (16,000 barrels) a year, which is not a great deal.

Iogen chief executive Brian Foody is not worried. The critical steps for getting the right enzymes, the right pretreatment systems and the right yeast systems, have all been done, he says. "We just need to go through the nuts and bolts of the process." This means making sure that the demonstration plant works well enough to be replicated elsewhere — the company is looking to build new facilities in Idaho, Saskatchewan and Germany.

Iogen recently secured a $30-million investment from the bankers Goldman Sachs, bringing the total invested in it since the 1970s up to $130 million. But not all potential investors are convinced. "I don't really understand what Iogen is doing," says Matt Drinkwater, market analyst at New Energy Finance in London, UK. And his concerns are not unique to Iogen — many of the companies in the sector, he says, hold details of their processes so close to their chests that they are hard to evaluate, whether they be relatively small outfits such as Iogen or giants such as DuPont, which is also developing cellulosic ethanol technologies. Robert Wilder, who manages the Wilderhill clean energy index — the first such index to be accepted on Wall Street — agrees, but acknowledges the constraints that the chief executives of small cellulosic ethanol companies work under in terms of not tipping their hands to larger competitors.

Smells like green spirit
Perhaps because of these uncertainties over the technology's readiness, most of the money that has been invested recently in ethanol production both within the United States and beyond has been in the more traditional technologies. The sizable investments being made by agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland — the biggest ethanol producer in the United States and, perhaps tellingly, a company run by a chief executive who was recruited from the oil industry — seem mostly to be in traditional corn ethanol. The same applies to high-flying UK entrepreneur Richard Branson's recent investments in Ethanol Grain Processors of Tennessee and a new grain-based Californian ethanol venture, Cilion.

But there is some evidence that enthusiasm for investing in corn ethanol may be waning. Various ethanol companies that were riding high earlier in the year saw their stock slump after the summer when oil prices came down from their $78 a barrel peak.

This might mean the market is aware that, although subsidies may be able to keep it profitable for the time being, there is no way that corn ethanol can make a marked difference to long-term energy use in the United States. To make enough ethanol to start seriously displacing oil imports requires a process that can use cellulosic materials such as switchgrass, a tall prairie grass, or miscanthus, a grass imported from Asia, which provide far more tonnes of biomass per hectare than corn kernels ever can, and can be grown on land not suitable for conventional agriculture. Other sources could be farm waste or trees or newly engineered plants of some sort.. This leads to something of an investing impasse: the companies in the business at the moment make money; the ones that might take it to the next stage do not, in large part because no one has made the heavy capital investments needed for plants that make use of the technologies that have already been piloted.

One way round this is to invest across the board. This is the strategy pursued by Vinod Khosla, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who is one of the founders of Cilion. Khosla is also involved in cellulosic technologies through two companies based in Cambridge, Massachusetts: Celunol, which has just started to operate its own pilot plant, and Mascoma, which concentrates on process engineering and which last month raised $30 million in second-round venture funding. Farther afield in the biofuels world, Khosla is also a major investor in Kergy, a company that turns biomass into fuel in a completely different 'thermochemical' way, using just heat and catalysts. For some observers, such as Dan Schrag, a geochemist at Harvard University, these approaches are more attractive than fermentation, not least because they need no witches' brews made from fiddly feedstock-specific enzyme. "When the dust clears, cellulosic ethanol is unlikely to be where we end up," he predicts.

To Drinkwater, investors such as Khosla, with their broad-based approach to the problem, are exactly what the industry needs to drive the market forwards and get it over the final bump it needs to clear before commercial success. Unfortunately, there are few such people. In their absence, many in the industry, not without self-interest, see the responsibility resting with governments to provide attractive tax incentives. "All forms of energy should face market prices that reflect the cost to society that they impose," says Foody. And to set those market prices, the right tax incentives and government mandates need to be in place.

But government incentives won't make the scientists any smarter, and observers outside the pioneering companies believe there is still basic work to be done before those companies, or their eventual competitors, make the process economically viable. Thus they welcome increasing levels of basic research from the government, such as the US Department of Energy's pledge of $250 million to set up two bioenergy research centres that are largely focused on cellulosic ethanol. The European Union has set aside E100 million (US$132 million) for cellulosic ethanol in its seventh Framework Programme on research.

Ethanol alternative
Companies large enough to afford it are also following the basic research route rather than placing early bets on particular technologies. BP has announced it will invest $500 million over ten years to fund an Energy Biosciences Institute, which will be a dedicated facility based at a university. The University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have all been mentioned as possible hosts — the final decision is expected in December.

One intriguing possibility for such research to pursue is replacing ethanol with another form of alcohol. The fact that ethanol is easy to ferment can blind people to the fact that it has almost as many inherent problems as a fuel as corn has as a feedstock. Its tendency to pick up water wherever it goes makes it hard to transport, particularly in pipelines. It's corrosive. It's more volatile than one might wish. And its energy density is low compared with regular petrol.

For these reasons, BP and DuPont are working with British Sugar to adapt their ethanol fermentation facility in East Anglia to produce butanol — an alcohol with four carbons in it, as opposed to ethanol's two. This requires training microbes in new tricks, but it is not as hard a problem as breaking down woody plant material. The East Anglia plant will use locally grown sugar beet as the feedstock, but in the long term the aim would be to use a cellulosic feedstock. "We accept that taking stuff out of the food chain is not the right way to go," says Robert Wine, a BP spokesman.

Drinkwater thinks that an industry demand for butanol as an end product could actually increase interest in cellulosic approaches. "Most refiners would be much happier to use butanol than ethanol," he says. If oil companies become confident in biofuel technologies, investors would in turn be more confident of the biofuels industry as a whole, giving the industry that elusive final shove that it seems to need.

A twenty-first century science

2007-04-06T00:37:00.000-04:00

A twenty-first century science (Subscription)
February 1, 2007 -- By Duncan J. Watts, Nature

If handled appropriately, data about Internet-based communication and interactivity could revolutionize our understanding of collective human behaviour.

Few would deny that many of the major problems currently facing humanity are social and economic in nature. From the apparent wave of religious fundamentalism sweeping the Islamic world (and parts of the Western world), to collective economic security, global warming and the great epidemics of our times, powerful yet mysterious social forces come into play.

But few readers of Nature would consider social science to be the science of the twenty-first century. Although economics, sociology, political science and anthropology have produced a plethora of findings regarding human social behaviour, they have been much less successful than the physical and life sciences in producing a coherent theoretical framework that can account for their discoveries. This is not because social scientists are less clever than their peers in other fields, but because social phenomena are among the hardest scientific problems to solve.

