12 Degrees of Freedom

"Art is about trying to rethink the things you take for granted"

2009-12-03T05:59:00.004-05:00

According to recent polls here in the U.S. the general public's concern that climate change is a real and imminent threat to humanity is waning. That may be a result of the fact that issues like the war in Afghanistan, the economy and health care have a more direct impact on most people's lives.

We need a more effective means to communicate the tremendous threat that our experiment with the planet's atmosphere poses for all of us. Words alone may not be equal to this task. (GW)

The rise of climate-change art

Artists are waking up to climate change. But what good can they do – and how green is their work? Cornelia Parker, Gary Hume and Keith Tyson reveal how they're dealing with the threat of catastrophe

By Madeleine Bunting
Guardian
2 December 2009

A floating plastic bubble, so hi-tech it is lighter than air, is attached by ropes to the walls of the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen. As I step gingerly on to its see-through floor, I can peer down at the gallery 100ft below. When I'm joined by one of the museum staff, I become unsteady. We crawl around this airborne plastic yurt like babies and then, feeling giddy, stop to sit and talk about how our children might end up living in a city of such bubbles, sealed off from a contaminated earth; about who might be lucky enough to have such a refuge; how they might sing their children lullabies of a lost earth. It's an eerie conversation to have with a stranger, both of us imagining a deeply tragic future that seems highly plausible.

This installation, by Argentinian architect-artist Tomás Saraceno, is the biggest in Rethink, a series of contemporary art exhibitions taking place across Copenhagen ahead of next week's climate change summit. When I tell Saraceno of my experience in his bubble, he is delighted. "Perfect," he laughs. This, he says, is the role art has to play in tackling climate change. "Art is about trying to rethink the things you take for granted."

Saraceno is one of several artists appearing at Copenhagen and in the Royal Academy's Earth show, which opens in London this week. Some activists have wondered why the art world has been slow to grasp the significance of climate change, so you could argue that these exhibitions represent a dramatic awakening. Curators on both sides of the North sea say the response from artists has been so enthusiastic that they could have filled their spaces twice over. And both report unusually enthusiastic support from governments: the Department of Energy and Climate Change has paid for a free guide for every visitor to Earth. It's as if politicians, recognising the limits of their ability to engage the public on this issue, are turning in desperation to other means of communicating the enormity of what is at stake. "I didn't want penguins or icebergs," says Kathleen Soriano, one of Earth's curators. "There's nothing literal. We're not offering information – if visitors want that, we have a website. We wanted people to have an aesthetic response."

That emphasis is evident, but with the beauty comes a sinister undertow. In Copenhagen, Acid Rain, by Bright Ugochukwu Eke, consists of 6,000 hanging plastic bags. They sparkle, grey, clear and black, like Christmas decorations, but they contain carbon dust – currently choking the inhabitants of the delta region of Nigeria, an area of massive oil exploration. At first glance, the work of the Chinese artist Yao Lu appears to be an idealised landscape of mountains and clouds, but look more closely and you'll see that it's an urban waste dump.

A chilling lecture at Cern

Gary Hume's work, The Industrialist, is a lead tracing of a factory chimney billowing smoke. He calls it an epitaph for industrialists, but admits he finds the brief a challenge. "How do you depict global catastrophe?" he says. "I'm too selfish to describe the world's dilemma, so I describe my own paltry dilemma of what it's like to be alive."

Hume describes his involvement with Cape Farewell – an initiative to bring artists and scientists together, in Hume's case on a trip to the Arctic – as "completely beautiful, [but] hard to relate to my life". He recycles, grows vegetables, has made his house fuel-efficient, but acknowledges painful contradictions. "The people who do the most damage [environmentally] buy my work, and I'm not using ecologically sound paint. I feel like apologising – I can't help the world. Climate change is too big for my art. My painting is a small thing, like a child might do." Hume talks of the possibility of millions dying, but he is wary of visual art's long-held fascination with apocalypse. Nature's indifference to human survival has left him with no grand ambitions – only a modest, if deeply uncomfortable, determination to offer "solace".

