Cape Cod beaches battered by storms

Environmentalists and homeowners are racing to stay ahead of the eroding beaches on Cape Cod. Storms are getting stronger and the Cape is feeling the brunt of Nature's fury. As I've noted in the past, insurers have canceled many Cape homeowners' insurance policies over the past few years noting that the storms make homes near beaches to big a risk.

Despite the alarm and sense of desperation, there are still those who are fighting to prevent the first U.S. offshore wind farm to be built off the coast of the Cape -- a project that would significantly reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are in large part responsible for warming the atmosphere and oceans that feed the storms that batter the coast that erode the beaches that frightens insurers who abandon the homeowners. (GW)

Alarm raised on Sandwich beach erosion

By George Brennan
Cape Cod Times
March 30, 2008

SANDWICH — Dunes rise out of the beach, grass dances in the breeze, and a boardwalk snakes across Mill Creek and marshland in a scene worthy of a postcard.

But take a closer look at Town Neck Beach and you'll see three gaping breaches — 60 to 100 feet wide — and several smaller gaps where the ocean has treated dunes like tiny sand castles crushed by a rising tide. The valleys are now filled with rocks spit up each time the tide crashes through.

"It looks perfect from one side, like something you'd want to paint," said Paul Schrader, an environmentalist and local activist on a recent beach tour. "But the other side looks like a disaster waiting to happen."

The gaps are getting wider, the creek is filling in with silt and concerns grow with each coastal storm.

Schrader is sounding the alarm on erosion problems before it's too late and Sandwich deals with a problem all too familiar to Chatham property owners — a failing barrier beach and a shifting landscape.

During the most recent full moon, high tide flooded the marsh — a sneak peek at how the Sandwich waterfront might look some day if action isn't taken, Schrader said.

He's not alone.

"It is our opinion that if deterioration of the barrier beaches continue then the ocean could move closer to the more densely populated areas," a town committee wrote in a 1988 report that detailed erosion concerns. "It is possible that the downtown area bordering the Mill Creek marsh could have serious flooding danger from future storms. "

Mark Galkowski, director of natural resources for the town, said the beach is definitely vulnerable to a "100-year storm."

Are jetties partly to blame?

Schrader doesn't own one of the homes with a million dollar view. His house is safely tucked on Farmersville Road some five miles away from the beach. But as the former chairman of the North and South River Watershed Association on the South Shore, he took an interest in the dunes five years ago, when he saw children climbing up them and sliding down.

While people walking and playing in the dunes doesn't help, tides and storms take the heaviest toll. In five years, Schrader has seen dunes disappear and others shrink dramatically in size.

A federal project to build the Cape Cod Canal helped create the problem and federally protected birds are slowing possible solutions.

A 1959 study, done by the Army Corps of Engineers, warned that the Town Neck Beach is eroding at a pace of three feet per year. That same report blames man-made jetties that stretch out from the Cape Cod Canal, under the control of the Corps, "which eliminate sources of supply of the material which formerly provided equilibrium under natural shore processes."

Other researchers have come to the same conclusion.

"In 1906, the Cape Cod Canal constructed those jetties and it shut off the natural flow of sediment from Plymouth down to Sandwich," said Kirk Bosma, a coastal engineer with the Woods Hole Group, employed by the town to seek permits for the town's Old Harbor project. "That has basically starved the Sandwich coastline."

No one is suggesting the removal of the jetties or anything extreme.

"The canal jetties are there for a reason, so they don't have to dredge canal as often," Bosma said. "That's a fair reason. It's not necessarily that they should be taken out, but there is certainly a cause and effect. They have caused or exacerbated erosion on Town Neck Beach."

Federal officials acknowledge the jetties might have some effect, but it will take more and costly studies to come up with possible solutions. "I don't know if you could 100 percent equate the erosion of the beach to the canal work," said Edward O'Donnell, chief of the Army Corps' navigation section.

Restoration work never done

Meanwhile, the Old Harbor project, which would restore the inlet to the east of Town Neck Beach, remains stalled in the permitting process. The town is attempting to deal with concerns raised in the environmental impact report nearly four years ago.

The fading dunes are a nesting spot for protected least terns and piping plovers, Galkowski said. Beach grass, Christmas trees and fencing that was once commonplace to stem the tide of erosion is now frowned upon, he said. "Certainly, if there was a simple approach, we would have been on it by now."

Lisa Capone, spokeswoman for state Natural Heritage officials, said recommendations were made but the town has not followed up.

"The project as proposed would degrade that habitat," Capone said.

It will take permitting, engineering and money to accommodate the birds, Galkowski said. "It's expensive and time consuming."

But if the town doesn't act, Dewey Avenue, Boardwalk Road and even the Route 6A business district could eventually become oceanfront, Schrader said. "If they don't do something, there won't be any habitat left for (the birds) to nest in," he said.

State officials disagree. "We found the habitat that was there last year was good," Capone said.

The 1959 study predicted it would cost $67,000 to restore the dunes. Town officials now put that number in the millions.

A town study in 1988 indicated none of the work recommended for Town Neck Beach in the 1959 study was ever done. According to the 1988 report, the Army Corps of Engineers no longer thinks it's responsible for the erosion problems.

Selectman Randy Hunt, who is putting together a video with Schrader to raise awareness of the erosion problems, said the town would like the Corps to recognize its role and help fix the problems.

"Maybe we could get them to pay for some of it," he said.

So far, letters from Town Manager George "Bud" Dunham to Corps officials have been ignored. Dunham has written twice since 2006 to request that the Corps fund studies of the Town Neck erosion problems.

"The reduced protection by the narrowing beach and the lack of sediment source has already resulted in significant damage and in some cases complete loss of homes during storm events, as well as the breaching of Old Sandwich Harbor inlet from its existing jetties," Dunham wrote March 2, 2006.

In a follow-up letter last August, Dunham again asked for an Army Corps study of the erosion problems, as well as a temporary fix using dredge materials from a proposed canal project next year. There has been no response to those letters, Dunham said.

Federal officials this week said it takes time to get approvals to do the kind of in-depth study the town is requesting and much of their budget is tied up in projects overseas. "We do owe them a response," said John Kennelly, chief of the Corps planning branch.

Battered by storms

No money is currently budgeted for the canal dredging project, but that's more likely to happen first, O'Donnell said. The town would have to come up with 35 percent of the cost of that and it will require permitting.

In 1990, dredged sand from the canal was used to replenish part of the Town Neck dunes. The contrast between the stretch of dunes west of the Boardwalk that were restored and the area being battered by storm after storm is telling.

People who watch the ebb and flow of beach erosion say even the replenished dunes suffered a staggering blow only months after they were restored.

"It didn't last very long," Hunt said.

Still, they're doing better than the dunes closest to Old Harbor. "At least they're stable," Schrader said.

For now, all town officials can do is to continue working with Natural Heritage officials to work out a solution for the birds and the dunes.

And keep the pressure on the Army Corps of Engineers.

"It's on the radar," Schrader said. "It's just not high enough on the radar."

The new face of hunger

As food shortages and skyrocketing prices are being reported around the world it is apparent that globilization, NAFTA and and other perverse trade policies have produced systems that are becoming increasingly disconnected from the needs of people everywhere. (GW)

The new global menace: food inflation

By Barrie McKenna
Globe and Mail
March 29, 2008

WASHINGTON — First it was shelter. Now food.

Still reeling from the U.S. housing collapse, global markets are confronting a dangerous new bubble: food inflation.

The price of the world's three main grains – rice, wheat and corn – have all more than doubled in the past year, affecting just about everything people eat, and fanning social unrest in some of the most unstable corners of the world.

Canadians might be forgiven for not noticing. The remarkable rise of the loonie has so far largely insulated them from the kind of rampant inflation that is hitting much of the rest of the world. Canadian prices were up 1.8 per cent in February compared with last year, less than half the U.S. inflation rate – a gap economists say is largely due to the strong dollar.