Social phenomena involve the interactions of large (but still finite) numbers of heterogeneous entities, the behaviours of which unfold over time and manifest themselves on multiple scales. It is hard to understand, for example, why even a single organization behaves the way it does without considering (a) the individuals who work in it; (b) the other organizations with which it competes, cooperates and compares itself to; (c) the institutional and regulatory structure within which it operates; and (d) the interactions between all these components. To draw an analogy with physics, one must solve the equivalent of quantum mechanics, general relativity and the multi-body problem at the same time — even string theorists don't have it that bad! Fortunately, recent developments in network science auger some hope for the future.

For the past 50 years or so, sociologists have thought deeply about the importance of interactions between people, institutions and markets in determining collective social behaviour. They have even built a language — network analysis — to describe these interactions in quantitative terms. But the objects of analysis, such as friendship ties, are hard to observe, especially for large numbers of people over extended periods of time. As a result, network data have historically comprised one-time snapshots, often for quite small groups. And most studies have relied on self-reports from participants, which suffer from cognitive biases, errors of perception and framing ambiguities.

The striking proliferation over the past decade of Internet-based communication and interactivity, however, is beginning to lift these constraints. For the first time, we can begin to observe the real-time interactions of millions of people at a resolution that is sensitive to effects at the level of the individual. Meanwhile, ever-faster computers permit us to simulate large networks of social interactions. The result has been tremendous interest in social networks: thousands of papers and a growing number of books have been published in less than a decade, leading some to herald the arrival of a 'science of networks'.

This label, unsurprisingly, has attracted its share of critics, and with some justification. Some of the ideas are not as new as sometimes advertised; many of the popular models are too simplistic to stand up to scrutiny; and even the more sober-looking empirical studies tend to use data that happen to be available, rather than obtained with a specific research question in mind. As a result, despite the avalanche of publications and breathless headlines, it is probably true that little has been learned about real social processes.

Nevertheless, the near future looks promising, especially if a few fundamental features of social networks can be emphasized. First, social networks are not static structures, but evolve in time as a consequence of the social and organizational environments in which they are embedded. Second, they are not unitary, but multiplex, meaning that people maintain a portfolio of types of ties — formal, informal, strong, weak, sexual, business and friendship — each of which serves different functions. And finally, network structure must be understood within the larger framework of collective social dynamics. People do not just interact: their interactions have consequences for the choices they, and others, make.

Studies that combine all these features are currently beyond the state of the art, but two of my group's recent projects indicate tentative progress. The first used the anonymized e-mail logs of a university community of around 40,000 people to track daily network evolution over a year as a function of existing network structure, shared activities (such as classes) and individual attributes. Dynamic data of this type may shed light on the relative roles of structural constraints and individual preferences in determining, for example, observed homogeneity of friendship circles.

The second was a Web-based experiment in which 14,000 participants were asked to listen to, rate and download songs by unknown bands. Some participants made their decisions independently, and others could see how many times the songs had been downloaded previously. Experiments of this kind measure not only the influence that individuals have over each others' decisions, but also the consequences of these individual-level effects on macro properties, such as the predictability of 'hit' products.

Clearly, the leap from these still simplistic studies to the 'big questions' of social science remains formidable. In this regard, cooperation between academic researchers and the large Internet companies who currently dominate data collection may be extremely productive. Although such collaborations will encounter challenges, including privacy and intellectual-property issues, the questions are too difficult to be left to intuition, or even experience, alone. We must start asking how the technological revolution of the Internet can lead to a revolution in social science as well.

Do We Tax Energy Enough?

2007-04-04T01:19:00.000-04:00

Here is the link with audio and video of this great discussion as well as related papers by Hassett and Parry. I would recommend signing up for a free subscription to Resources by Resources for the Future as well as reading Greg Mankiw's blog. Below is an introduction to the discussion.

Do We Tax Energy Enough?
March 29, 2007 -- American Enterprise Institute For Public Policy Research

What are the advantages and disadvantages of carbon and gasoline taxes? Ian W. H. Parry of Resources for the Future and AEI’s Kenneth P. Green, Kevin A. Hassett, and N. Gregory Mankiw will examine the pros and cons of carbon and gasoline taxes, discuss possible levels at which they could be set, and compare taxation to regulation as an alternative way to address environmental concerns.

Newsweek Covers: October 16, 2006

2007-03-30T20:21:00.000-04:00

Compact Fluorescents Release Poisonous Mercury

2007-03-29T00:55:00.000-04:00

Mercury in Energy-Saving Bulbs Worries Scientists
March 28, 2007 -- By Lisa Von Ahn, Reuters via ENN

There's an old joke about the number of people it takes to change a light bulb. But because the newer energy-efficient kinds contain tiny amounts of mercury, the hard part is getting rid of them when they burn out.

Mercury is poisonous, but it's also a necessary part of most compact fluorescent bulbs, the kind that environmentalists and some governments are pushing as a way to cut energy use.

With an estimated 150 million CFLs sold in the United States in 2006 and with Wal-Mart alone hoping to sell 100 million this year, some scientists and environmentalists are worried that most are ending up in garbage dumps.

Mercury is probably best-known for its effects on the nervous system. The Mad Hatter in the classic children's book "Alice in Wonderland" was based on 19th-century hat makers who were continually exposed to the toxin.

Mercury can also damage the kidneys and liver, and in sufficient quantities can cause death.

U.S. regulators, manufacturers and environmentalists note that, because CFLs require less electricity than traditional incandescent bulbs, they reduce overall mercury in the atmosphere by cutting emissions from coal-fired power plants.

But some of the mercury emitted from landfills is in the form of vaprous methyl-mercury, which can get into the food chain more readily than inorganic elemental mercury released directly from a broken bulb or even coal-fired power plants, according to government scientist Steve Lindberg.

"Disposal of any mercury-contaminated material in landfills is absolutely alarming to me," said Lindberg, emeritus fellow of the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The mercury content in the average CFL -- now about 5 milligrams -- would fit on the tip of a ballpoint pen, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and manufacturers have committed to cap the amount in most CFLs to 5 milligrams or 6 milligrams per bulb.

The majority of Philips Lighting's bulbs contain less than 3 milligrams, and some have as little as 1.23 milligrams, said spokesman Steve Goldmacher.

To prevent mercury from getting into landfills, the EPA, CFL makers and various organizations advocate recycling.
Besides commercial recyclers and some municipal waste collection services, some retailers accept used CFLs.

IKEA, the Swedish home furnishings chain, has free drop-off programs at all of its 234 stores, 29 of which are in the United States. Spokeswoman Mona Astra Liss said response was slow at first, but has since picked up.

Now advocacy groups are calling on Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other big chains to get involved.

Andy Ruben, vice president for corporate sustainability at Wal-Mart, said the company was working with the EPA's Office of Solid Waste and others to find mercury and recycling solutions.

RECYCLING HURDLES

One problem with recycling is that it isn't cheap.

Larry Chalfan, executive director of the Zero Waste Alliance environmental group, said the value of the metal, glass and mercury reclaimed from recycling fails to offset the cost of the process. "Someone has to pay," he said.

