Searching for lessons from the "Old Urbanism"

In 1966 I was a junior at East Technical High School in Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland's race riots erupted on Hough Avenue in June of that year -- 13 months before Detroit. The photo from the Washington Post brought back memories. I know what it feels like to have a bayonet pointed at you. It happened to me one evening as I was waiting for a bus on Euclid Avenue. I had been at a meeting organized by IBM. A group of about 12 high schoolers from throughout the city were learning how to program computers.

I was wearing a blue blazer and had my Fortran training manual tucked under my arm, almost certainly looking every bit the pre-Steve Urkel. A national guardsman approached me, thrusting his gun and bayonet in my direction. He was shouting: "Where are you coming from? Where are you going?"

I was very scared and very angry.

I'm sure that in the minds of many Americans at least, Detroit and Cleveland are the once and future poster children for all that can go wrong with a major city. Here's what I know from experience: The all-black neighborhood that I grew up in during the 50's and 60's was economically, socially and spiritually robust and vibrant. Scores of locally owned businesses including grocery stores, drug stores, restaurants, cleaners, a printing shop, shoe repair, produce stands, barber shops and funeral homes lined the length of Quincy Avenue. Complementing these were churches, community centers, cultural centers (including the truly outstanding Karamu House), a local library, local banks and parks.

The backdrop to all this however were a couple of giant companies like the Carling Black Label Brewing Company (where my biological father worked) and Republic Steel (where my stepfather worked), screw manufacturers and foundries where most people worked and whose paychecks helped keep all those local businesses flourishing.

It really was a wonderful place to grow up.

During the period I was away at college, everything seemed to take a turn for the worse in both Cleveland and Detroit. We lost our manufacturing base and I'm sure the riots played a part in scaring away investments. For its part, Cleveland has been able to pull itself together and is making a comeback. Detroit, however continues to struggle.

With the world on the brink of becoming predominantly urban for the first time in history, it's imperative that we discover ways to make cities work again. (GW)

The Fire Last Time

40 Years Later, the Urban Crisis Still Smolders

By Kevin Boyle
Washington Post
July 29, 2007

On a sultry Sunday 40 years ago this week, the Detroit police raided an after-hours bar at the corner of 12th and Clairmount streets, in a poor black section of the city's west side. A crowd gathered to watch, the way it always does when it's too hot to be indoors and there's nothing else to do. In their rush to finish the operation, the cops got a bit rough with some of their prisoners, pushing and shoving and wielding their batons. A few onlookers started tossing insults at the officers, followed by bottles and stones. On the edge of the crowd, a teenager launched a trash can through the window of Hardy's drugstore, while someone else set a shoe shop ablaze. Within an hour, the melee had escalated into a riot -- a rebellion, some said later -- that raced like wildfire across the central city.

June 24, 2007, was another sultry Sunday in Detroit. Maybe it was the heat making tempers ragged. Maybe it was the perverse pride of an entrepreneur defending the business he built. Whatever the reason, when Dier Smith ripped off a local drug dealer, the man responded with stunning force. As Smith raced down Calvert Street, the dealer drew out his AK-47 and opened fire. Smith escaped, but the hail of bullets hit three bystanders: a young woman, her female friend and the friend's son. The adults survived. The little boy, 16-month-old Keith Wallace, didn't.

It's a short walk from Calvert to Clairmount, an easy stroll along seven blocks of boarded-up stores and weed-choked lots where buildings used to be. Between those two streets, though, lies a catastrophic failure of national will. As terrifying as the rioting was -- and a city wreathed in flames is one of the most terrifying sights imaginable -- it also created an extraordinary moment of opportunity. For the first time in the nation's history, Americans were forced to face the racial divisions and economic inequalities that ran through their cities. Four decades later, the divisions remain. The tragedy is that the nation's determination to confront them has long since slipped away.

Detroit was neither the first nor the last great urban upheaval of the 1960s. Los Angeles's Watts neighborhood had burned in 1965, West Side Chicago in 1966, the inner cities of Tampa, Cincinnati and Newark earlier in 1967. After the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in the spring of 1968, rioting broke out in more than 100 other cities, including Washington and Baltimore. But Detroit was the worst, a week-long conflagration so fierce it killed 43 people, injured hundreds and destroyed huge swaths of the city's most impoverished neighborhoods. Standing alongside 12th Street's smoldering ruins on the riot's final day, Detroit's mayor thought the area looked "like Berlin in 1945."

I was 6 years old that summer, living in a lower-middle-class white neighborhood far from the riot's epicenter. To this day, though, I remember the fear that descended over my home and my block: how parents rushed their kids inside long before dark; how we could hear gunfire and the constant wail of sirens in the distance.

A lot of whites fled to the suburbs in the riot's aftermath: about 80,000 in 1968 alone. (The city's population dwindled from 1.6 million in 1960 to fewer than 900,000 today.) After the riot, my family didn't join the rush -- not for 11 years, anyway. By then I was 17 and, against all reason, that sprawling mess of a city was in my blood. I've never shaken the addiction. Although I left Detroit to pursue an academic career, I've spent much of my life writing about its tortured racial history. To do that, I've come back time and again: to talk to people, to dig in archives, to drive the streets, to think. I suppose I just want to understand what happened that week in 1967, when I was introduced to the larger world around me, to the city I still think of as my home.

In retrospect, Americans should have seen the riot coming. Since the 1920s, not just Detroit but all of the nation's major cities had restricted blacks to the oldest, most decrepit neighborhoods available. Segregation inevitably spawned discrimination: Schools in African American areas were overcrowded and underfunded; city services were delivered sporadically; policing was frighteningly oppressive.

Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, the urban black economy tumbled into crisis, as decent-paying factory work started to disappear. From 1947 to 1967, Detroit alone lost 120,000 manufacturing jobs. In the city's ghetto, unemployment skyrocketed. Poverty intensified. And under the strain of it all, life on the streets became more dangerous. There were 112 murders in Detroit in 1946. In 1966, there were twice as many, a sure sign of a horribly strained social fabric.

As if that weren't bad enough, the crisis of the inner cities struck as much of the nation's economy boomed, creating a dazzling world of color TVs, backyard barbecues and cars the size of luxury liners. Poor blacks could see it all on display in the new suburbs that necklaced central cities. But suburbia was white man's territory, and it was fiercely defended. Just a month before the Detroit riot, white thugs killed a young black man, a Vietnam veteran who had the audacity to linger in a suburban park after dark. So African Americans had no choice but to stay on the far side of the urban color line, struggling to make do while white America made good.

No wonder Clairmount Street exploded in the summer of '67. And no wonder the riot's signature act wasn't battling police -- though that's how it started -- but looting and burning stores.

