The end of cheap food

I have visions of Charlton Heston in the 1973 sci-fi classic Soylent Green:

"Set in the year 2022, Soylent Green depicts a dystopia, a Malthusian catastrophe that occurs because humanity has failed to pursue sustainable development and has not halted uncontrolled population growth. The film portrays New York City's population as forty million, with more than half of it unemployed. Pollution has produced a "year-round heatwave"— identified in the film, presciently, as due to a "greenhouse effect"— and a thin, yellow, daytime smog. Food and fuel are scarce resources because of animal and plant decimation and soil poisoning, housing is dilapidated and overcrowded, and widespread government-sponsored euthanasia is encouraged to control overpopulation.

Meat, bread, cheese, fruit, vegetables, and alcoholic beverages are scarce and extremely expensive; for example, a six-ounce jar of strawberry jam is 150 "D's" (US Dollars). Like the Soylent food factories, the farms still producing rare foodstuffs are heavily guarded and off-limits to civilians. For most of the populace, natural foods are a rare luxury. The government dispenses rations of synthetic food — Soylent Yellow, Soylent Red — made by the Soylent Corporation, who controls half of the world's food supply. The newest and most popular product, Soylent Green - a small square green wafer - is made from plankton according to the corporation." (Wikipedia)

But we all know that Soylent Green is not made from plankton don't we? (GW)

Why the era of cheap food is over

The Christian Science Monitor
December 31, 2007

Corn, milk, bread, and other farm products hit record high prices in 2006 – and will likely keep rising in 2008.

Food prices worldwide hit record highs in 2006, and all the signs are that they will go on rising this year, and for the foreseeable future. The era of cheap food, the experts say, is over and we are going to have to get used to it. This is easier said than done for millions around the world, as evidenced by protests in Mexico over the cost of corn tortillas, and in Italy last September about the price of (wheat) pasta. Staff writer Peter Ford looks at why.

What is behind the increases in food prices?

Certainly not bad harvests. Although a drought hit the traditionally bountiful Australian wheat harvest this past year, world cereal harvests hit 2.1 billion metric tons, a record production level, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Two major trends have been pushing prices up faster than they have risen for more than 30 years. One is that increasingly prosperous consumers in India and China are not only eating more food but eating more meat. Animals have to be fed (grains, usually) before they are butchered. The other is that more and more crops – from corn to palm nuts – are being used to make biofuels instead of feeding people.

At the same time, the world is drawing down its stockpiles of cereal and dairy products, which makes markets nervous and prices volatile.

The result, says Joachim von Braun, who heads the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, is that "the world food system is in trouble. The situation has not been this much of a concern for 15 years."

How big a factor is the biofuels boom?

It is significant enough for the FAO to be warning about the dangers of turning too much food into fuel, and for the Chinese government, for example, to ban the construction of new refineries that use corn or other basic foods. In fact, earlier this month Beijing announced tax breaks and subsidies to encourage the use of cellulose, sweet sorghum, and cassava (nonfood crops in China) for biofuels.

Some analysts estimate that as much as 30 percent of the US grain crop will go toward producing ethanol this year, a doubling from 2006. IFPRI forecasts that if the world sticks to current biofuel expansion plans, the price of corn will go up 26 percent by 2020, and the price of oilseeds (such as soybean, sunflower, rapeseed) by 18 percent. If governments double efforts to produce this alternative fuel source, corn prices are expected to go up 72 percent and oilseeds by 44 percent in 12 years' time.

Who gets hit hardest? Does anyone benefit?

As usual, it is the poorest people in the world who suffer most, because food takes up a bigger share of their daily shopping bill than it does for richer people. A family in Bangladesh, for example, living on $5 a day, typically spends $3 of that on food. The 50 percent rise in food prices the world has seen in recent years takes a $1.50 chunk – nearly 30 percent – out of the family budget.

Even farmers are not immune. On the whole, small-scale farmers in developing countries buy more food than they sell, so they, too, are net losers. Relatively few peasants have holdings large enough to benefit from price increases.

Big farmers in the rich countries, however, are doing well: US corn farmers have seen the price their crop fetches jump by 50 percent since 2000. Other net food exporters, such as India, Australia, and South Africa, will also do well out of rising prices. Major dairy producers, such as New Zealand, have done well as consumption of milk, yogurt, and cheese rises in Asia. As a result, while property values in New Zealand are generally expected to soften, flat rural land, where cows can graze, is expected to continue to rise in price, according to a survey by Massey University in New Zealand.

Will market forces correct the situation, as farmers switch to the high-earning crops?

Not as quickly as you might expect, though the European Union, the largest food exporter in the world, has suspended a "set-aside" program that had paid its farmers to leave 10 percent of their land fallow (so as to prevent oversupply).

Cereal prices are considered "inelastic," meaning that a 10-percent price increase tends to boost supplies by only one or two percentage points. While prices are high, they are also very volatile at the moment, which scares a lot of farmers off making the investments they would need to switch crops.

At the same time, the food market overlaps with the fuel market. Farmers can now sell their corn, their palm nuts, or their sugar to biodiesel refineries. So the price of palm oil, for example, traditionally the cheapest in Africa, is now set not by the cooking oil market, but by the fuel market.

It will not help that climate change and the accompanying floods and droughts will reduce cereal output in more than 40 developing countries, mainly in Africa, according to recent studies.

Where will food shortages be most acute?

Wherever the underlying trends of rising prices and scarcer supplies are compounded by special problems. Sometimes they are natural disasters, such as the cyclone and flooding that hit Bangladesh last November, wiping out many people's stocks of food. Sometimes they are man-made, as in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where continuing civil conflict and mismanagement disrupt the market, or in Zimbabwe, where inflation of more than 7,000 percent and a crumbling economy are threatening people already short of food.

"The hot spots of food risks will be where high prices combine with shocks from the weather or political crises,", says Dr. von Braun. "These are recipes for disaster."

What effect will high prices have on hunger-prevention programs?

A big one says the World Food Program (WFP), the UN agency in charge of emergency food aid, which reported last year that food aid flows had reached their lowest levels since 1973.

Food prices "are an incredible concern for us at the moment" says WFP spokesman Robin Lodge. "The same dollars don't buy the same amount of food as they used to," and donations to the agency are flat.

The WFP has been making a big effort to buy food from countries as near as possible to crisis zones, to cut transport costs, and in 2007 it had 15 million fewer people to feed than in 2006 because there were fewer major emergencies.

"But we are now about as tight as we can get, so unless donations go up there is no doubt about it, we will have to reconsider who we are feeding and the rations" says Mr. Lodge. "There is no other way around it."

Many food aid organizations are trying to buy more food locally. The FAO is reportedly working on a program to offer poor farmers vouchers for seeds and fertilizer to help them adapt to changing climate conditions.

Reforming China's energy system

The decisions that China is making and will make in the near future on just about everything will have major implications for the all of us around the world. This is especially true with regard to energy -- a point that is being stressed with an increasing sense of urgency with each passing week that sees a new coal plant under construction there.

As has been mentioned here before, China's commitment to sustainable development appears to be sincere even as it clashes head-on with its non-negotiable goals for economic growth. The Chinese government is, for example, making considerable investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies.

But as California has clearly shown, technology alone is not enough. Indeed, even the most technically efficient technologies can be rendered impotent or irrelevant within an unfriendly policy context. China will be challenged to expedite the reform of its regulatory and pricing systems for energy as it focuses on the development and deployment of wind, solar and other clean energy technologies.

That's a very tall order. (GW)

Reform of the energy pricing system crucial

By Lin Boqaing
China Daily
December 25, 2007

Rapid economic growth has led to an increasing demand for energy. And as energy prices keep increasing more pressure is being put on supply and demand. The reform of the energy industry, especially its pricing mechanism, has drawn much attention.

The National Development and Reform Commission said recently it was necessary to reform the pricing mechanism of resource products to further improve efficiency. But the reform should be implemented at the right time with due consideration for all concerned.

Energy prices in China are mainly decided and controlled by the government and do not reflect the scarcity of resources and the impact of energy use on the environment. The prices are relatively low and the pricing mechanism is not in line with that of the international market. This has caused serious problems in energy utilization, economic development and environmental protection.

The pricing mechanism is not in line with production and consumption. This has led to the over-exploitation of resources. China's rapid economic growth is mainly built on an economic structure of high-energy consumption and low-efficiency. The waste in exploitation contrasts hugely with the shortage of resources.

At the same time, low energy prices have increased the competitiveness of China's high-energy-consuming, high-polluting and resource-based products, enlarged trade surpluses and exaggerated the pressure on the yuan's appreciation.

The government is now paying great attention to energy conservation and emission reduction. Without reform of the pricing mechanism, the efforts will only achieve half the results. Reform is a matter of urgency.

Reform will mean further price hikes, and as it takes hold, it will affect the producer price and consumer price indices. The pressure of increasing costs on producers will gradually be transferred to consumers. The process, however, will take time.

Though the rise of energy prices will increase pressure on middle and downstream products, its impact on inflation in the short term will depend on the supply and demand of consumer goods. Over-capacity will lessen pressure for price increases, judging by China's current industrial and energy consumption structure.

In the long run, a price lever is still the most effective way to conserve energy and reduce emissions. As long as energy prices are low, enterprises will lack the drive to improve efficiency and cut emissions. The only way to stop high-energy consuming enterprises from expanding is to increase energy costs. It is therefore necessary to reform the pricing mechanism, marketize energy products and let prices guide investment and economic restructuring.

The reform faces a series of tough issues.

First, the supporting measures of the reform are not completed. There is a lack of overall planning and design in the pricing structure of different energy products. For example, coal prices are market-led now but not electricity. China's crude oil prices are in line with the international market but reform of refined oil prices has not caught up.

Today discussions on reform of the energy pricing mechanism are mainly about bringing China's energy prices in line with the international market. But merely stressing this while ignoring the characteristics of the country's energy resources is not a good idea.

If the scarcity of resources and environmental costs are properly considered, China's energy prices may be even higher than the international level, which could attract more imports of energy resources.

Social fairness is also an issue that should be considered. The price hikes that will come with reform will produce different impacts on consumers of different income levels and social groups. Even prices that are in line with the international market will harm the interests of some consumers. Transparent subsidies for certain consumers will help solve the problem. This is also an important part of the reform.

The current way subsidies are granted to producers have led to unfair distribution and consumption, which does not improve efficiency or promote social fairness.

Compared with other reforms, reform of the energy pricing mechanism will take time because of its importance, complexity and sensitivity. Marketization offers a way.

Any further delay in reform will make us lose important opportunities and increase the cost of sustainable development. Without feasible alternatives, the inefficient use of energy resources driven by the low prices today will mean higher energy prices and a bigger cost to the environment tomorrow.

It is reported that mounting inflationary pressure could slow down our reform of the energy pricing mechanism, if we do not do it now, we will have to bear the costs later.

The author is director of China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University

Clean coal: hard to imagine, impossible to realize

Lost in the scientific and political debates over climate change and this country's growing concerns over energy security are the discussions about the human toll of our energy decisions. This is especially true among environmentalists who, on one hand, condemn the burning of fossil fuels -- primarily coal, and on the other oppose the development of of some renewable energy technologies -- especially wind energy. The opposition to wind technology (in many cases from the same environmentalists who oppose the burning of coal) usually boils down to concerns over their potential impacts on migrating birds and people's views.

Here's where the connection is apparently lost (or maybe just ignored). The people who don't want wind turbines spoiling their view of pristine ridge lines or ocean vistas are apparently unwilling to acknowledge that their continued opposition to wind (and its minimal impacts) only prolongs the massive devastation of land, people and communities due to our continuing dependence on "King Coal".

If, after reading the following article you are not thoroughly convinced that weaning ourselves from coal is equal in importance to reducing our dependence on foreign oil, read "Coal : A Human History" by Barbara Frees and/or "Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future" by Jeff Goodell.

To learn more about the topic and what you can DO to help increase public awareness about coal mining's destructive practice of mountaintop removal check out 700Mountains.org . (GW)

Coal's ascent is igniting a debate

W. Virginians split over costs, benefits

By John Donnelly
Boston Globe
December 26, 2007

TWILIGHT, W.Va. - Even the name of this place speaks of an end ahead.

Surrounded by the rubble of mountaintops obliterated to mine coal, several of tiny Twilight's homes have been demolished. King Coal bought and removed them. Now, the town is on the same path as scores of other West Virginia communities that gradually lost their residents and died in the shadow of a vast mining operation.

When Maria Gunnoe drove through last week, she didn't think of stopping. Gunnoe, 39, a descendant of Cherokees and Scots in Appalachia, has received death threats lately for her fight against filling valleys with the coal trash from the mountaintop excavations. And for her, any place, even this rapidly shrinking one, doesn't feel safe anymore. She travels now with a bullet-proof vest and a can of Mace.

"If I stop, I could be a dead woman," she said.

Her battle in the Appalachian Mountains is set against a backdrop of a great global fight over coal.

Over the past several months in Washington, D.C., places such as Twilight have become the center of a growing debate over carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming, the US drive for greater energy independence, the economic future of a coal-producing region, and the health of people who live among the coal fields.