Costs can range from 20 cents to 50 cents per bulb -- not a paltry sum when some CFLs sell for less than $2 at Wal-Mart.

But, compared with the overall lifecycle cost of buying and using a bulb, recycling would be less than 1 percent, said Paul Abernathy, executive director of the Association of Lighting & Mercury Recyclers, "a small price to keep the mercury out of the environment."

Another obstacle lies in the fragility of the bulbs and their mercury content.

"People who are going to accumulate these things from the public are going to have to address the fact that breakage will happen," Abernathy said. "There's the potential for contamination, and I think right now people are a little hesitant to volunteer to take on this liability."

The U.S. government has no single recycling plan in mind, said Matt Hale, director of the EPA's Office of Solid Waste.

Among the alternatives are special curbside collections by municipalities, mail-back programs by manufacturers and drop-off programs at various places, including retail stores that sell CFLs, he said.

Some methods lend themselves to certain geographic areas more than others, Hale said, because of differences in population density, transportation infrastructure and proximity to recycling sites.

State laws are also a factor.

Federal regulations mandate recycling of fluorescent lighting, while exempting households and other small users. Some states, however, are strict. For example, California no longer allows anyone to throw CFLs in the trash, while Massachusetts requires manufacturers to implement recycling programs and meet certain targets.

As technology advances, however, mercury could become less of an issue, at least as far as light bulbs are concerned.

Last month General Electric Co. said it was working on doubling the energy efficiency of incandescent lights and eventually developing versions comparable with CFLs. These bulbs, which the company hopes to begin marketing in 2010, will cost less than fluorescents but they won't last as long.

Meanwhile, some environmentally minded consumers are embracing CFLs and doing their best to dispose of them responsibly.

"I have CFLs throughout my house," said Lindberg, who lives in California. "None of them have burned out yet. I can't tell you what I'll do with them when they've burned out, but I won't throw them in the garbage."

San Francisco Lawmakers Vote To Ban Plastic Bags

2007-03-29T00:03:00.000-04:00

San Francisco Lawmakers Vote To Ban Plastic Bags
March 28, 2007 -- By Reuters via ENN

San Francisco's city council voted Tuesday to become the first U.S. city to ban plastic bags from large supermarkets to help promote recycling.

Under the legislation approved by the city's Board of Supervisors, large supermarkets and drugstores will not be allowed to offer plastic bags made from petroleum products starting in six months.

"Many (foreign) cities and nations have already implemented very similar legislation," said Ross Mirkarimi, the city legislator who championed the new law. "It's astounding that San Francisco would be the first U.S. city to follow suit."

"I am hopeful that other U.S. cities will also adopt similar legislation," he said. "Why wait for the federal government to enact legislation that gets to the core of this problem when local governments can just step up to the plate?"

The city's Department of the Environment said San Francisco uses 181 million plastic grocery bags annually. Plans dating back a decade to encourage recycling of the bags have largely failed, with shoppers returning just one percent of bags, said department spokesman Mark Westland.

Mirkarimi said the ban would save 450,000 gallons of oil a year and remove the need to send 1,400 tons of debris now sent annually to land fills. The new rules would however allow recyclable plastic bags which are not widely used today.

A spokesman for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who must approve or veto the legislation, called it sensible. "Chances are good that he is going to sign it," said Nathan Ballard.

Absent-minded killers

2007-03-28T00:14:00.000-04:00

Absent-minded killers
March 22, 2007 -- By Jeffrey Sachs, Project Syndicate

We kill other species not because we must but because we are too negligent to do otherwise.

As a species, human beings have a major self-control problem. We humans are now so aggressively fishing, hunting, logging, and growing crops in all parts of the world that we are literally chasing other species off the planet. Our intense desire to take all that we can from nature leaves precious little for other forms of life.

In 1992, when the world's governments first promised to address man-made global warming, they also vowed to head off the human-induced extinction of other species. The Convention on Biological Diversity, agreed at the Rio Earth Summit, established that "biological diversity is a common concern of humanity." The signatories agreed to conserve biological diversity, by saving species and their habitats, and to use biological resources (e.g. forests) in a sustainable manner. In 2002, the treaty's signatories went further, committing to "a significant reduction in the current rate of biodiversity loss" by 2010.

Unfortunately, like so many other international agreements, the Convention on Biological Diversity remains essentially unknown, un-championed, and unfulfilled. That neglect is a human tragedy. For a very low cash outlay - and perhaps none at all on balance - we could conserve nature and thus protect the basis of our own lives and livelihoods. We kill other species not because we must, but because we are too negligent to do otherwise.

Consider a couple of notorious examples. Some rich countries, such as Spain, Portugal, Australia, and New Zealand, have fishing fleets that engage in so-called "bottom trawling". Bottom trawlers drag heavy nets over the ocean bottom, destroying magnificent, unexplored, and endangered marine species in the process. Complex and unique ecologies, most notably underground volcanoes known as seamounts, are ripped to shreds, because bottom trawling is the "low cost" way to catch a few deep sea fish species. One of these species, orange roughy, has been caught commercially for only around a quarter-century, but already is being fished to the point of collapse.

Likewise, in many parts of the world, tropical rainforest is being cleared for pastureland and food crops. The result is massive loss of habitat and destruction of species, yielding a tiny economic benefit at a huge social cost. After cutting down a swath of rainforest, soils are often quickly leached of their nutrients so that they cannot sustain crops or nutritious grasses for livestock. As a result, the new pastureland or farmland is soon abandoned, with no prospect for regeneration of the original forest and its unique ecosystems.

Because these activities' costs are so high and their benefits so low, stopping them would be easy. Bottom trawling should simply be outlawed; it would be simple and inexpensive to compensate the fishing industry during a transition to other activities. Forest clearing, on the other hand, is probably best stopped by economic incentives, perhaps combined with regulatory limits. Simply restricting the practice of land clearing probably would not work, since farm families and communities would face a strong temptation to evade legal limits. On the other hand, financial incentives would probably succeed, because cutting down forest to create pastureland is not profitable enough to induce farmers to forego payments for protecting the land.

Many rainforest countries have united in recent years to suggest the establishment of a rainforest conservation fund by the rich countries, to pay impoverished small farmers a small amount of money to preserve the forest. A well-designed fund would slow or stop deforestation, preserve biodiversity, and reduce emissions of carbon dioxide the burning of cleared forests. At the same time, small farmers would receive a steady flow of income, which they could use for micro-investments to improve their household's wealth, education, and health.

Aside from banning bottom trawling and establishing a global fund for avoided deforestation, we should designate a global network of protected marine areas, in which fishing, boating, polluting, dredging, drilling, and other damaging activities would be prohibited. Such areas not only permit the regeneration of species, but also provide ecological benefits that spill over to neighbouring unprotected areas.

We also need a regular scientific process to present the world with the evidence on species abundance and extinction, just as we now have such a process for climate change. Politicians don't listen very well to individual scientists, but they are forced to listen when hundreds of scientists speak with a united voice.

