When it comes to chocolate: “Venezuela is in a league of its own”

Diamonds are extracted through massive environmentally harmful mining operations. "Blood Diamonds" come from war-torn third-world countries where prisoner-laborers are forced to work under horrid conditions to mine the diamonds that are often used to finance brutal terrorists regimes.

Some jewelers here in the U.S and in Europe go out of their way to certify and advertise that they do not deal in blood diamonds. May consumers be facing a similar ethical dilemma with regard to chocolate? (GW)

In Venezuela, Plantations of Cacao Stir Bitterness

By Simon Romero
New York Times
July 29, 2009

HENRI PITTIER NATIONAL PARK, Venezuela — Kai Rosenberg acknowledges that he might be a little insane. He owns a cacao plantation in this swath of untamed cloud forest in northern Venezuela, where ocelots dart under towering saman trees and howler monkeys shriek at visitors.

So far this decade, squatters have tried to wrest control of his land, a fungus nearly wiped out his entire crop, government inspectors have solicited bribes and export officials have given him countless headaches with demands for a barrage of permits.

Even worse, intruders armed with machine guns broke into his house one night. In the struggle that ensued, he said, one shot him in the throat. Evacuated by helicopter, he recovered after six operations. But he went back to growing the Venezuelan cacao bean, the raw ingredient for chocolate coveted in Europe and the United States.

“Maybe I’m actually more than a little insane, but that’s a job requirement for working in cacao,” said Mr. Rosenberg, a German Jew who was born in Hamburg in 1940 and moved to Venezuela at age 18.

Venezuela produces about the same amount of cacao as it did three centuries ago: 15,000 tons a year, less than 1 percent of global cacao output. But that amount stirs the passions of critics and devotees, turning a luxury crop destined for foreigners into a contentious, and sometimes violent, political issue.

Cacao from here is so desirable that European chocolate makers sometimes engage in cut-throat competition to gain access to it. Chocolatiers talk of the unique factors here on the Caribbean’s edge in a way that resembles the goût de terroir, or taste of the earth, crucial to fine wines.

“Venezuela is in a league of its own,” said Gary Guittard, a California chocolate maker who buys Venezuelan cacao. “It takes years to develop the uniqueness of the best cacao, maybe 20 or 30 years, maybe 100, so other nations need to catch up.”

Viewed as a treasure abroad, cacao is seen differently by many Venezuelans, from the president to the poor. A loophole for this nature reserve allows cacao haciendas to dot the forest, near villages populated by descendants of African slaves and near poor migrants who live in squatter villages in the park.

In a visit here last year, President Hugo Chávez asked why chocolate made from Venezuelan cacao could fetch high sums in Europe, singling out a Briton who owns a plantation in this jungle, William Harcourt-Cooze, for particularly harsh treatment.

“This gentleman is getting rich while the workers are living in poverty,” Mr. Chávez said after listening to residents’ complaints about Mr. Harcourt-Cooze’s farm.

Then came the nightmare feared by every cacao grower: government inspections into labor or land violations. “There was an official investigation, I’ve been vindicated, it was totally unfounded the remarks that were made,” Mr. Harcourt-Cooze said from Britain.

Others are not so lucky. Despite partnering with the government in a cacao venture in Barinas, Mr. Chávez’s home state, Chocolates El Rey, a leading company in Venezuela’s gourmet chocolate industry, was powerless to stop squatters who invaded the farm earlier this decade and still occupy it.

“We could be a world leader with cacao, what beef is for Argentina or rice for Thailand,” said Jorge Redmond, Chocolates El Rey’s chief executive, reflecting on the industry’s upheaval. “Instead we’re faced with 52 different permits to export a container of our product, compared with four steps to export when Chávez came to power.”

Still, growers go on with their business. Mr. Redmond works from a headquarters resembling a bunker in an industrial part of Caracas. Mr. Rosenberg enjoys unusually warm relations with the government, with which he manages a venture in another cacao region.

With its reliance on cheap labor, the industry seems hard-wired for conflict, though chaos afflicts some cacao areas are more than others. Barlovento, near here, is plagued by thievery of cacao pods, score-settling murders and the torching of storage facilities.

Built with slave labor, the industry here became the mainstay of Venezuela’s colonial economy. For centuries, the nation was the world’s top producer. European monarchs sipped concoctions made from Venezuelan cacao.

Then, in the 20th century, there was oil. Dictators came and went. Venezuela, despite its vast fertile lands, became a net food importer. The legendary strongman Juan Vicente Gómez seized cacao plantations in this forest and made them part of his personal empire.

Bureaucrats later assembled a monopoly over the industry, eroding incentives to produce high-quality cacao. Yields plunged. Still, cacao cultivation survived, attracting growers obsessive enough to weather policies bedeviling exports of anything but petroleum.

Venezuela is widely known as a difficult place to do business. But the peculiar resilience of the conflict-ridden cacao trade is evident from a ride on a fisherman’s skiff to Chuao, an isolated forest village founded in the 16th century that knows a thing or two about the cycles of Venezuelan history.

Chuao’s cacao hacienda was first expropriated from the Roman Catholic Church in the 1820s by Simón Bolívar, the region’s liberation hero, and given to a university. Then one dictator seized it, then another and so on, until a civilian government handed control to a worker cooperative a few decades ago.

Since then, its yields have languished, even though the cooperative employs perhaps triple the number it would if it were owned by a private company. The members of the cooperative are poorly paid, earning about $3 a day. One sun-drenched day in July, some members sprawled in the shade near the church patio where cacao has been dried for centuries, taking a nap.

But those same workers produce what some consider the world’s best cacao. The key, agronomists contend, lies in their adherence to methods used for generations.

One cooperative member, Clemencia Bacalao, 49, smiled into the sun when asked what Chuao would be like decades from now when the oil age finally dims in Venezuela. “We’ll be doing what we’ve always done,” she said. “We’ll be relying on cacao for our survival.”

Solar resurgence

Advances in technology promise to put large-scale solar thermal back on the map as a major player in the nation's clean energy economy. Water use was a very major concern of previous designs. Large solar collectors are yused to generate heat that in turn would drive turbines to create electricity. Those systems needed lots of water for cooing. New designs employ a closed-radiator system that reportedly does not consume water.

Cheaper Solar Thermal Power

A simpler design could reduce the cost of solar power generated by concentrating sunlight on Stirling engines.

By Kevin Bullis
Technology Review
July 28, 2009

Stirling Energy Systems (SES), based in Phoenix, has decreased the complexity and cost of its technology for converting the heat in sunlight into electricity, allowing for high-volume production. It will begin building very large solar-power plants using its equipment as soon as next year.

The company is currently building a 1.5-megawatt, 60-unit demonstration plant that will use the company's latest design. Stirling expects to finish that project by the end of the year. It also has contracts with two California utilities to supply a total of 800 megawatts of solar power in Southern California. The first of the plants that will supply this power could be built starting the middle of next year, pending government permits and loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

The projects are part of a resurgence in what's known as solar thermal power. Various solar thermal technologies were developed starting in the 1970s, but a breakdown in government funding and incentives caused them to stall before they reached a scale of production large enough to drive down costs and allow them to compete with conventional sources of electricity. "It was a classic problem with solar. The market support to bring solar to high volume wasn't there," says Ian Simington, the chairman of SES and chief executive of the solar division of NTR, a company based in Dublin, Ireland, that bought a controlling share of SES last year.

Recent state mandates and incentives for renewable energy have led to a new push to commercialize the technology. There are over six gigawatts of concentrated solar power under contract in the southwestern United States right now, says Thomas Mancini, program manager for concentrated-solar-power technology at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, NM. That's equivalent to about six nuclear-power plants. BrightSource Energy has contracts to provide 2.6 gigawatts of solar power with concentrated solar power (a previous version of this story cited only one of two 1.3 gigawatt contracts), and Solar Millenium has announced a project that would generate nearly one gigawatt of power.