Keith Tyson echoes this notion of humility. Nature Painting, an intense work on show in Earth, was made by mixing toxic chemicals with pigment, echoing natural forms such as cell formations. "Nature has an intelligence far greater than us," Tyson says. "We talk about saving the earth, but we're really talking about saving ourselves. The earth can look after itself." Tyson attended a lecture on climate change at Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research and home of the Hadron Collider: "It was a scientist talking to other scientists and it was horrific – far worse than people imagine. Terrifying."

The experience clarified his sense of the artist's role. "It is not to advocate solutions. It is something much deeper and more subtle – to make us reflect and rethink what it is to be a human being in the 21st century. We don't have that much power. It's nature that creates us. That's the kind of education too subtle to put on a syllabus: that's the important role of art."

Curator Soriano was aware of these competing perspectives when she put Earth together. "I didn't want to be preachy," she says, and is nervous of any suggestion that the exhibition is the most political the Royal Academy has mounted. In fact, says Anne Sophie Witzke, Rethink's project manager, the galleries involved in Copenhagen have been cautious: no one wants to be accused of propaganda.

This timidity is a source of frustration for the arts group Platform, which for over 20 years has worked to marry art and activism. "The arts stumble along the fault line between representation and transformation," says the organisation's James Marriott. "But, until 50 or so years ago, all art was about transformation and persuasion. Look at Goya: he wanted to persuade you of the horrors of war."

Art, Marriott thinks, is rediscovering a sense of purpose. In the last 50 days, Platform has curated 100 events at the Arnolfini Centre in Bristol; many of the featured artists will be joining activists in Copenhagen during the summit.

Huge carbon footprint

Marriott is delighted that climate change is finally attracting the attention it needs. "The more the merrier," he says, rejecting the criticism that artists are climbing on a green bandwagon. He is scathing, however, of the continuing blindness of artists, curators and institutions to their own enormous carbon footprints. "They lug lumps of wood around the world for exhibitions. Printing a catalogue on recycled paper is pathetic tokenism – no FTSE company would get away with that." Contemporary art is an expensive, global business. Artists, curators and the works all end up flying, while galleries themselves require expensive climactic conditions. Indeed, curators in London and Copenhagen admit they have no idea of the carbon cost of their exhibitions.

Charlie Kronick is the senior climate change adviser at Greenpeace. "The real role is not about using artists to leverage our message up the agenda," he says, "but for the artist to make this agenda their own. It is important they maintain their authenticity." Campaign initiatives have made a big impact on a number of artists (Ian McEwan and Antony Gormley have spoken enthusiastically about their Cape Farewell experiences), but many, such as Cornelia Parker, feel daunted by the need to respond to something so huge.

"I try to do my bit," says Parker, "as a citizen, an artist and in my everyday life." She has cut down on flying and offsets the flights she takes. But she confesses that her piece for the Earth show, Heart of Darkness, carbon frag-ments of a forest fire, was not originally about climate change; she was thinking of Al Gore's election loss and the hanging chads scandal. Now it is being co-opted into the climate change narrative. Similarly, Field, by Gormley, takes on a new meaning here: the frightened, gormless crowds of humans spill out of their room at the Royal Academy, not knowing where to go.

Parker's work has long had a preoccupation with the apocalyptic, but it was while listening to scientists recount their struggle to communicate the scale of climate change to politicians that she realised art had a vital role to play. She describes this as "a call to arms", but isn't keen to be associated with a single issue. She says she has done only one piece of work – a filmed interview with Noam Chomsky, showing in Copenhagen – that deals with climate change, and even then the interview covers a range of issues.

"It was intentionally propagandist," she says, adding hesitantly that perhaps this is what is required. "After all, the first world war artists were recruited to help fight the war – and this is the equivalent of war."