Finally, the world should negotiate a new framework no later than 2010 to slow human-induced climate change. There can be little doubt that climate change poses one of the greatest risks to species' viability. As the planet warms, and rain and storm patterns change dramatically, many species will find themselves in climate zones that no longer support their survival. Some can migrate, but others (such as polar bears) are likely to be driven to extinction unless we take decisive action to head off climate change.

These measures are achievable by 2010. They are affordable, and in each case would ultimately deliver large net benefits. Most importantly, they would allow us to follow through on a global promise. It is too painful to believe that humanity would destroy millions of other species - and jeopardise our own future - in a fit of absent-mindedness.

Corn Can't Solve Our Problem

2007-03-28T00:06:00.000-04:00

Corn Can't Solve Our Problem
March 25, 2007 -- By David Tilman and Jason Hill, The Washington Post

The world has come full circle. A century ago our first transportation biofuels -- the hay and oats fed to our horses -- were replaced by gasoline. Today, ethanol from corn and biodiesel from soybeans have begun edging out gasoline and diesel.

This has been hailed as an overwhelmingly positive development that will help us reduce the threat of climate change and ease our dependence on foreign oil. In political circles, ethanol is the flavor of the day, and presidential candidates have been cycling through Iowa extolling its benefits. Lost in the ethanol-induced euphoria, however, is the fact that three of our most fundamental needs -- food, energy, and a livable and sustainable environment -- are now in direct conflict. Moreover, our recent analyses of the full costs and benefits of various biofuels, performed at the University of Minnesota, present a markedly different and more nuanced picture than has been heard on the campaign trail.

Some biofuels, if properly produced, do have the potential to provide climate-friendly energy, but where and how can we grow them? Our most fertile lands are already dedicated to food production. As demand for both food and energy increases, competition for fertile lands could raise food prices enough to drive the poorer third of the globe into malnourishment. The destruction of rainforests and other ecosystems to make new farmland would threaten the continued existence of countless animal and plant species and would increase the amount of climate-changing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Finding and implementing solutions to the food, fuel and environment conflict is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. But solutions will be neither adopted nor sought until we understand the interlinked problems we face.

Fossil fuel use has pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide higher than at any time during the past half-million years. The global population has increased threefold in the past century and will increase by half again, to 9 billion people, by 2050. Global food and fossil energy consumption are on trajectories to double by 2050.

Biofuels, such as ethanol made from corn, have the potential to provide us with cleaner energy. But because of how corn ethanol currently is made, only about 20 percent of each gallon is "new" energy. That is because it takes a lot of "old" fossil energy to make it: diesel to run tractors, natural gas to make fertilizer and, of course, fuel to run the refineries that convert corn to ethanol.

If every one of the 70 million acres on which corn was grown in 2006 was used for ethanol, the amount produced would displace only 12 percent of the U.S. gasoline market. Moreover, the "new" (non-fossil) energy gained would be very small -- just 2.4 percent of the market. Car tune-ups and proper tire air pressure would save more energy.

There is another problem with relying on a food-based biofuel, such as corn ethanol, as the poor of Mexico can attest. In recent months, soaring corn prices, sparked by demand from ethanol plants, have doubled the price of tortillas, a staple food. Tens of thousands of Mexico City's poor recently protested this "ethanol tax" in the streets.

In the United States, the protests have also begun -- in Congress. Representatives of the dairy, poultry and livestock industries, which rely on corn as a principal animal feed, are seeking an end to subsidies for corn ethanol in the hope of stabilizing corn prices. (It takes about three pounds of corn to produce a pound of chicken, and seven or eight pounds to grow a pound of beef.) Profit margins are being squeezed, and meat prices are rising.

U.S. soybeans, which are used to make biodiesel, may be about to follow corn's trajectory, escalating the food vs. fuel conflict. The National Biodiesel Board recently reported that 77 biodiesel production plants are under construction and that eight established plants are expanding capacity.

In terms of environmental impact, all biofuels are not created equal. Ethanol is the same chemical product no matter what its source. But ethanol made from prairie grasses, from corn grown in Illinois and from sugar cane grown on newly cleared land in Brazil have radically different impacts on greenhouse gases.

Corn, like all plants, is a natural part of the global carbon cycle. The growing crop absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so burning corn ethanol does not directly create any additional carbon. But that is only part of the story. All of the fossil fuels used to grow corn and change it into ethanol release new carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The net effect is that ethanol from corn grown in the Corn Belt does increase atmospheric greenhouse gases, and this increase is only about 15 percent less than the increase caused by an equivalent amount of gasoline. Soybean biodiesel does better, causing a greenhouse gas increase that is about 40 percent less than that from petroleum diesel.

In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar cane produces about twice as much ethanol per acre as corn. Brazilian ethanol refineries get much of their power from burning cane residue, in effect recycling carbon from the atmosphere. The environmental benefit is large. Sugar-cane ethanol grown on established soils releases 80 percent less greenhouse gases than gasoline.

But that isn't the case for sugar-cane ethanol or soybean biodiesel from Brazil's newly cleared lands, including tropical forests and savannas. Clearing land releases immense amounts of greenhouse gases into the air, because much of the material in the plants and soil is broken down into carbon dioxide.

Plants and soil contain three times more carbon than the atmosphere. The trees and soil of an acre of rainforest -- which, once cleared, is suitable for growing soybeans -- contain about 120 tons of organic carbon. An acre of tropical woodland or savanna, suitable for sugar cane, contains about half this amount. About a fourth of the carbon in an ecosystem is released to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide when trees are clear-cut, brush and branches are burned or rot, and roots decay. Even more is lost during the first 20 to 50 years of farming, as soil carbon decomposes into carbon dioxide and as wood products are burned or decay.

This means that when tropical woodland is cleared to produce sugar cane for ethanol, the greenhouse gas released is about 50 percent greater than what occurs from the production and use of the same amount of gasoline. And that statistic holds for at least two decades.

Simply being "renewable" does not automatically make a fuel better for the atmosphere than the fossil fuel it replaces, nor guarantee that society gains any new energy by its production. The European Union was recently shocked to learn that some of its imported biodiesel, derived from palm trees planted on rain-forest lands, was more than twice as bad for climate warming as petroleum diesel. So much for the "benefits" of that form of biodiesel.

Although current Brazilian ethanol is environmentally friendly, the long-term environmental implications of buying more ethanol and biodiesel from Brazil, a possibility raised recently during President Bush's trip to that country, are cloudy. It could be harmful to both the climate and the preservation of tropical plant and animal species if it involved, directly or indirectly, additional clearing of native ecosystems.

Concerns about the environmental effects of ethanol production are starting to be felt in the United States as well. It appears that American farmers may add 10 million acres of corn this year to meet booming demand for ethanol. Some of this land could come from millions of acres now set aside nationwide for conservation under a government-subsidized program. Those uncultivated acres absorb atmospheric carbon, so farming them and converting the corn into ethanol could release more carbon dioxide into the air than would burning gasoline.