Stirling Energy Systems technology uses 12-meter-wide mirrors in the shape of a parabolic dish to concentrate sunlight onto a Stirling engine. The difference in temperature between the hot and cool sides of the engine is used to drive pistons and generate 25,000 watts of electricity. The first phase of the company's large-scale projects will use 12,000 of these dishes to generate 300 megawatts of power. Simington expects electricity from the systems to cost between 12 and 15 cents per kilowatt hour, higher than the cheapest sources of electricity--such as coal-fired power plants--but competitive in many markets, especially in the afternoon, when prices are highest.

Earlier this month the company unveiled its production design. Compared to several prototypes that have been tested for several years at Sandia National Laboratory, the new design cuts about two metric tons from the weight of each dish and reduces the number of mirrors in each from 80 to 40. The simplified design can be built in large quantities using equipment in existing factories for automobiles.

The company's design has certain advantages over other approaches to concentrated solar power. In other systems, heat is collected over a large area and used to drive turbines in a central facility. These turbines require large amounts of water for cooling, Mancini says, whereas the SES system uses a closed-radiator system that doesn't consume water. Water use is an important consideration for solar thermal technologies, Mancini adds, since they work best in areas with a lot of direct sunlight--that is, in deserts. (These concentrated-solar-power systems are quite different from solar water heaters used in homes.)

Another advantage of the SES system is its modularity. With other approaches, the entire solar collection and generation system has to be in place to start generating electricity. With the Stirling engine system, power can come online as the dishes are installed, and more generating capacity can easily be added by building more dishes, without any need to enlarge a central generating plant.

But the system also has a significant disadvantage. Other solar thermal power plants collect heat in a central place where it can easily be stored, making it possible to generate electricity when the sun isn't shining. "There's no obvious way to do this with the dishes," Mancini says.

Although there has been a resurgence in contracts for solar thermal power, obstacles to the plants being built still remain. The new projects could be stalled by slow action from the government. Permits originally thought to be ready by the end of this year are now expected no sooner than next May. What's more, the current economy has made financing hard to come by, says Sean Gallagher, SES's vice president for market strategy and regulatory affairs. That has forced his company and others to rely on Department of Energy loan guarantees. But, Gallager says, although the DOE has promised to speed up its process for issuing these, it has yet to issue even the rules for applying for the guarantees included in February's stimulus package.

Copyright Technology Review 2009.

Withholding evidence of climate change

Will George W. Bush (and Dick Cheney) one day be charged with committing crimes against Gaia? It's one thing to ignore the scientific community's near unanimous opinion that climate change is real and poses a most serious threat to planetary life. It's quite another to actually withhold evidence that supports scientists' conclusions and would represent a big-time inconvenience to carbon-emitting corporate friends.

I say guilty as charged and sentence them to 60 days of healthy labor in a certified platinum green building. Seriously, you have to wonder what else they kept from us. (GW)

Revealed: the secret evidence of global warming Bush tried to hide

Photos from US spy satellites declassified by the Obama White House provide the first graphic images of how the polar ice sheets are retreating in the summer. The effects on the world's weather, environments and wildlife could be devastating

By Suzanne Goldenberg and Damian Carrington
The Guardian
July 26, 2009

Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months.

The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week. President Barack Obama is currently trying to galvanise Congress and the American public to take action to halt catastrophic climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

One particularly striking set of images - selected from the 1,000 photographs released - includes views of the Alaskan port of Barrow. One, taken in July 2006, shows sea ice still nestling close to the shore. A second image shows that by the following July the coastal waters were entirely ice-free.

The photographs demonstrate starkly how global warming is changing the Arctic. More than a million square kilometres of sea ice - a record loss - were missing in the summer of 2007 compared with the previous year.

Nor has this loss shown any sign of recovery. Ice cover for 2008 was almost as bad as for 2007, and this year levels look equally sparse.

"These are one-metre resolution images, which give you a big picture of the summertime Arctic," said Thorsten Markus of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre. "This is the main reason why we are so thrilled about it. One-metre resolution is the dimension that's been missing."

Disappearing summer sea ice poses considerable dangers, scientists have warned. Ice shelves are used by animals such as polar bears as platforms for hunting seals and other sea creatures. Without them, they could starve. In addition, ice reflects solar radiation. Without that process, the Arctic sea could warm up even more. The phenomenon threatens to set off runaway heating of the planet, say climatologists.

The latest revelations have triggered warnings from scientists that they no longer have the funds to keep a comprehensive track of climate change. Last week the head of the US's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Professor Jane Lubchenco, warned that the gathering of satellite data - crucial to predicting future climate changes - was now at "great risk" because America's ageing satellite fleet was not being replaced.

"Our primary focus is maintaining the continuity of climate observations, and those are at great risk right now because we don't have the resources to have satellites at the ready and taking the kinds of information that we need," said Lubchenco, who was appointed by Obama. "We are playing catch-up."

Even before her warning, scientists were saying that America, the world's scientific superpower, was virtually blinding itself to climate change by cutting funds to the environmental satellite programmes run by the Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Nasa. A report by the National Academy of Sciences this year warned that the environmental satellite network was at risk of collapse.

In February, a Nasa satellite carrying instruments to produce the first map of the Earth's carbon emissions crashed near Antarctica only three minutes after lift-off.

The satellite would have measured carbon emissions at 100,000 points around the planet every day, providing a wealth of data compared to the 100 or so fixed towers currently in operation in a land-based network.

The NOAA is under additional pressure to provide environmental data because of the re-emergence of the El Niño climate phenomenon, where warming of the tropical Pacific causes heatwaves, droughts and flooding around the world. June's land and sea surface temperatures were the second hottest on record, and scientists are predicting this will be the warmest decade in recorded history. The last major El Niño was in 1998, the hottest year in recorded history.

The Obama administration has already taken steps to tackle America's flagging scientific lead. The president's economic recovery plan allotted $170m (£100m) to help close the gaps in climate modelling. The NOAA is seeking an additional $390m in its 2010 budget to upgrade environmental satellites, and help make data more available to researchers and government officials.

Satellite images of polar ice sheets taken in July 2006 and July 2007 showing the retreating ice during the summer. Photograph: Public Domain

On the cutting edge of solving our energy challenges

President Barack Obama is clearly convinced that electric vehicles are the future. He has cut funding for hydrogen automobiles that George W. Bush touted while he occupied the White House. Funding was redirected towards electric vehicles.

Now the Obama administration is focusing on driving down the costs of EVs by investing in the development of high performance and affordable batteries. The goal is to prime the pump for a domestic battery industry.

Not that he asked, but I think the President's strategy is right on. (GW)

A Jump-Start for New Battery Plants

Encouraged by Federal Aid, U.S. Firms Spring to Power Next Generation of Cars

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post
July 25, 2009

The Energy Department is getting ready to hand out about $2 billion in grants to create a domestic industry for electric-car batteries, and 122 companies are scrambling to get pieces.

The companies range from small niche firms to giants such as Dow Chemical and Johnson Controls. All are promising a combination of innovation and ability to deliver new products on a commercial scale to prevent the United States from trading dependence on foreign oil or reliance on foreign-made batteries.

"We've had 20 years of bad behavior in the United States in terms of developing ideas into products," said Mary Ann Wright, chief executive of Johnson Controls's joint venture developing hybrid battery systems.

Now policymakers hope that helping domestic battery manufacturers will produce economic savings that often come with large-scale production and which are needed to make electric cars affordable. With funds provided by the stimulus bill in February, the Energy Department can cover up to half the cost of a battery-related project.