On one side: environmentalists who want to sharply curtail coal use because of carbon dioxide emissions linked to global warming and mining operations they say destroy the nature of a land and its people. On the other side: the coal industry and those who seek America's independence from foreign oil, who argue that technology can create "clean coal" by burying the emissions in underground caverns.

But almost no one in Washington - and none of the Democratic or Republican presidential candidates - has mentioned what increased dependence on inexpensive, plentiful coal means for the people living amid the excavations.

In Twilight, 350 miles southwest of the nation's capital, residents say decisions made in Congress and at the White House shake their world like the powerful explosions on Montcoal Mountain that rattle the foundations of their homes. Some say these uncertain times for coal miners - whose jobs hang in the balance - eliminate tolerance for dissent.

Even though the US coal industry has reaped billions of dollars in revenue - Peabody Energy reported $5.2 billion in revenues in 2006 - the coal-rich regions have some of the worst poverty in the country. According to the US Census, the median income for Twilight and the surrounding region is less than $20,000 a year, and more than a quarter of families live below the poverty line.

Twilight is simply a line of double-wide trailers with no general store, set in the folds of steep hills, on a road that ends at a mountaintop coal operation.

"The coal industry just wants to keep what's happening here a secret," said Steve "Spankey" Webb, 51, of Twilight, who now works in an underground coal mine, a 33-year veteran of the business. "I know the country needs coal, but they don't worry about the people who live in these areas. They just don't care, I reckon."

Added Robbie Blevins, the retired president of United Mine Workers Local 9177: "We need the jobs here. I think if the coal companies were a little bit more responsible about how they do this mountaintop removal, it wouldn't be near as bad."

Few are betting against the coal industry now.

Coal accounts for at least half of the energy used to meet America's electricity needs, and coal-fired power plants produce 40 percent of the country's carbon dioxide emissions.

Since 2001, coal consumption nationally has risen gradually, according to US government figures, but several industry officials have forecast that demand could double by 2017 - if plans develop to turn coal into a liquid fuel.

Last week, Congress passed a bill that would allow the government to give up to $8 billion in loan guarantees to develop "clean coal" power plants and create liquid coal. Meanwhile, the new energy bill provides up to $240 million a year through 2012 on projects that would capture and store underground the carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired plants.

Pro-coal lawmakers and industry officials contend that if emissions-capture technology works, the pace of removing coal would probably accelerate, bringing more jobs to West Virginia and an increase in the mountaintop removal of coal.

Mountaintop removal involves stripping trees and topsoil and blasting away layers of rock to get at coal seams underneath. The blasting and the removal of tons of debris often have literally buried streams; or sent a torrent of water tainted with heavy metals downhill, flooding areas; or coated towns with layers of coal dust.

In Appalachia, activists say, coal companies have leveled more than 470 mountains in the region since the late 1970s. That pace stepped up considerably after 2002, when the Bush administration changed just one word in federal environmental regulations; it reclassified mining debris "waste" - rock blasted from the mountain, then pushed into a valley - as "fill," allowing companies to dump debris into mountain streams.

The Department of Interior is considering an additional change in the Clean Water Act that would effectively end a Reagan administration ban on mining within 100 feet of a stream.

In a Washington speech last week, Senator John F. Kerry - Democrat of Massachusetts and the party's 2004 presidential nominee - said the United States should invest billions in clean-coal technology. "Coal is cheap, dirty, and abundant not only here at home, but also in countries like China," he said.

Kerry later said that while he opposes "blasting off mountains" to mine coal, the resource must be a part of the United States' long-term energy strategy.

West Virginia's governor, two US senators, and three US representatives, however, have supported the practice; each declined requests by the Globe to comment on mountaintop-removal coal mining.

Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association, contends that the industry's future is extremely bright. He said 20,000 West Virginians are working in the industry, which has given residents "an opportunity to stay home in West Virginia and raise their kids here."

Coal is a promising solution to several urgent energy problems, he said: "We have plenty of coal resources in this country, we can make electricity with it, we can make liquid fuels with it, and we can sequester the carbon. I don't understand the hesitancy" to commit to it.

Raney also said the industry has made "tremendous strides" in environmental cleanup from mountaintop removal. "My conscience is completely clean," he said.

Gunnoe, a full-time organizer for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, rejected the idea that coal can be a viable, environmentally friendly energy source. Since 2001, she said, seven floods - some possibly caused by waste water-containment pools that burst - have submerged almost five acres of her family farm and polluted her drinking water.

"Clean coal is a complete and total lie," Gunnoe said last week on her 24-acre property in Bob White, W.Va. "Coal is black, through and through."

Mountaintop-removal mining, she said, is a moral test for society: Will it choose cleaner alternatives, or will it choose to generate electricity from a process that "is helping kill off a whole culture" of people whose lives are intertwined with the region's wooded environment.

Gunnoe and others have filed lawsuits to stop mining companies from dumping debris into valleys; their aim is stop mountaintop removal of coal throughout the Appalachians.

After winning a case in October that shut down one mining operation, resulting in the layoff of 39 workers, Gunnoe and others received death threats. One person, she said, walked up to her and threatened to destroy her property if she didn't stop.

But Gunnoe, a slender, tough-talking mother of two whose brown hair reaches to the small of her back, said she and others will press ahead - carefully.

"The mining companies want to depopulate the area, like in Twilight," she said. "They can destroy the land and the water, but I'm not leaving. I'm here for the long haul. I'm going to continue fighting."

Peace, prosperity, equity & sustainability

Tropical diseases on the move driven by climate change

There are so many reasons why trying to play the game of climate change "winners and losers" is a futile/irresponsible undertaking. The fact is, no one can predict its impacts. We've already been presented with surprises like the premature melting of the Arctic. That development threatens to give new meaning to cold war as nations quarrel over the mineral rights to the ocean floor that the melting has made accessible.

More serious and no less immediate is the introduction of deadly tropical diseases to regions of the world previously immune to them. Scientists have warned about this possibility for some time. Like other phenomena associated with climate change, this appears to be occurring sooner than even the most dire predictions. (GW)

As Earth Warms Up, Tropical Virus Moves to Italy

ByElisabeth Rosenthal
New York Times
December 23, 2007

CASTIGLIONE DI CERVIA, Italy — Panic was spreading this August through this tidy village of 2,000 as one person after another fell ill with weeks of high fever, exhaustion and excruciating bone pain, just as most of Italy was enjoying Ferragosto, its most important summer holiday.

“At one point, I simply couldn’t stand up to get out of the car,” said Antonio Ciano (in above photo), 62, an elegant retiree in a pashmina scarf and trendy blue glasses. “I fell. I thought, O.K., my time is up. I’m going to die. It was really that dramatic.”

By midmonth, more than 100 people had come down with the same malady. Although the worst symptoms dissipated after a couple of weeks, no doctor could figure out what was wrong.

People blamed pollution in the river. They denounced the government. But most of all they blamed recent immigrants from tropical Africa for bringing the pestilence to their sleepy settlement of pastel stucco homes.

“Why immigrants?” asked Rina Ventura, who owns a shop selling shoes and purses. “I kept thinking of these terrible diseases that you see on TV, like malaria. We were terrified. There was no name and no treatment.”

Oddly, the villagers were both right and wrong. After a month of investigation, Italian public health officials discovered that the people of Castiglione di Cervia were, in fact, suffering from a tropical disease, chikungunya, a relative of dengue fever normally found in the Indian Ocean region. But the immigrants spreading the disease were not humans but insects: tiger mosquitoes, who can thrive in a warming Europe.

Aided by global warming and globalization, Castiglione di Cervia has the dubious distinction of playing host to the first outbreak in modern Europe of a disease that had previously been seen only in the tropics.

“By the time we got back the name and surname of the virus, our outbreak was over,” said Dr. Rafaella Angelini, director of the regional public health department in Ravenna. “When they told us it was chikungunya, it was not a problem for Ravenna any more. But I thought: this is a big problem for Europe.”

The epidemic proved that tropical viruses are now able to spread in new areas, far north of their previous range. The tiger mosquito, which first arrived in Ravenna three years ago, is thriving across southern Europe and even in France and Switzerland.

And if chikungunya can spread to Castiglione — “a place not special in any way,” Dr. Angelini said — there is no reason why it cannot go to other Italian villages. There is no reason why dengue, an even more debilitating tropical disease, cannot as well.

“This is the first case of an epidemic of a tropical disease in a developed, European country,” said Dr. Roberto Bertollini, director of the World Health Organization’s Health and Environment program. “Climate change creates conditions that make it easier for this mosquito to survive and it opens the door to diseases that didn’t exist here previously. This is a real issue. Now, today. It is not something a crazy environmentalist is warning about.”

Was he shocked to discover chikungunya in Italy, his native land? “We knew this would happen sooner or later,” he said. “We just didn’t know where or when.”

It certainly caught this town off guard on Aug. 9, when public health officials in Ravenna received an angry call from Stefano Merlo, who owns the gas station.

“Within 100 meters of my home, there were more than 30 people with fevers over 40 degrees,” or 104 Fahrenheit, said Mr. Merlo, 47. “I wanted to know what was going on. I knew it couldn’t be normal.”

August is not the season for high fevers, Dr. Angelini agreed, and within days of interviewing patients she was intrigued.

“The stories were so similar and so dramatic,” she said. “But we had no clue it was something tropical.”

Hard-working shopkeepers could not get out of bed because their hips hurt so much. Able-bodied men could not lift spoons to their mouths. (Months later, many still have debilitating joint pain.)

From the start, doctors suspected that the disease was spread by insects, rather than people. While almost all homes had one person who was ill, family members seemed not to catch the disease from one another.

They initially focused on sand flies, since the disease clustered on streets by the river.

Canceling their traditional mid-August vacations (in Italy, a true sign of panic), health officials sent off blood samples, called national infectious-disease experts, searched the Internet and set out traps to see what insects were in the neighborhood. The first surprise was that the insect traps contained not sand flies but tiger mosquitoes, and huge numbers of them.

The scientific survey confirmed what residents of Castiglione had come to accept as a horrible nuisance, though not a deadly threat.

“In the last three or four years, you couldn’t live on these streets because the mosquitoes were so bad,” said Rino Ricchi, a road worker who fell ill, standing at the entrance to his neatly tended garden, where mosquito traps have now replaced decorative fountains. “We used to delight in having a garden or a porch to eat dinner. You couldn’t this year, you’d get eaten alive.”

Said Dr. Angelini: “They were treating the mosquitoes like an annoyance. They knew that mosquitoes could spread tropical diseases but they had peace of mind because they knew this didn’t happen in Italy.”

Ravenna immediately set about killing the bugs in the hopes of containing the epidemic. Workers sprayed insecticides and went into each family’s garden, emptying flower pots, fountains and the rainwater collection barrels to remove the mosquitoes’ breeding ground.

By early September, there were no new cases in Castiglione di Cervia. But there were a number of mini-epidemics in the region — in Ravenna, Cesena and Rimini — set off by tiger mosquitoes there. Each was controlled in the same way.

By that point, the doctors had cataloged the patients’ symptoms and tried to match them to mosquito-borne diseases.

“We realized,” Dr. Angelini said, “we were seeing a photocopy of an outbreak on Réunion,” a French island in the Indian Ocean where more than 10,000 people have contracted chikungunya in the last two years. Blood tests confirmed the diagnosis. By summer’s end, home-grown chikungunya had been diagnosed in nearly 300 Italians.

Chikungunya is spread when tiger mosquitoes drink blood from an infected person and, if conditions are right, pass the virus on when they bite again. Tiger mosquitoes first came to southern Italy with shipments of tires from Albania about a decade ago but their habitat has expanded steadily northward as temperatures have risen.

But the doctors were baffled by how chikungunya made its way into mosquitoes in northern Italy since no one in Castiglione di Cervia had been abroad. In the past two years France, especially Paris, has had a number of imported cases of chikungunya, in travelers returning from Réunion. But the disease has never spread in France, because the mosquito cannot thrive there yet.

Eventually investigators discovered a link: one of the first men to fall ill in Castiglione di Cervia had been visited by a feverish relative in early July. That relative, an Italian, had previously traveled to Kerala, India. Chikungunya traveled to Italy in his blood, but climatic conditions are now such that it can spread and find a home here.

Now it is winter in Castiglione di Cervia, near freezing as the sun went down on a recent evening and Christmas lights glowed across the piazza. There are no mosquitoes now.

But dozens of residents still suffer from arthritis, a known complication of chikungunya.

Mr. Ricchi, the road worker, says he still has trouble clenching his fists, and his left ankle has horrible pains. Three people in the town died after getting the virus, Mr. Merlo said, although all of those victims had other illnesses as well.

From the start, townspeople noticed that the very elderly never got the disease. Now it makes sense: “If all you do is walk the 50 yards from your home to the church, there’s not much chance to get bitten,” said Mr. Ciano, the retiree.

But the biggest mystery is whether chikungunya will emerge here next summer. In the tropics, it is a year-round disease, since the mosquitoes breed continually. But the virus can winter over in mosquito eggs, too, and no one knows if there are reservoirs of sleeping eggs in some pool of water in Italy.

With climate change at hand, Dr. Bertollini said, chikungunya will surely be back somewhere in Europe again.