There are biofuel crops that can be grown with much less energy and chemicals than the food crops we currently use for biofuels. And they can be grown on our less fertile land, especially land that has been degraded by farming. This would decrease competition between food and biofuel. The United States has about 60 million acres of such land -- in the Conservation Reserve Program, road edge rights-of-way and abandoned farmlands.

In a 10-year experiment reported in Science magazine in December, we explored how much bioenergy could be produced by 18 different native prairie plant species grown on highly degraded and infertile soil. We planted 172 plots in central Minnesota with various combinations of these species, randomly chosen. We found, on this highly degraded land, that the plots planted with mixtures of many native prairie perennial species yielded 238 percent more bioenergy than those planted with single species. High plant diversity led to high productivity, and little fertilizer or chemical weed or pest killers was required.

The prairie "hay" harvested from these plots can be used to create high-value energy sources. For instance, it can be mixed with coal and burned for electricity generation. It can be "gasified," then chemically combined to make ethanol or synthetic gasoline. Or it can be burned in a turbine engine to make electricity. A technique that is undergoing rapid development involves bioengineering enzymes that digest parts of plants (the cellulose) into sugars that are then fermented into ethanol.

Whether converted into electricity, ethanol or synthetic gasoline, the high-diversity hay from infertile land produced as much or more new usable energy per acre as corn for ethanol on fertile land. And it could be harvested year after year.

Even more surprising were the greenhouse gas benefits. When high-diversity mixtures of native plants are grown on degraded soils, they remove carbon dioxide from the air. Much of this carbon ends up stored in the soil. In essence, mixtures of native plants gradually restore the carbon levels that degraded soils had before being cleared and farmed. This benefit lasts for about a century.

Across the full process of growing high-diversity prairie hay, converting it into an energy source and using that energy, we found a net removal and storage of about a ton and a half of atmospheric carbon dioxide per acre. The net effect is that ethanol or synthetic gasoline produced from this grass on degraded land can provide energy that actually reduces atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.

When one of these carbon-negative biofuels is mixed with gasoline, the resulting blend releases less carbon dioxide than traditional gasoline.

Biofuels, if used properly, can help us balance our need for food, energy and a habitable and sustainable environment. To help this happen, though, we need a national biofuels policy that favors our best options. We must determine the carbon impacts of each method of making these fuels, then mandate fuel blending that achieves a prescribed greenhouse gas reduction. We have the knowledge and technology to start solving these problems.

Al Gore Excerpt With House & Senate Committee: March 21, 2007

2007-03-27T00:31:00.000-04:00

"I promise you--I say this to each of you as individuals--I promise you a day will come when our children and grandchildren will look back and they'll ask one of two questions. Either they will ask, "What in God's name were they doing? Didn't they see the evidence? Didn't they realize that four times in 15 years the entire scientific community of this world issued unanimous reports calling upon them to act. What was wrong with them? Were they too blinded and numb with the busyness of political life or daily life to take a deep breath and look at the reality of what we're facing? Did they think it was perfectly alright to keep dumping 70 million tons every single day of global warming pollution into this earth's atmosphere? Did they think all the scientists were wrong? What were they thinking? Or, they'll ask another question. They may look back and they'll say, "How did they find the uncommon moral courage to rise above politics and redeem the promise of American democracy?" And do what some said was impossible and shake things up. And tell the special interest, "Okay, we've heard you and we're going to do the best we can to take your considerations into account, but we're going to do what's right." I'm going to do my part to make sure that you have all the support that I and lots of other folks can muster for you in both parties. When you do the right thing."

- Al Gore, March 21, 2007

Check out another nice post from Grist

Food to Fuel Increases World Food Prices

2007-03-23T01:42:00.000-04:00

Massive Diversion of U.S. Grain To Fuel Cars Is Raising World Food Prices
March 21, 2007 -- By Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

ECO-ECONOMY UPDATE:
Massive Diversion of U.S. Grain To Fuel Cars Is Raising World Food Prices

If you think you are spending more each week at the supermarket, you may be right. The escalating share of the U.S. grain harvest going to ethanol distilleries is driving up food prices worldwide.

Corn prices have doubled over the last year, wheat futures are trading at their highest level in 10 years, and rice prices are rising too. In addition, soybean futures have risen by half. A Bloomberg analysis notes that the soaring use of corn as the feedstock for fuel ethanol “is creating unintended consequences throughout the global food chain.”

The countries initially hit by rising food prices are those where corn is the staple food. In Mexico, one of more than 20 countries with a corn-based diet, the price of tortillas is up by 60 percent. Angry Mexicans in crowds of up to 75,000 have taken to the streets in protest, forcing the government to institute price controls on tortillas.

Food prices are also rising in China, India, and the United States, countries that contain 40 percent of the world’s people. While relatively little corn is eaten directly in these countries, vast quantities are consumed indirectly in meat, milk, and eggs in both China and the United States.

Rising grain and soybean prices are driving up meat and egg prices in China. January pork prices were up 20 percent above a year earlier, eggs were up 16 percent, while beef, which is less dependent on grain, was up 6 percent.

In India, the overall food price index in January 2007 was 10 percent higher than a year earlier. The price of wheat, the staple food in northern India, has jumped 11 percent, moving above the world market price.

In the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that the wholesale price of chicken in 2007 will be 10 percent higher on average than in 2006, the price of a dozen eggs will be up a whopping 21 percent, and milk will be 14 percent higher. And this is only the beginning.

In the past, food price rises have usually been weather related and always temporary. This situation is different. As more and more fuel ethanol distilleries are built, world grain prices are starting to move up toward their oil-equivalent value in what appears to be the beginning of a long-term rise.

The food and energy economies, historically separate, are now merging. In this new economy, if the fuel value of grain exceeds its food value, the market will move it into the energy economy. As the price of oil climbs so will the price of food.

Some 16 percent of the 2006 U.S. grain harvest was used to produce ethanol. With 80 or so ethanol distilleries now under construction, enough to more than double existing ethanol production capacity, nearly a third of the 2008 grain harvest will be going to ethanol.

Since the United States is the leading exporter of grain, shipping more than Canada, Australia, and Argentina combined, what happens to the U.S. grain crop affects the entire world. With the massive diversion of grain to produce fuel for cars, exports will drop. The world’s breadbasket is fast becoming the U.S. fuel tank.

The number of hungry people in the world has been declining for several decades, but in the late 1990s the trend reversed and the number began to rise. The United Nations currently lists 34 countries as needing emergency food assistance. Many of these are considered failed and failing states, including Chad, Iraq, Liberia, Haiti, and Zimbabwe. Since food aid programs typically have fixed budgets, if the price of grain doubles, food aid will be reduced by half.