"This investment will not only reduce our dependence on foreign oil, it will put Americans back to work," President Obama said in March. "It positions American manufacturers on the cutting edge of innovation and solving our energy challenges."

The federally funded battery effort has its skeptics. Grants are expected to focus on lightweight lithium-ion batteries similar to those found in laptops. They are the newest thing in a business that had not changed much since lead-acid batteries were invented a century and a half ago.

But U.S. hopefuls face stiff competition from foreign firms such as Japan's Panasonic and Sony, and South Korea's LG Chem, which already dominate the lithium-ion battery market in power tools, laptops and cellphones. Some domestic firms have recruited foreign companies as partners in new U.S.-based manufacturing facilities.

Moreover, some economists warn of the perils of government subsidies. "To the extent that this is part of a broader industrial policy scheme, I'm against it for all the reasons I've always been against it," said Charles Schultze, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. "If you're not heavy-handed about screening [applications], you're going to get a lot of the equivalent of political pork."

Some industry experts also note that lithium-ion batteries may not be ready for tough road conditions, that they generate a lot of heat and that there is no infrastructure for recycling them. For the moment, it is easier to recycle lead-acid batteries, like those in combustion-engine cars, or nickel-metal hydride batteries, like those in the current generation of hybrid vehicles.

Nonetheless, Obama has set a goal of having 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015 and the Energy Department is trying to make sure a large share of them are powered by U.S.-made batteries. In addition to the $2 billion in grants it is expected to announce soon, the Energy Department can also lend from a separate $25 billion program. It has already announced a $1.6 billion loan to help Nissan develop an electric car, including the construction of a new battery plant, and a $465 million loan for Tesla Motors, part of which would go to a battery-pack facility that would stock Tesla and Daimler.

Here's a quick look at some of the companies, big and small, that hope to benefit.

-- Johnson Controls, the world's largest maker of lead-acid batteries, is applying with Ford Motor to make lithium-ion batteries at a Michigan plant that once made automobile interiors. The Wisconsin-based company says that the project would be up and running within 15 months, creating 4,700 jobs for Michigan, where unemployment has climbed to 15.2 percent.

"Some people won't lose their jobs and some people who've lost theirs will get new ones," said Alex Molinaroli, president of power solutions at Johnson Controls. (The state of Michigan is also offering about $150 million in tax breaks and grants.)

The company touts its experience. "It's a natural extension of what we do," Molinaroli said of the battery business. Last year, Johnson Controls made 112 million conventional car batteries; a joint venture in France already makes lithium-ion car batteries.

-- Dow Chemical is also vying for Energy Department dollars. It has asked for $140 million in grants to scale up production of raw materials for batteries, as well as $550 million to cover about half the cost of setting up plants to manufacture battery packs in Michigan and Missouri. A South Korean company, Kokam, would be a partner in the venture.

Dow says it can make the batteries affordable. "Dow is very experienced in scaling up and figuring out how to drive costs out" of production, said George Hamilton, a company vice president.

-- A company called A123 Systems also thinks it deserves federal support. It has developed a lithium-ion battery using its own technology, which it says will deliver more power, endure more abuse and last longer than other batteries. The technology may be used in cars made by SAIC in China and by Chrysler. General Electric has invested in the company.

A123 Systems had sought to win the contract to make batteries for General Motors's Chevy Volt, but GM ultimately opted for lithium-ion batteries from LG Chem.

-- Quallion is another contestant for government battery grants. Founded in 1998 by biotechnology and aerospace entrepreneur Alfred E. Mann and lithium-ion battery specialist Hisashi Tsukamoto, Quallion has focused on high-priced niche markets such as custom aerospace uses, medical device implants and battery packs that soldiers can carry more easily on the battlefield.

"We make 70,000 a year," said Paul Beach, Quallion's senior vice president; "really nothing" compared to Japanese companies that make around 70 million batteries a month, he added.

Now Quallion has applied for up to $200 million to build a plant in Santa Clarita, Calif., that would make batteries for trucks and heavy vehicles, which could use them to avoid idling at truck stops. The Environmental Protection Agency says truck idling accounts for 11 million tons of carbon-dioxide emissions and for 960 million gallons of diesel fuel use.

If Quallion gets the federal grant, state and local governments have promised to provide financial incentives and land.

-- One of the smaller firms seeking Energy Department grants is run by Charles Haba, who was part of the team that pioneered semiconductors at Fairchild Semiconductor and later at Intel. Haba seeks $100 million in grant money to cover half of the cost for a lithium-ion battery plant in Los Angeles. The city wants to install 400 megawatts of energy storage, and lithium-ion batteries can store energy from solar and wind facilities as they help provide a more continuous supply of energy from those sources.

Haba says that "a lot of the techniques of the semiconductor industry were directly applicable" to help make the systems more effective and to come up with arrays that made it easier to manage the large amount of heat that the batteries give off. Haba's nine-year-old company, iCel, has already produced small quantities of batteries for specialty uses, such as movie-camera battery packs or television lighting.

Haba also hopes to set up a nationwide chain of battery training centers with the help of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. He said that at the Los Angeles local union, iCel has trained 3,700 people to install the company's batteries.

"This is about people, not just about polar bears and wildlife”

It seems like there are an awful lot of ailing "canaries in coal mines" these days. Global climate change is already affecting great numbers of people. Most are poor. Many are finding that their way of life is being seriously threatened as Nature adjusts to the increasing levels of greenhouse gases being dumped into the atmosphere. (GW)

An Amazon Culture Withers as Food Dries Up

By Elisabeth Rosenthal
New York Times
July 25, 2009

XINGU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil — As the naked, painted young men of the Kamayurá tribe prepare for the ritualized war games of a festival, they end their haunting fireside chant with a blowing sound — “whoosh, whoosh” — a symbolic attempt to eliminate the scent of fish so they will not be detected by enemies. For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the Kamayurá diet, the tribe’s primary source of protein.

But fish smells are not a problem for the warriors anymore. Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.

“Us old monkeys can take the hunger, but the little ones suffer — they’re always asking for fish,” said Kotok, the tribe’s chief, who stood in front of a hut containing the tribe’s sacred flutes on a recent evening. He wore a white T-shirt over the tribe’s traditional dress, which is basically nothing.

Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayurá people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.

Responsible for 3 wives, 24 children and hundreds of other tribe members, he said his once-idyllic existence had turned into a kind of bad dream.

“I’m stressed and anxious — this has all changed so quickly, and life has become very hard,” he said in Portuguese, speaking through an interpreter. “As a chief, I have to have vision and look down the road, but I don’t know what will happen to my children and grandchildren.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that up to 30 percent of animals and plants face an increased risk of extinction if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in coming decades. But anthropologists also fear a wave of cultural extinction for dozens of small indigenous groups — the loss of their traditions, their arts, their languages.

“In some places, people will have to move to preserve their culture,” said Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior adviser on social policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland. “But some of those that are small and marginal will assimilate and disappear.”

To make do without fish, Kamayurá children are eating ants on their traditional spongy flatbread, made from tropical cassava flour. “There aren’t as many around because the kids have eaten them,” Chief Kotok said of the ants. Sometimes members of the tribe kill monkeys for their meat, but, the chief said, “You have to eat 30 monkeys to fill your stomach.”

Living deep in the forest with no transportation and little money, he noted, “We don’t have a way to go to the grocery store for rice and beans to supplement what is missing.”

Tacuma, the tribe’s wizened senior shaman, said that the only threat he could remember rivaling climate change was a measles virus that arrived deep in the Amazon in 1954, killing more than 90 percent of the Kamayurá.