Suffering and social injustice continue in New Orleans

So what does it say about the United States when actor Brad Pitt has a better plan to address the post-Katrina housing crisis in New Orleans than either the president of the United States or any of the candidates (Democrat or Republican) running for office? With many people still living in formaldehyde-polluted trailers, the New Orleans city council is following through with its plans to demolish the city's four largest low-income housing developments.

Protesters, who understandably do not trust the promises of government officials, do not believe that the current units will be replaced with housing they can afford. In their view, the plan to transform New Orleans into a kind of sanitized "Dixeyland" tourist destination (devoid of "undesirable elements") continues to unfold. (GW)

Violent protests over housing erupt in New Orleans

CNN News
December 21, 2007

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- Protests against a City Council plan to tear down low-income New Orleans housing turned ugly Thursday, with police using pepper spray and stun guns to clear a crowd angry they weren't allowed into City Hall for the vote.

The City Council voted unanimously to greenlight the demolition of the city's four largest public housing developments, saying they are too damaged by Hurricane Katrina to allow residents back into them.

But many in New Orleans, including former residents of the developments, say they fear the local and federal governments will not guarantee similarly affordable housing be built in their place -- calling the demolition an effort to move poor people out of the city.

At about 11 a.m., several protesters were dragged out of council chambers after scuffles broke out among people who packed the room, and members of the crowd booed council members and shouted insults at them.

About 30 minutes later, hundreds more protesters angry that they weren't allowed into the meeting began rattling an iron gate outside City Hall.

"They were pulling the gate open, trying to come in," said Superintendent Warren J. Riley of the New Orleans Police Department. "They were allowed to stand there and protest peacefully. Then they began to try and tear the gate down. They punched a couple of civil sheriffs in the face. They broke the gate open. So, some of those officers did use Mace to defend themselves and also to regain control of the gate and close the gate."

Riley said that after the council chamber's maximum capacity of 278 was reached, no one else was allowed inside.

Video, shot by New Orleans television station WDSU, shows at least one law enforcement officer shooting a liquid spray at the crowd as police struggled with protesters for control of the gate.

Moments later, a woman could be seen crying and screaming on the ground before several other protesters picked her up and carried her away.

Peter O'Connell, who described himself as a student living in New Orleans, told the station he was hit by pepper spray and narrowly avoided being shocked by a police stun gun, which hit his jacket but not his body.

"We were just trying to gain access to the City Council meeting, which we all feel and know that we have a right to attend," he said. "We were denied access and, in the process, brutalized by the police."

Riley said the use of force was justified.

"It was clear that there were people there that had one goal in mind and that was to be disruptive, be disobedient and in some cases to actually start a physical confrontation," he said.

The department said 15 people were arrested. Most were charged with disturbing the peace, and all had been released from jail by Thursday evening, police said. Authorities said there were no serious injuries.

After the vote, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin commended the council for the decision.

"Could the federal government have done better? Sure. Could [federal housing officials] have opened more units quicker? Sure," he said. "But we are where we are today, and today, we had a unified decision to move forward with accountability, honoring our overriding premise that every citizen has a right to return to the city."

The city has promised to replace the developments with mixed-use family housing that will provide plenty of low-income units.

Some at Thursday's meeting said that saving the existing developments would not have been a favor to the city's poor.

Howard Robertson, a retired major with New Orleans police, said the units already were in bad shape before Katrina -- with many of them boarded up and vacant havens for crack dealers.

"Since the storm, they are even in worse condition -- windows are broken, more than a fourth of all the buildings are boarded up where you can't even go in," he said. "All the city's trying to do is actually improve the living conditions."

"We are facing the perfect storm for the world's hungry"

It is amazing to me how much most of us in the "developed world" take food for granted. And not just food -- cheap food.

That will probably not be the case much longer.

Dire warnings have been issued by the United Nations and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) among others in recent months. Their message is clear: unprecedented demands on nations' agricultural systems (including increased dependence on unsustainable energy/fossil fuel-intensive farming practices, climate instability, and the conversion of land to grow crops for biofuels ) have converged to dramatically drive up food prices and threaten future food security.

Unfortunately, those who have the power to address this problem don't seem to be listening. And once again, the poor are the first to feel the brunt of these developments. However, if nations continue to adopt a business-as-usual attitude it won't take long before everyone will feel the pain. (GW)

World food stocks dwindling rapidly, UN warns

By Elisabeth Rosenthal
International Herald Tribune

Monday, December 17, 2007

ROME: In an "unforeseen and unprecedented" shift, the world food supply is dwindling rapidly and food prices are soaring to historic levels, the top food and agriculture official of the United Nations warned Monday.

The changes created "a very serious risk that fewer people will be able to get food," particularly in the developing world, said Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

The agency's food price index rose by more than 40 percent this year, compared with 9 percent the year before - a rate that was already unacceptable, he said. New figures show that the total cost of foodstuffs imported by the neediest countries rose 25 percent, to $107 million, in the last year.

At the same time, reserves of cereals are severely depleted, FAO records show. World wheat stores declined 11 percent this year, to the lowest level since 1980. That corresponds to 12 weeks of the world's total consumption - much less than the average of 18 weeks consumption in storage during the period 2000-2005. There are only 8 weeks of corn left, down from 11 weeks in the earlier period.

Prices of wheat and oilseeds are at record highs, Diouf said Monday. Wheat prices have risen by $130 per ton, or 52 percent, since a year ago. U.S. wheat futures broke $10 a bushel for the first time Monday, the agricultural equivalent of $100 a barrel oil. (Page 16)

Diouf blamed a confluence of recent supply and demand factors for the crisis, and he predicted that those factors were here to stay. On the supply side, these include the early effects of global warming, which has decreased crop yields in some crucial places, and a shift away from farming for human consumption toward crops for biofuels and cattle feed. Demand for grain is increasing with the world population, and more is diverted to feed cattle as the population of upwardly mobile meat-eaters grows.

"We're concerned that we are facing the perfect storm for the world's hungry," said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program, in a telephone interview. She said that her agency's food procurement costs had gone up 50 percent in the past 5 years and that some poor people are being "priced out of the food market."

To make matters worse, high oil prices have doubled shipping costs in the past year, putting enormous stress on poor nations that need to import food as well as the humanitarian agencies that provide it.

"You can debate why this is all happening, but what's most important to us is that it's a long-term trend, reversing decades of decreasing food prices," Sheeran said.

Climate specialists say that the vulnerability will only increase as further effects of climate change are felt. "If there's a significant change in climate in one of our high production areas, if there is a disease that effects a major crop, we are in a very risky situation," said Mark Howden of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Canberra.

Already "unusual weather events," linked to climate change - such as droughts, floods and storms - have decreased production in important exporting countries like Australia and Ukraine, Diouf said.

In Southern Australia, a significant reduction in rainfall in the past few years led some farmers to sell their land and move to Tasmania, where water is more reliable, said Howden, one of the authors of a recent series of papers in the Procedings of the National Academy of Sciences on climate change and the world food supply.

"In the U.S., Australia, and Europe, there's a very substantial capacity to adapt to the effects on food - with money, technology, research and development," Howden said. "In the developing world, there isn't."

Sheeran said, that on a recent trip to Mali, she was told that food stocks were at an all time low. The World Food Program feeds millions of children in schools and people with HIV/AIDS. Poor nutrition in these groups increased the risk serious disease and death.

Diouf suggested that all countries and international agencies would have to "revisit" agricultural and aid policies they had adopted "in a different economic environment." For example, with food and oil prices approaching record, it may not make sense to send food aid to poorer countries, but instead to focus on helping farmers grow food locally.

FAO plans to start a new initiative that will offer farmers in poor countries vouchers that can be redeemed for seeds and fertilizer, and will try to help them adapt to climate change.

The recent scientific papers concluded that farmers could adjust to 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) to 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees) of warming by switching to more resilient species, changing planting times, or storing water for irrigation, for example.

But that after that, "all bets are off," said Francesco Tubiello, of Columbia University Earth Institute. "Many people assume that we will never have a problem with food production on a global scale, but there is a strong potential for negative surprises."

In Europe, officials said they were already adjusting policies to the reality of higher prices. The European Union recently suspended a "set-aside" of land for next year - a longstanding program that essentially paid farmers to leave 10 percent of their land untilled as a way to increase farm prices and reduce surpluses. Also, starting in January, import tariffs on all cereal will be eliminated for six months, to make it easier for European countries to buy grain from elsewhere. But that may make it even harder for poor countries to obtain the grain they need.

In an effort to promote free markets, the European Union has been in the process of reducing farm subsidies and this has accelerated the process.

"It's much easier to do with the new economics," said Michael Mann a spokesman for the EU agriculture commission. "We saw this coming to a certain extent, but we are surprised at how quickly it is happening."

But he noted that farm prices the last few decades have been lower than at any time in history, so the change seems extremely dramatic.

Diouf noted that there had been "tension and political unrest related to food markets" in a number of poor countries this year, including Morocco, Senegal and Mauritania. "We need to play a catalytic role to quickly boost crop production in the most affected countries," he said.

Part of the current problem is an outgrowth of prosperity. More people in the world now eat meat, diverting grain from humans to livestock. A more complicated issue is the use of crops to make biofuels, which are often heavily subsidized. A major factor in rising corn prices globally is that many farmers in the United States are now selling their corn to make subsidized ethanol.

Mann said the European Union had intentionally set low targets for biofuel use - 10 per cent by 2020 - to limit food price rises and that it plans to import some biofuel. "We don't want all our farmers switching from food to biofuel," he said.

Who says we won't be fooled again?

Not everyone is thrilled with the outcome at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that recently concluded in Bali. George Monbiot is tough, hard-nosed, respected journalist. I'm sure many consider him a radical (see "Manifesto for a New World Order"). His book on what can be done to avert a global climate catastrophe: "Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning" is one of the best books I read this past year.

His pull-no-punches analysis of the Bali talks within the context of Kyoto should give one pause. Climate change is a very tough issue. No one can be allowed a "pass" on this based on reputation or even good intentions. The stakes are too high. (GW)

We've been suckered again by the U.S. So Far the Bali deal is worse than Kyoto

Bush trashed the climate talks. But look what Gore did.

By George Monbiot
The Guardian
December 17, 2007

“After eleven days of negotiations, governments have come up with a compromise deal that could … even lead to emission increases. … The highly compromised political deal … is largely attributable to the position of the United States which was heavily influenced by fossil fuel and automobile industry interests. The failure to reach agreement led to the talks spilling over into an all night session …”(1)

These are extracts from a press release by Friends of the Earth. So what? Well it was published on December 11th - I mean to say, December 11th 1997. The US had just put a wrecking ball through the Kyoto Protocol. George W Bush was innocent; he was busy executing prisoners in Texas. Its climate negotiators were led by Albert Arnold Gore.

The European Union had asked for greenhouse gas cuts of 15% by 2010. Gore’s team drove them down to 5.2% by 2012. Then it did something worse: it destroyed the whole agreement.

Most of the other governments insisted that the cuts be made at home. But Gore demanded a series of loopholes big enough to drive a Hummer through. The rich nations, he said, should be allowed to buy their cuts from other countries(2). When he won, the protocol created an exuberant global market in fake emissions cuts. The western nations could buy “hot air” from the former Soviet Union. Because the cuts were made against emissions in 1990, and because industry in that bloc had subsequently collapsed, the FSU countries would pass well below the bar. Gore’s scam allowed them to sell the gases they weren’t producing to other nations. He also insisted that rich nations could buy nominal cuts from poor ones. Factories in India and China have made billions by raising their production of potent greenhouse gases, so that carbon traders in the rich world will pay to clean them up(3).

The result of this sabotage is that the market for low carbon technologies has remained moribund. Without an assured high value for carbon cuts, without any certainty that government policies will be sustained, companies have continued to invest in the safe commercial prospects offered by fossil fuels rather than gamble on a market without an obvious floor.

By ensuring that the rich nations would not make real cuts, Gore also guaranteed that the poor ones scoffed when we asked them to do as we don’t. When George Bush announced, in 2001, that he would not ratify the protocol, the world cursed and stamped its feet. But his intransigence affected only the United States. Gore’s team ruined it for everyone.

The destructive power of the US delegation is not the only thing that hasn’t changed. After the Kyoto Protocol was agreed, the British environment secretary, John Prescott, announced that “this is a truly historic deal which will help curb the problems of climate change. For the first time it commits developed countries to make legally binding cuts in their emissions.”(4) Ten years later the current environment secretary, Hilary Benn, told us that “this is an historic breakthrough and a huge step forward. For the first time ever all the world’s nations have agreed to negotiate on a deal to tackle dangerous climate change.”(5) Do these people have a chip inserted?

In both cases the United States demanded terms which appeared impossible for the other nations to accept. Before Kyoto, the other negotiators flatly rejected Gore’s proposals for emissions trading. So his team threatened to sink the talks. The other nations capitulated, but the US still held out on technicalities until the very last moment, when it suddenly appeared to concede. In 1997 and in 2007 it got the best of both worlds: it wrecked the treaty and was praised for saving it.

Hilary Benn is an idiot. Our diplomats are suckers. United States negotiators have pulled the same trick twice and for the second time our governments have fallen for it.