Urban food protests in response to rising food prices in low and middle income countries, such as Mexico, could lead to political instability that would add to the growing list of failed and failing states. At some point, spreading political instability could disrupt global economic progress.

Against this backdrop, Washington is consumed with “ethanol euphoria.” President Bush in his State of the Union address set a production goal for 2017 of 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels, including grain-based and cellulosic ethanol, and liquefied coal. Given the current difficulties in producing cellulosic ethanol at a competitive cost and given the mounting public opposition to liquefied coal, which is far more carbon-intensive than gasoline, most of the fuel to meet this goal might well have to come from grain. This could take most of the U.S. grain harvest, leaving little grain to meet U.S. needs, much less those of the hundred or so countries that import grain.

The stage is now set for direct competition for grain between the 800 million people who own automobiles, and the world’s 2 billion poorest people. The risk is that millions of those on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder will start falling off as higher food prices drop their consumption below the survival level.

In February 2007 the World Food Programme Director James T. Morris reported that 18,000 children are now dying every day from hunger and malnutrition. This daily loss of life is six times the number of U.S. combat fatalities in Iraq over the last four years.

There are alternatives to this grim scenario. A rise in auto fuel efficiency standards of 20 percent, phased in over the next decade would save as much oil as converting the entire U.S. grain harvest into ethanol.

One option that is gaining momentum is a shift to plug-in hybrids. Adding a second storage battery to a gas-electric hybrid car along with a plug-in capacity so that the batteries can be recharged at night allows most short-distance driving—daily commuting and grocery shopping, for example—to be done with electricity. If this shift were accompanied by investment in thousands of wind farms that could feed cheap electricity into the grid, then cars could run largely on electricity for the equivalent cost of $1 per gallon gasoline.

Encouragingly, three auto manufacturers—Toyota, Nissan, and GM—have announced plans to bring plug-in hybrid cars to market. Plug-In Partners, which is spearheading a national campaign to shift to plug-in hybrid cars, already has 508 partners, including electrical utilities, corporations, state and city governments, and farm and environmental groups. Among its fast-growing list of partners are the American Public Power Association, Electric Power Research Institute, American Wind Energy Association, American Corn Growers Association, and the cities of Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, and Boston. Already a number of Partners have collectively pledged to purchase for their own fleets more than 8,000 plug-in hybrids as soon as they reach the market.

Ethanol euphoria is not an acceptable substitute for a carefully thought through policy. For Washington, it is time to decide whether to continue with the current policy of subsidizing more and more grain-based fuel distilleries or to encourage a shift to more fuel-efficient cars and a new automotive fuel economy centered on plug-in hybrid cars and wind energy. The choice is between a future of rising world food prices, spreading hunger, and growing political instability, or one of stable food prices, sharply reduced dependence on oil, and much lower carbon emissions.

Water Prices Rising Worldwide

2007-03-23T01:33:00.001-04:00

Water Prices Rising Worldwide
March 7, 2007 -- By Edwin H. Clark, II, Earth Policy Institute

ECO-ECONOMY UPDATE:
Water Prices Rising Worldwide

The price of water is increasing—sometimes dramatically—throughout the world. Over the past five years, municipal water rates have increased by an average of 27 percent in the United States, 32 percent in the United Kingdom, 45 percent in Australia, 50 percent in South Africa, and 58 percent in Canada. In Tunisia, the price of irrigation water increased fourfold over a decade.

A recent survey of 14 countries indicates that average municipal water prices range from 66¢ per cubic meter in the United States up to $2.25 in Denmark and Germany. Yet consumers rarely pay the actual cost of water. In fact, many governments practically (and sometimes literally) give water away for nothing.

The average American household consumes about 480 cubic meters (127,400 gallons) of water during a year. Homeowners in Washington, DC, pay about $350 (72¢ per cubic meter) for that amount. Buying that same amount of water from a vendor in the slums of Guatemala City would cost more than $1,700.

The price people pay for water is largely determined by three factors: the cost of transport from its source to the user, total demand for the water, and price subsidies. Treatment to remove contaminants also can add to the cost.

The cost of transporting water is determined largely by how far it has to be carried and how high it has to be lifted. Growing cities and towns may have to go hundreds of kilometers to find the water needed to satisfy their increasing thirst. California cities have long imported water from hundreds of kilometers away. And China is constructing three canals that are 1,156 kilometers, 1,267 kilometers, and 260 kilometers long to transfer water from the Yangtze River to Beijing and other rapidly growing areas in the northern provinces.

Pumping water out of the ground or over land to higher elevations is energy-intensive. Pumping 480 cubic meters of water a height of 100 meters requires some 200 kilowatt-hours of electricity. At a price of 10¢ per kilowatt-hour, the cost is $20—not including the cost of the pump, the well, and the piping. One hundred meters is not an unusual lift for wells tapping falling supplies of groundwater. In Beijing and other areas in northern China, for instance, lifts of 1,000 meters are sometimes required.

Mexico City, at an elevation of 2,239 meters, has to pump some of its water supply over 1,000 meters up a mountain. The operating costs alone amount to $128.5 million annually. Pumping this water requires more energy than is consumed overall in the nearby city of Puebla, home to 8.3 million people. Amman, Jordan, faces a similar problem related to delivering water to higher elevations.

In most places water is not purchased or exchanged in a market. But formal water markets are developing in the western United States, Australia, and Chile. Where these water markets do exist, they provide examples of how high the scarcity value of the water—that is, the amount that other potential users would be willing to pay for it—can be. Water prices in Australia’s markets peaked at near 75¢ per cubic meter in December 2006, climbing 20-fold in a year in part due to prolonged drought. In the U.S. West, water prices typically range between 3¢ and 10¢ per cubic meter. This is just the cost of the water itself and does not include the expense of treating or transporting it. In some western U.S. cities, water is so scarce that cities are selling sewage effluent for as much as $1 a cubic meter to be used for irrigating gardens.

In India, water scarcity has prompted some farmers to profit by selling their water instead of farming. The water they formerly used to irrigate their crops is instead pumped from their wells and trucked to nearby cities. The farmers are harvesting water rather than food and at the same time promoting a rapid drop in underground water tables.

The final factor affecting how much people pay for water is the amount it is subsidized. Water subsidies can be very large. For instance, water revenues in the city of Delhi are less than 20 percent of what it spends each year to provide water. On average worldwide, nearly 40 percent of municipal suppliers do not charge enough for water to meet their basic operation and maintenance costs.

Subsidies often benefit only higher-income families. Frequently, urban slum residents in developing countries have no access to municipal water supplies and instead purchase water from private purveyors who bring it in by truck. In part because unscrupulous vendors often control this distribution, the prices are very high, typically exceeding $1 per cubic meter. In several Asian cities, for instance, households forced to purchase water from a private vendor pay more than 10 times as much as middle-income families who are connected to the municipality’s distribution system. The poorest households in Uganda spend 22 percent of their income on water, while those in El Salvador and Jamaica use more than 10 percent of their income to satisfy water needs.