Cultures threatened by climate change span the globe. They include rainforest residents like the Kamayurá who face dwindling food supplies; remote Arctic communities where the only roads were frozen rivers that are now flowing most of the year; and residents of low-lying islands whose land is threatened by rising seas.

Many indigenous people depend intimately on the cycles of nature and have had to adapt to climate variations — a season of drought, for example, or a hurricane that kills animals.

But worldwide, the change is large, rapid and inexorable, heading in only one direction: warmer. Eskimo settlements like Kivalina and Shishmaref in Alaska are “literally being washed away,” said Thomas Thornton, an anthropologist who studies the region, because the sea ice that long protected their shores is melting and the seas around are rising. Without that hard ice, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to hunt for seals, a mainstay of the traditional diet.

Some Eskimo groups are suing polluters and developed nations, demanding compensation and help with adapting.

“As they see it, they didn’t cause the problem, and their lifestyle is being threatened by pollution from industrial nations,” said Dr. Thornton, who is a researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. “The message is that this is about people, not just about polar bears and wildlife.”

At climate negotiations in December in Poznan, Poland, the United Nations created an “adaptation fund” through which rich nations could in theory help poor nations adjust to climate change. But some of the money was expected to come from voluntary contributions, and there have been none so far, said Yvo De Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “It would help if rich countries could make financial commitments,” he said.

Throughout history, the traditional final response for indigenous cultures threatened by untenable climate conditions or political strife was to move. But today, moving is often impossible. Land surrounding tribes is now usually occupied by an expanding global population, and once-nomadic groups have often settled down, building homes and schools and even declaring statehood.

The Kamayurá live in the middle of Xingu National Park, a vast territory that was once deep in the Amazon but is now surrounded by farms and ranches.

About 5,000 square miles of Amazon forest are being cut down annually in recent years, according to the Brazilian government. And with far less foliage, there is less moisture in the regional water cycle, lending unpredictability to seasonal rains and leaving the climate drier and hotter.

That has upended the cycles of nature that long regulated Kamayurá life. They wake with the sun and have no set meals, eating whenever they are hungry.

Fish stocks began to dwindle in the 1990s and “have just collapsed” since 2006, said Chief Kotok, who is considering the possibility of fish farming, in which fish would be fed in a penned area of a lake. With hotter temperatures as well as less rain and humidity in the region, water levels in rivers are extremely low. Fish cannot get to their spawning grounds.

Last year, for the first time, the beach on the lake that abuts the village was not covered by water in the rainy season, rendering useless the tribe’s method of catching turtles by putting food in holes that would fill up, luring the animals.

The tribe’s agriculture has suffered, too. For centuries, the Kamayurá planted their summer crops when a certain star appeared on the horizon. “When it appeared, everyone celebrated because it was the sign to start planting cassava since the rain and wind would come,” Chief Kotok recalled. But starting seven or eight seasons ago, the star’s appearance was no longer followed by rain, an ominous divergence, forcing the tribe to adjust its schedule.

It has been an ever-shifting game of trial and error since. Last year, families had to plant their cassava four times — it died in September, October and November because there was not enough moisture in the ground. It was not until December that the planting took. The corn also failed, said Mapulu, the chief’s sister. “It sprouted and withered away,” she said.

A specialist in medicinal plants, Ms. Mapulu said that a root she used to treat diarrhea and other ailments had become nearly impossible to find because the forest flora had changed. The grass they use to bound together the essential beams of their huts has also become difficult to find.

But perhaps the Kamayurá’s greatest fear are the new summer forest fires. Once too moist to ignite, the forest here is now flammable because of the drier weather. In 2007, Xingu National Park burned for the first time, and thousands of acres were destroyed.

“The whole Xingu was burning — it stung our lungs and our eyes,” Chief Kotok said. “We had nowhere to escape. We suffered along with the animals.”

"The Yosemite model"

This September PBS will release Ken Burns' latest documentary. It's called "The National Parks: America's Best Idea." The PBS website describes the film as:

"[A] story of people: people from every conceivable background — rich and poor; famous and unknown; soldiers and scientists; natives and newcomers; idealists, artists and entrepreneurs; people who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved, and in doing so reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy. It is a story full of struggle and conflict, high ideals and crass opportunism, stirring adventure and enduring inspiration - set against the most breathtaking backdrops imaginable."

Conspicuously absent from this description are any references to racists or racism. There is a definite dark side to the National Parks story. Mark Dowie exposes it in his new book "Conservation Refugees". (GW)

No natives allowed

Over the last century, the conservation movement has created some beautiful parks - and millions of refugees.

By Mark Dowie
Boston Globe
May 3, 2009

LAFAYETTE BUNNELL, AMERICAN explorer and wilderness romantic, first rode into the bucolic stillness of Yosemite on March 21, 1851. He was on a voyage of discovery. Once in the valley he thought he had arrived, if not in heaven, in Eden. "I have seen the power and glory of a supreme being," he wrote in his journal, and "the majesty of his handiwork."

Bunnell's attitude toward the people who actually lived in the valley was decidedly more ambiguous. At times he romanticized the lifeways of the Miwoks who had settled there some 4,000 years earlier. But he also said there was no room for them in the West, calling them "yelling demons" and "overgrown vicious children." The whole territory, he wrote, should be "swept of any scattered bands that might infest it."

Accompanying him that day was one of the most ferocious militias in western American history, the Mariposa Battalion, commanded by James Savage. A veteran of Indian wars, Savage was there with one blunt aim: to rid Yosemite of its natives. Bunnell, who is remembered today largely for his lyrical prose about nature, stood by and watched while Savage and his men burned acorn caches to starve the Miwok out of the valley. Seventy were physically removed. Twenty-three were later slaughtered at the foot of El Capitan, the towering granite obelisk that has become a totem of California wilderness. Although it took some years to complete the task of creating a fictional wilderness in Yosemite, all the valley's residents were eventually evicted, and in 1914 their land became a national park - no natives welcome.

This tactic became known as "the Yosemite model" and was replicated around the country, and eventually around the world. At most of the major parks created in America - Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Mount Rainier, Zion, Glacier, Everglades, and Olympic - thousands of tribal people were expelled from their homes and hunting grounds so the new parks could remain in an undisturbed "state of nature." In the century that followed, millions of tribal natives around the world were forcibly evicted from wildlife reserves and national parks such as the Royal National Park of Australia, Banff in Canada, and Tongariro in New Zealand. In East Africa, the Serengeti and Amboseli National Parks were formed this way; on the border of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest of Kenya, Batwa pygmy refugees still camp in hovels hoping one day to return to their forest homeland.

Refugees from conservation have never been counted; in fact they're not even officially recognized as refugees. But the number of people displaced from traditional homelands worldwide over the past century, in the interest of conservation, is estimated to be close to 20 million, 14 million in Africa alone. It is a sad history, and one that has forced conservationists to reevaluate the hero status of their movement's founders, and to reconsider the idea of protecting biological diversity by removing humans from the mix.

The conservation establishment desperately wants the world, particularly its funders, to believe it is working hand in hand with indigenous peoples - two august and ancient forces dedicated to protecting the world against the depredations of development. But in fact conservation and native people remain locked in a deep struggle over what it really means to "preserve" something, and whether that something should be nature or culture.

The conflict is also compelling the conservation movement to grapple with the effects of its own century-long blunder, and with its origins as an American movement driven largely by nature romantics and aristocratic men determined to protect their hunting grounds. Not only has it dispossessed millions of people who might very well have been excellent stewards of the land, but it has engendered a worldwide hostility toward the whole idea of wildland conservation - damaging the cause in many countries whose crucial wildland is most in need of protection.