There are still two years to go, but so far the new agreement is even worse than the Kyoto Protocol. It contains no targets and no dates. A new set of guidelines also agreed at Bali extend and strengthen the worst of Al Gore’s trading scams, the clean development mechanism(6). Benn and the other dupes are cheering and waving their hats as the train leaves the station at last, having failed to notice that it is travelling in the wrong direction.

Though Gore does a better job of governing now that he is out of office, he was no George Bush. He wanted a strong, binding and meaningful protocol, but US politics had made it impossible. In July 1997 the Senate had voted 95-0 to sink any treaty which failed to treat developing countries in the same way as it treated the rich ones(7). Though they knew this was impossible for developing countries to accept, all the Democrats lined up with all the Republicans. The Clinton administration had proposed a compromise: instead of binding commitments for the developing nations, Gore would demand emissions trading(8). But even when he succeeded he announced that “we will not submit this agreement for ratification [in the Senate] until key developing nations participate”(9). Clinton could thus avoid an unwinnable war.

So why, regardless of the character of its leaders, does the United States act this way? Because, like several other modern democracies, it is subject to two great corrupting forces. I have written before about the role of the corporate media (particularly in the US) in downplaying the threat of climate change and demonising anyone who tries to address it(10). I won’t bore you with it again, except to remark that at 3pm eastern standard time on Saturday there were 20 news items on the front page of the Fox News website. The climate deal came 20th, after “Bikini-wearing stewardesses sell calendar for charity” and “Florida store sells ‘Santa Hates You’ T-shirt”(11).

Let us consider instead the other great source of corruption: campaign finance. The Senate rejects effective action on climate change because its members are bought and bound by the companies which stand to lose. When you study the tables showing who gives what to whom, you are struck by two things(12).

One is the quantity. Since 1990, the energy and natural resources sector (mostly coal, oil, gas and electricity) has given $418m to federal politicians in the US(13). Transport companies have given $355m(14). The other is the width: the undiscriminating nature of this munificence. The big polluters favour the Republicans, but most of them also fund Democrats. During the 2000 presidential campaign, oil and gas companies lavished money on George Bush, but they also gave Al Gore $142,000(15), while transport companies gave him $347,000(16). The whole US political system is in hock to people who put their profits ahead of the biosphere.

So don’t believe all this nonsense about waiting for the next president to sort it out. This is a much bigger problem than George W Bush. Yes, he is viscerally opposed to tackling climate change. But viscera don’t have much to do with it. Until the American people confront their political funding system, their politicians will keep speaking from the pocket, not the gut.

"Turning ocean winds into gold"

When I posted a story on this back in December 2006, the concept of a kite hauler was featured in the New York Times Magazine Annual Review of the year's best ideas. It seemed pretty conceptual at the time. But here we are just a little over a year later and the first commercial freighter to be pulled by a high tech kite has been christened and is preparing to take its maiden voyage this coming January.

Back then a California company called KiteShip appeared to have the competitive edge on the technology. But it looks as if German-based SkySails will be the first out of the gate. (GW)

New high-tech kite helps power ship, cut emissions

By Erik Kirschbaum
Reuters
December 16, 2007

HAMBURG, Germany, Dec 16 (Reuters) - Turning ocean winds into gold while cutting greenhouse emissions in the process might sound like some sort of alchemy for the 21st century.

But unlike futile earlier efforts to convert ordinary metals to gold, two fast-growing German companies have worked together developing a high-tech kite system to pull enormous ships across the oceans -- and save enormous amounts of money.

The 132 metre (433 ft) long MV "Beluga SkySails" will make its maiden voyage in January across the Atlantic to Venezuela, up to Boston and back to Europe. It will be pulled by a giant computer-guided 500,000-euro ($725,000) kite tethered to a 15-metre high mast.

It is a throwback to an earlier maritime age, harnessing the winds that fell out of favour over a century ago when sailing lost the battle for merchant shipping to modern steam power because it was seen then as primitive and unpredictable.

But now, in the age of climate change, wind power is making a remarkable comeback thanks to modern technology.

"This is the start of a revolution for the way ships are powered," Beluga chief executive Niels Stolberg said in an interview with Reuters on the windswept deck of his new ship MV Beluga SkySails. "It's a small but crucial step for the future."

To latch onto the powerful winds prevailing well above the surface, the kite attached to the high-tech steerage unit flies up to 300 metres high to tug the 10,000-tonne ship forward, supporting its diesel engines and cutting fuel consumption.

Under favourable wind conditions, the 160-square metre kite shaped like a paraglider is expected to reduce fuel costs by up to 20 percent or more ($1,600 per day) and cut, by a similarly significant amount, its carbon dioxide emissions.

Burning fossil fuels cause CO2 blamed for climate change.

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE?

A driving force for Beluga -- and other shippers already lining up to buy the system if it delivers on its promise -- is the fuel price, which has tripled for shippers in recent years.

While it might seem almost too simple -- or too good -- to be true, SkySails inventor Stephan Wrage and German engineers have spent more than five years perfecting the system and they will tell you that it is anything but pie-in-the sky technology.

"At the heart of this all for me, the real motivating factor is to get to the crossroads of ecology and economics -- and to prove it pays to protect the environment," Wrage said in an interview on the ship so new it still smells of fresh paint.

While some political and industry leaders complain about the financial burdens of fighting climate change and cite costs in resisting CO2 reduction efforts, Wrage said SkySails is proof that the opposite can be true: there's money to be made.

"If our calculations are right, our clients will not only have considerably greater earnings but also substantially reduce their CO2 output as well," the 35-year-old added after a ceremony to christen the new ship in Hamburg port on Saturday.

"To be able to make a contribution to fighting climate change makes us all proud," the SkySails managing director said as the sail made of ultralight synthetic fibre and as big as a medium-sized passenger jet unfurled in a breeze above the deck.

MUCH BIGGER KITES COMING

SkySails developed the kite propulsion system that Beluga Shipping only just finished installing on the new cargo ship. Both firms aim to prove on a commercial scale what years of testing on smaller vessels showed: you can turn wind into cash.

Wrage, who got the idea as a 16-year-old while flying kites and wishing he could tap their power to make a small sail boat go faster, is optimistic even greater savings can be achieved. He said larger kites should cut fuel usage by 30 to 50 percent.

Two 320-square metre kites will pull two more Beluga ships by 2009 and after that 600-square metre kites will be added.

"That's where the savings get really interesting," he said.

But the immediate impact on cutting CO2 caused by ships will be limited. Shipping carries more than 90 percent of the world's traded goods. There are more than 50,000 merchant ships carrying everything from oil, gas, coal, and grains to electronic goods.

They emit 800 million tonnes of CO2 each year -- 5 percent of the world's total. They emit high levels of sulphur dioxide.

Yet Wrage is confident the demand will take off. There are three orders in hand and if the savings achieved on a smaller 55-metre long prototype are confirmed by the "Beluga SkySails", he said others were lined up to buy systems.

"We're planning to equip four to eight ships next year, provided the first voyage turns out as well as the trials did," he said. "In 2009 we expect to sell at least 35 systems. After that, we want to at least double every year."

The target is 1,500 vessels equipped by 2015.

"I've had a lot of meetings where shippers have said to me 'If it works out on the Beluga SkySails we're going to buy one, two, four or 10 systems'," Wrage said. "Believe me. If we're successful now, it won't be hard to find buyers." (Editing by Stephen Weeks) ($1=.6881 Euro)

Radical agriculture revisited

I've always thought that when intellectual carpetbaggers attempt to co-opt words or catch-phrases like "natural", "organic" or " sustainability" it's precisely because they understand the power of word's underlying concept.

Whereas the terms natural and organic apply to inherent qualities of a product or practice, sustainable is, I would argue more systemic and consequently a bit more complex and difficult to describe. I don't think that means it is any less precise. Just more susceptible to being exploited and co-opted.

The Brundtland Report: "Our Common Future" published in 1987 is usually cited as the document that officially defined sustainable development. In reality, folks involved in appropriate technology like Rodale the New Alchemy Institute were designing, modeling and building sustainable food and energy systems dating back to the early '40's (Rodale) and '70's (New Alchemy).

The work of these grassroots non-profit organizations became the basis for the sustainable agriculture movement (once deemed "Radical Agriculture") in the U.S. Their definitions, models and practices are as valid today as they were 30 years ago. (GW)

Our Decrepit Food Factories

By Michael Pollan
New York Times Magazine
December 16, 2007

The word “sustainability” has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever “it” means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university’s spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school’s faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”

Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the “rectification of the names.” The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.

For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial agriculture as “unsustainable” in precisely these terms, though what form the “breakdown” might take or when it might happen has never been certain. Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop working? The soil lose its fertility? All these breakdowns have been predicted and they may yet come to pass. But if a system is unsustainable — if its workings offend the rules of nature — the cracks and signs of breakdown may show up in the most unexpected times and places. Two stories in the news this year, stories that on their faces would seem to have nothing to do with each other let alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent breakdown in the way we’re growing food today.

The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS — 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria. It’s Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain — called “community-acquired MRSA” — is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent of the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases. That the antibiotics speed up the animals’ growth also commends their use to industrial agriculture, but the crucial fact is that without these pharmaceuticals, meat production practiced on the scale and with the intensity we practice it could not be sustained for months, let alone decades.

Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this situation is a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, the profligate use of these antibiotics — in many cases the very same ones we depend on when we’re sick — would lead to the evolution of bacteria that could shake them off like a spring shower. It appears that “sooner or later” may be now. Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations have become reservoirs of MRSA. A European study found that 60 percent of pig farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs (compared with 5 percent of farms that did not feed pigs antibiotics). This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that a strain of “MRSA from an animal reservoir has recently entered the human population and is now responsible for [more than] 20 percent of all MRSA in the Netherlands.” Is this strictly a European problem? Evidently not. According to a study in Veterinary Microbiology, MRSA was found on 45 percent of the 20 pig farms sampled in Ontario, and in 20 percent of the pig farmers. (People can harbor the bacteria without being infected by it.) Thanks to Nafta, pigs move freely between Canada and the United States. So MRSA may be present on American pig farms; we just haven’t looked yet.

Scientists have not established that any of the strains of MRSA presently killing Americans originated on factory farms. But given the rising public alarm about MRSA and the widespread use on these farms of precisely the class of antibiotics to which these microbes have acquired resistance, you would think our public-health authorities would be all over it. Apparently not. When, in August, the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition asked the Food and Drug Administration what the agency was doing about the problem of MRSA in livestock, the agency had little to say. Earlier this month, though, the F.D.A. indicated that it may begin a pilot screening program with the C.D.C.

As for independent public-health researchers, they say they can’t study the problem without the cooperation of the livestock industry, which, not surprisingly, has not been forthcoming. For what if these researchers should find proof that one of the hidden costs of cheap meat is an epidemic of drug-resistant infection among young people? There would be calls to revolutionize the way we produce meat in this country. This is not something that the meat and the pharmaceutical industries or their respective regulatory “watchdogs” — the Department of Agriculture and F.D.A. — are in any rush to see happen.

he second story is about honeybees, which have endured their own mysterious epidemic this past year. Colony Collapse Disorder was first identified in 2006, when a Pennsylvanian beekeeper noticed that his bees were disappearing — going out on foraging expeditions in the morning never to return. Within months, beekeepers in 24 states were reporting losses of between 20 percent and 80 percent of their bees, in some cases virtually overnight. Entomologists have yet to identify the culprit, but suspects include a virus, agricultural pesticides and a parasitic mite. (Media reports that genetically modified crops or cellphone towers might be responsible have been discounted.) But whatever turns out to be the immediate cause of colony collapse, many entomologists believe some such disaster was waiting to happen: the lifestyle of the modern honeybee leaves the insects so stressed out and their immune systems so compromised that, much like livestock on factory farms, they’ve become vulnerable to whatever new infectious agent happens to come along.

You need look no farther than a California almond orchard to understand how these bees, which have become indispensable workers in the vast fields of industrial agriculture, could have gotten into such trouble. Like a great many other food crops, like an estimated one out of every three bites you eat, the almond depends on bees for pollination. No bees, no almonds. The problem is that almonds today are grown in such vast monocultures — 80 percent of the world’s crop comes from a 600,000-acre swath of orchard in California’s Central Valley — that, when the trees come into bloom for three weeks every February, there are simply not enough bees in the valley to pollinate all those flowers. For what bee would hang around an orchard where there’s absolutely nothing to eat for the 49 weeks of the year that the almond trees aren’t in bloom? So every February the almond growers must import an army of migrant honeybees to the Central Valley — more than a million hives housing as many as 40 billion bees in all.

They come on the backs of tractor-trailers from as far away as New England. These days, more than half of all the beehives in America are on the move to California every February, for what has been called the world’s greatest “pollination event.” (Be there!) Bees that have been dormant in the depths of a Minnesota winter are woken up to go to work in the California spring; to get them in shape to travel cross-country and wade into the vast orgy of almond bloom, their keepers ply them with “pollen patties” — which often include ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and flower pollen imported from China. Because the pollination is so critical and the bee population so depleted, almond growers will pay up to $150 to rent a box of bees for three weeks, creating a multimillion-dollar industry of migrant beekeeping that barely existed a few decades ago. Thirty-five years ago you could rent a box of bees for $10. (Pimping bees is the whole of the almond business for these beekeepers since almond honey is so bitter as to be worthless.)