Earth is at the Royal Academy, London W1, until 31 January. Details: 020-7300 8000. The Guardian is a media partner for the exhibition. Rethink runs until 5 April and will tour next year. Details: www.rethinkclimate.org

“The Amish were the solution that we were looking for"

2009-12-02T05:37:00.000-05:00

There's something in short supply in today's information-overloaded, always-accessible-by-cellphone, around-the-clock-news world: simplicity, humility and an appreciation of what's truly sacred. (GW)

Living in Unity

Residents in this small Maine town embrace Amish neighbors and their belief in leading a simple life

By Sarah Schweitzer
Boston Globe
November 29, 2009

UNITY, Maine - The land was gorgeous. Pastures bounded by forests and overlooked by the distant Dixmont hills. And that was the problem.

As dairy farms in Unity have struggled and died in recent years, town leaders worried the setting would draw developers more interested in erecting neo-Colonials and paving roads than preserving the town’s agricultural heritage. They recruited organic farmers who bought small plots. But vast swaths remained.

Then a little more than a year ago men in banded straw hats and denim suits arrived and started buying big parcels. They built sturdy houses on the hillsides above fields where they planted strawberries and butternut squash, and loosed goats and cows to graze. They started small businesses on their land, turning out metal siding, wind turbines, and furniture, and sold vegetables and baked goods.

“The Amish were the solution that we were looking for - that we could never have dreamed up,’’ said Doug Fox, a neighbor of the Hochstetlers, one of Unity’s eight Amish families.

In a rugged stretch of Maine, where self-reliance and iconoclasm have been long honored, Amish are settling and finding eager neighbors. Amish first made homes in Smyrna and Easton in Aroostook County and most recently in Unity and neighboring Thorndike, in the state’s center, transforming landscapes into scenes that could be postcards from Lancaster, Pa. - byways dotted with pickups giving wide berth to horse-drawn buggies carrying women in bonnets and men with beards. Today, about 200 Amish live in Maine, according to their leaders.

They have come from Michigan and Canada, Tennessee and Kentucky, and other offshoots of original Amish settlements in Pennsylvania. Some are fleeing encroaching suburbs and neck-craning tourists, and seeking open-minded communities that will allow them to practice their brand of ultra-simple living. Some are following a directive to spread the word of their lifestyle and Christian beliefs by starting communities in places far from other Amish settlements.

With their hand-stitched shirts and chaste frocks, the Amish still command double-takes in Maine as they bike to school and carpool to Wal-Mart. But they quickly have become integral parts of their communities even as they observe boundaries to avoid technologies that they shun, such as electricity from the grid. Among some Mainers, there is a small but not insignificant amount of Amish envy.

“I stand here all day and watch them,’’ said Josh Miville, manager of Chase Toys in Unity, a shop that sells all-terrain vehicles and sits across from an Amish farm and the community’s one-room schoolhouse. “And I’ll tell you, they’ve got something figured out that we don’t. It’s the simple life. No power bills, no cellphones, no worries.’’

In Unity, population 1,900, the Amish have found a particularly happy coincidence of interests. The town is home to Unity College, an environmental school that teaches sustainable living practices and lends an earthy quality to the culture. That a group of people with such small carbon footprints - erecting wind turbines to charge battery packs used for powering tools and lanterns, keeping food cold in summer in an insulated basement room lined with three wagonloads of ice chunks from a pond - would land here, strikes many as a perfect alignment.

“You should see how hard they work,’’ said Ron Rudolph, a town selectman and co-owner of an organic vineyard. “I couldn’t believe the houses they put up - in days. And the best part of it is, they don’t drive cars that smoke up the area.’’

Amish residents say the appreciation is mutual.

“I like the laid-back lifestyle,’’ said Andrew Stoll, a 35-year-old father of five who moved to Unity from Michigan and runs a metal roofing business out of his barn. His mother and three brothers also now make their homes here. “People are very neighborly.’’