The beautifully written and widely read essays and memoirs of early American eco-heroes like Bunnell, John Muir, Samuel Bowles, George Perkins Marsh, and Aldo Leopold inform a conservation mythology that until quite recently separated nature from culture. In their writings, natives and early settlers of frontier areas were portrayed as reckless, irresponsible abusers of nature, with no sense or tradition of stewardship, no understanding of wildlife biology, and no appreciation of biodiversity. It was the "manifest destiny" of conservation leaders, then, to tame what Michael Wigglesworth had earlier described poetically as:

A waste and howling wilderness

Where none inhabited

But hellish fiends and brutish men

That devils worshipped.

This was not lost on native peoples themselves, and they began to resist the idea that they were less important than the land they lived on. In 1923, a Mohawk chief named Deskaheh led a small delegation of American Indians to Geneva, Switzerland. There they called upon the recently formed League of Nations to defend the rights of their people to live under their own laws, on their own land, and according to their own faith. The delegation was turned away at the gate. But in the decades that followed, the rights of aboriginal peoples grew into a movement.

As the world shrank and transportation accelerated, inhabitants of the most remote villages began to discover that they were not alone. There were others like them on almost every continent - people with unique dialects, diets, cultures, and cosmologies who were at best misunderstood, at worst oppressed by the dominant nationalities that surrounded them. These indigenous groups began to communicate with one another and to meet, and through interpreters they learned of ways that aboriginals in other societies had succeeded in protecting their cultures and recovering their sovereignty, independence, and homelands lost to colonization. They began to resist assimilation and to petition for recognition of territorial rights.

Coming to their aid in the "developed" world were people who valued cultural diversity as much as biological diversity - anthropologists in particular, as well as human rights lawyers, social activists, and members of organizations like Cultural Survival, the Forest Peoples Programme, and First Peoples Worldwide. Members of this growing social movement established links, formed networks, and founded new nongovernmental organizations, from the Arctic to the Kalahari, some with fewer than 100 members, others with millions.

As these movements gained force, it was perhaps inevitable that they'd come in conflict with conservationists. And as conservation became global in its reach, conflicts with large international organizations like the Worldwide Fund for Nature, the Nature Conservancy, the Africa Wildlife Federation, and Conservation International occurred on every continent. The sad consequence of this discord is that proven land stewards like the Maasai of Eastern Africa, the San Bushmen of Botswana, the Karen of Thailand, the Ashaninka of Peru, and the Kuna of Panama have in one way or another declared themselves "enemies of conservation."

It has taken transnational conservation a long and painful century to see the folly of some of its heroes - not only the early writers, but more recent leaders as well. Paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, as minister of wildlife conservation in Kenya, denied the existence of indigenous peoples in his home country, and called for the removal of all "settlers" from game reserves and other protected areas.

Today, however, all but the most stubborn and entrenched enclose-and-exclude conservationists are willing to admit that conflating nature with uninhabited wilderness, and defining occupants as merely "first visitors," is specious reasoning. And they have come to realize, from simple observation, that even if they don't own it, indigenous people manage immense areas of biologically rich land. And most, although not all, are managing it well.

I have traveled all five inhabited continents, visiting hundreds of indigenous communities, some in conflict with western conservation and others in harmony. While tension persists, I have found an encouraging dialogue growing between formally educated wildlife biologists, who once saw humanity as inimical to nature, and ancient aboriginal societies that have passed their remarkable ecological knowledge from generation to generation without a page of text or the benefit of PowerPoint. And I have been heartened to find, mostly in the field, a new generation of conservationists who have come to realize that the landscapes they seek to protect contain high biodiversity in part because people who have been living there, some for thousands of years, are living right.

Out of this realization have grown two successful new categories of wildland conservation. In some places they are called Community Conserved Areas; in others, Indigenous Protected Areas. In both cases the traditional inhabitants of the area not only remain in their homeland, but as legally tenured residents, play an active role in the conservation of biological diversity. They work side by side, as equals, with representatives of global conservation. This is happening, albeit slowly and against some reservation on the part of some conservation leaders, on every continent.

As cultural ecologist Gene Anderson observed, many of the world's traditional societies long ago came to "some kind of terms with their environment, or they would not have lasted long enough to become 'traditional.' " They are, in the language of ecology, living sustainably. And it seems self-evident now that the only way global conservation is going to succeed in its mission of preserving wild places and biodiversity is to end the counterproductive practice of evicting these proven land stewards from their homelands, and instead work together with them in developing sustainable ways of living.

Mark Dowie is an investigative historian. This article was adapted from his seventh book, "Conservation Refugees: The Hundred Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native People," and portions of the article appeared in Resurgence, Orion, and Stanford Social Innovation Review.

© Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

"Common but differentiated responsibilities"

What should be taken into consideration when deciding what role nations should play in fighting global climate change? Both China and the United States are current heavy emitters of greenhouse gases. But the U.S. has been at it a lot longer than China and in the process became the most powerful and wealthy country in the world. Meanwhile China is in the midst of a major economic development program designed to lift its people out of poverty.

Scientific consensus that climate change is real and poses a potential threat to the entire global population has led to calls for action. We share a common problem but should the responsibility for addressing it be differentiated based on history and need? (GW)

China fights climate change in its own way

China View
July 24, 2009

BEIJING, July 24 -- As Chinese President Hu Jintao and Chinese diplomats sat in a spacious hall in Beijing over the weekend to discuss diplomatic projects, they sacrificed the formality of suits and ties in favor of white dress shirts to better weather the warm temperatures inside the building - a measure to help conserve energy.

The temperature in the room is set automatically to 26 degrees Celsius, or 79 Fahrenheit, so the usual attire would make for a sweaty mission.

Two years ago, the Chinese Cabinet regulated the lowest indoor temperature in all public venues during the summer to save energy, with the rare exception of diplomatic occasions or grand state ceremonies.

Premier Wen Jiabao met last week with US Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, who were in China to advance bilateral cooperation on clean energy and energy efficiency technologies.

Wen's deputy, Vice Premier Li Keqiang, told Secretary Chu, a Nobel laureate who is a strong promoter of clean energy, that China adhered to the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" as it actively responds to global climate change.

"Common but differentiated responsibilities" refers to the responsibilities of both developed and developing countries in reducing their carbon footprints respective to their developmental abilities.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) notes "that the largest share of historical and current global emissions of greenhouse gases has originated in developed countries, that per capita emissions in developing countries are still relatively low and that the share of global emissions originating in developing countries will grow to meet their social and development needs."

The UNFCCC was signed by more than 150 countries at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and was approved by at least 192 countries.

George Washington University law professor David Freestone, who retired six months ago from the World Bank as a senior adviser and deputy general counsel, said in an e-mail interview with Xinhua, "I do not see it (the principle) as outdated."

Professor Robert Stavins at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government also wrote to Xinhua:

"The central feature of the principle is (that) all countries should be involved in addressing climate change, their burden in addressing climate change need not be the same, and their relative burdens could be related to their stage of economic development."

Data from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) showed from 1950 to 2000 greenhouse gas emissions from industrialized countries accounted for 77 percent of the world total while China contributed about 9 percent.

Renewable energy

Between 1850 and 2005, the US emitted 27 percent of the world's total carbon dioxide, Russia and China both 8 percent, Germany 7 percent, the United Kingdom 6 percent, Japan 4 percent and India 2 percent, according to the Global Environment and Energy in the 21st Century, or GEE-21. The Honolulu, Hawaii, -based nonprofit organization carries out research and educational activities on resource management and environment.

Even though China's per capita carbon dioxide emissions were about only one-fifth of those in the United States, the 1.3 billion population and the rapidly growing economy makes China the second largest emitter next to the US.

Cooperating with the world to address global climate change, China looks toward renewable energy sources and stringent emission rules.