In 2005 the demand for honeybees in California had so far outstripped supply that the U.S.D.A. approved the importation of bees from Australia. These bees get off a 747 at SFO and travel by truck to the Central Valley, where they get to work pollinating almond flowers — and mingling with bees arriving from every corner of America. As one beekeeper put it to Singeli Agnew in The San Francisco Chronicle, California’s almond orchards have become “one big brothel” — a place where each February bees swap microbes and parasites from all over the country and the world before returning home bearing whatever pathogens they may have picked up. Add to this their routine exposure to agricultural pesticides and you have a bee population ripe for an epidemic national in scope. In October, the journal Science published a study that implicated a virus (Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus) in Colony Collapse Disorder — a virus that was found in some of the bees from Australia. (The following month, the U.S.D.A. questioned the study, pointing out that the virus was present in North America as early as 2002.)

“We’re placing so many demands on bees we’re forgetting that they’re a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle,” Marla Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told The Chronicle. “We’re wanting them to function as a machine. . . . We’re expecting them to get off the truck and be fine.”

We’re asking a lot of our bees. We’re asking a lot of our pigs too. That seems to be a hallmark of industrial agriculture: to maximize production and keep food as cheap as possible, it pushes natural systems and organisms to their limit, asking them to function as efficiently as machines. When the inevitable problems crop up — when bees or pigs remind us they are not machines — the system can be ingenious in finding “solutions,” whether in the form of antibiotics to keep pigs healthy or foreign bees to help pollinate the almonds. But this year’s solutions have a way of becoming next year’s problems. That is to say, they aren’t “sustainable.”

From this perspective, the story of Colony Collapse Disorder and the story of drug-resistant staph are the same story. Both are parables about the precariousness of monocultures. Whenever we try to rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do, we’ll be prepared to treat the whole idea of sustainability as something more than a nice word.

Michael Pollan is a contributing writer. His new book, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” will be published next month.

There are no winners and losers with business-as-usual climate change

More curious than climate change naysayers are those who believe that climate change is real but feel that we should either just prepare to "adapt" to it and those who are convinced that there will be winners and losers and we should first determine if we'd be the former or latter before deciding if we should take action.

Gregg Easterbrook wrote about climate change winners and losers in the April 2007 issue of Atlantic Monthly: Global Warming: Who Loses-- And Who Wins? I did not find it to be a very convincing argument. Several state governments, most notably Vermont, have already begun to develop adaptation strategies. To be sure, some measure of adaptation will be necessary if for no other reason than we are already committed to -- and in fact are arguably experiencing -- the effects of climate change already (i.e., the melting of the Arctic).

Both scenarios (Winners/Losers and Adaptation) assume that that we are able to accurately predict how climate change will unfold. That is a mistake. Already we are seeing that predictions of even the more pessimistic scientists may be too conservative both in terms of actual impacts and their timeframes.

Moreover, as the results from research conducted at Purdue University points out, we need to look beyond the obvious physical impacts in order to fully appreciate the full measure of climate change. (GW)

Scientists develop new measure of 'socioclimatic' risk

Purdue University News
December 10, 2007

New analysis 'highly relevant' for U.N. Bali negotiations

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - As the United Nations climate negotiations proceed in Bali, Indonesia, researchers have taken a first step toward quantifying the "socioclimatic" exposure of different countries to future climate change.

The research team from Purdue University and the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, found that China, India and the United States - major greenhouse gas-emitting nations that are currently unbound by the Kyoto treaty - face substantial exposure relative to other nations, but that every area of the world faces high exposure in at least one category.

"Climate negotiations have become increasingly concerned not only with who is responsible for climate change, but also who is likely to suffer the most damage," said Noah Diffenbaugh, the Purdue assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences who led the study. "Our analysis provides quantitative information to support international negotiations such as those that are taking place in Bali this week. By integrating state-of-the-art global climate model experiments with socioeconomic indicators of poverty, wealth and population, we create a unique measure of 'socioclimatic' risk for each nation."

Filippo Giorgi, vice-chair of Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and head of the Abdus Salam International Center of Theoretical Physics (ICTP) Earth System Physics section, initiated the research and worked closely on the analysis.

"This study goes beyond the physical aspects of climate change – such as increased temperatures, sea-level rise and changes in precipitation patterns – and looks at the interaction of these physical changes with various socioeconomic factors throughout the world," Giorgi said. "A key message is that there are no winners and losers with business-as-usual climate change. Countries in all regions of the world face different – but high – potential exposure to socioclimatic stressors in the 21st century. We hope this message will be heard in the Bali negotiations, as the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony highlights the importance of effective and immediate response to the climate change crisis."

The research will be published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Leigh Raymond, associate director of Purdue's Climate Change Research Center and co-author of the study, said different nations face different exposures to climate change depending on their socioeconomic dimensions.

"Climate change is only half of the story," said Raymond, who also is an associate professor of political science at Purdue. "We need to consider how different societies are threatened by these physical changes in unique ways. Impoverished areas have fewer resources to deal with environmental stress, while wealthy areas have a greater amount of infrastructure that could be lost, and areas with larger populations have more lives at stake."

Barry Rabe, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, said the study is pertinent for negotiations to explore a post-Kyoto treaty framework of climate policy.

"This study provides an insightful reminder that different nations and regions will likely face very different impacts from continuing climate change," he said. "This adds to the complexity of establishing a viable international policy and underscores the importance of getting as many key design elements right as possible."

Raymond is currently attending the U.N. conference on climate change in Bali, where he is participating as an official observer of the negotiations.

"Our study is an important first step to get people thinking about the issues from this new perspective," he said. "Of course, famine is a far more serious risk than property damage. But all of these parameters are relevant to policy decisions, and it seems clear that more sophisticated estimates of national exposures to socioclimatic risk will be highly relevant for negotiations of any future climate change agreement."

Regionally, the most exposed nations are China, Bangladesh and Myanmar in Asia; western Sahel and southwestern nations in Africa; Brazil in South America; the eastern United States in North America; and the Mediterranean nations (including France, Italy and Spain), Russia and Scandinavia in Europe.

The study found that the climatic and socioeconomic variables together determine the international variations in socioclimatic risk.

"Patterns emerge that you wouldn't recognize from just looking at either climatic or socioeconomic conditions," Diffenbaugh said. "For example, China has a relatively moderate expected climate change. However, when you combine that with the fact that it has the second largest economy in the world, a substantial poverty rate and a large population, it creates one of the largest combined exposures on the planet. We see similar effects in other parts of the world, including India and the United States, which also have relatively moderate expected climate change. So it's where the socioeconomic and climatic variables intersect that is the key."

He added that the study does not address the absolute degree of impact or risk.

"This study illustrates exposure of one nation relative to another," Diffenbaugh said. "Thus, it is important to note that a country low on the relative scale could still face substantial risk."

Michael Mastrandrea, a research associate at the Center for Environmental Science and Policy at Stanford University and member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said this combination of climatic and socioeconomic indicators provides a new method to assess the risks of 21st century climate change and how they vary across nations.

"As this work is developed further, it has the potential to be informative to the international climate policy debate," he said. "The severity of future climate impacts is very sensitive to the pathway of socioeconomic development. This paper proposes an interesting basis from which to quantify the broad implications of concurrent changes in climate and society."

The climate models used the A1B scenario, which is a standard greenhouse gas emissions scenario used by the IPCC. However, the authors calculated the exposures based on each degree of global warming, meaning that similar results could be expected from other scenarios, said Xunqiang Bi, a researcher at the ICTP and co-author of the paper.

"Our study leads toward providing integrated, country-based information to aid the development of adaptation and mitigation policies at the national and regional level," Giorgi said. "Much additional work has to be done to account for more comprehensive climatic and socioeconomic information. This is an extremely exciting and innovative area of future research."

The Purdue Climate Change Research Center is affiliated with Purdue's Discovery Park. The center promotes and organizes research and education on global climate change and studies its impact on agriculture, natural ecosystems and society. It was established in 2004 to support Purdue in research and education on regional scale climate change, its impacts and mitigation, and adaptation strategies. The center serves as a hub for a range of activities beyond scientific research, including teaching, public education and the development of public policy recommendations.

The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics was founded in 1964 by Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam. The center operates under a tripartite agreement among the Italian Government and two U.N. agencies, UNESCO and IAEA. Its mission is to foster advanced studies and research, especially in developing countries. While the name of the center reflects its beginnings, its activities today encompass most areas of physical sciences, including geophysical and environmental sciences.

Let there be hybrids

In Leonardo DiCaprio's film "The Eleventh Hour" Environmental Entrepreneur Paul Hawken states that the most exciting thing about the times we live in now -- given the environmental and social challenges facing us -- is the opportunity (one might even say the responsibility) to remake the world. It's probably safe to say that it will take nothing less than that for civilization to have a shot at surviving this century.

So for starts how about dramatically changing the way we move ourselves and goods around in ways that really begins to move society towards emissions-free transportation systems? Plug-in hybrid vehicles are poised to play such a disruptive role. With some serious support for research and development and a modicum of political vision and courage, we could transform the transportation sector -- perhaps just in time to save ourselves from oblivion. (GW)

Could Germany set the standard? (GW)

Full Charge Ahead

Wind and solar power could completely replace petrol and diesel fuels in Germany. The wind and solar powered cars aren’t yet available. But a new generation of batteries and electric motors is boosting hopes of zero-emission mobility.

By Martin Bensmann
New Energy
August 2007

Felix von Borck is the proud owner of an Oscar. Not a polished one on a shelf – this one’s in the garage. The name is all it has in common with the gilded Hollywood accolade. Four wheels and electric propulsion are the outstanding features of a high-tech automobile called Oscar based in Darmstadt, Germany. From the front the small car looks a bit like a VW Beetle crunched from all sides. At the back the chassis drops suddenly perpendicularly as if it was cut off.

The small crunch ball was developed by the Academic Solar Technology Group Akasol e.V. headed by von Borck. In 1990 Akasol grew from the group of developers of the Pinky solar racing car at the Darmstadt University of Technology. Now numbering more than 50 students, engineers, scientists and other interested people the group aims to develop environmentally friendly and efficient vehicles.

Their newest product has room for two adults or an adult and two children – not exactly grand. And so Little Oscar, 2.5 metres long and 1.2 metres wide – resembles the legendary Messerschmidt cabin scooter of the 1950s much more than a modern automobile.

Interior space and cargo room don’t look any better in the other electric vehicles now on offer. They only partly meet the needs of present users. But many families do have two vehicles, a station wagon or van and a smaller car. Short local trips are usually done with the compact car, often carrying several people. For these uses hardly adequate electric vehicles are available able to match conventional ones in space and costs. It doesn’t look any better in the middle-class segment.

However, some hybrid models are on offer, that is vehicles running on both liquid fuel and electricity. The Asian corporations Toyota, Nissan and Honda dominate the field. Since 1997 market leader Toyota has sold just over a million hybrid vehicles. Last year 100,000 were bought in the United States, 3,000 in Germany. The numbers also show that even for the most established supplier of this environment friendly technology hybrid vehicles are still a niche product. They amount to about four per cent of Toyota’s sales.

Not enough research

And so Oscar is also likely to interest only a few users. Even so, its performance ratings are quite impressive. A fully loaded battery will drive it 200 kilometres. It’s lighter than the Smart, has a battery charge capacity of 17 kilowatt-hours and can do a top speed of some 130 kilometres an hour. Oscar is thrifty, consuming 8.5 kilowatt-hours per 100 kilometres, which corresponds to fuel consumption of under a litre.

Though it won’t do as the family car, the low-consumption model could serve well as a city-hopper. Von Borck points out that “50 per cent of all car trips are shorter than five kilometres, 90 per cent shorter than nine kilometres”. Studies by various manufacturers have found that on average a car is driven only 20 km a day in Germany. Electric cars could easily deliver that with their stand-by times. The big gain would be electric vehicles saving a lot of CO2 -pollution in the transport sector because of their efficiency and low emissions. But the power they use would have to be cleanly produced.

Von Borck emphasises that the main thrust of his team of designers in building models is to prove feasibility. Safety is another main issue. Does a tiny car like the Oscar have traction? The Akasol designers are pretty rough with Oscar when testing it. One car was sacrificed to a crash test after its third birthday. Other models have it a bit easier. Just recently an Oscar passed the so-called elk test of a car’s ability to swerve safely to avoid a hypothetical moose on the road.

Naturally the Darmstadt engineers are not making light of the safety issue. But it is just one of many the designers have to work on. “We need new developments in the battery area as the storage medium, in the electric motor and in the light construction of the bodywork,” says von Borck. He wants the European Union to launch a research initiative and to set up a “Zero Emission Car Platform” that puts a test fleet on the roads. He thinks 100 million euros split between Brussels and German promotion programmes should suffice for the project. Von Borck believes that would be enough to build 1,000 new electric vehicles.

€100 million is only a tenth of what the German economics ministry has spent just on 100 prototypes with fuel cell propulsion. Not only the German government has put a lot of money into the fuel cell and hydrogen, with meagre results so far (new energy 1/2007). The introduction of fuel cell vehicles has dropped far back, if it ever does become a mass phenomenon. Even in the high-end stage the technology is three times less efficient than an electric motor. The main reason for that is the high energy input and loss in producing hydrogen.