Water subsidies are not limited to the developing world. Farmers in California’s Central Valley, for example, use roughly one fifth of the state’s water and pay on average slightly over 1¢ per cubic meter, just 2 percent of what Los Angeles pays for its drinking water and only 10 percent of its replacement value. One analysis of a new U.S. project in central Utah found that the water it will provide will cost close to 40 times more than irrigators pay for it.

Water is currently managed as if it were worthless instead of the life-sustaining, valuable, and increasingly scarce resource that it is. A key step in moving toward more rational water management is to place a price on water that reflects its value and scarcity. This can, of course, result in substantial price increases that particularly hurt low-income families. The best way to avoid this problem is to use a block rate pricing system where a low level of consumption—that required to satisfy basic needs—is very cheap, while prices increase at higher levels of consumption. In Osaka, Japan, for instance, users pay a set monthly fee that includes 10 cubic meters of water; beyond that prices increase in steps from 82¢ per cubic meter up to $3 or more for high-volume users. In addition, ensuring that the poorest households are connected to a secure water supply can protect them from price gouging by private vendors.

Although pricing water at a reasonable cost can generate political problems in the short run, it can lead to substantial efficiencies in the longer run and eliminate a perverse drain on government budgets. Higher prices will lead farmers and industries to use water more efficiently and encourage households to buy more water-efficient appliances and reduce the amount of water they waste. Many efficiency improvements are relatively inexpensive, and most pay for themselves. Any improvement that reduces hot water use, for instance, can pay for itself over time because it saves energy as well as water.

Indeed, there are many links between energy and water. Not only are substantial amounts of energy required to extract, transport, and treat water, but just as the oil price shocks of the 1970s stimulated energy conservation, so too could pricing water to better reflect its real cost stimulate similar conservation efforts by industries, farmers, and households.

Distillery Demand For Grain To Fuel Cars Vastly Understated

2007-03-23T01:19:00.000-04:00

Distillery Demand For Grain To Fuel Cars Vastly Understated: World May Be Facing Highest Grain Prices in History
January 4, 2007 -- By Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

ECO-ECONOMY UPDATE:
World May Be Facing Highest Grain Prices in History

Investment in fuel ethanol distilleries has soared since the late-2005 oil price hikes, but data collection in this fast-changing sector has fallen behind. Because of inadequate data collection on the number of new plants under construction, the quantity of grain that will be needed for fuel ethanol distilleries has been vastly understated. Farmers, feeders, food processors, ethanol investors, and grain-importing countries are basing decisions on incomplete data.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) projects that distilleries will require only 60 million tons of corn from the 2008 harvest. But here at the Earth Policy Institute (EPI), we estimate that distilleries will need 139 million tons—more than twice as much. If the EPI estimate is at all close to the mark, the emerging competition between cars and people for grain will likely drive world grain prices to levels never seen before. The key questions are: How high will grain prices rise? When will the crunch come? And what will be the worldwide effect of rising food prices?

One reason for the low USDA projection is that it was released in February 2006, well before the effect of surging oil prices on investment in fuel ethanol distilleries was fully apparent. Beyond this, USDA relies heavily on the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA), a trade group, for data on ethanol distilleries under construction, but the RFA data have lagged behind movement in the industry.

We drew on four firms that collect and publish data on U.S. ethanol distilleries under construction. RFA is the one most frequently cited. The other three firms are Europe-based F.O. Licht, the publisher of World Ethanol and Biofuels Report; BBI International, which publishes Ethanol Producer Magazine; and the American Coalition for Ethanol (ACE), publisher of Ethanol Today.

Unfortunately, the lists of plants under construction maintained by RFA, BBI, and ACE are not complete. Each contains some plants that are not on the other lists. Drawing on these three lists and on biweekly reports from F.O. Licht, EPI has compiled a more complete master list. For example, while we show 79 plants under construction, RFA lists 62 plants. (We welcome any information that will improve this list, which can be viewed at www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2007/Update63_data.htm).

According to the EPI compilation, the 116 plants in production on December 31, 2006, were using 53 million tons of grain per year, while the 79 plants under construction—mostly larger facilities—will use 51 million tons of grain when they come online. Expansions of 11 existing plants will use another 8 million tons of grain (1 ton of corn = 39.4 bushels = 110 gallons of ethanol).

In addition, easily 200 ethanol plants were in the planning stage at the end of 2006. If these translate into construction starts between January 1 and June 30, 2007, at the same rate that plants did during the final six months of 2006, then an additional 3 billion gallons of capacity requiring 27 million more tons of grain will likely come online by September 1, 2008, the start of the 2008 harvest year. This raises the corn needed for distilleries to 139 million tons, half the 2008 harvest projected by USDA. This would yield nearly 15 billion gallons of ethanol, satisfying 6 percent of U.S. auto fuel needs. (And this estimate does not include any plants started after June 30, 2007, that would be finished in time to draw on the 2008 harvest).

This unprecedented diversion of the world’s leading grain crop to the production of fuel will affect food prices everywhere. As the world corn price rises, so too do those of wheat and rice, both because of consumer substitution among grains and because the crops compete for land. Both corn and wheat futures were already trading at 10-year highs in late 2006.

The U.S. corn crop, accounting for 40 percent of the global harvest and supplying 70 percent of the world’s corn exports, looms large in the world food economy. Annual U.S. corn exports of some 55 million tons account for nearly one fourth of world grain exports. The corn harvest of Iowa alone, which edges out Illinois as the leading producer, exceeds the entire grain harvest of Canada. Substantially reducing this export flow would send shock waves throughout the world economy.

Robert Wisner, Iowa State University economist, reports that Iowa’s demand for corn from processing plants that were on line, expanding, under construction, or being planned as of late 2006 totaled 2.7 billion bushels. Yet even in a good year the state harvests only 2.2 billion bushels. As distilleries compete with feeders for grain, Iowa could become a corn importer.

With corn supplies tightening fast, rising prices will affect not only products made directly from corn, such as breakfast cereals, but also those produced using corn, including milk, eggs, cheese, butter, poultry, pork, beef, yogurt, and ice cream. The risk is that soaring food prices could generate a consumer backlash against the fuel ethanol industry.

Fuel ethanol proponents point out, and rightly so, that the use of corn to produce ethanol is not a total loss to the food economy because 30 percent of the corn is recovered in distillers dried grains that can be fed to beef and dairy cattle, pigs, and chickens, though only in limited amounts. They also argue that the U.S. distillery demand for corn can be met by expanding land in corn, mostly at the expense of soybeans, and by raising yields. While it is true that the corn crop can be expanded, there is no precedent for growth on the scale needed. And this soaring demand for corn comes when world grain production has fallen below consumption in six of the last seven years, dropping grain stocks to their lowest level in 34 years.