In building up hydro, nuclear, solar and wind power capacities, China aims at increasing renewable energy consumption to 10 percent by 2010 and 15 percent by 2020, with an emphasis on supplying advanced energy technologies to rural China to accommodating 750 million villagers in a more environment-friendly fashion.

By 2008, according to the Global Wind Energy Council, China had the largest wind turbines fleet in Asia, with a total power-generating capacity of 12.21 million kilowatts, which ranked the fourth in the world.

The government's incentives policies brought about more than 600 solar cell companies, mostly privately owned, which manufacture 44 percent of the world's cells for solar power devices.

More than 90 percent of the solar cells manufactured in China were exported to other countries to advance their green efforts. However, the production of these cells causes heavy pollution, leading to a greater emission debt in China's industrial areas.

Aggressive program

The task ahead remains arduous.

Currently two-thirds of China's energy supply is fueled by coal.

When he was told that almost 40 percent of China's four trillion-yuan economic stimulus package had gone to green projects, Secretary Locke said last week in Beijing to the American Chamber of Commerce and the US-China Business Council, "China has already adopted the most aggressive energy-efficiency program in the entire world, and they are on track to exceed many of their renewable energy adoption goals."

China and the US kicked off last week a joint research center on clean energy, with an initial funding of US$15 million for research and development, mainly on energy-efficient buildings, clean coal use and clean-fuel vehicles.

At a meeting of leaders from five developing countries' leaders on July 8 in Italy, State Councillor Dai Bingguo urged developed countries to "make an explicit commitment to take the lead in emissions reductions and provide developing countries with measurable, reportable and verifiable support in technology, funding and capacity building."

He made the remarks on behalf of Hu Jintao who could not attend the meeting due to the incident in Xinjiang.

Stavins, who directs the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements, said, "The ongoing dialogue between China and the United States is particularly important."

The American environmental economist, however, suggested capital markets should place more emphasis on supporting competitive cutting-edge environmental technologies.

"Technological transfer will surely be a major part of any future international climate regime that is meaningful, but the most effective way for it to be included will be through market-based incentives for private-sector investment in the developing world," he said.

(Source: Shanghai Daily)

Averting environmental collapse

Many societies -- especially highly developed ones -- have collapsed under the weight of their technological advances. Historian Fernand Braudel referred to the "the weight of numbers": improvements in medicine, hygiene, shelter and food production results in more people living longer lives, increasing pressures on life-supporting ecosystems.

Climate change seems to have us on track for global ecological collapse. Is this pessimistic scenario inevitable? The answer depends on how much we are willing to learn from history (GW)

Top 10 checklist: How societies can avoid ‘ecocide’

By Moises Velasquez-Manoff
Christian Science Monitor
July 23, 2009

In his book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” Jared Diamond explores why some societies fall apart, and why others endure.

He uses the term “ecocide” to describe humanity’s penchant for ignoring signs that current behavior is unsustainable, environmentally speaking, and effectively committing suicide.

Accepting that the human sphere exists within the larger biosphere, you might further generalize Diamond’s idea to: “cultures that ignore the limits of the biosphere in which they exist tend to fall apart.”

But not every human society collapses. Some heed the warning signs, adjust their behavior, and keep on keeping on. Human cultures can evolve to fit within – rather than overstep – environmental limits. Mr. Diamond counts Java, Japan, and Tonga among his successful case studies; Easter Islanders, the Greenland Vikings, and the Anasazi of the Southwest failed, by his criteria.

So what made the difference? What do some cultures respond and change while others collapse? What are the attributes of long-term success?

That’s the question that Elinor Ostrom, research director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, Bloomington, has been asking for years.

In an essay appearing in the current issue of the journal Science, she tries to parse how and why some cultures achieve sustainability.

In her own words:

“[A]ccepted theory has assumed that resource users will never self-organize to maintain their resources and that governments must impose solutions. Research in multiple disciplines, however, has found that some government policies accelerate resource destruction, whereas some resource users have invested their time and energy to achieve sustainability.”

Then she poses the trillion-dollar question: “When will the users of a resource invest time and energy to avert ‘a tragedy of the commons’?” That is, the exhaustion of a resource shared by different individuals or groups.

In the language of cost-benefit analysis, change comes when the benefits of sustainability seem to outweigh the costs of achieving it. Averting environmental collapse often means taking a loss now – no fishing for a few years, for example, so that stocks can recover – in the interest of long-term sustainability. That means sacrifice now. What makes people more willing to make such a sacrifice?

In her essay, Ostrom offers a list of 10 variables that, she says, greatly influence whether a group organizes to become sustainable or not.

1) Size of resource system
2) Productivity of system
3) Predictability of system dynamics
4) Resource unit mobility
5) Collective-choice rules
6) Number of users
7) Leadership/entrepreneurship
8) Norms/social capital
9) Knowledge of social-ecological systems/mental models
10) Importance of resource

“There are a number of questions you have to ask to diagnose illness,” says Ostrom in a phone conversation. “What I’m trying to get people to recognize is that we need diagnostic theories that enable us to dig down and unpack the complexity.”

Some of these seem obvious. No. 4, for example – resource mobility. It’s easier to manage wood from a stationary forest than, say, bluefin tuna, which swim many thousands of miles in a lifetime. Here’s what’s at stake: According to the WWF, if fishing as usual continues, bluefin stocks in the Mediterranean will collapse by 2012.

Then there’s No. 6: how many people use the resource. Again, (failed) fishery management illustrates how important this variable is. Open-access fisheries, where anyone can join the fishing fray, collapse time and time again. It’s one reason that New England is so overfished. For decades, the fishery was essentially open to all.

The failure of open access partly explains the trend toward managing fish with so-called “hard TACs” – an absolute cap on the yearly Total Allowable Catch – and catch shares, in which people “own” a percentage of the year’s scientifically determined TAC. Sustainable management means limiting and controlling access.

The importance of other variables is somewhat less apparent … at first. No. 8: a shared set of norms, for example. People have to speak the same language – and that’s meant in the broadest sense – before they can agree on anything.

But the real magic is in the synergy of these variables, how they work together. Ostrom uses Maine lobstermen as a case study in success.

Lobsters were overharvested in the 1920s; the stock was nearly destroyed. But today, Maine’s waters teem with lobsters, and lobstermen can make a good living. How did that happen? Here’s one secret, she says: harmony among local communities and state government. Top-down management didn’t squelch bottom-up organizing. Lobstermen worked out lobstering rights themselves – plots of ocean along Maine’s coast. “They were allowed to organize at a local level,” she says.

But the state didn’t butt out entirely. That was also key. Maine launched projects to grow lobsters in artificial ponds. And it introduced an innovation: notching lobster tails. Originally introduced as a way to track hatchery lobsters, tail-notching has become an important management tool in the greater scheme of things. Lobstermen notch the lobsters they release – if they’re bearing eggs, say. Characteristics specific to the species in question – the fact that you can notch lobsters without killing them, not necessarily the case with fin fish — helped, in this case.

Also important: Maine lobstermen have a shared culture – shared social norms. That helped in hammering out the regulations at a local level. And finally, Maine has leaders (No. 7), professors like James Acheson and Jim Wilson as well as fishers like Ted Ames – all of them respected by the community and having an understanding of the larger problems and issues.

How might this apply to human-caused global warming, say, a potential tragedy of the global commons? Get global agreements in place, she says, but make sure to allow for innovations at the local level, and make sure to learn from them.

“We need both good science and very careful research designs,” says Ostrom. “We need to treat citizens and resource users with respect and get them involved with problem-solving, and [we need] various ways of learning from more successful cases.”

The true costs of climate change

Read any portions or accounts of the reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that describe the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of humanity's carbon loading of the atmosphere. If you do I don't know how you could reach any conclusion other than we have to take responsible,comprehensive actions designed to mitigate global climate change as quickly as possible.