It has to be green power

You could conclude that the electric vehicle’s biggest problem is not its battery, nor motor, nor comfort, but lack of research funding. And this although there’s probably no more efficient use of electricity than in electric vehicles. So argues the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) of the German government. “Electric mobility makes sense only if it’s achieved with green power,” says the UBA’s transport expert, Andreas Ostermeier. “Those who call for electric vehicles must also consistently develop renewable energies.” He points out that too much CO2 is still emitted to produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity.

Ostermeier cites two factors for the new positive attitude to the electrically powered car of the German government’s highest authority on the environment. Lithium-ion batteries have significantly cut costs and the introduction of hybrid propulsion is playing an important part. “The physical parameters, such as energy density, of lithium-ion batteries are already adequate for many applications in electric vehicles. A major drawback of these power packs are the high costs,” Ostermeier explains. He adds that their use in port able equipment, such as laptops, has cut costs considerably in recent years. If costs continue to drop in the midterm, the lithium-based systems could also become attractive for electric vehicles, he says. Conditional on these price drops, he says, electric vehicles could soon become competitive with conventional cars for many uses over short and medium distances. “Refi ned biogas and cleanly produced power for electric vehicles are now the most promising propulsion energies to make a meaningful future contribution to a sustainable transport energy supply in terms of climate protection and volume,” predicts the expert for alternative drive trains and fuels.

7,000 wind turbines power Germany’s fleet

That’s a vision welcomed by Johannes Lackmann, President of the German Renewable Energy Federation (BEE). He calculates that about 7,000 large wind converters of the fi ve-megawatt class would produce 100 terawatt-hours of power. That’s enough to replace 400 terawatt-hours from fossil fuels because electric vehicles need significantly less power per kilometre. Road transport in Germany consumes 600 terawatt-hours per year. Lackmann suggests that the remaining gap could be filled by biofuels. Lackmann puts the lithium battery costs at €2,500 to €3,000 per kilowatt-hour. Depending on the number produced, the battery costs drop dramatically. The proportional storage costs per kilowatt-hour can also be substantially reduced in relation to the number of charging cycles. In mid-June the US company Lithium Technology Corporation (LTC) in Plymouth Meeting in Pennsylvania presented a new battery technology that comes close to future demands. The company presented a retrofitted Toyota Prius with plug-in hybrid technology (see box), which is claimed to consume the equivalent of 1.88 litres of fuel per 100 km and is propelled by the company’s newest battery generation. LTC claims that the new battery can deliver more than 240,000 km of driving.

For the battery of the retrofitted Prius, 63 lithium iron phosphate cells of a new type were used. For the negative electrodes LTC uses graphited carbon, for the positive electrodes lithium iron phosphate. This battery chemistry delivers a median discharge voltage of 3.2 volts and in the Prius battery stores 35 ampere-hours per cell. The 63 cells are series-connected, enabling them to deliver a nominal voltage of 200 volts. Thus the entire battery contains seven kilowatts of energy, enough for 50 kilometres of solely electric propulsion.

With this battery the Americans may have made a breakthrough contributing to the further development of all hybrid and electrically powered vehicles. The lithium ion technology stores power in higher quantities and much faster than the nickel metal hydride battery used hitherto, which enables better use of energy recovery (braking energy is stored in the battery) and shortens the recharging periods.

Environment friendly hot-rods?

British carmaker Lightning also touts a new technical development. The London engineers have put a new type of battery into a sports car, the Lightning GT. The battery was developed in the USA from titanium and ceramic components by the Altairnano company in Reno, Nevada, with the aid of nanotechnology. It is claimed to have a useful life of at least 12 years and be capable of 15,000 recharges.

It is certainly no thrift-vehicle. The sport racer has four wheel hub motors that deliver 700 horsepower. The recharging time of the high-tech battery is noteworthy. The company claims it takes just 10 minutes. Fully charged, the car is claimed to have a range of 400 kilometres. Both numbers are unusual at the present time. Electric vehicles usually have to be connected to the grid for at least a few hours to recharge their batteries and hardly anyone gets further than 150 km with one fi lling. There’s not likely to be a rush to buy the Lightning GT because of its €200,000 price tag. Not least the car is an expression of a new trend in the automobile and monetary upper class. Zero-emission mobiles are the rage. Hollywood stars and multi-millionaires are showing up in great numbers in environment friendly luxury vehicles. And horsepower junkies can alternatively buy the Tesla or Venturi Fétish. The designers of these fast cars show very graphically what can be technically realised now.

The question is whether hightech-made individual components will ever be available as affordable mass goods for the general vehicle market. And so, too, carbon fi bre is hardly likely to become a cheap product for making the car bodywork of the future. Some designers have recognised this drawback. In the conventional segment smart engineers are tinkering for example with the Loremo, a German-made car with the lowest consumption built from affordable materials.

First there will be hybrids

In addition to cost, comfort, reach and lifespan, infrastructure is delaying the proliferation of electric vehicles. “It is imaginable that vehicles with corresponding battery storage have a reach of about 200 km. To continue the journey, batteries could be exchanged,” says Johannes Lackmann. “At special service stations robots could remove the empty battery from the vehicle through a trapdoor in the floor and replace it with a recharged one.” In towns there could be dedicated charging stations.

“Conventional drive will be the most important in the foreseeable future, the improvement potentials for clean diesel and petrol engines are still considerable,” argues Thomas Schlick, CEO of the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA). He says purely electric vehicles would be most suitable now and in the years immediately ahead for limited mobility uses. A combination of combustion engine and electric motor – the hybrid – is better, he says. A big potential for hybrid propulsion is also seen by Professor Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, transport expert at the Gelsenkirchen University of Applied Sciences. The biggest markets for hybrids are now North America and Asia. “Currently about 400,000 hybrid vehicles are sold per year worldwide, with an upward trend. Compared with the global vehicle market of about 56 million cars sold annually the hybrid share is very small,” he says.

Like VDA’s Schlick, he sees purely electric propulsion still far off. Dudenhöffer expects the combustion engine to dominate for another 20 to 30 years. He also dismisses as unrealistic service stations where batteries are replaced after 200 km. “For that you need a completely new infrastructure. You only need to look how slowly gas driven cars are coming on to the market. In Germany 10,000 fuel stations are operating, it’s hard to imagine equipping them all with reserve batteries,” Dudenhöffer argues.

But considering the small market volume he doesn’t think the German and American car industries have missed out on the hybrid technology. “They’ll very quickly catch up with the Japanese,” predicts the mobility specialist. To speed the process, alliances are being formed. For example BMW, Daimler and General Motors have joined forces to present a petrol-electric full hybrid by 2009.

But the main attention of the large German car manufacturers is neither on electric vehicles nor hybrids. A lot more work and money is going into improving conventional combustion engines to make them cleaner and more efficient. Mercedes, for example, is touting its “clean” Bluetec Diesel. In addition to the usual particulate filters the new system has catalytic converters. Mercedes has two versions of Bluetec to suit different models. In the first system four catalysers reduce the emission of air pollutants and soot particles. The second version does even more. Separate injection into the exhaust system of the reducing agent “Adblue”, a special urea-based substance developed by Mercedes, cuts nitrogen oxides by about 90%.

VW puts its main focus on TSI technology in its petrol models. TSI combines turbocharging, supercharging and direct fuel injection. With this technology even smaller cylinder capacities are to achieve the performance of larger engines. A drivetrain delivers approximately the potential of a six-cylinder engine with the consumption of a four-cylinder one. In the midterm VW intends to use the concept in all its petrol engines. And in the long term the company wants to combine petrol and diesel technology in one engine. That means the cleanliness of petrol with the effi ciency and frugality of diesel in one machine. VW calls it the combined combustion system (CCS).

BMW continues to focus on inefficient hydrogen. Ford, Volvo, Saab and Renault want to boost their green images with biofuels. Apparently VW is the only maker looking at electric mobility as a pure propulsion form.

Association sees drivetrain future in hydrogen

“Our vision is the zero emission vehicle. That’s why the VDA regards hydrogen as the energy source of the future,” says Schlick. He sees both electric power generation from hydrogen with the fuel cell and the direct combustion of hydrogen in the engine pointing the way beyond the fi nite fossil sources. He argues that hydrogen can be obtained from many sources but the clear aim is to produce it regeneratively. But he doesn’t expect hydrogen, even in a fuel cell, to conquer the market before 2020.

It’s surprising that the German motor industry lobby still clings to the hydrogen vision. Wasn’t electric drive three times as energy efficient as the hydrogen chain? The car companies appear to have recognised that long ago. Many have scaled back their hydrogen activities or are setting other priorities. For example, VW’s head power train researcher Wolfgang Steiger sees two central challenges for the company. In the midterm conventional engines will be increasingly powered by biofuels, in the long term electric mobility will conquer the market. And that’s where the research activities of the biggest German car maker are headed.

The potential in switching to electric mobility is enormous. The present capacity of all German combustion vehicles is about 15 times that of all the country’s electric power stations, calculates BEE president Lackmann. “There’s enormous power in this mobile energy park,” he says. But so far this fleet passes its power only to the engine and into the air. He sees electric vehicles assuming an important function as energy storage systems in future. Power from the battery vehicles could also be fed into the grid, thereby taking a lot of strain off the power stations and making some of them superfluous.

Power industry favours the electric car

Because this would have fundamental consequences, the power industry is also taking an interest in the subject. Surprisingly, the German Electricity Association (VDEW) takes the view that it is possible to operate all German personal transportation with electric mobility compatible with the environment and climate. “We did some projections. Even if one took just wind-generated power and based the calculations on expansion scenarios, including offshore, then wind energy alone has the potential to displace all petrol consumption in Germany,” says Roger Kohlmann, deputy director of the VDEW. It would take about 35,000 megawatts (MW) of installed wind energy capacity. Precisely the same figure has been calculated by the BEE.

Ralf Bischof, managing director of the German Wind Energy Association (BWE), is happy to hear affirmation from the established energy industry that wind energy can make a much larger contribution to the energy supply than just electricity. “In the long term we will also deliver considerable contributions in the mobility and heating sectors. Wind energy will become one of Germany’s most important primary energy suppliers.” Bischof sees the big attraction of plug-in vehicles in giant battery storages spread throughout the country. “Cars are parked 23 hours of the day, mostly near a power outlet. Combined with modern communications technology we can thus make an enormous contribution to controlling power range and short-term storage to buffer wind and solar peaks,” Bischof says. But he does see a limitation. “The replacement of oil as the drivetrain energy only by wind power is sub-optimal macroeconomically, the vehicles also have to get a lot more efficient.”

The VDEW is likely to knock on the BWE’s door soon because an alliance is to be forged to discuss the topic across the stakeholders in wind converter manufacturing and battery production, power companies and the automobile industry. “The whole thing also needs political support,” suggests Kohlmann. “Our aim is to have the e-mobility option included in the federal government’s energy programme.”

No wonder the power industry is so keenly involved. Electric mobility would be a vast business for the companies. Given the urgent need to raise energy efficiency and to cut energy use, there’s hardly any scope for power sales to rise in Germany and Europe at large. On the contrary, consumption must and will drop. If the electricity industry could serve the transport sector, a large new market would open up. The power industry would be able to fire up the automobile industry and give the oil industry a run for its money. So, exciting prospects for an as yet small sector. And with those prospects the name “Oscar” for an electric vehicle is not a bad choice at all.

Micro-hybrid

This powertrain system is especially frugal in stop-and-go traffic. The vehicles are equipped with a belt-driven electric motor and control system, and an intelligent belt tightening system which enables the stop-start and generator operation. With that the combustion engine can be switched off when the vehicle is stationary, for example at a light or in a tailback, and restarted automatically without a noticeable time lag. Together with an energy management system up to 6% fuel can be saved. Vehicle type: for example the BMW 1 series since 2007.

Car with wind converter

Anyone buying a Venturi Eclectic can order a small wind power turbine (400 - 800 watts) as an accessory. Instead of petrol or diesel, the three-seater, open at the sides, runs on electricity. In eight hours, for example at night, the small wind converter generates enough power for a run of 15 kilometres. The futuristically designed little buggy also loads its battery with a 2.5 square metre solar roof area. An hour of sunlight loads enough power for the Venturi Eclectic to run one kilometre.

Mild-hybrid

This type of propulsion saves when braking. In this system the electric motor is situated on the crankshaft between the engine and transmission. In addition to the automatic stopstart facility and the generator function this system uses the braking effect of the electric motor in generation mode to recharge the battery. This process is called recuperation.

For enhanced driving performance the electric engine in motor mode provides additional boost thereby supporting the starting or acceleration phases of the combustion engine, for example. Up to 18% fuel can be saved. Vehicle type: e.g. Honda Civic IMA, since 2006.

Full-hybrid

Vehicles with this drivetrain can be powered optionally purely electrically or by combustion engine. When operated in town traffic purely electrically no emissions occur. In the design there has to be deeper intervention in the drivetrain and vehicle structures than with the micro and mild hybrids. Some full hybrids need a second clutch, a higher electric propulsion capacity as well as a traction battery with corresponding energy content.

Because voltage has to be increased for more performance a second electric system is added to the present 14-volt system. A transmission connects the two. This kind of powertrain can save up to 25% fuel. Vehicle type: Since May 2006 the Lexus GS 450h is available in Europe, the most prominent model is the Toyota Prius.