Policymakers didn't understand -- not at first. "What happened?" a shaken President Lyndon B. Johnson asked on the day he appointed the Kerner Commission to investigate the riots. It would have been easy for his appointees to equivocate, to blame the violence on black hoodlums or radical agitators. Instead, they gave the president a searingly honest answer. "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal," they reported in March 1968, a month before Washington's inner city burned. "Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American."

But Johnson's appointees also believed, in classic American fashion, that the nation could right itself. "The movement apart can be reversed," they insisted, though doing so would be extraordinarily difficult. The federal government had to shatter the institutions that fostered neighborhood segregation. City schools had to be integrated and dramatically improved. Inner-city housing had to be rehabilitated. Welfare programs had to be made less bureaucratic and far more generous. And together, the public and private sectors had to create millions of entry-level jobs in poor neighborhoods.

For a few years, policymakers tried -- imperfectly, half-heartedly, sometimes stupidly -- to break down the ghettos' walls. Congress passed legislation that banned discrimination in housing. The Supreme Court ordered city school systems to desegregate, even if that meant busing kids from one end of town to another. And the Nixon White House took a small, innovative program called affirmative action and extended it nationwide. It wasn't enough, not close to enough, to pull the urban poor into the mainstream of American society. But it was a start. The percentage of Americans living below the poverty line declined in the early 1970s. And partly because of affirmative action, the black middle class began to expand, a transformation of profound importance.

Then, in the late 1970s and '80s, the national commitment to the urban poor unraveled, destroyed by a furious white backlash and a resurgent conservatism that vilified big government and sanctified the free market. With that shift in American politics, hope gave way to neglect. It has been 30 years since the federal government really invested in America's inner cities. The only time anyone talks about segregation is when the Supreme Court prohibits another school district from employing the mildest of racial remedies. The welfare state has been eviscerated, not expanded. Even progressives prefer to focus more on the needs of the middle class than on the burdens of the poor.

And on the streets of Detroit and in other urban cores, life grows inexorably grimmer.

To be sure, Detroit has its glittering new ballparks and trendy loft apartments, lures the city has laid to draw the well-to-do back from the suburbs. As attractive as they are, though, downtown developments don't address the tangle of problems that beset Detroit's dispossessed.

Half a century after deindustrialization began, the city continues to hemorrhage jobs. Detroit now has an unemployment rate higher than any other major metropolitan area, with joblessness exceeding 50 percent in its poorest sections. One-third of Detroit's people -- and half of its children -- live below the poverty line. Its infant-mortality rate is only a bit better than that of the West Bank. Despite the continuing success of the African American middle class, neighborhoods are still profoundly segregated, far closer to apartheid than to anything approaching racial balance. The school system is almost completely segregated and frighteningly ineffective: Only 22 percent of Detroit's kids graduate from high school. The drug trade flourishes, fueled by young men who see it as the best (and maybe only) entree into America's consumer paradise. And the body count climbs. More than 20,000 Detroiters have been killed since the summer of '67, 203 of them in the first half of this year.

Inner-city Detroit isn't alone in its misery. Cleveland's poverty rate is higher. Memphis's infant-mortality rate is worse. Though Detroit is the most segregated city in the United States, Milwaukee, Newark and New York don't trail far behind. Public schools in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington -- in most major cities, in fact -- remain largely segregated, Washington's at a rate comparable to that of Detroit. And after a decline in the late 1990s, the brutal, senseless violence that policymakers pledged to stop 40 years ago is again on the rise in poor neighborhoods across urban America.

It's not the violence of '67, of course. Nowadays there are no thick black curls of smoke rising above 12th and Clairmount, demanding the nation's attention. Today's violence is hidden away: a petty crime on Calvert Street; a burst of automatic fire; a little boy -- a baby, really -- lying in a pool of blood. And except for the family and friends who are left to grieve his loss, no one gives a damn.

Kevin Boyle teaches American history at Ohio State University and is the author of "Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age."

Energy-generating "crowd farms"

I commute to work each day via Boston's South Boston station and can vouch for the fact that there's plenty of potential mechanical energy waiting to take advantage of the piezoelectric effect-- especially at both ends of the day when I dash to catch my bus.

Referring to a popular New York restaurant, Yogi Berra once remarked: "It's so crowded nobody goes there anymore". Architectural students at MIT who have proposed a novel idea that would take advantage of the mechanical energy generated by walking crowds of people, hope that Yogi's observation doesn't turn out to be a universal principle. (GW)

MIT duo see people-powered "Crowd Farm"

Plan would harvest energy of human movement

MIT News
July 25, 2007

Two graduate students at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning want to harvest the energy of human movement in urban settings, like commuters in a train station or fans at a concert.

The so-called "Crowd Farm," as envisioned by James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk, both M.Arch candidates, would turn the mechanical energy of people walking or jumping into a source of electricity. Their proposal took first place in the Japan-based Holcim Foundation's Sustainable Construction competition this year.

A Crowd Farm in Boston's South Station railway terminal would work like this: A responsive sub-flooring system made up of blocks that depress slightly under the force of human steps would be installed beneath the station's main lobby. The slippage of the blocks against one another as people walked would generate power through the principle of the dynamo, a device that converts the energy of motion into that of an electric current.

The electric current generated by the Crowd Farm could then be used for educational purposes, such as lighting up a sign about energy. "We want people to understand the direct relationship between their movement and the energy produced," says Juscyzk.

The Crowd Farm is not intended for home use. According to Graham and Jusczy, a single human step can only power two 60W light bulbs for one flickering second. But get a crowd in motion, multiply that single step by 28,527 steps, for example, and the result is enough energy to power a moving train for one second.

And while the farm is an urban vision, the dynamo-floor principle can also be applied to capturing energy at places like rock concerts, too. "Greater movement of people could make the music louder," suggests Jurcyzk.

The students' test case, displayed at the Venice Biennale and in a train station in Torino, Italy, was a prototype stool that exploits the passive act of sitting to generate power. The weight of the body on the seat causes a flywheel to spin, which powers a dynamo that, in turn, lights four LEDs.

"People tended to be delighted by sitting on the stool and would get up and down repeatedly," recalls Graham.

Other people have developed piezo-electric (mechanical-to-electrical) surfaces in the past, but the Crowd Farm has the potential to redefine urban space by adding a sense of fluidity and encouraging people to activate spaces with their movement.

"Our intention was to think of it not as a high-tech mat that would be laid down somewhere, but to really integrate it into a new sort of building system," Graham says.

The Crowd Farm floor is composed of standard parts that are easily replicated but it is expensive to produce at this stage, they said. "Only through experimentation - which can be expensive - do technologies become practical," Graham says.

Graham and Juscyzk rely on bicycles, rather than trains or buses, for their commute to MIT. But, both students were impressed enough by recent experiences in large crowds - for Graham, the 2003 New York City blackout; for Juscyzk, Boston's World Cup celebration in City Hall Plaza - to start work on the Farm. The students were inspired as well by an "ingenious little device by Thomas Edison. When visitors came to his house, they passed through a turnstile that pumped water into his holding tank," says Graham. In addition, they were guided by their advisor, Associate Professor J. Meejin Yoon, who helped them take their proposal from the power-stool to the Crowd Farm.