A man sells rice from the National Food Authority at a store in Manila on Thursday March 27, 2008. A sharp rise in the price of rice is hitting consumer pocketbooks and raising fears of public turmoil in the many parts of Asia where rice is a staple. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

Signs of stress are emerging just about everywhere else. Food riots have erupted in Egypt, Morocco, Senegal and Cameroon. In Thailand, rice farmers are sleeping in their fields to prevent thieves from stealing their crops.

Numerous countries, including Argentina and Vietnam, have capped or taxed exports of key farm products in a bid to quell domestic inflation, running the risk of violating international trade rules. To ease growing shortages, the Philippine government has asked fast-food restaurants to serve less rice with meals to ease shortages.

In Egypt, the price of many basic foods has spiked as much as 50 per cent in a matter of months. In Asia, where rice is part of virtually every meal, prices are rising almost daily.

The United Nations World Food Programme warned this week it will have to ration food aid to cope with soaring grain prices unless it gets an emergency cash infusion of $500-million (U.S.) from donor countries.

“We are seeing a new face of hunger – people who suddenly can no longer afford the food they see on store shelves,” lamented Sheila Sisulu, deputy executive director of hunger solutions for the UNFP. “Prices have soared beyond their reach.”

And yesterday Chinese authorities announced they will pay farmers substantially more for rice and wheat as they try to boost output and cool surging inflation that threatens to spark unrest ahead of the Beijing Olympics.

“This could be the next bubble,” suggested William Cline, an agricultural economist and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

The trick is sorting out how much of the recent inflationary burst is permanent, and how much is caused by speculators flocking to commodities to escape the turmoil in financial markets. “There's a lot of speculative money that has gone into commodities as a store of value in turbulent times,” Mr. Cline said.

There are also longer-term factors pushing food prices higher, including global warming, Asia's dramatic economic emergence, $100-a-barrel oil and the United States's love affair with ethanol.

“Markets do adapt over the longer term,” said Kimberly Elliott, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Global Development.

“But in the short-run, we are going to continue to see some pretty serious effects in parts of the world.”

The era of cheap food may be over for a while. Food prices soared 40 per cent between 2006 and 2007, according to a key UN index, and the rate of inflation has accelerated this year. In a report this month, the United Nations predicted that food prices are likely to remain high for a decade.

The most lasting cause of higher food prices is certainly population growth. As countries such as China and India grow and prosper, they are consuming a greater share of the world's food. Prosperity affects how much people eat and what they eat.

This has pushed inventories such as rice and wheat to lows not seen in decades. World rice inventories currently stand at about 72 million metric tones, equal to about 17 per cent of what the world consumes annually and the lowest level since the 1970s. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has predicted that, this year, wheat inventories will hit their lowest point since 1946.

The Chinese, for example, are eating a lot more meat as they move from rural areas to cities. Ms. Elliott pointed out that it takes roughly eight pounds of grain to produce a single pound of meat.

Ms. Elliott warned that export controls aren't the answer to rising prices because they distort markets and may ultimately discourage production.

Experts also point to climate change as a reason for rising food prices. Rising temperatures are being blamed for longer and more frequent droughts, such as the ones now affecting grain production in Australia and Ukraine.

The spike in oil prices isn't helping.

Farmers consume large quantities of fertilizer, which in turn depends on now more expensive fossil fuel to produce. Likewise, in a global economy, food is shipped over ever-greater distances, compounding the impact on food prices when oil prices rise.

Even oil-rich Persian Gulf states, such as the United Arab Emirates, are experiencing rampant food inflation, and the resulting unrest. Last week, hundreds of construction workers demanding higher wages burned cars and ransacked buildings. Like most Arab states, the UAE's currency is pegged to the falling U.S. dollar, forcing consumers to pay more for the largely imported food they eat.

Another major culprit is the ethanol boom in the United States, Brazil and Europe. The diversion of crops, such as corn and soybeans, to produce biofuels has raised the price of all crops and diverted fields from food to fuel production.

This, in turn, has sparked growing tension between North and South over agricultural policies. During a visit to London this month, Egyptian Investment Minister Mahmoud Mohieldin complained that U.S. and Europe biofuel subsidies are hurting the world's poor.

“[The market] is out of order,” he told Dow Jones. “It sends the wrong message to the world, especially its poorer nations. It takes from the food of people to feed thirsty automobiles used by the relatively rich.”

Oddly, global consumers may get some relief from higher prices if Americans endure some economic pain as the U.S. economy slumps.

“We may quickly see a decline in [food] prices if we see a recession in the United States,” said Ms. Elliott of the Center for Global Development.

*****

The Crisis felt around the world

Globe and Mail
March 29, 2008

Argentina

Farmers in Argentina called off their 16-day strike against higher taxes on grains exports yesterday, aiming to ease talks with the government, strike leaders said.

The national farm and ranch strike has all but paralyzed one of the leading world exporters of soybeans, beef and wheat. There were no reports of major violence. President Cristina Fernandez had angrily refused to roll back new export taxes, facing down angry farmers.

Thousands took to the streets this week to support the farmers.

Spreading shortages of beef, milk, cooking oil and other farm products on supermarket shelves only compounded public angst.

Asia-Pacific region

Biofuels are not only hurting poor consumers in Asia by driving up crop prices, they are also failing to help farmers who have not been able to adapt their production to cash in on the boom, a UN report said this week.

The UN report noted that the sector has the potential to lower oil prices as well as provide higher demand for farmers, but urged governments to "carefully consider the impact on the poor."

The report calls for a "revolution" in the agriculture sector, saying that it could lift 218 million people living across the Asia-Pacific region out of poverty.

Urging attention on the sector that employs 60 per cent of the region's workers, the report says that raising average agricultural labour productivity is needed.

Australia

Australia, once the second largest exporter of grain, would harvest about 25 million tonnes in a good year. But, because of the worst drought in a century, the 2006 crop yielded only 9.8 million tonnes.

Global wheat stocks are at their lowest levels since 1979, and the Australian drought is one of the reasons why.

But things are looking up as rainfall in grain-growing regions has replenished soil moisture after years of drought, improving prospects for this year's crop. "Rain in late April, May and June will be the key for production this year," said Luke Chandler, a senior commodities analyst in Sydney. Bloomberg and BBC

China

China said yesterday it will pay farmers more for rice and wheat, trying to raise output and cool surging inflation that threatens to fuel unrest ahead of the Beijing Olympics.

Beijing has frozen retail prices of rice, cooking oil and other goods in an effort to rein in food costs that jumped 23.3 per cent in February over the same month last year.

But analysts warn that holding down prices paid to farmers will discourage them from raising production and easing shortages blamed for the increases.

Egypt

Egypt banned rice exports from April to October to ensure availability of the grain at affordable prices and as an alternative food to wheat products, the government-run news agency said, citing Trade and Industry Minister Rachid Mohamed Rachid.

"Consumption of rice went up because the price of pasta and bread soared," Mr. Rachid said to MENA. "We had to make sure there is enough rice available in the local market, so we halted exports." A global increase in grain prices pushed up food costs in Egypt, which imports about half of its wheat. Bread and grain prices jumped 27 per cent last month in Egypt, which imports about half of its wheat.

Philippines

Higher rice prices have sparked protests in the Philippines.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, worried about anything that could spark a revolt against her, is assuring the public rice won't run out or skyrocket in price during the traditionally lean months of July to September.

This week, she arranged the purchase of up to 1.4 million tonnes from Vietnam. She also has ordered a crackdown on price manipulation, hoarding and profiteering on subsidized rice and will hold a food summit April 4.

Things are so tight the Agriculture Secretary has asked people not to throw away leftover rice and urged fast-food restaurants to dole out less rice.