To be sure, when the Amish first arrived in town last year, they were curiosities, their culture a whispered topic that sent some people scurrying to laptop computers to figure out just what their dress and German-accented English were all about. Residents weren’t sure whether to wave when they saw Amish bicycling along the road, which was now sometimes speckled with manure from horses pulling buggies. Some leery residents asked the town clerk whether they paid property taxes. She assured them they did.

But in short order, they became the cool kids that everyone wanted to know. Recently, neighbors flocked to a pig roast the Hochstetlers hosted. Meanwhile, the Unity Union Church men’s fellowship lobbied for weeks to have the leading Amish men attend their meeting and explain the Amish lifestyle. On any given day, the Amish have their pick of residents’ standing offers to drive them to stores in nearby Waterville. (The Amish in Unity do not own or drive cars but will accept rides.)

“There’s a friendly competition to see who knows the most about the Amish,’’ said Fox, a professor of landscape horticulture at Unity College.

The Amish maintain some divisions. They send their children to their own school and do not permit their children to visit the homes of non-Amish. They are not easily reached because they don’t have phones in their houses, though some have put phones in sheds. Amish discourage phones in homes to preserve family time. They do not read local newspapers or vote in elections. And they often defer to their first language, Pennsylvania Dutch, a German dialect.

But Amish have increasingly become a part of town life. Crosstrax, a funky deli that sells milk and cheeses from local farms, now also offers baskets of Amish-grown vegetables - last week, spaghetti squash from Amish in Thorndike. Amish businessmen regularly show up at Chase Toys, where Miville receives faxes on their behalf. And come Wednesdays, the store is flooded with calls from residents wanting to know whether Abner Stoll is selling his glazed doughnuts across the way that week.

“The Amish don’t so much influence the town as complement the town,’’ said Naomi Caywood, a clerk at Crosstrax.

The Amish residents say they had little idea of Unity’s makeup when they settled here. They were looking for land and heard that Unity had ample stock at reasonable prices. (One family bought a 200-acre parcel for $350,000 and another a 100-acre parcel for $235,000, with money principally earned from small businesses.) They say the land needs work to revive its haying potential, but they have been pleasantly surprised by the town’s embrace of their efforts.

“They want the land to be preserved,’’ said Ervin Hochstetler, 45. He moved his wife, Esther, also 45, and 11 children - now 12 children, ages 21 to 7 months - to Unity from Smyrna, and is planning to build wind turbines that produce compressed air for pneumatic tools.

The Hochstetler home is a study in efficiency, with solar panels on the roof and two small wind turbines in the field. As they tucked into a meal of deer meat and potatoes for lunch on a recent day, their eldest daughter retrieved yogurt from the porch, where food is stored in winter. On the wall, a sign read: “To be content with little is hard, to be content with much is impossible.’’

Still, the house is not without traces of contemporary culture. The baby, Seth, happily bounced in a multicolored plastic ExerSaucer, and when the Hochstetlers hosted the pig roast at their home and neighbors brought bottles of soda and Little Debbie cakes, the Hochstelters did not turn away the offerings.

Sarah Schweitzer can be reached at schweitzer@globe.com

Traditions under siege

2009-12-01T05:29:00.006-05:00

Indigenous peoples around the world are under siege. Two recent books put what's going on in perspective. I've mentioned both in previous posts. The historical context for the displacement and disruption of cultures is provided in "The Art of Not Being Governed" by James C. Scott. He describes these practices as part of state-making and the emphasis is on assimilating indigenous people into the state apparatus. "Conservation Refugees" by Mark Dowie describes the current state of affairs from the perspective of the conservation movement.

Both books make the point that the threatened indigenous people are, in many cases, members of the most egalitarian and sustainable cultures on the planet. (GW)

Clinging to the Forest Despite the Chaos

By Simon Romero
New York Times
December 1, 2009

EDOWINÑA, Venezuela — The hunt for the tapir, a large mammal that roams the remote Caura forest in southern Venezuela, began at dawn. Sunlight peeked through the tree canopy, a piece of one of South America’s last virtually pristine river basins.