Plug-in-hybrid

The power socket hybrid, also called plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) is a vehicle whose battery can be additionally charged externally from the power grid. Most have larger batteries than full hybrids, but basically they’re a mixed form between them and purely electric vehicles.

While one powertrain, the electric motor, is determined by the designation ‘hybrid-electric’, the other, called the ‘range extender’, for now is optional. In the present models and prototypes it’s usually a conventional combustion engine. The second powertrain in future models might be a fuel cell or a small, highly efficient diesel engine.

On short runs or in town traffic the electrically powered car runs emission-free and frugally with power from the battery. On longer runs or when the battery is empty, the car keeps going with the range extender. Vehicle type: Only test vehicles as yet; the Toyota Prius is to have these features in future.

Global warming brings strange bedfellows together in China

Is it possible that one of the most important thing the U.S. can do to help China reduce its greenhouse gas emissions is to work with government officials design policies that incentivize conservation, efficiency and renewables and help them develop strategies leading to stronger enforcement of environmental regulations?

That would environmental officials from California have concluded. These same officials have been quietly working with their counterparts in China over the years to realize these reforms. (GW)

Bali needs to know - can China go green?

By Robert Collier
San Francisco Chronicle
December 9, 2007

As international diplomats gather in Bali to try to begin negotiating a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, their toughest challenge is how to deal with China's fast rise as the world's leading source of greenhouse gases.

At the talks, which began Dec. 3 and continue until Dec. 14, no binding agreement is likely to be reached on cutting emissions. The Bush administration refuses to consider such a pact unless China also does so and China says wealthy nations must go first. Not widely understood, however, are two underlying elements behind this conflict - the degree to which China has become the central battlefront of global warming, and the reasons why China's government cannot make any concessions to U.S. demands.

According to several international studies in recent months, China's emissions have not only surged past the U.S. level, but also are growing at a rate that far outstrips wealthy nations' capacity to decrease theirs. Even if China met its own targets to reduce energy intensity (consumption per unit of economic output), its emissions would increase by about 2.5 billion metric tons over the next five years, the data show. This total is far larger than the 1.1 billion tons in reductions imposed by the Kyoto Protocol on developed nations, including the United States, which has since withdrawn from the treaty.

Yet Beijing's leaders are not being stubborn or in denial. To the contrary, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao seem much more aware of the global warming problem than President Bush or many members of Congress. The crucial sticking point is that Beijing's top leadership seems largely incapable of complying with any significant cutback commitments.

Amid China's explosive economic growth of recent years, the Communist government has lost so much political and regulatory power that it has been unable to force provincial and municipal authorities to obey environmental laws. Despite its image abroad as an all-powerful dictatorship, the government desperately needs real regulatory clout.

For example, the central government has made high-profile pledges to reduce energy intensity by 4 percent annually and to punish local officials who fail to comply, but many local authorities have blithely ignored Beijing, continuing to pursue economic growth at all costs. As a result, the country cut its energy intensity by just 1.3 percent last year and by 3 percent in the first nine months of this year, according to official statistics - which are believed to be marred by the data-fudging of local officials.

"The situation remains extremely bleak, with some work not being properly done," Xie Zhenhua, vice chairman of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission, told a Beijing press conference Nov. 29. Asked about the government's claims that local officials would be judged by their environmental performance, Xie replied, "I know one province that will take action against leaders of selected areas and enterprises if they fail to meet the final energy conservation and emission reduction target."

What's urgently needed to help China go green is a crash program of technical aid, modeled on California's 20-year record of quietly helping Chinese officials learn from the state's own success in setting standards on air quality and energy efficiency that are tighter than those required under federal law.

With virtually no publicity, scientists and specialists from the California Energy Commission, California Environmental Protection Agency, Air Resources Board, Public Utilities Commission, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the nonprofit Energy Foundation of San Francisco have traveled to China to advise the national, provincial and municipal governments. They have set up pro-conservation electricity rate structures, clean-energy technology tax incentives, tighter vehicle emissions regulations, stronger building insulation standards, home appliance energy standards and other programs. Researchers from the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Resources Institute and Harvard University's Belfer Center are giving similar assistance. The resulting reduction in China's energy consumption has saved the equivalent of scores of coal-fired power plants and supertankers full of oil.

In contrast, the U.S. government gives little energy assistance to China, totaling less than $2 million per year, little of which will have any impact in the near term. This stinginess is partly caused by the Bush administration's preference for private sector-led programs, and partly by the sanctions imposed after the 1989 Tiananmen Square bloodshed. Most U.S. energy assistance is focused on clean coal technology, such as so-called carbon capture and storage, which is not expected to become commercially ready until about 2017.

At Bali, Chinese diplomats find it easier to beg for money than to admit that they are no longer kings of their roost. They are demanding that foreign governments create a multibillion-dollar fund to promote the spread of environmentally friendly technology to the developing world, and they also propose that wealthy nations relax patent protections on green technology.

These proposals are much needed for poor nations without enough money to go green, and China has the world's biggest foreign-exchange reserves, at $1.4 trillion and growing by about $30 billion per month. Rather than use this money to create the sort of green investment funds that the West is now expected to provide, central bank authorities in Beijing have followed an orthodox investment strategy, largely in U.S. government securities that enable the Bush administration's war programs and deficit spending.

China is already receiving large sums of foreign aid through the Clean Development Mechanism, an arrangement under the Kyoto Protocol that allows industrialized countries to gain emissions credits by investing in energy-saving projects in developing countries. China is the largest single recipient of these funds, and about $15 billion in credits have been registered over the past two years. Many foreign experts say these funds are largely superfluous, supporting projects that would have been built anyway without the extra money.

Another kind of help that is not needed is the confusion of global warming with Western principles of free-market democracy.

To many in Washington, the idea of helping a communist government regulate its citizens more effectively is sheer anathema. Some U.S. policymakers see the environment as a potential tool to try to support Chinese democracy activists, similar to the way citizen movements helped to transform the former Soviet bloc.

It's certainly true that the lack of democracy enables local Communist Party authorities to repress citizen complaints about pollution. But the Chinese government is already suspicious that the West is using global warming as a Trojan horse for pro-democracy plotting. Leaders of China's beleaguered but heroic environmental groups privately beg their foreign colleagues to never even mention George Soros, who is seen in the United States as an arch-liberal but is viewed by Chinese security officials as the man who almost single-handedly overthrew communism in Eastern Europe and would seek to do the same in China.

Any muddling of global warming and democracy would be counterproductive, poisoning Beijing's attitudes and undermining the stance of top leaders who want China to go green. The cause of democracy in China is a noble issue, but the overwhelming need to stop global warming requires that it be dealt with on a separate plane.

As in the United States, the issue of global warming brings strange bedfellows together in China. Like Washington's neoconservatives who drive Priuses to help wean the American economy from Middle Eastern oil, Beijing's own security establishment increasingly supports energy conservation for reasons that have nothing to do with the environment. In recent years, the hard-liners complain, China's booming energy consumption has not only turned China into a net petroleum importer but also has made its economy totally dependent on U.S. military control of shipping lanes for oil and coal - thus severely restricting the Chinese military's strategy on Taiwan.

The uniting factor amid this kaleidoscope of self-interests is the need to develop modern, efficient regulatory enforcement. Given that, China could turn around its emissions-belching economy and adopt a clean, green development path - and in the process, give the world hope in the battle against climate change. Without it, that fight will be lost.

More than money, more than whiz-bang technological breakthroughs, China needs to gain the capacity for environmental governance. Western nations, using the tested California model, can help it do so.

Robert Collier is a visiting scholar at the Center for Environmental Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He is writing a book about China and global warming for University of California Press.

How to build wind farms that proivide constant supplies of electricity

Affordable, reliable wind energy capable of meeting base load demand is within reach. In a report released by Stanford University, researchers Cristina L. Archer and Mark Z. Jacobsonconclude that interconnected windfarms in complementary wind regimes (or meteorological zones) could address the intermittent nature of individual wind projects.

The concept is similar to that proposed by European wind developer Eddie O'Connor in proposing an offshore wind "s\Supergrid" that would connect projects located in the Atlantic Ocean and the Irish, Baltic and North Seas. (GW)

Study finds that linked wind farms can result in reliable power

By Louis Bergeron and Stephanie Kenitzer
Stanford Report
December 5, 2007

Wind farms can be built in mountainous regions, such as in Spain, or placed offshore like the one at Middelgrunden, near Copenhagen, Denmark.

Wind farms can be built in mountainous regions, such as in Spain or placed offshore like the one at Middelgrunden, near Copenhagen, Denmark.

Wind power, long considered to be as fickle as wind itself, can be groomed to become a steady, dependable source of electricity and delivered at a lower cost than at present, according to scientists at Stanford University.

The key is connecting wind farms throughout a given geographic area with transmission lines, thus combining the electric outputs of the farms into one powerful energy source. The findings are published in the November issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology.

Wind is the world's fastest growing electric energy source, according to the study's authors, Cristina Archer and Mark Jacobson, who will present their findings Dec. 13 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. Their talk is titled "Supplying Reliable Electricity and Reducing Transmission Requirements by Interconnecting Wind Farms."

However, because wind is intermittent, it is not used to supply baseload electric power today. Baseload power is the amount of steady and reliable electric power that is constantly being produced, typically by power plants, regardless of electricity demand. But interconnecting wind farms with a transmission grid reduces the power swings caused by wind variability and makes a significant portion of it just as consistent a power source as a coal power plant.

"This study implies that, if interconnected wind is used on a large scale, a third or more of its energy can be used for reliable electric power, and the remaining intermittent portion can be used for transportation, allowing wind to solve energy, climate and air pollution problems simultaneously," said Archer, the study's lead author and a consulting assistant professor in Stanford's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and research associate in the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution.

It's a bit like having a bunch of hamsters generating your power, each in a separate cage with a treadmill. At any given time, some hamsters will be sleeping or eating and some will be running on their treadmill. If you have only one hamster, the treadmill is either turning or it isn't, so the power's either on or off. With two hamsters, the odds are better that one will be on a treadmill at any given point in time, and your chances of running, say, your blender, go up. Get enough hamsters together, and the odds are pretty good that at least a few will always be on the treadmill, cranking out the kilowatts.

The combined output of all the hamsters will vary, depending on how many are on treadmills at any one time, but there will be a certain level of power that is always being generated, even as different hamsters hop on or off their individual treadmills. That's the reliable baseload power.

The connected wind farms would operate the same way.

"The idea is that, while wind speed could be calm at a given location, it could be gusty at others. By linking these locations together we can smooth out the differences and substantially improve the overall performance," Archer said.

As one might expect, not all locations make sense for wind farms. Only locations with strong winds are economically competitive. In their study, Archer and Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, evaluated 19 sites in the Midwestern United States with annual average wind speeds greater than 6.9 meters per second at a height of 80 meters above ground, the hub height of modern wind turbines. Modern turbines are 80 to 100 meters high, approximately the height of a 30-story building, and their blades are 70 meters long or more.

The researchers used hourly wind data, collected and quality-controlled by the National Weather Service, for the entire year of 2000 from the 19 sites. They found that an average of 33 percent and a maximum of 47 percent of yearly-averaged wind power from interconnected farms can be used as reliable baseload electric power. These percentages would hold true for any array of 10 or more wind farms, provided it met the minimum wind speed and turbine height criteria used in the study.

Another benefit of connecting multiple wind farms is reducing the total distance that all the power has to travel from the multiple points of origin to the destination point. Interconnecting multiple wind farms to a common point and then connecting that point to a far-away city reduces the cost of transmission.

It's the same as having lots of streams and creeks join together to form a river that flows out to sea, rather than having each creek flow all the way to the coast by carving out its own little channel.

Another type of cost saving also results when the power combines to flow in a single transmission line. Explains Archer: Suppose a power company wanted to bring power from several independent farms—each with a maximum capacity of, say, 1,500 kilowatts (kW)—from the Midwest to California. Each farm would need a short transmission line of 1,500 kW brought to a common point in the Midwest. Then a larger transmission line would be needed between the common point and California—typically with a total capacity of 1,500 kW multiplied by the number of independent farms connected.

However, with geographically dispersed farms, it is unlikely that they would simultaneously be experiencing strong enough winds to each produce their 1,500 kW maximum output at the same time. Thus, the capacity of the long-distance transmission line could be reduced significantly with only a small loss in overall delivered power.

"Due to the high cost of long-distance transmission, a 20 percent reduction in transmission capacity with little delivered-power loss would notably reduce the cost of wind energy," added Archer, who calculated the decrease in delivered power to be only about 1.6 percent.

With only one farm, a 20 percent reduction in long-distance transmission capacity would decrease delivered power by 9.8 percent—not a 20 percent reduction, because the farm is not producing its maximum possible output all the time.

Archer said that if the United States and other countries each started to organize the siting and interconnection of new wind farms based on a master plan, the power supply could be smoothed out and transmission requirements could be reduced, decreasing the cost of wind energy. This could result in the large-scale market penetration of wind energy—already the most inexpensive clean renewable electric power source—which could contribute significantly to an eventual solution to global warming, as well as reducing deaths from urban air pollution.