EU Commission finds biofuels and agriculture can coexist

Amid growing concerns that aggressive development of biofuels could have serious adverse impacts on food production and food prices, the European Union has concluded that limited targets for biofuels production would lead to only modest impacts on agriculture.

In an interview with David Roberts in the current grist, energy guru Amory Lovins says that his analysis produces similar results:

"We suggest that U.S. mobility fuels could be provided without displacing any food crops. You could do it just with switchgrass and the like on conservation reserve land. Being a perennial, which can even be grown in polyculture, switchgrass and its relatives would hold the soil better because they're much deeper rooted than the shallow-rooted annuals with which that erosion-prone land is often planted. And of course the perennials don't need any cultivation or other inputs. "

This discussion/debate is clearly far from over. (GW)

Biofuels: Impact on agriculture 'modest' says Commission

EurActiv
July 27, 2007

Amid growing public concern about the impact of biofuels production on land-use and cereal prices, the Commission has found that 10% biofuels use in transport by 2020 would produce only limited pressure on agricultural markets.

Related:

LinksDossier: Biofuels for transport

Background:

The 8-9 March Council Conclusions set a target of 10% biofuels use in transport by 2020, following recommendations made by the Commission.

A target of 5.75% biofuels use by 2010 was set in 2003, but the Commission decided to increase the targets in light of growing concerns over rising oil prices, energy security and climate change.

An important condition for reaching the 2020 target is the development of so-called "second generation" biofuels, which are made from the stems and woody parts of plants through advanced technological processes. Currently, most "first generation" biofuels are made from vegetable oils, animal fats, plant sugars and starches. In many cases, first generation fuels require significant amounts of land and are less efficient than second generation processes, which do not yet exist at an industrial scale.

Issues:

Reaching the 10% target for biofuels in transport by 2020 would not "overly stretch the [EU's] land availability", according to an impact assessment conducted by DG Agriculture and published on 24 July.

The assessment predicts that 15% of arable land would need to be used for biofuel production by 2020, a figure that the Commission considers "relatively modest". Much of the increased biofuel production would take place on "set aside" land, which is reserved under the Common Agricultural Policy to limit excessive production by farmers.

While the Commission argues in its assessment that the use of set-aside land would not lead to an increase in pesticide or fertiliser use, environmental groups have countered that this would be detrimental for wildlife.

WWF, for example, supports the 10% biofuels target, but under the condition that it is coupled with energy efficiency measures and an EU-wide sustainability certification scheme, including set aside land for conservation and wildlife.

In terms of prices, the Commission foresees a 3%-6% "long-run" increase of cereal prices compared with 2006 levels. Changes in feed prices for livestock "would appear relatively moderate to neutral", since by-products from biodiesel and bioethanol production could be used to feed the animals, according to the Commission.

But the Commission's conclusions on land use and prices depend to a great extent on the availability of second-generation biofuels at an industrial scale, as this would decrease land-use requirements as well as the EU's reliance on biofuel imports.

Without second-generation biofuels, however, costs, imports and land use would increase considerably, according to the Commission.

The assessment also points out that relying on first-generation biofuels alone would not be sufficient for reaching the 10% target simply in terms of fuel production. The assessment puts 2014 as the date when second generation technology would likely become available.

In related news, the NGO Eurobserv'ER has published its annual "Biofuel Barometer" for 2007, which reports an 80% increase in EU biofuel consumption since 2005. Germany in particular has witnessed a significant increase in the consumption of crude vegetable oil, which is considered a fully fledged fuel.

Biofuels Barometer

EU Biofuels Barometer: Germany & France in the Lead

RenewableEnergyAccess.com
July 27, 2007

Energy crops devoted to biofuel production are redesigning the European Union (EU) agricultural landscape a little more each year. According to the first estimates for 2006, EU biofuel consumption in the 25 member states reached 5.38 million tons of oil equivalent (Mtoe) -- up from 3 Mtoe in 2005.

In spite of the presence of biofuel promotion mechanisms in most EU member States, it must be recognized that a significant number of countries shall not reach the threshold as set by the directive -- 5.75% biofuel share of total consumption in 2010.

According to the 2006 statistics published in issue N° 179 of Systèmes Solaires-Le Journal des Énergies Renouvelables, biodiesel represented 71.6% of the energy content of biofuels devoted to transport last year, far ahead of bioethanol (16.3%) and the other biofuels (12.1%). This percentage is attributed to the explosion of vegetable oil consumption in Germany, which considers this product as a fully-fledged fuel.

Germany itself remained the largest European biofuel consumer last year, with a consumption estimate of 2.8 million tons of biodiesel (equivalent to 2,408,000 toe), 0.71 million ton of vegetable oil (628.492 toe) and 0.48 million ton of bioethanol (307,200 toe).

France was the second largest biofuel consumer among the 25-member EU States in 2006. According to the Ministry of Industry, France's consumption increased by 62.7% to reach 682,000 toe (i.e. 1.6% of French fuel consumption). Biodiesel represents the largest share of this (78%, far ahead of bioethanol with 22%).

(Click on chart to enlarge)

Biodiesel & Bioethanol: The Major Players
While the principal biodiesel players are Germany and France, the unquestionable leader is the French Diester Industrie. The firm has numerous production sites in France: those of Grand-Couronne and Compiègne, to which the sites of Sète, Mériot and Montoir/Saint-Nazaire have been added this year.

The company also plans to inaugurate three new sites next year, those of Grand-Couronne 2, Capelle-la-Grande and Bordeaux/Bassens, with each having a 250,000 ton production capacity. The company expects to have a total production capacity of approximately 2 million tons at the end of 2008, up from approximately 710,000 tons in 2006. The group's total investments should exceed €2 billion.

Germany also continues to be a major player in the European biofuel industry thanks to the presence of several large companies. The biggest of these is ADM Oelmühle Hamburg AG (photo above), which is a subsidiary of the American group Archer Daniels Midland Company. The firm's current strategy is that of increasing its production capacities with the 2006 commissioning of a new 275,000 ton production unit in Mainz and the 150,000 ton extension of its plant in Hamburg in 2007.

Among the other large German producers, MUW (Mitteldeutsche Umesterungswerke GmbH & Co KG) and EOP Biodiesel AG can also be cited.

The European bioethanol fuel industry on the other hand is somewhat mixed with that of the production of alcohol and sugar, and its multiple market outlets (food industry, industrial processes, etc.). The Spanish group Abengoa, via its American subsidiary Abengoa Bioenergy, is the European leader in production of bioethanol. It operates three production units in Spain with a total production capacity of 526 million litres.

The group is presently building a fourth production unit in France in the Lacq petrochemical complex in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department.