Can we afford to do this? How can we afford not to? (GW)

IPCC Chief: Benefits of Tackling Climate Change Will Balance Cost of Action

By Damian Carrington
The Guardian
20 July 2009

The cost of tackling climate change will be paid for by benefits that would come from better energy security, employment and health, Rajendra Pachauri (pictured above) says ahead of a major announcement on 2013 reports.

Measures needed to tackle global warming could save economies more money than they cost, the world's top climate change expert said today.

Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told the Guardian: "The cost could undoubtedly be negative overall." This is because of the additional benefits that reducing greenhouse gas emissions could bring, beyond limiting temperature rises.

Until now, estimates of the price of preventing dangerous climate change have all indicated significant costs. The most authoritative study, the 2006 Stern report, concluded that 1% of global GDP would be required, and he has since said 2% is now more likely.

Pachauri's comments came ahead of a press announcement in New York today about the IPCC's plans for its next series of reports in 2013. He said these would include a greater emphasis on the economics, as well as ethical and humanitarian concerns.

Funding for reducing and adapting to climate change in one of the most difficult issues in the negotiations towards a global deal at a UN summit in December in Copenhagen. But Pachauri argues that if the costs are negative, then "inertia and vested interests would be washed away. As the Americans say, it would be like dollar bills lying on the sidewalk."

Alex Bowen, one of the Stern report authors, said: "[Pachauri's] is a defensible postion, not delusional. But I am more of a sceptic."

"My hunch overall is that it will be a little more costly than we estimated in 2006. But if well designed policies are put in place, we can still do it remarkably cheaply. And there is still no doubt that strong action now is much cheaper than no action," added Bowen, an economist at the Grantham Research Institute On Climate Change at the London School of Economics.

The associated benefits Pachauri pointed to include better energy security, protecting consumers from oil price spikes, new employment in green industries, more productive agriculture and lower air pollution, cutting health costs. He said one good example was insulating draughty homes and installing better energy control systems. "This can yield very high rates of returns, with pay back in one year."

The idea of co-benefits is also central to the "green new deals" promoted by the UN Environment programme, Lord Stern's group and others.

Bowen said: "Negative costs depends on assumption that policy design and implementation is sensible and very consistent across countries all over the world. But we have gone three years [since the Stern report] without global policies. Emissions have grown rapidly and a lot of people now think economic growth will be much higher later in the century." The faster you have to reduce emissions, he said, the more expensive it is likely to be.

Pachauri's comments came as he led discussions what the next set of reports from the IPCC should cover. Its last report in 2007 is acknowledged to have settled the argument over whether emissions from human activities were causing climate change.

In the next series, due in 2013, Pachauri said the focus would change. "The IPCC cannot address the issue in purely scientific terms. For adaptation and mitigation, we need to put euro or dollar values on those. But there are also some costs you can't quantify. For example, take Hurricane Katrina. You can put a value on property losses, what about psychological, sociological, and institutional costs. I would not like to try to quantify those."

The IPCC meeting raised a range of further issues that it believes need more attention, including extreme weather events, new greenhouse gases, the full impacts of aviation and global scale geo-engineering.

The reports take between five and seven years to complete, but Pachauri argued that this is their strength: "The IPCC process of regular peer review means the reports are far more defensible than anything else. Comments received are posted on our website as are actions."

A clear case for reinvention

If a way of thinking about the world confers a survival advantage, then that way of thinking will become ubiquitous. The scientific correctness of it is irrelevant.

Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. why does e=mc2?

The economic system is out of order. The U.S. is investing billions of dollars in an attempt to stimulate the economy. Meanwhile, California -- the world's eighth largest economy -- is broke. The state is issuing IOU's and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is selling state cars, furniture and office supplies (some autographed) to raise funds.

Conservatives insist the economy is just suffering from the ill-advised tinkering by computer modelers and gamers. Others are convinced that the realities of our energy-intensive and environmentally unsound ways have caught up with us revealing the need for fundamental changes in the way we do business.

Following, the highly regarded and very conservative Economist offers its view on the state of the economy. (GW)

What went wrong with economics

The Economist
Jul 16th 2009

And how the discipline should change to avoid the mistakes of the past

OF ALL the economic bubbles that have been pricked, few have burst more spectacularly than the reputation of economics itself. A few years ago, the dismal science was being acclaimed as a way of explaining ever more forms of human behaviour, from drug-dealing to sumo-wrestling. Wall Street ransacked the best universities for game theorists and options modellers. And on the public stage, economists were seen as far more trustworthy than politicians. John McCain joked that Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, was so indispensable that if he died, the president should “prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him.”

In the wake of the biggest economic calamity in 80 years that reputation has taken a beating. In the public mind an arrogant profession has been humbled. Though economists are still at the centre of the policy debate—think of Ben Bernanke or Larry Summers in America or Mervyn King in Britain—their pronouncements are viewed with more scepticism than before. The profession itself is suffering from guilt and rancour. In a recent lecture, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, argued that much of the past 30 years of macroeconomics was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst.” Barry Eichengreen, a prominent American economic historian, says the crisis has “cast into doubt much of what we thought we knew about economics.”

In its crudest form—the idea that economics as a whole is discredited—the current backlash has gone far too far. If ignorance allowed investors and politicians to exaggerate the virtues of economics, it now blinds them to its benefits. Economics is less a slavish creed than a prism through which to understand the world. It is a broad canon, stretching from theories to explain how prices are determined to how economies grow. Much of that body of knowledge has no link to the financial crisis and remains as useful as ever.

And if economics as a broad discipline deserves a robust defence, so does the free-market paradigm. Too many people, especially in Europe, equate mistakes made by economists with a failure of economic liberalism. Their logic seems to be that if economists got things wrong, then politicians will do better. That is a false—and dangerous—conclusion.

Rational fools

These important caveats, however, should not obscure the fact that two central parts of the discipline—macroeconomics and financial economics—are now, rightly, being severely re-examined (see article, article). There are three main critiques: that macro and financial economists helped cause the crisis, that they failed to spot it, and that they have no idea how to fix it.

The first charge is half right. Macroeconomists, especially within central banks, were too fixated on taming inflation and too cavalier about asset bubbles. Financial economists, meanwhile, formalised theories of the efficiency of markets, fuelling the notion that markets would regulate themselves and financial innovation was always beneficial. Wall Street’s most esoteric instruments were built on these ideas.

But economists were hardly naive believers in market efficiency. Financial academics have spent much of the past 30 years poking holes in the “efficient market hypothesis”. A recent ranking of academic economists was topped by Joseph Stiglitz and Andrei Shleifer, two prominent hole-pokers. A newly prominent field, behavioural economics, concentrates on the consequences of irrational actions.

So there were caveats aplenty. But as insights from academia arrived in the rough and tumble of Wall Street, such delicacies were put aside. And absurd assumptions were added. No economic theory suggests you should value mortgage derivatives on the basis that house prices would always rise. Finance professors are not to blame for this, but they might have shouted more loudly that their insights were being misused. Instead many cheered the party along (often from within banks). Put that together with the complacency of the macroeconomists and there were too few voices shouting stop.

Blindsided and divided

The charge that most economists failed to see the crisis coming also has merit. To be sure, some warned of trouble. The likes of Robert Shiller of Yale, Nouriel Roubini of New York University and the team at the Bank for International Settlements are now famous for their prescience. But most were blindsided. And even worrywarts who felt something was amiss had no idea of how bad the consequences would be.

That was partly to do with professional silos, which limited both the tools available and the imaginations of the practitioners. Few financial economists thought much about illiquidity or counterparty risk, for instance, because their standard models ignore it; and few worried about the effect on the overall economy of the markets for all asset classes seizing up simultaneously, since few believed that was possible.