A wind power feasibility study of potential sites along the California coast by Mike Dvorak, a Stanford doctoral student in civil and environmental engineering who is working with Jacobson and Archer, also is being presented during an afternoon poster session at the meeting.

Imagine every home in the UK powered by offshore wind energy (it isn't hard to do)

By now it should be apparent to anyone paying attention that there is no single solution to the twin challenges of meeting society's energy needs and combating global climate change. However it should also be apparent that wind energy is certainly one of the options immediately available that is capable of affordably achieving these critically important goals.

The offshore environment offers opportunities for the deployment of windfarms with capacities comparable to those of conventional energy sources such as coal and natural gas. Moreover, strategically arrayed of windfarms have the potential for addressing what many consider wind's most serious drawback -- its variable nature. More on this in my next post.

Many European Union countries like the UK and Denmark are taking serious steps to make wind energy a major part of their energy portfolios. (GW)

Offshore wind to power every British home by 2020

By Billy Youngson
Energy Current
December 7, 2007

UK: Within the next 12 years, the seas of Britain could have enough wind farms to power every one of the country's 25 million homes.

Harnessing the vast potential of the UK's island status has entered a new phase with Energy Secretary John Hutton announcing proposals to open up its seas to up to 33 GW (gigawatts) of offshore wind energy.

He also announced that he will chair a panel of experts to advise him on renewable energy, underscoring the UK Government's determination to play its part in meeting the EU target of 20 percent renewable energy by 2020.

Speaking to the European energy industry in Berlin, Hutton launched a Strategic Environmental Assessment of the seas surrounding the UK, paving the way for a possible 'third round' of wind energy development and beyond.

He said, "The draft plan I'm setting out today could allow companies to develop up to 25 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2020, in addition to the 8 gigawatts already planned.

"This potential major expansion will be subject to the outcome of a Strategic Environmental Assessment. But if we could manage to achieve this, by 2020 enough electricity could be generated off our shores to power the equivalent of all of the UK's homes.

"The challenge for government and for industry is to turn this potential - for our energy and economy - into a cost-effective reality. This will be a major challenge."

The UK has some of the best offshore wind resources in the world, a long history of design, installation and operational expertise in the offshore environment and the skills and manufacturing capability to transfer to the emerging sector.

On top of that, the UK is now the number one location for investment in offshore wind in the world and next year will overtake Denmark as the country with the most offshore wind capacity.

Hutton added, "I want to ensure the UK remains one of the best places for renewable business. Our trajectory on renewables is beyond question. They are as central to our future low carbon economy as chimneys were to the industrial revolution and road building following the invention of the mass produced car."

The first round of offshore wind farms, in 2001, comprised a number of small demonstration projects. The second round, in 2003, resulted in the award of options for leases for larger scale projects in three designated areas - the Thames Estuary, the Greater Wash and the North West.

Based on current plans under the first and second leasing rounds, about 8 GW of capacity could be operational by around 2014, including the 1 GW London Array, which is the largest planned offshore wind farm in the world.

The proposal for a possible third round, and further regular rounds, of offshore wind development announced today would open up the vast bulk of the UK's continental shelf to large scale development. It would allow for up to a further 25 GW of offshore capacity on top of the planned 8 GW.

Hutton announced that he will chair an enhanced Renewable Advisory Board with a bigger remit to advise the government on the EU 2020 renewable energy target and a wider pool of expertise to help deal with the issues and opportunities across renewable energy.

The government is also working on a regulatory regime to ensure that all offshore projects can connect to onshore electricity transmission and distribution networks, quickly, securely and as cheaply as possible.

The developments sit alongside plans in the Energy Bill, to be introduced shortly, to 'band' the support provided by the Renewables Obligation to give greater support to offshore wind, wave and tidal energy. The support will incentivise the expansion envisaged by today's proposals.

The amount of electricity from renewable sources of all kinds in the UK has doubled to almost five percent since the introduction of the Renewables Obligation in 2002. Current forecasts will see a further tripling to around 15 percent by 2015. Plans are also under way for a feasibility study into the potential for electricity generation from the Severn Estuary.

At the Spring European Council the EU agreed a target of 20 percent of all energy from renewables by 2020. The target includes fuel for electricity, heat and transport. The commission is due to propose how that target should be apportioned between member states in January.

Green teens

Young people around the world are very concerned about climate change.

As a teenager during the tumultuous 60's, I regard this as a an encouraging sign. Being concerned is the first step toward taking action. And mobilizing young people around this most pressing issue is just what we need right now.

Now the challenge is to find ways of constructively channeling this potential energy by finding more effective ways of communicating to these concerned teens about the solutions that are at hand. GW)

Climate Change Tops List of Teenage Worries

But many don't know what to do about it

Emily Beament
The Daily Green
December 5, 2007

Teenagers in developed countries around the world are more concerned about climate change than issues such as drugs, violence or war, according to a survey released today.

A poll of nearly 50,000 youngsters from countries ranging from the UK to Russia and Singapore found almost three-quarters (74%) believed global warming was a serious problem.

Two-thirds of the 12 to 17-year-olds questioned in the online survey thought climate change was going to have a negative impact on their lives, although 64% believed it was still possible to stop the warming of the planet.

But 78% thought their governments were more concerned with terrorism and international conflict than climate change and almost a fifth (18%) thought their national leaders were not concerned at the scale of the climate problem.

While two-fifths (39%) of the youngsters around the world blamed North America for being responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions, a quarter of teenagers on the continent remained unsure if global warming was a problem.

Europe was blamed by 24% of those questioned in the poll by virtual world Habbo and Greenpeace International, while 19% pointed the finger at Asia.

Despite their concerns about the issue, nearly two-fifths did not know what caused climate change or how to prevent it.

Some 49,243 teenagers were questioned on Habbo websites in the US, UK, Spain, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Finland, Netherlands, Portugal/Brazil, Norway, Australia, Switzerland/Austria, Denmark, Singapore, Japan and Russia.

Announcing the results as negotiators gather in Bali to begin discussions on a new international deal on climate change, Greenpeace International executive director Gerd Leipold said: "Today's teenagers are tomorrow's decision makers.

"They are 'Generation C' - the generation that has to beat climate change.

"It will be up to them to create a revolution in non-polluting, renewable energy to prevent global warming from affecting the lives of billions of people and threatening the survival of countless species of animals and plants.''

"Our spirits in this area are totally against this."

Yucca Mountain continues to be a symbol for one of the two major reasons many argue that although nuclear reactors do not emit greenhouse gases, the technology still cannot be considered to be a "clean" or sustainable source of energy. And once again the communities that would be subjected to what amounts to a form of constant "torture" happen to be home of the poor and/or politically disenfranchised. (GW)

Yucca Mountain remains nuclear waste dump choice

By Ralph Vartabedian,
Los Angeles Times
December 3, 2007

LONE PINE, Calif. - Henry Williams, a Paiute Indian from Bishop, drove an hour south to a meeting hall to deliver his tribe's verdict on the contested federal plan to bury nuclear waste inside Nevada's Yucca Mountain, about 16 miles from the California border.

"I am here to speak for my Paiute family," he told a public hearing last week held by federal government. "We have been here for thousands of years. Our spirits in this area are totally against this."

The federal plan to bury nuclear waste at a dump in Yucca Mountain has encountered one setback after another in the courts. It is hated in much of the West. It looks like it is in deep political trouble in Congress. And a number of presidential candidates have attacked the dump.

But the wheels of the US Energy Department bureaucracy are still going through the exacting legal steps to get a license for Yucca Mountain, where it wants to bury 70 metric tons of spent commercial fuel and nuclear weapons waste.

In the last week, the department has held a series of public hearings on two environmental impact statements, a process required under federal law.

At the hearing in Hawthorne, Nev., only four local people showed up, greeted by 30 or so federal employees and contractors bused in from Las Vegas. About 55 people showed up for a meeting in Reno. A bigger turnout is expected in Las Vegas today and in Washington on Wednesday.

The only hearing in California was held Thursday in Lone Pine, part of Inyo County whose eastern border can be seen from the crest of Yucca Mountain. A few dozen area residents showed up, including a local book publisher, several American Indians, some retirees, a few antinuclear activists, and a lot of people in cowboy boots and worn blue jeans.

"We are putting a burden on future generations to watch and care for this waste longer than man has been on this earth," said Roger Rasche, a retired proofreader from Lone Pine. "I hope future generations will be forgiving."

Asked about public opposition to the dump, Ward Sproat, the Energy Department's director of civilian radioactive waste management, said in an interview, "I wouldn't expect anything less. This program has been around a long time and it has a lot of history."

Government scientists insist that there is no chance any radioactivity could leak for 10,000 years and that the dump will be safe for hundreds of thousands of years after that.

The hearing also focused on another aspect of the plan: getting the waste to the dump.

The plan calls for 13,600 truck and rail shipments of waste, about 12 percent of which probably would move through California.

Wynne Benti, a book publisher in Bishop, said the environmental impact statements, one for the dump and one for a rail transportation plan, failed to adequately assess the risk of accidents in transportation or the federal government's ability to respond.

"Recent experience shows, from the collapse of a bridge in downtown Minneapolis to a barge dumping oil into the San Francisco Bay, that federal and local agencies' ability to coordinate and quickly deal with the aftermath of large-scale accidents have been wrought with delays in communication and immediate, critical action," she said.

The Energy Department has also failed to explain who will pay for emergency training and equipment along those rail and tuck lines, said David Weisman of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility.

The group alleges that the Energy Department held the hearing in remote Lone Pine to discourage a larger turnout. Lone Pine was chosen because it is part of Inyo County, an AULG, or "affected unit of local government," Energy officials said. Once the waste gets to Yucca Mountain, it would be transferred to special 18-foot long alloy canisters inside a series of large facilities built to handle highly radioactive waste.

U.S. "brimming" with "negative cost opportunities"

I am in China for a week so my posts will probably be a little less frequent and with briefer commentaries. However, I am here to meet with government officials and business leaders to discuss China's clean energy options and will be reporting on some of those meetings in the future. For now, it's at least encouraging to see that some creative thinking about energy is going on in the U.S.

Having said that, one has to acknowledge that almost all of what is outlined in the McKinsey & Company report cited below is not new. Many have been advocating similar strategies for more than two decades.

The critical missing ingredient? Leadership in the White House. (GW)

Study Details How U.S. Could Cut 28% of Greenhouse Gases

By Matthew L. Wald
The New York Times
November 30, 2007

The United States could shave as much as 28 percent off the amount of greenhouse gases it emits at fairly modest cost and with only small technology innovations, according to a new report.

A large share of the reductions could come from steps that would more than pay for themselves in lower energy bills for industries and individual consumers, the report said, adding that people should take those steps out of good sense regardless of how worried they might be about climate change. But that is unlikely to happen under present circumstances, said the authors, who are energy experts at McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm.

The report said the country was brimming with “negative cost opportunities” — potential changes in the lighting, heating and cooling of buildings, for example, that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels even as they save money. “These types of savings have been around for 20 years,” said Jack Stephenson, a director of the study. But he said they still face tremendous barriers.

Among them is that equipment is often paid for by a landlord or a builder and chosen for its low initial cost. The cost of electricity or other fuels to operate the equipment is borne by a tenant or home buyer. That means the landlord or builder has no incentive to spend more upfront for efficient equipment, even though doing so would save a lot of money in the long run.

Another problem, the report said, is that consumers often pay no attention to energy use in choosing gear. Computers, for instance, can be manufactured to use less power, but with most users oblivious to energy efficiency when they are shopping for a computer, manufacturers perceive no competitive edge in spending the extra money on efficiency.

“What the report calls out is the fact that the potential is so substantial for energy efficiency,” said Ken Ostrowski, a leader of the report team. “Not that we will do it, but the potential is just staggering here in the U.S. There is a lot of inertia, and a lot of barriers.”

The country can do the job with “tested approaches and high-potential emerging technologies,” the study found, but doing the work “will require strong, coordinated, economywide action that begins in the near future.”

The report focused on describing the problem, rather than on advocating fixes. But it did mention some possible solutions. Rules for utilities could be rewritten so they make as much money in promoting conservation as in selling electricity, the study said.

The task might also require emissions limits and other government mandates, as well as incentives like tax breaks to promote efficient buildings, cars and appliances, the study said. The McKinsey report said “lifestyle changes” by Americans could play a role in improved efficiency, even though they were not a major factor in the potential gains the report cited.

“A broad public education program around wasteful energy consumption could be mounted,” the report said. Modeled on the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign of the 1960s, it could promote reduction in “carbon littering” by increasing people’s awareness of the problem.

In contrast to improved efficiency, measures like capturing carbon dioxide from coal power plants and storing it would be relatively costly, and they account for less than 10 percent of the potential to cut emissions, the study said. The potential contributions from new nuclear plants and renewable energy supplies from wind or solar sources are also relatively modest, the report said.

The study, released yesterday in Washington, was conducted by McKinsey & Company for DTE Energy (the parent company of Detroit Edison), Environmental Defense, Honeywell, National Grid, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Pacific Gas & Electric and Shell.

Its release comes a week before a United Nations climate conference is to convene in Bali, and as Congress approaches a vote on proposals to limit emissions of greenhouse gases.