From an agricultural vantage point, the automotive demand for fuel is insatiable. The grain it takes to fill a 25-gallon tank with ethanol just once will feed one person for a whole year. Converting the entire U.S. grain harvest to ethanol would satisfy only 16 percent of U.S. auto fuel needs.

The competition for grain between the world’s 800 million motorists who want to maintain their mobility and its 2 billion poorest people who are simply trying to survive is emerging as an epic issue. Soaring food prices could lead to urban food riots in scores of lower-income countries that rely on grain imports, such as Indonesia, Egypt, Algeria, Nigeria, and Mexico. The resulting political instability could in turn disrupt global economic progress, directly affecting all countries. It is not only food prices that are at stake, but trends in the Nikkei Index and the Dow Jones Industrials as well.

There are alternatives to creating a crop-based automotive fuel economy. The equivalent of the 2 percent of U.S. automotive fuel supplies now coming from ethanol could be achieved several times over, and at a fraction of the cost, by raising auto fuel efficiency standards by 20 percent.

If we shift to gas-electric hybrid plug-in cars over the next decade, we could be doing short-distance driving, such as the daily commute or grocery shopping, with electricity. If we then invested in thousands of wind farms to feed cheap electricity into the grid, U.S. cars could run primarily on wind energy—and at the gasoline equivalent of less than $1 a gallon. The stage is set for a crash program to help Detroit switch to gas-electric hybrid plug-in cars.

It is time for a moratorium on the licensing of new distilleries, a time-out, while we catch our breath and decide how much corn can be used for ethanol without dramatically raising food prices. The policy goal should be to use just enough fuel ethanol to support corn prices and farm incomes but not so much that it disrupts the world food economy. Meanwhile, a much greater effort is needed to produce ethanol from cellulosic sources such as switchgrass, a feedstock that is not used for food.

The world desperately needs a strategy to deal with the emerging food-fuel battle. As the leading grain producer, grain exporter, and ethanol producer, the United States is in the driver’s seat. We need to make sure that in trying to solve one problem—our dependence on imported oil—we do not create a far more serious one: chaos in the world food economy.

Is It Time for a New Tax on Energy?

2007-03-17T14:03:00.000-04:00

Is It Time for a New Tax on Energy?
February 9, 2007 -- By Phil Izzo, Wall Street Journal

Economists Say Government Should Foster Alternatives – But Not How Bush Proposes

The government should encourage development of alternatives to fossil fuels, economists said in a WSJ.com survey. But most say the best way to do that isn't in President Bush's energy proposals: a new tax on fossil fuels.

Forty of 47 economists who answered the question said the government should help champion alternative fuels. Economists generally are in favor of free-market solutions, but there are times when you need to intervene," said David Wyss at Standard & Poor's Corp. "We're already in the danger zone" because of the outlook for oil supplies and concerns about climate change, he said.

A majority of the economists said a tax on fossil fuels would be the most economically sound way to encourage alternatives. A tax would raise the price of fossil fuels and make alternatives, which today often are more costly to produce, more competitive in the consumer market. "A tax puts pressure on the market, rather than forcing an artificial solution on it," said Mr. Wyss.

President Bush has made a strong push on energy initiatives over the past month but he has steered clear of proposals that would raise taxes. In his State of the Union address, Mr. Bush set targets that call for a 20% reduction in gasoline use over the next 10 years. He proposed regulations to tighten gas-mileage standards and force fuel suppliers to use more alternative fuels. In addition, his budget proposal presented to Congress this week provides substantial funding for biofuel, clean coal and renewable energy programs.

In the survey, which was conducted Feb. 2-7, just two economists recommended regulations that require energy companies use more alternatives, one of the keys of the Bush plan, while six advised subsidies for producers of alternative fuels. "With subsidies, the government chooses the market solution," said Diane Swonk at Mesirow Financial. "I'd favor taxes in this area."

Other economists in the survey, though, said the smartest course for the government is to let market forces determine the future of alternative energies. "The more we mess with things the more problems we create," said Brian S. Wesbury of First Trust Advisors. "Government interference in the marketplace can do damage to long-term development of alternate energies."

Biggest Economic Risks

Although crude-oil prices have eased from levels hit last year, the economists said dependence on fossil fuels remains a threat. When asked to pick the greater geopolitical threat to the economy, by almost an 3-to-1 margin the economists chose a disruption in crude oil supplies caused by tensions in the Mideast over the impact on spending and confidence that could follow a major terrorist attack. "The economy has already proven it can survive terror attacks. It had a harder time with almost $80 per barrel oil," said Ms. Swonk.

The economists generally expect oil to remain below $60 a barrel for the remainder of this year. The average forecast puts crude oil futures at $57.98 a barrel in June and $58.72 in December. That roughly matches the price at which crude futures have traded in New York this week, but is well below the nominal highs set last year at around $77 a barrel.

"Demand for energy is going to grow, and energy likely to come from existing sources isn't going to grow fast enough," said Daniel Laufenberg at Amerprise Financial. "It's not a crisis today, but higher prices are telling us now is the time the start preparing."

Sarbanes-Oxley Fallout

The survey also gauged economists' sentiment on concerns expressed by business leaders that Sarbanes-Oxley rules, other regulatory enforcement and litigation are hurting the competitiveness of U.S. financial markets. Twelve of 51 economists who responded to the question said they feel these forces are hurting market competitiveness "a lot and are a serious threat to the economy." Thirty-six of the economists said markets are being hurt some but not enough to be a major economic worry.

Regarding Sarbanes Oxley specifically, a majority – 26 of 50 economists – said they believe the rules have had a "more negative than positive" impact on the economy. Four others said the impact has been entirely negative. In contrast, 19 economists deemed the impact "more positive than negative" and one said it has been an entirely positive influence on the economy.

Among other findings in the survey:

• Economists, on average, increased their forecast for first-quarter gross domestic product growth by three-tenths of a percentage point to 2.5% following the release of the government's first estimate of fourth-quarter growth last week. That report put growth for the period at a 3.5% rate. GDP is the broadest measure of economic output. Expectations of modest improvement in growth for the rest of the year were changed little. For the fourth quarter of 2007, the economists forecast growth at a 3% rate.

• The economists are skeptical that the federal budget will be balanced by 2012, a goal that is shared by President Bush and Democratic leaders. The economists put the probability of attaining that goal at 32%.

• There is a split on where the Federal Reserve's federal-funds rate is headed this year. Some 69% of respondents expect the next move to be a decrease, while 31% see a rate increase on the horizon. However, most don't see any move until some time in the summer.

• Sentiment improved a bit on the outlook for home prices. On average, economists expect a closely watched index calculated by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight will show that prices rose 3.52% last year, up from an earlier forecast of 2.76%. Ofheo's report on 2006 prices is expected to be released early next month. For 2007, the economists see a price decline of 0.18% compared to an earlier forecast of a 0.49% decline. However, when one outlier, who forecast a 20% drop, is removed, the economists expect a modest gain in home prices this year.