Another major contender in terms of bioethanol production is the German sugar corporation, Südzucker. Over the past few years, the company has invested heavily in Germany as well as in other European countries where it owns or controls numerous sugar companies.

The French agro-industrial group Téréos is also increasing its production capacities. Last September, this French company inaugurated a new beet distillation plant in Origny-Sainte-Benoîte (in the Aisne department), with a 300 million litre ethanol production capacity. Total investment amounted to €190 million.

Meeting the European Target
In spite of the presence of biofuel promotion mechanisms in most EU member States, it must be recognized that a significant number of countries shall not reach the threshold as set by the directive—5.75% biofuel share of total consumption in 2010.

At the beginning of the year, the European Commission drafted a report on the progress made with respect to the directive on biofuels. According to this report, the Commission estimates that the incorporation rate should be more likely in the region of 4.2%. This possible setback should not be of consequence on the future development of the sector.

During the European Summit Meeting held March 8th and 9th, the European Council approved the principle of a restrictive obligation (on the contrary to the present directive) of the biofuels incorporation rate at 10% of total gasoline and diesel oil consumption by the year 2020.

This decision should be confirmed by the European Council and the European Parliament by way of adoption of a European Commission directive.

EurObserv'ER is a consortium composed of five European organisations devoted to the promotion of renewable energies within the European Union. These five organisations are: Observ'ER, the Observatory of renewable energies (Paris, France); Eurec Agency, the European association of renewable energy research centers (Brussels, Belgium); Eufores, European forum for renewable energy sources (Brussels, Belgium); Erec, The European Renewable Energy Council (Brussels, Belgium); Jozef Stefan Institute, Energy Efficiency Center (Ljubljana, Slovenia).

The new "Ugly Americanism"?

News out of Brazil that some activists are raising doubts about the motives behind America's interest in preserving the Amazon rain forest pretty much confirms that the image and reputation of the United States throughout the so-called developing world has just about reached rock bottom. Assuming that their intentions really are honorable, groups like the World Wildlife Fund may well suffer collateral damage from deeply flawed American foreign policies. Regardless of whether accusations against specific non-governmental organization's initiatives are true or not, it is easier to make the case of guilt by association these days, given the growing perception that the U.S. has lost its moral compass. (GW)

In the Amazon: Conservation or Colonialism?

By Larry Rohter
New York Times
July 27, 2007

ANAVILHANAS ECOLOGICAL STATION, Brazil — Depending on one’s point of view, the World Wildlife Fund’s financial support of a nature reserve here on the Rio Negro is either part of a laudable attempt to conserve the Amazon jungle — or the leading edge of a nefarious plot by foreign environmental groups to wrest control of the world’s largest rain forest from Brazil and replace it with international rule.

In 2003, after signing an agreement with the WWF and the World Bank, the Brazilian government created the Amazon Region Protected Areas program. Since then, more than a score of national parks and reserves covering an area larger than New York, New Jersey and Connecticut combined have been brought into that network and provided with an infusion of new funds.

The program’s objective is to set up “a core system to anchor bio-diversity protection for the Amazon,” Matthew Perl, the WWF’s Amazon coordinator, said during a June visit to the area, a sparsely populated archipelago of 400 islands northwest of Manaus. “It’s part of a strategy to buy time, bring each protected area up to certain standards of management and pool resources for monitoring and enforcement.”

But that effort has aroused the suspicions of powerful business and political groups in Brazil that want to integrate the Amazon into the country’s economy through dams, mining projects, highways, ports, logging and agricultural exports.

“This is a new form of colonialism, an open conspiracy in which economic and financial interests act through nongovernmental organizations,” said Lorenzo Carrasco, editor and co-author of “The Green Mafia,” a widely circulated anti-environmentalist polemic. “It is evident these interests want to block the development of Brazil and the Amazon region by creating and controlling these reserves, which are full of minerals and other valuable natural resources.”

Such views are widely held in Brazil, cutting across regional and class lines. In a survey of 2,000 people in 143 cities conducted in person in 2005 by the country’s leading polling organization, Ibope, 75 percent said that Brazil’s natural riches could provoke a foreign invasion, and nearly three out of five distrusted the activities of environmental groups.

Winning the battle for Brazilian public opinion is crucial to any global effort to preserve the environment and, by extension, curb climate change. Brazil is the world’s fourth largest producer of the principal greenhouse gases; more than three-quarters of those emissions result from deforestation, most of which occurs here in the Amazon.

But the notion that foreigners covet the Amazon has long been widespread in Brazil, fed in part by anxiety about the central government’s tenuous control of the region. Those concerns have been exacerbated in recent years by the Internet, which has become a home for fabricated documents and declarations meant to convince Brazilians that their sovereignty is at risk.

The most notorious example is a widely reproduced map supposedly used in an American middle-school geography textbook. Rife with misspellings and errors of syntax of a type common to speakers of Romance languages like Portuguese, it shows the Amazon as an “international reserve,” and describes Brazilians as “monkeys” incapable of managing the rain forest.

Other spurious documents say that both President Bush and Al Gore made speeches during the 2000 presidential campaign in favor of wresting the Amazon from Brazil. Elsewhere, the documents quote an apocryphal American general, who leads an agency that the Pentagon says does not exist, as saying, “In the event Brazil decides to use the Amazon in a way that puts the environment of the United States at risk, we must be ready to interrupt that process immediately.”

Since the Iraq war began, accusations of American military designs on the Amazon are often invoked to denigrate environmentalists and their complaints about government policy. At hearings late last year on a proposed dam on the Madeira River, proponents distributed a map showing what they said were American “forward-operations locations” in the region meant to block Brazil’s development, including military bases and advisers in Bolivia and Venezuela, two countries not exactly on friendly terms with the Bush administration.

Some of the material circulating has been traced to right-wing nationalist groups sympathetic to the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. But in an unusual instance of former adversaries agreeing, organizations on the extreme left — even in the governing Workers’ Party — have also endorsed the notion of a foreign plot to seize the Amazon, as have some active duty segments of the military.

“Everything indicates that the environmental and indigenous problems are merely pretexts,” said a recent Brazilian military intelligence report, which was made available to The New York Times by a Brazilian who received a copy and who was concerned at the views expressed. “The main NGO’s are, in reality, pieces in the great game in which the hegemonic powers are engaged to maintain and augment their domination. Certainly, they serve as cover for those secret services.”

In reality, Mr. Perl, the WWF coordinator, said, his organization hopes merely to create a buffer around the nature reserve here through the creation of a larger “Rio Negro Conservation Bloc.” He said the idea was to protect the existing reserve by helping existing Indian reservations, state parks and nature reserves along the banks of the river to operate more effectively.

By 2012, Mr. Perl said, his organization and its partners hope to bring an area larger than California into the system. A fund administered by a Brazilian foundation that aims to raise $390 million and includes donations from the German government and others has been created.