Russia

Russian consumer prices probably rose between 1 per cent and 1.2 per cent in March from the month before, driven by food costs, the Economy Ministry said.

"Accelerating inflation at the start of 2008 is principally due to food price growth," which was twice as high as in the first two months of last year, the ministry said in its monthly review posted on its website yesterday.

In a bid to rein in food prices, the government has cut dairy and vegetable oil import duties, sold grain from state reserves and added a grain export duty.

United States

The worst case of food inflation in nearly 20 years has more Americans giving up restaurant meals to eat at home.

Record-high energy, corn and wheat prices in the past year have led to sticker shock in the grocery aisles. At $1.32, the average price of a loaf of bread has increased 32 per cent since January, 2005. In the past year alone, the average price of a carton of eggs has increased almost 50 per cent.

Ground beef, milk, chicken, apples, tomatoes, lettuce, coffee and orange juice are among the staples that cost more these days, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Overall, food prices rose nearly 5 per cent in 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and a survey by the Food Marketing Institute showed the average number of weekly shopping trips falling below two per household for the first time. Food banks are seeing increases in their overall client loads.

Vietnam

A sharp rise in the price of rice has Vietnamese exporters and farmers stockpiling it in expectation of further price increases.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts global rice stocks for 2007-08 at 65 million tonnes, the lowest since 1983-84 and about one-half of the peak in 2000-01.

In Vietnam, a major rice exporter, the crop has been hit by a virus called tungro and infestations of the brown plant-hopper insect.

Farmers there say they are not benefiting from the higher prices.

"The rice price has gone up 50 per cent over the past three months but I'm not making any more money because I have to pay double for fertilizer, insecticides and labour costs," said one farmer in Ha Tay province, just outside Hanoi.

Creative financial engineering unleashes solar power

Photovoltaic (PV) panels that convert sunlight into electricity works. We know that. We also know that photovoltaics are very expensive compared to other sources of energy -- fossil or renewable. The problem is the high initial capital costs. PVs are expensive to make.

One of the working assumptions about distributed sources of electricity like PV is that they should be owned by the homeowners and businesspeople living and working in the buildings where they are installed -- "Power to the People". But it has become clear that not everyone can afford to own solar panels and, in fact, some many not want the responsibility of owning and maintaining them.

By taking advantage of financial tools including "power purchase agreements" and "third party intermediaries" solar panels are rapidly becoming available and affordable to those interested in taking steps to reduce their carbon footprint. (GW)

Pay for the Power, Not the Panels

By Peter Maloney
New York Times
March 26, 2008

INNOVATION is driving a boom in solar power, but some of the most compelling advances are taking place in financial engineering rather than photovoltaic technology.

Solar power is simple, clean and easily installed, but manufacturing solar panels is expensive, which is why this energy source is out of reach for many residences and businesses. Lately, however, solar power companies have discovered that they can attract more buyers if they act as financial intermediaries as well as suppliers of equipment and systems used to generate electricity from sunlight.

The new financial techniques allow the solar companies to separate the capital expense of the systems they sell and the tax benefits that accrue to the buyer from the final costs of the electricity produced. In doing so, the solar companies have made it possible for more corporations and even some homeowners to kill two birds with one stone: doing good for the environment while cutting the cost of the power they consume.

Creative financing “tears down the Berlin Wall of capital-cost barriers and opens up a floodgate of installations,” said Julie Blunden, vice president for public policy and communications at the SunPower Corporation, one of the solar equipment manufacturers that has taken on the techniques. “If a company is looking at putting a system on more than one roof, they don’t have to worry about installation costs or the expiration of tax incentives. All they have to look at is the energy cost.”

The new financial methods are propelling the recent surge in photovoltaic solar power installations. Some 148 megawatts of solar capacity came online in 2007, up 46.5 percent from the 101 megawatts installed the previous year, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a Washington trade group. Including isolated solar installations — that is, those not connected to the power grid — the 2007 total was 190 megawatts, a 35 percent increase over the 141 megawatts of solar power installed in 2006.

Using a “power-purchase agreement” model, or P.P.A., companies like SunEdison L.L.C. and SunPower take on the cost of installing solar panels on customers’ roofs. In return, customers pay the solar power company for the panels’ output, generally at a lower rate than they would otherwise pay.

SunEdison first used the P.P.A. model, also called a solar power service agreement, in March 2004 when it installed solar panels on the roof of a building in Edgewater, N.J., occupied by a Whole Foods Market. Since then, it has installed 93 systems, most for large retailers, using the agreements.

The power purchase model is also attracting bankers. In November, Morgan Stanley agreed to provide $190 million to finance solar projects being developed by SunPower. In January, SunPower struck a deal with G.E. Energy Financial Services that requires G.E. to buy five solar power projects in California for about $50 million.

“The lesson,” said Thomas H. Werner, SunPower’s chief executive, “is there is a very competitive market for financing systems in the United States with lots of high-quality investors looking to participate.”

Goldman Sachs is also financing solar power, as are Wells Fargo and MMA Renewable Ventures, a unit of Municipal Mortgage and Equity, which says it has arranged financing for $300 million worth of solar energy projects.

“The P.P.A. model is becoming the dominant model,” said Edward Levin, vice president for global capital markets at Morgan Stanley. “It is no longer a plausible business model for a solar developer to sell panels to a property owner or corporation.”

The market for commercial solar power installations is not based solely on environmental concerns. Solar power is exploding because of “pure economics,” said Barry Neal, director of environmental finance at Wells Fargo.

Companies like Wal-Mart and Kohl’s are turning to solar power because “they can actually reduce their electricity costs, particularly in states like California and New Jersey,” where electricity rates are high and rising, Mr. Neal said. Those states, which also offer generous incentives, account for about 85 percent of solar installations in the country.

California’s Million Solar Roofs program includes incentives that could translate into an $8,000 rebate for a typical home solar system. New Jersey’s solar incentive program has been so popular — the state went from six solar installations in 2001 to 2,712 at the end of 2007 — that it has run out of money. It is moving from cash rebates to rebates in the form of certificates that can be bought and sold to help companies meet required emission reduction levels.

Besides state incentives, there is a federal investment tax credit worth up to 30 cents on the dollar. For bankers involved in solar power, these credits make the deals more profitable than cash returns alone would. Mark McLanahan, vice president for marketing and strategy at MMA Renewable Ventures, said that the credits mean that companies like his can charge less for electricity under the power purchase contracts.

Credit quality issues make the residential market harder to crack than the commercial market. SunPower works with home builders to install solar panels on new homes and with New Resource Bank in San Francisco to offer second mortgages to finance solar installations on existing homes. But credit issues must be resolved before this market can take off, executives say.

There are several possible solutions. One being watched is a city-run program developed by Berkeley, Calif. Under the plan, Berkeley pays homeowners to install solar systems and then recoups the cost through a 20-year addition to their property tax bills.

But repackaging risk does not eliminate it. Under the solar power purchase agreements, the buyer — the retailer, the homeowner — takes the risk. “They are making a big bet” that the price of conventional power stays high, said Severin Borenstein, director of the University of California Energy Institute.

Photovoltaic solar power is “incredibly expensive,” he said. “It isn’t economic, and you can’t make it economic through financial engineering.”

Mr. green gene

It's reassuring to see that plant geneticists are turning their attention and microscopes away from trying to develop food crops that are resistant to pesticides and instead are focusing on how to develop plants that are capable of entering into symbiotic relationships that improve their ability to uptake naturally occurring nitrogen. The former strategy was encouraging the increased use of pesticides. The research reported on below could dramatically reduce the application of chemical fertilizers.