Macroeconomists also had a blindspot: their standard models assumed that capital markets work perfectly. Their framework reflected an uneasy truce between the intellectual heirs of Keynes, who accept that economies can fall short of their potential, and purists who hold that supply must always equal demand. The models that epitomise this synthesis—the sort used in many central banks—incorporate imperfections in labour markets (“sticky” wages, for instance, which allow unemployment to rise), but make no room for such blemishes in finance. By assuming that capital markets worked perfectly, macroeconomists were largely able to ignore the economy’s financial plumbing. But models that ignored finance had little chance of spotting a calamity that stemmed from it.

What about trying to fix it? Here the financial crisis has blown apart the fragile consensus between purists and Keynesians that monetary policy was the best way to smooth the business cycle. In many countries short-term interest rates are near zero and in a banking crisis monetary policy works less well. With their compromise tool useless, both sides have retreated to their roots, ignoring the other camp’s ideas. Keynesians, such as Mr Krugman, have become uncritical supporters of fiscal stimulus. Purists are vocal opponents. To outsiders, the cacophony underlines the profession’s uselessness.

Add these criticisms together and there is a clear case for reinvention, especially in macroeconomics. Just as the Depression spawned Keynesianism, and the 1970s stagflation fuelled a backlash, creative destruction is already under way. Central banks are busy bolting crude analyses of financial markets onto their workhorse models. Financial economists are studying the way that incentives can skew market efficiency. And today’s dilemmas are prompting new research: which form of fiscal stimulus is most effective? How do you best loosen monetary policy when interest rates are at zero? And so on.

But a broader change in mindset is still needed. Economists need to reach out from their specialised silos: macroeconomists must understand finance, and finance professors need to think harder about the context within which markets work. And everybody needs to work harder on understanding asset bubbles and what happens when they burst. For in the end economists are social scientists, trying to understand the real world. And the financial crisis has changed that world.

“We are going to need all this and a lot more’’

The promise of "something better" will always exist. It should never serve as a reason for not acting in the here and now. Especially when the stakes are high. Offshore wind has the potential for meeting a significant percentage of our nation's electricity needs. Current technology requires that offshore wind farms be built in shallow waters near shore. However, as yesterday's post points out, some people consider wind turbines as eyesores and have worked hard to block their construction within their "viewsheds". They say we should wait until the technologies enabling deep-water projects far from shore is ready.

The stakes have never been higher for the human species than they are today. The reason, of course is climate change. We cannot afford to wait until the next "something better" arrives on the scene. In fact we'll need to develop the available sites today and the deep-water sites when technology permits. (GW)

Chasing the wind

Deep-water turbine farms could overshadow near-shore projects like Nantucket Sound’s

By Beth Daley
Boston Globe
July 20, 2009

Could the proposed Nantucket Sound wind farm become obsolete before it is even built?

Aesthetic concerns have stalled the Cape Wind project, which would erect 130 turbines 5 to 13 miles from Cape Cod and Nantucket. But technological advances in recent years are allowing developers elsewhere to consider building wind turbines farther from shore, where they would be less visible.

Last month, the US Department of the Interior granted the nation’s first ocean leases for exploring the feasibility of large wind farms, with most of the sites 12 to 18 miles off New Jersey and Delaware. New York power companies are exploring the possibility of a vast wind farm 13 miles off the Rockaways. And a 120-turbine farm has been proposed 48 miles off New Bedford.

If these and similar projects prove viable, some wind energy specialists and developers say, they could leapfrog closer-to-shore projects like Cape Wind. Winds are often stronger and more sustained farther from shore.

Yet these proposed wind farms face enormous hurdles. Most will require new, unproven structural designs to withstand fiercer seas and deeper water. They are farther from the onshore electrical grid and more expensive to build. Only one deep-water project exists in the world - a two-turbine test farm 12 miles off the east coast of Scotland in about 150 feet of water.

“People do take Cape Wind into account and try to avoid the same kind of controversy,’’ said Walt Musial, principal engineer of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, part of the US Department of Energy. “But the trade-off is that the deeper the project is, the greater the technical risk in terms of reliability, survivability, and . . . payback.’’

The Cape Wind project is proposed in what wind energy specialists say is probably the best place on the East Coast to build the nation’s first wind farm: in protected shallow waters close to shore. That allows developers to use technology already proven for land-based wind turbines, driving an enormous single steel pole into the seabed and placing a turbine on top.

But in water 100 to 200 feet deep, that same structure loses stability and can cost too much. So a race is now on to construct wind turbines using much the same technology as used for oil rigs. This method would involve driving pilings into the seabed and mounting a structure on top. The turbines are built on land, carried by barges, and then placed on the structure.

In even deeper water, such as on the West Coast, or in the Gulf of Maine, scientists envision floating turbines anchored to the seabed, although most acknowledge the technology is still years away from being economically viable. Blue H, the company proposing a project off New Bedford, hopes to test its design for floating turbines in US waters by 2011.

“Projects in shallow waters visible from shore have been proposed in the US and many have had public support but others have had some resistance,’’ said Habib Dagher, director of the Advanced Structures and Composites Center at the University of Maine, which wants to host a deep-water wind research center at the university and test designs in deep state waters 3 miles from shore. “In Maine, our goal for large-scale commercial development is to go about 20 miles offshore so you don’t see the structures from land, and to capture the best winds. But it’s a big learning curve for that depth.’’

Wind turbines need to be about 20 miles offshore to be invisible from land, many wind researchers say, although those that are at least 13 miles offshore are barely visible most of the time.

There is no rule about how far away an offshore wind park must be to win public support, said Willett Kempton, professor of marine policy at the University of Delaware. Yet surveys he conducted of thousands of coastal residents show there is little opposition to projects at least 8 miles offshore. Yet with no turbines built offshore in the United States, he added, it is hard to gauge public reaction.

Given the opposition to Cape Wind, developers are acutely sensitive to public perceptions. Deepwater Wind, which is hoping to build a two-phase project in partnership with Rhode Island, moved most of the proposed turbines farther offshore than the state had requested to improve aesthetics, wind power, and safety for birds. The company wants to construct up to eight turbines near Block Island, using a structure anchored to the seabed. Then it plans to build an additional 110 turbines about 15 to 18 miles out in federal waters to generate power for sale to the electrical grid. The company also received two of the federal exploratory leases 12 to 18 miles off New Jersey.

“Our philosophy is as far from the coastline as possible,’’ said Jim Lanard, managing director of Deepwater. “We think wind parks are a beautiful sight, but we understand some people don’t like them. The turbines can look - even though they are not - chaotically placed near shore because they are spinning at different times and speeds.’’

Bluewater Wind LLC, which also won two exploratory federal leases, is using technology similar to Cape Wind’s for two large projects 14 to 18 miles off New Jersey and Delaware. Founder and president Peter Mandelstam said the relatively shallow water, strong winds, and proven technology will make it faster and easier to build and maintain a wind farm.

Musial, of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said it makes more sense to build nearer-to-shore projects first, to work out technical problems, before jumping ahead to more challenging conditions farther out at sea.

Closer-to-shore wind turbines are certainly not being abandoned.

The Cape Wind project is waiting for a final federal sign-off. And Massachusetts recently unveiled a draft ocean zoning plan that designates six areas within 3 miles of shore where up to 10 wind turbines could be built in each, but only if most communities want them. The state also set aside two areas for large-scale wind farms offshore from two nearly empty islands.

Ian Bowles, Massachusetts secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs, said a suite of wind farms - onshore and those at varying distances offshore - are needed to meet ambitious national and state renewable energy goals.

“We are going to need all this and a lot more,’’ he said.

Beth Daley can be reached at bdaley@globe.com.