In the mid-1990s, part of the area surrounding the archipelago was in fact declared a state park. But little was done to make that decree effective, and since then the federal government’s land-reform agency has settled 700 peasant families here and the Brazilian Navy, Marines and police have set up jungle training centers in the protected area.

“There is layer upon layer of claims, plan upon plan, and so this has become an area of conflict,” said Thiago Mota Cardoso, who monitors the park for the Institute for Ecological Research, one of the WWF’s regional partners. “It is ironic that this land belongs to the federal government, and yet the government does nothing.”

"Super-smart" grid would propel renewable energy deployment

As Herman Scheer, author of "Energy Autonomy" has been telling us for some time now, the real reason why renewable energy technologies like wind and solar have not been able to penetrate the market to meet a greater percentage of our energy demand has less to do with the technologies themselves and everything to do with the system they're trying to fit into. The fragmented, AC-based grid system creates a context that makes transportable combustible fuels "dispatchable" i.e. available whenever and wherever needed.

The folks at Airtricity, are out to change that by changing the context. As reported earlier on this blog on a few occasions, Airtricity President Eddie O'Connor is determined to build a European super-grid that spans a number of meteorological zones. It will be powered by a network of offshore wind turbines. Making the grid "smart" by digitizing it so that it can provide and process real-time information on supply, demand and pricing completes the re-design that, in this case, transforms wind energy into a dispatchable energy source.

For anyone concerned about climate change, this initiative and those of TREC and The Global Energy Network Institute are just about the best news we could receive. (GW)

Where the wind blows

The Economist
July 26, 2007

A grandiose plan to link Europe's electricity grids may recase wind power from its current role as a walk-on extra to being the star of the show

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.

In search of water security

According to the latest edition of Pinsent Masons Water Yearbook -- the bible of the water industry -- today about ten percent of the planet's population is served by private water companies. Big business is offering to solve the global water crisis. The May 2007 issue of Vanity Fair (its second annual "Green Issue") carried a story entitled "The Rise of Big Water" by Charles C. Mann.

"Big Water makes arguments straight out of Economics 101. The best way to deliver water to people's homes efficiently, the water barons argue, is to put the process in the hands of the market. If water is scarce, then raise the price -- let the law of supply and demand take over! If people want water that is not only plentiful but actually clean, then raise the price again."

Can "Big Air" be far behind? (GW)

A dry-weather crisis for Hoover Dam

By Daniel Terdiman
CNET News.com
Jul 23, 2007

HOOVER DAM, Ariz.--To get a sense of what seven years of drought in the Colorado River basin looks like, all you have to do is gaze out at Lake Mead from the top of the dam here and view the 108 feet of brightly colored earth below the familiar red walls rising from the water.

Lake Mead is 108 feet below its traditional level, the result of the many years of low rainfall, and these dry years could soon have some serious effects on the region.

I visited Hoover Dam on my Road Trip around the Southwest and was given a behind-the-scenes tour by Robert Walsh, the external affairs officer for the lower Colorado region of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the dam.

And Walsh was not in an optimistic mood.

He explained to me that while there have been several severe droughts in the dam's history--including one that lasted 12 years in the 1950s, as well as some in the 1970s and 1980s--this one is more serious because the population in the region has exploded, due in large part to the tremendous growth of the Las Vegas area.

Now, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne, who has legal control over the dam, has mandated that the Bureau of Reclamation come up with a plan for how to deal with potential shortages in available water for California, Nevada and Arizona, should continued low rainfall eventually mean that the Colorado River--and thus Hoover Dam--not be able to meet those states' water demands.

The problem, Walsh said, begins with the 7.5 million acre-feet of water allotted to the lower Colorado River basin region under the Boulder Canyon Act enacted by Congress in 1928. Every year, the river has been able to provide Arizona, California and Nevada with that much water--or more--but it is beginning to look like there may be a shortfall in the future if the drought doesn't end.

Ironically, in the 1990s, the basin had a surplus of water, and Reclamation began to work on guidelines for how to share the extra water. The guidelines were completed and implemented in 2000, according to Walsh, just as the drought began.

The situation is actually quite complex, it turns out, and has to do with the interior secretary's annual responsibility to make a determination of whether there is a surplus, a shortage or a normal supply of water.

And now that it looks like we're in for the first shortage year, the secretary has demanded that Reclamation have a plan ready by this winter.

What seemed to me to have Walsh--and presumably many others--pessimistic is the sense that the likely scenario would be to come up with a plan that mandates stretching the existing supply out as long as possible, which means drawing supplies from the water table, something that can never be replaced.

Of course, one option could be to demand severe conservation on the part of southern Nevada, southern California and Arizona--the constituencies of the Lower Colorado River basin region--but who can imagine that happening?

Walsh said that all those constituencies recognize that the circumstances surrounding the river--and its water production--have changed since the dam was opened in the 1930s, and that the states understand that they have to work together to solve the serious problem that could come from continued drought and presumably water shortage.

Yet, no one knows how to solve the problem.

Reclamation has come up with a complex matrix of possible scenarios (click here for PDF), and we may see the bureau demand some of those be implemented when it makes its determination of what to do in the case of a shortage in December.

It does appear that conservation is part of the bureau's preferred plan, and that would be good.

But judging from Walsh's assessment, it's not necessarily a bright future for the region. Droughts do come and go, but water demand is only going up, and over time, it seems certain that the region is going to need more water than is available.

And unless it comes up with some way to drastically alter its water use, the future is a more than a little scary.

Plug in, turn on, tune out emissions

It's true that the widespread adoption of plug-in cars would increase the demand for electricity as they reduce our dependence on foreign oil. If they plugged into a smart electric grid fed by a network of wind farms, they would be a huge plus for the environment and the economy. Offshore wind would have a particularly important role to play in a clean-energy transportation system. There's more than 100 gigawatts of wind off the U.S. coast waiting to be harvested as part of a strategy to wean our transportation system off of foreign oil without sacrificing prime farmland to produce fuels.

While no wind projects have yet to be built in the waters off the coast of the U.S., there is a great deal of activity. The U.S. Department of Interior's Minerals Management Service (MMS) is expected to release their Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Cape Wind project later this summer. One proposed offshore project off the coast of Texas continues to move forward, while another has been scrapped for economic reasons. The Long Island Power Authority's proposed wind farm off the coast of Long Island is being re-evaluated. A pilot project near Plum Island, New York is being reviewed. New Jersey and Delaware are exploring their offshore wind options. City officials in Cleveland are monitoring the winds of Lake Erie. The municipal light department of the town of Hull, Massachusetts is considering erecting up to four wind turbines off its coast to complement the two it has already constructing onshore. (GW)

Plug-In Hybrids Get Green Grades

Overall, plug-in cars are a plus for the environment, despite the fact that they would increase the demand for electricity.