Genetically altering plants to become efficient nitrogen fixers may not sit well everyone. I'm certain that some may even question if techniques like this constitutes sustainable agriculture. I think it's fair to say that no systemic-wide analysis of potential impacts over space and time have been done yet. However, I'm also guessing that over the centuries just about every domesticated plant and animal in the global agricultural system has been biologically modified for in for the purposes of efficiency and economy. (GW)

Scientists discover genetics of nitrogen fixation in plants -- potential implications for future agriculture

Biopact
March 8, 2008

Some plants have the capacity to grow well in nutrient poor soils without additional fertilizers. This is the result of a very efficient symbiosis between either nitrogen fixing bacteria that interact with the plant's roots, or between these roots and mycorrhizal fungi. These symbioses allow plants to strongly improve their uptake of nitrogen, phosphorus and water. Now a team of French and German scientists has discovered [*.pdf French/Spanish] the common genetic mechanism at work that allows the elements of the symbiosis to interact.

Their findings might make it possible to transfer the nitrogen fixing capacity of legumes to a wide range of crops that do not have this ability, including maize and rice. Ultimately, this could lead to a massive reduction of inorganic fertilizer consumption. The discovery is reported in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team of researchers from the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) and the University of Munich have been collaborating for years on the project. They found that one of the genetic elements of nitrogen fixing plants called SymRK (Symbiosis Receptor Kinase), used by leguminous plants (pea, alfalfa...) to join Rhizobia bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi, is also essential for the establishment of the symbiosis between the tropical tree Casuarina - an actinorhizal plant that thrives in poor sandy soils - and nitrogen fixing bacteria belonging to the genus Frankia. This new understanding unlocks the keys to the genetics of the nitrogen fixing capacity of plants, and could make it possible to apply the mechanism to the development of crops that massively cut back on fertilizers.

Inorganic fertilizers are an essential but expensive input for farmers. World wide consumption of nitrogen fertilizers was around 130 million tonnes in 2007. Phosphate demand stood at around 37 million ton. Prices are rising steadily because of high oil and gas prices. Some crops like maize require large applications that have to be repeated each growing seaon. Particular cropping systems - such as growing nitrogen-fixing crops after other crops - can limit the need for fertilizers marginally and temporarily.

But what if crops like maize and rice could be designed in such a way that they do not require any additional inorganic fertilizers? That would revolutionise agriculture on a global scale and would greatly limit the different types of pollution and ecosystem damage caused by artificial fertilizers. The discovery of the genetic basis for the efficient N2-fixing capacity in plants might make the development of such crops possible.

The association between mycorrhizal fungi and plants is estimated to be more than 400 million years old. It helped plants colonize the land. Today, the symbiosis can be found in more than 80% of the all plant species. More recently, approximately 60 million years ago, a new symbiosis developed between soil bacteria known as rhizobia, and leguminous plants, which granted them the unique capacity to nourish themselves by extracting nitrogen from the air to use it as a nutrient.

Rhizobia establish themselves inside the root nodules of legumes, where they transform nitrogen into ammonium that can be directly taken up by the plant. In return, the plant provides to the micro-organisms with nutrients in the form of complex glucides.

Unlocking the mechanism
For several years, scientists have tried to unlock the genetic mechanisms responsible for these mutually beneficial relations between plants and bacteria on the one hand, and bacteria and fungi on the other.

Already in 2000, IRD researchers discovered a genetic signaling mechanism common to the way in which legumes interact with rhizobia and to the way in which mycorrhizae work. The symbioses use a common genetic element baptized SymRK. This gene intervenes in recognizing Nod factors - the signaling molecules that are crucial for the rhizobia to establish themselves in root nodules.

So-called actinorhizal plants have formed a second group of plants that have acquired the capacity to benefit from a symbiosis with another type of nitrogen-fixing bacteria called Frankia. The genetic mechanisms of these plants' relationship with their symbiont has not been studied in-depth so far.

The actinorhizal plants can be found in disturbed environments, such as volcanic soils or mining terrain and in soils starved of nitrogen, such as sandy moraines.

There are approximately 260 species of actinorhizal plants distributed over 24 genera and 8 families of flowering plants. To study the symbiosis, the French and German researchers were particularly interested in the tropical Casuarina tree, better known under the name filao. Casuarinas thrive at tropical beaches, in poor sandy soils.

Using techniques from molecular biology, the scientists looked for the sequence coding the SymRK gene within the Casuarina genome. Once they identified the gene, they wanted to find out whether it is again responsible for the establishment of the symbiosis between filao and the Frankia bacteria.

To find out, they developed transgenic plants in which the expression of the SymRK gene was strongly reduced. They then compared the capacity of these plants to form symbiotic nodules on their roots with that of wild plants. According to these analyses, the plants whose SymRK gene's potency was reduced, produced half the number of root nodules compared with the control plants. The formation of mycorrhizae also strongly decreased compared with the wild Casuarina trees.

These results indicate that the reduction of the expression of the SymRK gene, in filao, causes a major reduction in its capacity to fix atmospheric nitrogen as well as a reduction of its aptitude to form mycorrhizae. More generally, these conclusions highlight the fact that there is a common genetic element at work in nitrogen fixing plants that seems essential for the installation of the three types of symbiotic associations utilizing bacteria (Rhizobium and Frankia) or mycorrhizal fungi.

Implications
A better comprehension of these genetic mechanisms could contribute, in the years to come, to the development of techniques to transfer the genetic material necessary for the nitrogen fixing capacity to crops that are unable to perform this task, such as cereals like maize and rice.

Whereas rice does establish a symbiotic relation with a mycorrhizal fungus, it is indeed inapt to develop nitrogen fixing nodules. However, by modifying its genome in such a way that rice plants too are capable of feeding off the atmospheric nutrient, it would become possible to significantly limit the nitrogen fertilizer needs in rice cultivation. This would have major economic and environmental effects: reduced production costs for farmers world wide and less pollution from nitrogen runoff.

If the N2-fixing capacity is transferred to all the major grain crops currently produced, world agriculture would be transformed forever.

Translated for Biopact by Laurens Rademakers.

References:
Hassen Gherbi, Katharina Markmann, Sergio Svistoonoff, Joan Estevan, Daphné Autran, Gabor Giczey, Florence Auguy, Benjamin Péret, Laurent Laplaze, Claudine Franche, Martin Parniske, and Didier Bogusz, "SymRK defines a common genetic basis for plant root endosymbioses with arbuscular mycorrhiza fungi, rhizobia, and Frankia bacteria", Published online on March 3, 2008, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0710618105,

IRD: Un mécanisme génétique universel découvert chez les plantes fixatrices d’azote [*.pdf] - Fiche n°288 - Février 2008

AlphaGalileo: Un mecanismo genético universal descubierto en las plantas fijadoras de nitrógeno - March 7, 2008.

Everybody talks about the weather, Beijing aims to do something about it

The Chinese government is taking the concept of command and control to new heights (literally) as it prepares to host this year's Summer Olympics. Not content with forcing cars off the street and people back onto bicycles in an effort to appear to be cutting back on air pollution, the Beijing Weather Modification Office stands ready to do all that it can to ensure that no rain falls on their Olympic parade.

Both the general public and the media raised a skeptical eyebrow this past February when the U.S. announced it would shoot down a wayward satellite to prevent it from crashing to Earth and spill its toxic contents on vulnerable ecosystems. Surely that was just an excuse for the Pentagon to test its "Star Wars" toys. The other eyebrow must at least be twitching over this news. Is China acting locally and thinking globally with respect to climate modification?(GW)

Weather Engineering in China

How the Chinese plan to modify the weather in Beijing during the Olympics, using supercomputers and artillery.

By Mark Williams
Technology Review
March 25, 2008

To prevent rain over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium that Beijing natives have nicknamed the Bird's Nest, the city's branch of the national Weather Modification Office--itself a department of the larger China Meteorological Administration--has prepared a three-stage program for the 2008 Olympics this August.

First, Beijing's Weather Modification Office will track the region's weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer, purchased from Big Blue last year, that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. It models an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each kilometer.