Menace lurked on branches in the form of inch-long bullet ants, called “veinticuatro” since the intense pain from their sting lasts 24 hours. The shed skin of a bushmaster viper decomposed on the ground. Resonating moans of howler monkeys drowned out the buzzing of sand flies, which transmit a dreaded spleen-enlarging disease.

“Temblador,” said Romero González, 18, a Ye’kuana tribesman, grasping a machete in one hand and a 16-gauge shotgun in the other. He pointed at the carcass of a six-foot-long electric eel his hunting party found in a stream a day earlier.

They sliced off part of the eel’s head and ate it quickly for good luck. Then they came across a black curassow, a bird resembling a wild turkey, and promptly shot it. “The curassow is my favorite bird,” said Mr. González, referring to the roasted meat consumed for dinner the previous night.

Undisturbed by roads or hydroelectric dams, and largely forgotten by the rest of the world, the remote Caura covers a section of southern Venezuela larger than Belgium. Only about 3,500 indigenous people from two forest tribes, the Ye’kuana and Sanema, live in its rain forest and savannas, which are fed by rivers flowing down from the Venezuelan table-top mountains known as tepuis that geologists think are remnants of the mountains of the Gondwana supercontinent.

The Ye’kuana and the Sanema cling to their way of life here by hunting peccary, spider monkey and tapir. They farm manioc and use barbasco, a vine poison, to rouse fish from streams.

But their traditions are coming under siege, and anthropologists say it is a wonder that their cultures remain intact at all. Among the daunting challenges they face are a thriving illicit bush-meat trade, incursions by gold miners and the government’s resistance to requests by the Caura’s forest dwellers that they be given greater administrative control over their land.

The two groups have survived countless trials. Carib slavers from what is now Guyana’s coast led 17th-century raids in the Caura, delivering captives to the Dutch. More recently, the Ye’kuana and Sanema fought a brutal war in the 1930s, apparently over Sanema raids for metal and women, forcing the Sanema into a subservient role in some Ye’kuana villages.

Somehow, the forests in which the two groups live were not felled. Historians credit this slip of fate to the Caura’s remoteness, and to the country’s overwhelming dependence on a different natural resource: oil. Projects to dam rivers were drawn up, then forgotten. Scientific research stations in the forest lie abandoned.

Foreign missionaries and anthropologists, once plentiful here, are now rarely seen. President Hugo Chávez expelled American proselytizers this decade, accusing them of espionage. For reasons not entirely clear, his government rarely grants permits to experts from abroad to conduct research in the Caura.

Partly as a result, conservation efforts here are almost nonexistent. One project by Caura Weichojo, a nongovernment group in the hamlet of Edowinña, records and catalogs the songs of hundreds of birds in the forest to teach children here about the Caura’s rich wildlife, knowledge that is being eroded as the Ye’kuana and Sanema become increasingly exposed to the chaotic Venezuela around them.

“The sound of the Tokolomawai guides one under the tree cover to where the peccaries roam,” said a Sanema who gave his name as Wokía (“just Wokía,” he smiled) and said he believed he was in his 50s. He used his language’s name for the bird called the marbled wood-quail in English.

The birdsong project, supported by ornithologists from the March Foundation, a California environmental group, stands in contrast to the pressures faced by the Ye’kuana and Sanema as the outside world sets its sights on their forests and rivers.

A glimpse of one possible outcome for the groups, assimilation, can be seen in Maripa, a town of about 4,000 residents six hours by canoe from Edowinña.

A strong military presence there — ostensibly to combat illegal gold mining in the Caura that is polluting rivers with mercury and resulting, in some cases, in miners burning the huts of the Ye’kuana and Sanema — serves as a source of tension. Last month, residents responded to a shooting episode by army soldiers, which wounded three people, by setting fire to the town’s main military checkpoint.

But the government also brings resources that are impossible to refuse. One recent Saturday morning, officers in an armed civilian force nurtured by Mr. Chávez, the Bolivarian Militia, led about 30 recruits, nearly all Ye’kuana or Sanema, in reciting their official hymn. Officers said the recruits would receive about $6 for showing up.