By Kevin Bullis
Technology Review
July 24, 2007

Plug-in hybrids, which use electricity from the grid to replace gasoline for daily driving, would cut gas consumption and save commuters from high fuel prices. But some experts have been concerned that switching from gas to electricity, much of which is generated from fossil fuels, would actually significantly increase pollution in some parts of the country, as opposed to decreasing it.

A study released last week by the environmental group National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the largely utility-funded Electric Power Research Institute shows that plug-ins, once they're on the market, will significantly cut greenhouse gases. Across the country, the vehicles will on average also decrease other pollutants, but the impact in local areas will depend on the source of electricity.

In plug-in hybrids, a large battery pack that is recharged by plugging it in stores enough energy to power a car entirely, or almost entirely, with electricity for the first 40 miles or so of driving. For longer trips, the car reverts to conventional hybrid operation, relying largely on gasoline for power but improving efficiency: by storing energy from braking in the battery and using it for acceleration, for example.

The study shows that if plug-in hybrids are adopted widely in the United States, and if measures are taken to clean up power plants, by 2050, plug-in hybrids could reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 612 million metric tons, or roughly 5 percent of the total U.S. emissions expected in that time frame, according to Marcus Sarofim, a researcher at MIT's Joint Program for the Science and Policy of Global Change. That's a significant amount, he says, considering that transportation accounts for only about a third of the total greenhouse-gas emissions.

But if plug-in hybrids account for only a small part of the total vehicle sales in 2050 (about 20 percent, compared with 80 percent in the first scenario), and if little is done to improve pollution from power plants, the vehicles will still reduce greenhouse emissions by about 163 metric tons, according to the study.

The picture for other pollutants is more complicated. The study found that on average, air would be cleaner. But in some areas of the country, such as those downwind from coal plants and having certain atmospheric characteristics, there could be a slight increase in levels of mercury, ozone, or particulate matter in the air by 2030, due to increased demand on power plants from plug-in hybrids. The best results would be in areas that use the cleanest electricity, such as in the Northwest, which relies heavily on hydroelectric power.

One implication of the study, says Luke Tonachel, an NRDC analyst, could be that federal incentives for encouraging the sale of plug-in hybrids should be adjusted by region. In some areas, the study shows, conventional hybrids may do almost as well as plug-ins at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, while resulting in overall cleaner air. It would make sense to promote plug-ins more in other regions, where electricity sources are cleaner.

The report makes clear that turning to plug-in hybrids will mean changing the way the government thinks about vehicles. The standard miles-per-gallon EPA ratings will only give a part of the picture. What's needed, Tonachel says, is a new standard that conveys the impact of both burning liquid fuels and using electricity, such as a measurement of the overall amount of carbon that using a car will release.

(Offshore wind in the U.S.: We're getting close)

Darfur's potential water war

To suggest that there is a strong link between climate change and the horrific human suffering taking place in Darfur does not mean that the suffering will automatically end with the discovery (or invention) of a potential solution. Not if the politics of greed is allowed to work its perverse magic. The tragic irony of the potential discovery of an underground lake beneath Darfur is that, more than anything else, it may set off the kind of resource wars that threatens to characterize a world where efforts to arrest climate change were too little and too late. (GW)

A Godsend for Darfur, or a Curse?

By Lydia Polgreen
New York Times
July 22, 2007

DAKAR, Senegal

THE announcement by researchers at Boston University last week that a vast underground lake the size of Lake Erie had been discovered beneath the barren soil of northern Darfur, a blood-soaked but otherwise parched land racked by war for the past four years, was greeted by rapturous hopes. Could this, at last, bring deliverance from a cataclysmic conflict that has killed at least 200,000 people and pushed more than 2.5 million from their homes?

That hope is built upon an argument, advanced by a United Nations report released last month and an opinion article in The Washington Post by Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, that environmental degradation and the symptoms of a warming planet are at the root of the Darfur crisis.

“There is a very strong link between land degradation, desertification and conflict in Darfur,” said the United Nations Environmental Program report, which noted that rainfall in northern Darfur has decreased by a third over the last 80 years. “Exponential population growth and related environmental stress have created the conditions for conflicts to be triggered and sustained by political, tribal or ethnic differences,” the report said, adding that Darfur “can be considered a tragic example of the social breakdown that can result from ecological collapse.”

The idea that more water — unearthed through a thousand wells sunk into the underground lake — could neatly defuse the crisis is seductive. Messy African conflicts, from Congo to Liberia, from northern Uganda to Angola, have a way of defying all efforts to solve them. Instead, they seem to become hopelessly more complex as they drag on, year after agonizing year. A scientific explanation for the problem (environmental degradation) along with a tidy technological solution (irrigation) gratifies the modern humanitarian impulse.

But the history of Sudan, a grim chronicle of civil war, famine, coups and despotism, gives ample reason to be skeptical.

“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”

The droughts that gripped Sudan in the 1980s, and the migrations and other social changes they forced, have doubtless played a role in the conflict by increasing competition for water and land between farmers, who tend to be non-Arab, and herders, many of whom are Arabs. But an environmental catastrophe cannot become a violent cataclysm without a powerful human hand to guide it in that direction.

“These wider environmental factors don’t have impact in and of themselves” in terms of fomenting conflict, Mr. de Waal said. “The question is how they are managed.”

In fact, while different regions and social groups suffer severely, Sudan as a whole has riches to spare, in oil, fertile soil, and even water. Indeed, history suggests that this newly discovered lake is just as likely to become a source of conflict as a solution to the bloodshed.

Successive Sudanese governments and their colonial precursors have adopted agricultural policies that have almost inevitably led to conflict. They have favored large mechanized farms and complex irrigation schemes, controlled by the government and its allies, over the small, rain-fed farms that are the backbone of the rural economy in much of Sudan.

In eastern Sudan, where a rebellion has been brewing for years, the Beja people have nursed grievances since Britain and Egypt ruled Sudan jointly during the first half of the 20th century. Under their rule, irrigation programs for commercial farming deprived the Beja of their prime grazing land.

Post-colonial governments, which in the early years had the blessing of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, took vast tracts of land in the name of agricultural development, turning farmers who worked their own land into wage laborers for the state and its allies.

Some Sudanese have even been pushed off their land entirely. In the early 1990s the Nuba people were forced into “peace villages,” where they provided a steady supply of cheap, captive labor to mechanized farms. In other areas, including parts of Darfur, intensive mechanized farming by the government and investors who were heedless to the need to protect the fertility of the land left large tracts barren.

A vast new agricultural scheme in a largely uninhabited swath of northern Darfur is more likely to fit into this destructive pattern than not, said John Prendergast, a founder of the Enough Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress and the International Crisis Group to abolish genocide and mass atrocities.

“Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable,” said Mr. Prendergast, who has been studying Sudan for 20 years. “That was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.”