Then, using their two aircraft and an array of twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around Beijing, the city's weather engineers will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds that are still far enough away that their rain can be flushed out before they reach the stadium.

Finally, any rain-heavy clouds that near the Bird's Nest will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that rain won't fall until those clouds have passed over. Zhang Qian, head of Beijing's Weather Modification Office, explains, "We use a coolant made from liquid nitrogen to increase the number of droplets while decreasing their average size. As a result, the smaller droplets are less likely to fall, and precipitation can be reduced." August is part of Northeast Asia's rainy season; chances of precipitation over Beijing on any day that month will approach 50 percent. Still, while tests with clouds bearing heavy rain loads haven't always been successful, Qian claims that "the results with light rain have been satisfactory."

Modifying the weather may seem a hubristic exercise. But arguably, given what else the Chinese have already invested to make this year's Olympics a showcase for China's emergence as a 21st-century superpower, it's almost the least they could do. Following the announcement in 2001 that the 2008 Games had been awarded to Beijing, the government of the People's Republic initiated $40 billion of new construction there, bringing 120,000 Chinese migrant workers into the city (at about $130 each a month) and triggering a five-year steel shortage worldwide. Today, Beijing boasts, alongside the vast Bird's Nest, megastructures like a new airport terminal that on its own is bigger than any airport elsewhere in the world. One measure of the city's transformation is that today 300 or so new towers, some designed by the most avant-garde architects on the planet, rise where a few short years ago there were only siheyuans (traditional Chinese courtyard residences) interspersed with bland 1950s-era boxes in the Sino-Soviet style.

Equally, though, the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions estimates that 1.5 million of Beijing's natives will have been displaced from their homes by government edict when the Olympics finally begins. This preemptory modernization is of a piece with China's scale, its 1.32 billion population, and the authoritarian control exerted by its Communist central government, which nowadays is dominated by technocrats and engineers who favor mega-projects like the world's largest dam (the Three Gorges dam over the Yangtze River), its highest railway (the Qinghai-Tibet line), and even its biggest Ferris wheel (in Beijing, opening in 2009). Unsurprisingly, therefore, China's national weather-engineering program is also the world's largest, with approximately 1,500 weather modification professionals directing 30 aircraft and their crews, as well as 37,000 part-time workers--mostly peasant farmers--who are on call to blast away at clouds with 7,113 anti-aircraft guns and 4,991 rocket launchers.

The Chinese began experimental weather engineering in 1958 to irrigate the country's north, where average yearly rainfall compares with that during the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and sudden windstorms blasting down from the Gobi desert have made drought and famine constant possibilities. Today, the People's Republic budgets $60 to $90 million annually for its national Weather Modification Office. As for the return on this investment, the state-run news agency Xinhua claims that between 1999 and 2007, the office rendered 470,000 square kilometers of land hail-free and created more than 250 billion tons of rain--an amount sufficient to fill the Yellow River, China's second largest, four times over. Furthermore, while Qian's weather engineers in Beijing have been testing their capabilities for the past two years, the Chinese say that during the past five years, similar efforts have already helped produce good weather at national events like the World Expo in Yunnan, the Asian Games in Shanghai, and the Giant Panda Festival in Sichuan.

Although they possess the world's largest weather modification program, the Chinese point to the Russians as being the most advanced. In 1986, Russian scientists deployed cloud-seeding measures to prevent radioactive rain from Chernobyl from reaching Moscow, and in 2000 they cleared clouds before an anniversary ceremony commemorating the end of World War II; China's then president, Jiang Zemin, witnessed the results firsthand and pushed to adopt the same approach back home. As for the historical credit for starting the whole weather-engineering ball rolling back in 1946, that belongs to employees of General Electric in Schenectady, NY--most notably, scientist Bernard Vonnegut (brother of the late novelist Kurt), who worked out silver iodide's potential to provide crystals around which cloud moisture would condense. During the 1960s and '70s, the United States invested millions of federal dollars in experiments like Stormfury (aimed at hurricane control), Skywater (aimed at snow- and rainfall increase), and Skyfire (aimed at lightning suppression). Simultaneously, the U.S. military tried to use weather modification as a weapon in Project Popeye, during the Vietnam War, by rain-making over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in an effort to close it.

Nevertheless, because weather is the epitome of a complex, emergent system, no analytical models or methodologies existed that produced data conclusively, proving that weather modification worked. In the United States, research funding died down and commercial weather modification efforts became hemmed in by stringent regulation. A 2003 report from the National Academy of Sciences concluded that despite more than 30 years of efforts, "there is still no convincing scientific proof of the efficacy of intentional weather modification efforts."

Still, according to William Cotton, a meteorologist at Colorado State University, "as far as the science of weather modification is concerned, the evidence that it works in certain situations is very compelling." The Chinese are certainly in no doubt: once they have demonstrated their capabilities to the rest of the world at the Olympics later this year, the party's central planners intend to expand their national weather modification program in 2010, turning the Weather Modification Office into a separate government ministry that will double the amount of rain-making and other weather engineering that China is now doing.

"We knew we were poor before, but now it's worse than poverty."

It was only a matter of time before the consequences of a world that has become increasingly dependent on energy-intensive agriculture would become painfully clear. With the price of oil settling in above the $100-a-barrel level for the past few weeks, the price of food around the world is also on the rise as the cost of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and transportation have all been driven upwards.

Making matters worse is the fact that incentives designed to encourage the development of biofuels as a substitute for expensive and dwindling supplies of oil are diverting both attention and land away from food production -- an obvious unsustainable strategy no matter how you spin it.

We live in an interconnected world and it's time to act accordingly. Incentives encouraging the development of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, renewable energy resources and technology (especially our vast offshore wind energy resource), and sustainable agricultural practices is a smarter path to pursue. (GW)

Food Prices Rising Around The World

CNN.Com
March 25, 2008

MEXICO CITY, Mexico (AP) -- If you're seeing your grocery bill go up, you're not alone.
From subsistence farmers eating rice in Ecuador to gourmets feasting on escargot in France, consumers worldwide face rising food prices in what analysts call a perfect storm of conditions. Freak weather is a factor. But so are dramatic changes in the global economy, including higher oil prices, lower food reserves and growing consumer demand in China and India.

The world's poorest nations still harbor the greatest hunger risk. Clashes over bread in Egypt killed at least two people last week, and similar food riots broke out in Burkina Faso and Cameroon this month.

But food protests now crop up even in Italy. And while the price of spaghetti has doubled in Haiti, the cost of miso is packing a hit in Japan.

"It's not likely that prices will go back to as low as we're used to," said Abdolreza Abbassian, economist and secretary of the Intergovernmental Group for Grains for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. "Currently if you're in Haiti, unless the government is subsidizing consumers, consumers have no choice but to cut consumption. It's a very brutal scenario, but that's what it is."

No one knows that better than Eugene Thermilon, 30, a Haitian day laborer who can no longer afford pasta to feed his wife and four children since the price nearly doubled to $0.57 a bag. Their only meal on a recent day was two cans of corn grits.

"Their stomachs were not even full," Thermilon said, walking toward his pink concrete house on the precipice of a garbage-filled ravine. By noon the next day, he still had nothing to feed them for dinner.

Their hunger has had a ripple effect. Haitian food vendor Fabiola Duran Estime, 31, has lost so many customers like Thermilon that she had to pull her daughter, Fyva, out of kindergarten because she can't afford the $20 monthly tuition.

Fyva was just beginning to read.

In the long term, prices are expected to stabilize. Farmers will grow more grain for both fuel and food and eventually bring prices down. Already this is happening with wheat, with more crops to be planted in the U.S., Canada and Europe in the coming year.

However, consumers still face at least 10 years of more expensive food, according to preliminary FAO projections.