They meekly chanted: “All of Venezuela’s people must grip their rifles. Man’s true peace is his nation’s progress.”

Progress in Maripa, or what passes for it, manifests itself in a slum that serves as home for Ye’kuana who left Chajuraña, a village deep in the interior.

“We want money to buy things,” said Silverio Flores, 49, who moved to Maripa’s squalor three years ago. “If we join a mission,” he said using the term for Mr. Chávez’s social welfare programs, “maybe we’ll get a monthly payment of some kind.”

At a truck stop in Maripa, a dealer in illegal bush meat listed his products: tapir, agouti (a coveted rodent), curassow and peccary. He said prices ran about $4 a kilogram for the wild animals, which had been killed near indigenous communities by poachers.

As others encroach on their land, the Ye’kuana and Sanema go on with their lives. They farm. They fish. They hunt. The results are not always promising. On the day of Romero González’s hunt, the desired tapir was elusive.

A day later, the hunters’ canoe drifted past a clearing in the forest where poachers had left the innards and bones of a freshly killed tapir to decay.

The canoe’s pilot, Mocuy Rodríguez, a 23-year-old Ye’kuana, pondered the significance. “Call it our reality,” he said, as the rapids of the river swirled around his canoe. “Call it the end of our reality if it is not stopped.”

"...buying diplomatic support by giving away land’’

2009-11-30T04:47:00.002-05:00

No matter how you slice this one, it doesn't seem like a very good idea. Ethiopian government officials are leasing some of their prime farmland to rich foreign nations so those nations may use it to ensure their food security. Large agribusiness concerns are scooping up the long-term leases (some for as long as 99 years).

Experience teaches that absentee farmers -- especially those practicing industrialized agriculture generally show little interest in nurturing the land. Despite the reassurances offered by UN representatives, I'm willing to bet that these foreign agribusinessmen will extract as much as they can from the land in as short a time period as possible and then move to secure new leases when the land is exhausted. (GW)

Wealthy nations outsource crops to Ethiopia’s farmland

Trend is driven in part by last year’s global food crisis

By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post
November 29, 2009

BAKO, Ethiopia - In recent months, the Ethiopian government began marketing abroad one of the hottest commodities in an increasingly crowded and hungry world: farmland.

“Why Attractive?’’ reads one glossy poster with photos of green fields and a map outlining swaths of the country available at bargain-basement prices. “Vast, fertile, irrigable land at low rent. Abundant water resources. Cheap labor. Warmest hospitality.’’

This impoverished and chronically food-insecure Horn of Africa nation is rapidly becoming one of the world’s leading destinations for the booming business of land leasing, by which relatively rich countries and investment firms are securing 40- to 99-year contracts to farm vast tracts of land.

Governments across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and especially Africa are seizing the chance to attract this new breed of investors, wining and dining executives, creating land-leasing agencies and land catalogs to showcase their offerings of earth. In Africa alone, experts estimate that about 50 million acres - roughly the size of Nebraska - have been leased in the past two years.

The trend is driven in part by last year’s global food crisis. Relatively wealthy countries are shoring up their food supplies by growing staple crops abroad. The desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for instance, is shifting wheat production to Africa. The government of India, where land is crowded and overfarmed, is offering incentives to companies to carve out mega farms across the continent.

Increasingly, though, purely profit-seeking companies are snatching up land, making a simple, if somewhat grim, calculation. As one Saudi-backed businessman here put it, “The population of the world is increasing dramatically, so land and food supplies will be short, demand will be higher, and prices will rise.’’

The scale and pace of the land scramble has alarmed policymakers and others concerned about the implications for food security in countries such as Ethiopia, where officials recently appealed for food aid for about 6 million people as drought devastates parts of East Africa. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization is in the midst of a food security summit in Rome where some of the 62 heads of state attending are to discuss a code of conduct to govern land deals, which are being struck with little public input.