During those years, the government exploited tensions over water and land to achieve its own aims, putting down a rebellion among the non-Arab tribes, who rose up because they wanted a greater share of Sudan’s wealth and power. It armed tribal militias to fight the rebels, and these militias unleashed a tide of violence that ultimately would become, according to the Bush administration and many others, the 21st century’s first genocide.

A report released last year by the Coalition for International Justice on the role that oil and mechanized farming have played in human rights abuses in Sudan concluded: “The predominant root of conflict in Sudan is the instability that results from the systemic abuse of the rural (and recently urbanized) poor at the hands of the economic and political elites of central Sudan.”

In this analysis, the heart of the Darfur conflict, as in all conflicts in Sudan, is the battle for control of resources and riches, but not between farmers and herders, northerners and southerners, Christians and Muslims, or Arabs and non-Arabs.

It is a conflict between those at the center of the country, the elites who have controlled Sudan and its wealth for the past century and a half, and the desperately poor people who beg for scraps from the periphery.

Until that equation changes, many analysts argue, nothing else will.

Gulf coast recovery update by the numbers

It's hurricane season once again and we're approaching the two-year anniversary of hurricane Katrina's and hurricane Rita's devastation of gulf coast communities. Beginning in December 2005, The Brookings Institution has been tracking the recovery efforts in the region month by month. Following is the update issued on June 14, 2007.

Meanwhile, the August 2007 issue of National Geographic Magazine features an article entitled "The Perils of New Orleans"(GW) in which author Joel K. Bourne, Jr. observes:

"The sinking city faces rising seas and stronger hurricanes, protected by dwindling wetlands and flawed levees. Yet people are trickling back to the place they call home, rebuilding in harm's way."

Some experts are concerned that "We simply lack the capacity to protect New Orleans". Of course, not everything can be measured by numbers. In many respects, it appears as if the spiritual recovery of the area has been rather remarkable. Among those who are drawn by the powerful sense of place, the will is clearly there. (GW)

Katrina Index: Tracking Recovery of New Orleans and the Metro Area

Bookings Institution
June 14, 2007

Beginning in December 2005, the Katrina Index began monitoring the social and economic recovery of the Gulf Coast region, especially the New Orleans area, from the storm’s impact in August 2005. Relying on nearly 40 indicators, the Index has aimed to provide members of the media, key decision makers, nonprofit and private sector groups, and researchers with an independent, fact-based, one-stop resource to monitor and evaluate the progress of on-the-ground recovery.

Starting in 2007, The Katrina Index is being released as a joint collaboration between the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center and the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program. The goal of this collaboration is to bring an even better, more tailored assessment of recovery to this Index’s many users.

Executive Summary

Months Since Katrina Made Landfall: 21

With the beginning of hurricane season, the entire New Orleans region is bracing for the potential of upcoming storms. Residents are anxiously reviewing evacuation plans, while local authorities put the final touches on new regional emergency response plans.

In the meantime, the state is making headway to restore long-term hurricane protection for the region. Last month, the Louisiana state legislature approved Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast. The plan offers a multifaceted effort to protect the southern Louisiana coastline and restore wetlands, beyond strengthening the levee system. The plan will be funded by a dedicated stream of revenues from off-shore oil leases approved by the federal government and mandated for coastal restoration by Louisiana voters.

To help accelerate infrastructure repairs, Congress just approved a provision to waive Louisiana’s 10 percent match to FEMA’s infrastructure aid, finally triggering federal repayment for critical repairs of roads, school buildings, and other public facilities.

Despite this progress, many other obstacles to recovery remain.

• The Road Home program will stop accepting applications after July 31, largely due to the estimated $5 billion shortfall in the program. Neither Congress nor the Louisiana legislature have committed to providing additional funding for Road Home.
  

• Funding for the city’s plan to redevelop 17 targeted neighborhoods has yet to be secured, stalling recovery czar Ed Blakely’s plans to have “cranes up in the skyline” by September.
  

• Skyrocketing insurance rates continue to place a tremendous burden on residents and small businesses alike, leading to the termination of several plans to develop high rises and multi-family dwellings already approved by the state and city.
  

Nonetheless, New Orleans continues to repopulate, as long displaced residents return and newcomers arrive to fill multiple job vacancies at schools, hospitals, and in the construction trades. In sum, this month’s index suggests continued repopulation of the New Orleans area, with a moderately healthy housing market, and a local economy that continues to benefit from significant construction activity.

Housing

• There were a total of 937 single family homes sold in the metro area in April. This is slightly lower than spring period pre-Katrina, but home purchases are robust in the east bank of New Orleans, where 243 home sales match pre-Katrina levels.
  

• Home values in the outlying parishes of St. Tammany, St. John, St. James and St. Charles remain strong relative to pre-Katrina averages. While average home sales prices on the east bank of New Orleans are approximately $50,000 lower than this time in 2005, likely reflecting the large number of flooded homes sold as-is in recent months.
  

• There were 243 free home demolitions in April in the metro area, with nearly all of these demolitions taking place in Orleans Parish. This continued pace may reflect home owners taking advantage of the final months in which FEMA will pay for this service.
  

• Permits for new housing construction jumped to 687 for the metro area and 337 for New Orleans, surpassing pre-Katrina levels. The bulk of the new activity is in the approval of multifamily housing units, which grew from 70 approvals in March to 285 for the metro area this month.
  

• ICF International closed 9,655 Road Home applications in the last four weeks, moving closer to their goal of 500 closings per day (or 11,000 per month). For the first month since January, new applications slowed to fewer than 9,000. However, even at this accelerated rate, it will be May of 2008 before all of the currently open applications have been processed.
  

Population

• April delivery statistics from the U.S. Postal Service suggest that New Orleans and the metro area continue to repopulate. Active residential deliveries in Orleans Parish grew to 63.8 percent of pre-Katrina levels in April 2007, up slightly from 61.9 percent last month and from 49.5 percent at the one-year anniversary of Katrina. In St. Bernard, this indicator grew to 33.2 percent of pre-Katrina levels from 26.3 percent in October 2006. Overall, postal deliveries to residential addresses for the five-parish region have increased from 76.5 percent to 82 percent since last August.

• Spring enrollment numbers for the six largest colleges in New Orleans fell to approximately three-quarters of pre-Katrina numbers, with 76 percent of original enrollment at Tulane, 50 percent at Dillard, and 63 percent at UNO. However, these colleges report dramatic increases in the number of students who have made deposits to attend school in New Orleans in the fall of 2007.

Infrastructure

• One child care center opened in Orleans Parish, along with two in Jefferson Parish. However, one child care center closed in St. Tammany parish. St. Bernard has only two child care centers open, representing 8 percent of the twenty-six child care centers that were open there pre-Katrina. And Orleans has only 93 child care centers open, roughly one-third of the pre-Katrina centers in that parish.
  