Among the driving forces are petroleum prices, which increase the cost of everything from fertilizers to transport to food processing. Rising demand for meat and dairy in rapidly developing countries such as China and India is sending up the cost of grain, used for cattle feed, as is the demand for raw materials to make biofuels.

What's rare is that the spikes are hitting all major foods in most countries at once. Food prices rose 4 percent in the U.S. last year, the highest rise since 1990, and are expected to climb as much again this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

As of December, 37 countries faced food crises, and 20 had imposed some sort of food-price controls.

For many, it's a disaster. The U.N.'s World Food Program says it's facing a $500 million shortfall in funding this year to feed 89 million needy people. On Monday, it appealed to donor countries to step up contributions, saying its efforts otherwise have to be scaled back.

In Egypt, where bread is up 35 percent and cooking oil 26 percent, the government recently proposed ending food subsidies and replacing them with cash payouts to the needy. But the plan was put on hold after it sparked public uproar.

"A revolution of the hungry is in the offing," said Mohammed el-Askalani of Citizens Against the High Cost of Living, a protest group established to lobby against ending the subsidies.

In China, the price hikes are both a burden and a boon.

Per capita meat consumption has increased 150 percent since 1980, so Zhou Jian decided six months ago to switch from selling auto parts to pork. The price of pork has jumped 58 percent in the past year, yet every morning housewives and domestics still crowd his Shanghai shop, and more customers order choice cuts.

The 26-year-old now earns $4,200 a month, two to three times what he made selling car parts. And it's not just pork. Beef is becoming a weekly indulgence.

"The Chinese middle class is starting to change the traditional thought process of beef as a luxury," said Kevin Timberlake, who manages the U.S.-based Western Cattle Company feedlot in China's Inner Mongolia.

At the same time, increased cost of food staples in China threatens to wreak havoc. Beijing has been selling grain from its reserves to hold down prices, said Jing Ulrich, chairwoman of China equities for JP Morgan.

"But this is not really solving the root cause of the problem," Ulrich said. "The cause of the problem is a supply-demand imbalance. Demand is very strong. Supply is constrained. It is as simple as that."

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao says fighting inflation from shortages of key foods is a top economic priority. Inflation reached 7.1 percent in January, the highest in 11 years, led by an 18.2 percent jump in food prices.

Meanwhile, record oil prices have boosted the cost of fertilizer and freight for bulk commodities -- up 80 percent in 2007 over 2006. The oil spike has also turned up the pressure for countries to switch to biofuels, which the FAO says will drive up the cost of corn, sugar and soybeans "for many more years to come."

In Japan, the ethanol boom is hitting the country in mayonnaise and miso, two important culinary ingredients, as biofuels production pushes up the price of cooking oil and soybeans.

A two-pound bottle of mayonnaise his risen about 10 percent in two months to as much as 330 yen (nearly $3), said Daishi Inoue, a cook at a Chinese restaurant.

"It's not hurting us much now," he said. "But if prices keep going up, we have no choice but to raise our prices."

Miso Bank, a restaurant in Tokyo's glitzy Ginza district, specializes in food cooked with miso, or soybean paste.

"We expect prices to go up in April all at once," said Miso Bank manager Koichi Oritani. "The hikes would affect our menu. So we plan to order miso in bulk and make changes to the menu."

Italians are feeling the pinch in pasta, with consumer groups staging a one-day strike in September against a food deeply intertwined with national identity. Italians eat an estimated 60 pounds of pasta per capita a year.

The protest was symbolic because Italians typically stock up on pasta, buying multiple packages at a time. But in the next two months pasta consumption dropped 5 percent, said farm lobbyist Rolando Manfredini.

"The situation has gotten even worse," he said.

In decades past, farm subsidies and support programs allowed major grain exporting countries to hold large surpluses, which could be tapped during food shortages to keep prices down. But new trade policies have made agricultural production much more responsive to market demands -- putting global food reserves at their lowest in a quarter century.

Without reserves, bad weather and poor harvests have a bigger impact on prices.

"The market is extremely nervous. With the slightest news about bad weather, the market reacts," said economist Abbassian.

That means that a drought in Australia and flooding in Argentina, two of the world's largest suppliers of industrial milk and butter, sent the price of butter in France soaring 37 percent from 2006 to 2007.

Forty percent of escargot, the snail dish, is butter.

"You can do the calculation yourself," said Romain Chapron, president of Croque Bourgogne, which supplies escargot. "It had a considerable effect. It forced people in our profession to tighten their belts to the maximum."

The same climate crises sparked a 21 percent rise in the cost of milk, which with butter makes another famous French food item -- the croissant. Panavi, a pastry and bread supplier, has raised retail prices of croissants and pain au chocolat by 6 to 15 percent.

Already, there's a lot of suspicion among consumers.

"They don't understand why prices have gone up like this," said Nicole Watelet, general secretary at the Federation of French Bakeries and Pastry Enterprises. "They think that someone is profiting from this. But it's not us. We're paying." Food costs worldwide spiked 23 percent from 2006 to 2007, according to the FAO. Grains went up 42 percent, oils 50 percent and dairy 80 percent.

Economists say that for the short term, government bailouts will have to be part of the answer to keep unrest at a minimum. In recent weeks, rising food prices sparked riots in the West African nations of Burkina Faso, where mobs torched buildings, and Cameroon, where at least four people died.

But attempts to control prices in one country often have dire effects elsewhere. China's restrictions on wheat flour exports resulted in a price spike in Indonesia this year, according to the FAO. Ukraine and Russia imposed export restrictions on wheat, causing tight supplies and higher prices for importing countries. Partly because of the cost of imported wheat, Peru's military has begun eating bread made from potato flour, a native crop.

"We need a response on a large scale, either the regional or international level," said Brian Halweil of the environmental research organization Worldwatch Institute. "All countries are tied enough to the world food markets that this is a global crisis."

Poorer countries can speed up the adjustment by investing in agriculture, experts say. If they do, farmers can turn high prices into an engine for growth.

But in countries like Burkina Faso, the crisis is immediate.

Days after the riots, Pascaline OuÄedraogo wandered the market in the capital, Ouagadougou, looking to buy meat and vegetables. She said a good meal cost 1,000 francs (about $2.35) not long ago. Now she needs twice that.

"The more prices go up, the less there is to meet their needs," she said of her three children, all in secondary school. "You wonder if it's the government or the businesses that are behind the price hikes."

IrÇene Belem, a 25-year-old with twins, struggles to buy milk, which has gone up 57 percent in recent weeks.

"We knew we were poor before," she said, "but now it's worse than poverty."

Portugal 's power shift

Portugal, one of the European Union's most unassuming countries has been quietly assessing and developing its considerable renewable energy resources. For years, with no fossil fuel resources to speak of, Portugal imported 80 percent of its energy. Last year it met 40 percent of its needs from renewable sources primarily from wind and hydro. This year Portugal is set to inaugurate major wave and solar projects. The solar initiative will be the world's largest installed panel array spanning more tha 600 acres and expected to provide electricity to approximately 30,000 homes.

In a world in the throes of climate change and peaking oil reserves, Portugal is illustrating what smart growth based on the sustainable development of a variety of indigenous energy sources will look like. (GW)

Portugal solar power plant to be world's largest

By Barry Hatton
The Associated Press

March 14th, 2008

AMARELEJA, Portugal

Broad fields of giant solar panels as big as houses tilt toward the sun in this torrid patch of the Iberian peninsula.

Arranged in tidy rows, like the vineyards and olive groves that quilt the typical Portuguese landscape, the panels belong to a solar power plant that comes online this month and is due to be the world's largest when it is completed later this year.

Portugal, one of the European Union's least conspicuous countries, is in the vanguard of the continent's rush to harness renewable energy. Despite its frail economy, it is one of eight EU countries whose push into clean technology has enabled a double- digit share of electricity consumption from green sources.