“These contracts are pretty thin,’’ said David Hallam, a deputy director at the UN organization. “You see statements from ministers where they’re basically promising everything with no controls, no conditions.’’

The harshest critics of the practice conjure bleak images of poor Africans starving as food is hauled off to rich countries. Some express concern that decades of industrial farming will leave good land spoiled even as local populations surge. And skeptics also say the political contexts cannot be ignored.

“We don’t trust this government,’’ said Merera Gudina, a leading opposition figure here who accuses Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia of using the land policy to hold on to power. “We are afraid this government is buying diplomatic support by giving away land.’’

But many experts are cautiously hopeful, saying that big agribusiness could feed millions by industrializing agriculture in countries such as Ethiopia, where about 80 percent of its 75 million people are farmers who plow their fields with oxen.

“If these deals are negotiated well, I tell you, it will change the dynamics of the food economy in this country,’’ said Mafa Chipeta, the UN group’s representative in Ethiopia, dismissing the worst-case scenarios. “I can’t believe Ethiopia or any other government would allow their country to be used like an empty womb. The human spirit would not allow it.’’

Few countries have embraced the trend as zealously as Ethiopia, where hard-baked eastern deserts fade into spectacularly lush and green western valleys fed by the Blue Nile. Only a quarter of the country’s estimated 175 million fertile acres is being farmed.

Desperate for foreign currency, the government of former Marxist rebels who once proclaimed “land to the tiller!’’ has set aside more than 6 million acres for agribusiness. Lured with 40-year leases and tax holidays, investors are going on farm shopping sprees, crisscrossing the country on chartered flights to pick out their swaths of Ethiopian soil.

Indian companies have committed $4.2 billion. Anand Seth, director general of the Federation of Indian Export Organizations, described Africa as “the next big thing’’ in investment opportunities and markets.

As he stood on a little hill overlooking 30,000 acres of rich, black soil, Hanumantha Rao, chief general manager of the Indian company Karuturi Agro Products, agreed. He said the Ethiopian government has imposed few requirements on his company.

“From here,’’ Rao said, “you can see the past and the future of Ethiopian agriculture.’’

From there it was possible to see a river designated for irrigating cornfields and rice paddies; it is no longer open for locals to water their cows. Several shiny green tractors bounced across the 6-mile-long field where teff, the local grain, once grew.

Is sustainable development transforming America into regional soviets?

2009-11-29T07:55:00.009-05:00

I'll never forget the look of disbelief (bordering on disgust) when I admitted to my friend that on occasion I tune in Rush Limbaugh and other conservative radio talk shows while driving. He asked why would I do such a thing? My response was (and is) because, among other things, I want to know how they are influencing public opinion on important issues like global climate change and how they are characterizing those of us who do not share their views.

Today's post is a case in point. Did you know that if you believe in ideas like sustainable development, consensus decision making, collaborations, smart growth, land trusts, community supported agriculture, global warming or community visioning that you are a "Marxist Utopian" working to undermine private property rights and impose a Global Governance system on society? (GW)

Sen. Dodd: U.N. facilitator of 'Marxist utopia'

By Henry Lamb
WorldNetDaily
November 28, 2009

When the term “Sustainable Development” first entered the world, it was defined to be:

"Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

The term and the definition are the creation of the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, then vice-chair of the International Socialist Party.

To give meaning to this grandiose definition, the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development adopted Agenda 21, signed by 179 nations, including the United States. This document is a 40-chapter laundry list of recommendations to create "Sustainable Communities."

Sen. Christopher Dodd is facilitating these U.N. recommendations through his "Livable Communities Act" (S. 1619), which further defines the term this way:

"The term 'sustainable development' means a pattern of resource use designed to create livable communities by:
(A) providing a variety of safe and reliable transportation choices;
(B) providing affordable, energy-efficient, and location-efficient housing choices for people of all income levels, ages, races, and ethnicities;
(C) supporting, revitalizing, and encouraging the growth of communities and maximizing the cost effectiveness of existing infrastructure;
(D) promoting economic development and economic competitiveness;
(E) preserving the environment and natural resources;
(F) protecting agricultural land, rural land, and green spaces; and
(G) supporting public health and improving the quality of life for residents of and workers in a community."