• All other infrastructure indicators remain stalled this month. Thirty-six percent of the state-licensed hospitals in the region remain shuttered. Fourteen libraries remain closed across the five parishes. And only 58 out of 128 public schools have opened in New Orleans to date. However, at least a dozen more public schools are projected to open in New Orleans by fall.
  

Economy

• Unemployment in New Orleans and the metro area has fallen by more than half a percentage point since January—to 4 percent and 3.8 percent respectively. And for the third month, it remains below the national rate of 4.5 percent in April.
  

• The labor force in New Orleans and the metro area gained a small number of workers from March to April, reaching 157,836 in Orleans and 502,588 in the RMLA. While at the same time, the labor force nationwide lost 392,000 workers from March to April.
  

• Arriving and departing passengers through Louis Armstrong International airport jumped to over 320,000 each in March, reaching their highest level since Katrina.

— The Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program

Green greed

Well, it's sundown on the union
And what's made in the U.S.A.
Sure was a good idea
'Til greed got in the way.
(Bob Dylan. Union Sundown)

The problem with making environmentalism profitable is that the lure of profits attracts schemers as well as dreamers -- and probably a disproportionate share of the former. The schemers are in search of fast and easy big bucks. They spend more time on figuring out how to manipulate the "system" (carbon trading, for example), than on finding real solutions to our mounting environmental challenges. This is an unavoidable consequence of capitalism: it attracts the good the bad and the ugly. Unless we remain vigilant, the bads and the uglies threaten to derail the environmental movement just when it has gained the level of momentum and credibility capable of making the world work for everyone. (GW)

Environmentalism for Billionaires

How businesses are looking to cash in on global warming with green-washed plans that aren't as eco-friendly as they seem.

By Glen Hurowitz
The American Prospect
July 17, 2007

Lately, I've been inundated with phone calls from venture capitalists, private equity guys, and hedge fundistas. They're coming to me because I'm their environmentalist friend and they all want to know one thing: how they can make a buck off the surge in interest in combating global warming.

In a way, that's a sign that the environmental movement has finally arrived. After decades of struggling to convince the titans of finance that protecting the planet and making money weren't mutually exclusive, the tycoons are now coming to us.

But many of these capitalist converts need watching. While Wall Street's eco-splurge has generated a flood of financing for legitimately clean ventures like wind and solar power, it's also spawned extremely dangerous projects that are painted green by their unscrupulous backers, but that at their core are as black as, well, coal.

The green sheen plastered on some of these projects -- like burning down the rainforest to generate electricity for homes -- has actually convinced some members of Congress to start throwing billions of taxpayer dollars their way. Of course, not all those representatives and senators are gullible enough to believe that making forests into electricity is really good for the planet. Some just think voters will be so dazzled by the spin doctors' lovingly applied emerald veneer that they won't notice them pocketing these eco-pretenders' campaign donations.

Take that burning-the-rainforest-to-power-your-iPhone proposal. All over the tropics, international agribusiness giants like Cargill, as well as smaller domestic operators, have turned pristine rainforests into millions of acres of soy, sugar, and palm oil plantations. Much of that provides raw material to make biodiesel, touted by its numerous backers as a quintessential green fuel.

Unfortunately, rainforest biodiesel is triply bad for the planet. When rainforest is burned to clear the land, the carbon that had been safely stored in tree trunks, orangutans, and other living matter gets incinerated and becomes the carbon dioxide responsible for warming the planet. Also incinerated: vital habitat for endangered species (like the orangutans) and indigenous people who need intact rainforests to survive.

Then, the farms that replace the forests spew out greenhouse gases as workers drive their tractors and spray pesticides made in factories running on coal, natural gas, or more biofuels. And when that biofuel finally arrives in your gas tank or the local power plant, it may actually produce slightly more cancer-causing toxins than regular old gasoline, according to a recent Stanford University study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology (though the study didn't evaluate rainforest biodiesel, but other biofuels instead).

But you don't have to go to the tropics to see billionaire faux-environmentalism at work. Just drive out to West Virginia, where Big Coal executives are hoping for a renewed mining bonanza if they can somehow convince members of Congress that coal is clean and that liquefied coal can replace gasoline. They're lobbying hard for taxpayer guarantees for liquid coal projects that they argue can help free America from its reliance on foreign oil. That's the kind of sweetheart deal that could make even oil executives jealous.

But not only is the proposal expensive, it's also extremely dangerous to the environment. Turning hard coal into an automotive fuel takes a lot of energy, which is why liquid coal produces twice the greenhouse gas emissions of regular coal. Liquid coal backers claim that, with the right amount of additional taxpayer support, they can use advanced technology to capture and store that extra global warming pollution. Even if that's true (and taxpayers are willing to take the hit), it doesn't do anything about coal's remaining non-climate environmental hazards: the soot and smog that kill more than 30,000 people every year and the destruction of mountaintops across Appalachia and elsewhere.

That's bad, but it's nothing compared to the scam being pushed by the timber lobby. The logging industry not only cuts down the forests that act as the planet's lungs, they also use tremendous amounts of energy to turn dead trees into furniture and paper. If Congress takes serious action to stop global warming, the loggers would have to clean up their act. But their resident wonks at the American Forest and Paper Association have found a way to reap a financial windfall from likely climate legislation.

Call it the Sofa Scheme. They're arguing that every sofa, Post-It note, and Kleenex tissue they produce should be counted as carbon storage, just like forests are. Their logic is that even when these forest products are discarded and put in a landfill, they're keeping that carbon safely in the ground rather than sending it into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide.

If the timber lobby gets its way, that could mean big money for the logging companies. Under the carbon trading schemes likely to be a part of any global warming legislation, they could use all the credits they get from producing furniture and paper to avoid having to make any actual reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions or preserving actual living forests. Alternately, they could sell those credits to other polluters who would use them to avoid making their own reductions.

That could perversely endanger recycling programs, which are huge energy savers (it takes less energy to make paper from paper than from virgin trees). If wood and paper are given value just for lying in a landfill, it could create an incentive for trash operators to dispose of them that way, rather than recycling them. Indeed, whoever is able to get credit for landfilling the 59 million tons of forest products disposed of annually would reap more than $1 billion in profit, based on the price of carbon pollution permits being traded in European markets.

The good news is that some lawmakers are starting to get wise to these polluter schemes. Facing worries about the impact of increasing demand for palm oil grown in ecologically sensitive parts of Southeast Asia and Colombia, Europe may ban biofuels grown unsustainably. During the debate over the energy bill, the Senate defeated an attempt to provide billions of dollars in subsidies and loan guarantees for liquid coal. And there's growing support for giving financial value to living forests instead of forests that have been turned into toilet paper.

But even if these particular scams are beaten back, environmentalists and others must remain vigilant. Capitalism is, for good and bad, an infinitely creative phenomenon. America must be sure to harness that creativity to solve the climate crisis rather than letting rogue billionaires make it worse.