The EU wants clean power sources to furnish 20 percent of the bloc's energy by 2020, up from 8.5 percent in 2005 - and the Amareleja project is at the forefront of that mission.

More than 2,500 gray-blue solar panels are being assembled over nearly 618 acres - roughly 350 soccer fields - in this town of about 3,000 people that lies in one of Europe's hottest spots. Each panel measures 43 feet by 26 feet and weighs more than 2.2 tons. Like sunflowers the panels follow the sun, swiveling on thick metal stems. When complete, the $396 million project will provide power for some 30,000 homes.

Not far from Amareleja, a dam that will create Europe's largest man-made lake when it fills up is already pumping electricity into the national grid. Ten other new dams are planned. On Portugal's Atlantic coast, a pioneering wave energy project waits to be deployed within months.

In the country's hilly north, Europe's largest wind farm will be ready by the end of the year. Portuguese authorities claimed the highest EU growth rate in wind energy production between 2005 and 2006, when the country posted a fourfold increase. Approved wind farm projects are slated to power 750,000 homes.

By the end of last year energy from renewable sources accounted for just over 40 percent of the electricity consumed in Portugal, a country of 10.6 million people with plenty of sunshine, big rivers and a long coastline.

"Not taking advantage of our resources such as water and the wind would be like Venezuela not taking advantage of its oil," Economy and Innovation Minister Manuel Pinho said.

Portugal didn't need much encouragement. With no coal, oil or gas of its own, the country imports more than 80 percent of its energy needs, including for transport. High oil prices have further squeezed an already pinched economy.

The government has made renewable energy a priority. It is providing grants and subsidies to companies investing in the sector.

Anticipated rewards of the clean energy sector include an expected 10,000 new jobs and forecast investments of $12.1 billion between 2007 and 2012.

That's welcome news in this easygoing nation which at the turn of the century discovered it was an analog country in a digital age.

Gross domestic product per capita has dropped to around 71 percent of the European Union average, down from a peak of 80 percent in 2000, as Portugal failed to keep pace with a changing world. Its jobless rate of 8.3 percent is the fifth-highest in the EU.

Portuguese companies, traditionally viewed as international lightweights, are getting a lift from the rising tide of clean energy investments. Utility company EDP Energias de Portugal SA last year agreed to pay $2.15 billion to buy Houston-based Horizon Wind Energy LLC, making it an intercontinental player.

The 27-nation bloc's progress in harnessing alternative energy sources has been "patchy," says Oliver Schaefer, policy director of the European Renewable Energy Council, an industry group based in Brussels, Belgium.

"Some countries are clearly lagging behind," he said.

A few bigger European countries, such as Britain and Italy, currently tap renewables for only around 5 percent of their needs.

Countries that have embraced the makeover include Sweden, Denmark, Spain and Austria.

Investors in expensive new technology will likely need state- funded incentives for some time, analysts say. In the Netherlands, for example, electricity produced by renewable sources slipped back to 2.4 percent of the national total last year, down from 2.7 percent the previous year, after the government scrapped state grants for new projects.

In Amareleja, a town previously best known for its rustic solitude, the local council got the ball rolling with public funds and later sold the project to Spanish company Acciona.

The plant has brought 200 jobs and has given a new lease on life to one of Europe's poorest regions.

"It's given the whole town a lift," says Manuel Cipriano Ramalho, president of the Amareleja parish council. "We're all for it."

Manifesto for a 21st century design revolution

What did Albert Einstein mean when he said that "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them" ? One eloquent and urgent response to this question can be found in Sanford Kwinter's remarkable book "Far From Equilibrium: Essays On Technology and Design Culture". On the surface this is a critique of the shortcomings of American architecture, but it is actually much more. It is a argument for the absolute necessity for the architecture profession to realize that the survival of humanity depends on comprehensive infrastructure design and to accept the challenge of expanding beyond designing isolated buildings.

In one of the books many dazzling essays, infrastructure is defined as big, ubiquitous and foundational: "It is the systemic expression of capital, deregulated currency, interest rates, credit instruments, trade treaties, and market forces; it is water, fuel and electrical reservoirs, routes and rates of supply; it is demographic mutations and migrations, satellites and lotteries, logistics and supply coefficients, traffic computers, airports and distribution hubs, cadastral techniques, juridical routines, telephone systems, business district self-regulation mechanisms, evacuation and disaster mobilization protocols, prisons, subways and freeways and their articulated connections. libraries and weather monitoring apparatuses, trash removal and recycling networks, sports stadiums, garages, gas pipelines and meters, hotels, public toilets, postal and park utilities and management, school systems and ATMs, rail nodes and networks, television programming, interstate systems, ports of entry and the public goods and agencies associated with them, sewers and alarms, multi-tiered military-entertainment apparatus, decision engineering pools, wetlands and water basins, civil structure maintenance schedules, epidemiological algorithms and virology labs, cable delivery systems, law enforcement matrixes, licensing bylaws, green markets, medical-pharmaceutical complexes, Internet scaffolds, handgun regulations, , granaries and water towers, military deployment procedures, street and highway illumination schemas; in a word grids of any and all kinds." (It's the grid, stupid).

Interestingly enough (but not surprising to me), one of the few individual who really got this was Buckminster Fuller. "Fuller had a profoundly scientific intuition, which meant that he was primarily interested in values such as beauty, elegance and economy as they pertained to a solution, not to cloying ornamental or stylistic properties."

This made him a real threat to the architectural community. An excerpt from one of the essays featured in "Far From Equilibrium" follows.

Fuller Themselves?

First published in ANY 17, "Forget Fuller?" (1997)

Mainstream architects-with the notable exception of Louis Kahn—have never recognized the significance of Buckminster Fuller. Yet the more appropriate question today is, do they deserve him? No other discipline has survived from the days of the Trivium and Quadrivium with as small-minded an outlook as architecture. Brunelleschi's dome, for example, remains acceptably part of the aesthetico-ecclesiastical order that current "avant-gardists" continue to worship; Fuller's languishes. No other discipline makes small-mindedness a virtue quite the way architecture does, and nowhere as dogmatically as in its knowing denunciation of overextended ambition, unbridled invention, systematic theorization, obsessive technical rigor, sweeping universalism and anti-classicism – in a word, of Fuller. One might say, in the tradition of the Italian Futurists, that Fuller was the first truly secular architect, the first to embrace synthetic ideas and the brute realities of modernization to the total eschewal of tradition, its glories and superstitions. Fuller was the veritable Einstein, the Schonberg of architecture, but architecture was never interested in real revolutions. Its business it believed was gravity, and it was comfortably, though cravenly, ensconced within the fey yet impregnable citadel of art history. Fuller revealed "modern” architecture to be an imposter, and in a treacherous, effective summoning of its own army of clerks, the architecture establishment succeeded in exiling him to its lunatic fringe. But Fuller was indomitable because he was the first to truly marry design to science and philosophy, and no one could then, nor now, dispute the following point: he alone was responsible for more fundamental innovations and transformations of thought than the entire profession could muster or make claim to in several hundred years.

For decades one was well instructed not to mention Fuller in architectural circles, lest one bring down upon oneself the wrath of the clerks. Today, how ever, it has become strangely possible to speak to the subject. What has changed? Perhaps no more than the following fact: Architecture, moribund for so long yet fatally vain, has only of late had the clear, sobering glimpse of its own mortality. The elements contributing to this perception of mortality have been rising. Like the formations of an attacking army, all around it for a century, but the central fact has been driven home by a single point of pressure: the economico-demographic dynamo of ultra-rapid, hyper-rational development. The era of naive infill, of the isolated building or building system set in a firmament of immobile forces, is over

The brave new world we now face-and there is no looking away-is consti­tuted by the media-economic imperative to produce "urban fabric" everywhere, even where no concrete or historical firmament for it preexists, where all is a-swirl with abstract "infra" structures waiting to be captured, concretized, set into play. But designing buildings and designing development (routines, propensities, unfoldings) could not be more different things. Development poses the unprecedented challenge of giving form within the agar of politics, history, media, demographics, knowledge systems and economics. In a sea of dammed but invisible forces, it is an art of total deployment: full-scale, all out, comprehensive systems design. Architecture could never figure as anything more than an incidental relay before the brute fact of a society's total technical deployment, the synchronized mobilization of all of its machines and its tools, of its physical and intellectual resources and life. This is what once made Fuller intolerable to all architects bien pensants, and of course, what also makes him so necessary for all of us today. Futurism formulated it, Nagy probed it and began to repertory it, but only Fuller, in his hubris and madness, systematized it. Design, he showed us, must attack the entire world; UN task is to produce "advantage" over adversity or hazard, to embrace work-­potential wherever and whenever it exists. Most work-potential in advanced societies is lodged within patterns of knowledge and patterns of matter and their fluid interplay: that is, in shaped action and configuration. Every pattern, Fuller understood, is something made, it is a modulus of trapped potential (shape), a system or reservoir of active storage and retrieval.

Fuller was the first designer in history to understand structure as a pattern comprised entirely of energy and information. In this, his precursors are more Carnot, Clerk-Maxwell or Boltzmann than Viollet-Ie-Duc or the masters of the Gothic cathedrals. Fuller never discussed design uniquely in terms of buildings. He conceived of the universe itself as an energetico-informational continuum, something dynamic, and always transforming. Fuller was the first designer to think of form in terms of consequent phases of forces and matter, and though he did not apply his attention to the dynamics of its temporal partitioning (i.e., its pro­ductive dis-symmetries), he may certainly be said to have anticipated by decades the morphodynamic insights of mathematician Rene Thorn. Energy, he surmised, was conserved. It was saved in form, that is, saved informationally in pattern-work.

Fuller's very existence menaced every complacent idea of architecture in the twentieth century.

Some things you can't bank on

No matter how you look at it, Spaceship Earth is clearly in trouble. All major natural (air, water, soil) and human (food, energy, shelter, infrastructure) support systems are failing -- and the failures are all interrelated. The problems/crises are systemic, yet none of our political leaders has shown the courage to propose taking a comprehensive approach to solving them.

While the impacts of the current mortgage crisis are mostly felt at the local and national levels, its roots run deep and wide. (GW)

The Triple Failing of the Big Private Banks

by Damien Millet and Eric Toussaint
Counterpunch
March 20, 2008

Since August 2007, US and European banks have constantly made headline news concerning the deep crisis they are going through and its knock-on effect on the neoliberal economic system as a whole. Asset depreciation for these banks currently stands at over 200 billion dollars. Several banking research services and seasoned economists estimate that the final damage will exceed 1,000 billion dollars.¹

How did the banks manage to build such an irrational lending system? Eager for profit, mortgage companies made loans to a sector of the population that was already heavily indebted. The conditions attached to these mortgages -- highly profitable for the lender -- amounted to daylight robbery for the borrower: the interest rate was fixed and reasonable for the first two years but thereafter rose sharply. Lenders assured borrowers that the property they were buying would quickly appreciate thanks to the boom in the real estate sector. The problem was that the real estate bubble burst in 2007 and house prices started to go steadily down. The number of defaults on payment soared and mortgage brokers had trouble repaying their own loans. To protect themselves, the big banks either refused extra credit to the mortgage lenders or agreed to new loans at far higher interest rates. But the spiral did not stop there, since the big banks had bought up a large number of the original loans as off-balance sheet operations by creating specific companies called Structured Investment Vehicles (SIV), which finance the purchase of high yield mortgages converted into bonds (CDOs, or Collateralized Debt Obligations).

As from August 2007, investors stopped buying the unguaranteed commercial papers issued by SIVs, which no longer looked like a safe or credible option. Consequently, the SIVs lacked the liquidity needed to buy up mortgages and the crisis worsened. The big banks who had created the SIVs therefore had to bail them out to stop them going bankrupt. Up to then, SIV operations had not appeared in the banks' accounts (thus allowing them to conceal the risks involved), but now the SIV debts had to come out of the closet and onto the books.

The result was general panic. In the US, 84 mortgage companies either went bankrupt or partially stopped doing business between 1 January and 17 August 2007, as opposed to only 17 similar cases for the whole of 2006. In Germany, the IKB BANK and SachsenLB were saved by the skin of their teeth. Recently, in England, the bankrupt Northern Rock has had to be nationalized. On 13 March 2008, the Carlyle Capital Corporation (CCC) fund, known to be close to the Bush clan, collapsed with debts 32 times its capital. The following day, the prestigious US bank Bear Stearns (5th US investment bank) called on the US Federal Reserve to provide an emergency credit line. Bear Stearns is being snapped up by JPMorgan Chase for a mere pittance.

Several branches of the lending market are shaky constructions on the point of collapse. They drag into their misadventures the powerful banks, hedge funds, or investment funds through which they were created. The salvage of these private financial institutions requires massive intervention on the part of the public authorities. And thus once again, profits accrue to the private sector, and losses to the public purse.

Which brings us to a key question: how is it that banks can readily waive bad debts to the tune of tens of billions of dollars yet have constantly refused to cancel the debts of developing countries? Why should the one be feasible and the other impossible? It should be remembered that the debts claimed today from these countries go back in the past to criminal dictatorships, corrupt regimes, and leaders pandering to major powers and investors. The big banks lavished loans on such notorious regimes as that of Mobutu in Zaire, Suharto in Indonesia, the Latin-American dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, not to mention the apartheid regime in South Africa. How can the banks persist in inflicting the burden of debt on people who have suffered the consequences of despotic regimes funded by the banks themselves? From a legal standpoint, many of the debts appearing in their accounts are odious and as such should not be repaid. But the banks continue to demand their pound of flesh.

We should also remember that the Third World debt crisis was caused by the drastic unilateral hike in interest rates imposed by the Fed in 1982. Up to then the private banks had been happily handing out variable rate loans to countries that were already over-indebted. The crash came when these countries could no longer sustain repayments. Today history is repeating itself, this time in the North: over-indebted households in the US are faced with mortgages that they can never repay as they watch the value of their properties plummet.

The recent waiving of debts by banks can only justify the claims of those who, like the CADTM, demand the cancellation of Third World debt. Why? Because the long-term debt of Third World public authorities towards international banks reached 181.9 billion dollars in 2006.² Since August 2007, the banks have had to cancel a far greater amount, with more still to come.

It is clear that the big private banks have failed in three ways:

• they have built up catastrophic private lending structures that have led to the present disaster;

• they have lent to despotic regimes and forced the democratic governments that replaced them to repay this odious debt down to the last cent;

• they refuse to cancel the debts of developing countries, for whom repayment means ever-worsening living conditions for their people.

For all these reasons, the banks must be held to account for their actions over the last decades. The governments of the countries of the South must make a full audit of their debts, as Ecuador is doing today, and repudiate all debts that are odious and illegitimate. The bankers have shown them that such a step is perfectly feasible. It would also be the first step towards restoring the true role of finance, which is to be of service to men and women. Everywhere, without exception.

1 On 7 March 2008 Goldman Sachs research department estimated losses of 1,156 billion dollars, George Magnus of UBS in February floated a figure in excess of 1,000 billion, and Nouriel Roubini of New York University put the figure at 1,000 billion dollars at the very lowest (see rgemonitor.com/blog/roubini).

2 World Bank, Global Development Finance 2007.

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Damien Millet is the spokesman for CADTM France (Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt, www.cadtm.org) and a coauthor with Eric Toussaint of Who Owes Who? (Zed Books, 2004). Eric Toussaint is the president of CADTM Belgium and author of The World Bank: A Critical Primer (Pluto, 2008). Translated by Judith Harris