Dodd's bill will authorize the appropriation of billions of dollars to bribe states and local communities to transform the nation into soviet-styled communities where freedom is sacrificed for the utopian vision of sustainable development.

Dodd's bill will create two new grant programs, and two new bureaucracies, with $100 million authorized for "Comprehensive Planning Grants." These grants are available only to multijurisdictional organizations that are defined in the bill, which will assure comprehensive planning on a regional basis. "Sustainability Challenge Grants" are offered on the same multijurisdictional basis. Nearly $4 billion is authorized over three years for grants to implement the projects set forth in the comprehensive plans.

The "Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities" is created within the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This new agency is charged with issuing and overseeing the grants program and providing guidance and technical assistance in the transformation to "sustainable," or as Dodd describes them, "livable" communities. The other new bureaucracy is the "Interagency Council on Sustainable Communities." This is a new council consisting of cabinet secretaries – or their designees. The council is authorized to hire a staff to "ensure interagency coordination of federal policy on sustainable development."

The United Nations has a similar agency. It's called the DOEM: Designated Officials on Environmental Matters.

As a basis for his legislation, Dodd lists 20 "findings" which may or may not be true, but certainly do not provide an accurate picture. For example, he says that between 1980 and 2000, population growth in 99 urban centers "consumed" 16 million acres of rural land. What he did not say is that all urban land in all the cities occupies only 60 million acres, or 2.6 percent of the 2.3 billion acres in this country. Land designated as "wilderness," however, occupies more than 107 million acres. Wilderness is land on which no human activity – other than walking carefully – is allowed.

Dodd's bill, like all sustainable development propaganda, paints a warm and fuzzy picture of what "livable" or "sustainable" communities should be. The propaganda fails to point out that in order to achieve this Marxist utopia, government has to enforce the vision. This means that people must live where government says they must live; in homes that meet the government's design criteria; and travel to work in vehicles approved by the government.

The end result of the comprehensive land-use plan is to draw lines on a map, which deprives individuals of private property rights whose land is outside the urban boundary zones. The value of land inside urban boundary zones skyrockets, as does the cost of living for all who reside there.

There is a free, detailed, 3-part video presentation available here, that explains sustainable development quite thoroughly.

Dodd's bill goes a long way to transforming America into what looks a lot like regional soviets where unelected agency appointees draft a plan by which all must live, and then enforce the plan with the power of law.

Such a place cannot be described as "the land of the free." Nor can it be called "the home of the brave," if voters allow this transformation to continue.

Henry Lamb is the author of "The Rise of Global Governance," chairman of Sovereignty International and founder of the Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO) and Freedom21 Inc..

Aquaculture and food security

2009-11-27T07:47:00.009-05:00

I remember a conversation I had with Ron Zweig a few decades ago who, at the time was the director of aquaculture research at the New Alchemy Institute. He said that it was just a matter of time before the majority of fish that people consume would be raised on fish farms. Even then he could see that the hunter/gathering era of fishing was coming to an end. (GW)

Fish farming seen driving food security

EurActiv
27 November 2009

As global fish stocks continue to plunge, fish farming is seen as a way of contributing to food security. The EU has pledged to increase the competitiveness of European aquafarming to meet a growing appetite for seafood, but policymakers stress that this must go hand-in-hand with farming to restore fish stocks.

Background:

According to the European Commission, more than 150 million of the world's poor depend on fishing and related activities such as processing and trade for their livelihoods.

The UN stresses that the catches of subsistence fishermen provide essential nourishment for poor communities across Africa, Asia, much of Latin America and islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. As for food security and health, fish are estimated to provide over 25% of animal protein intake in many developing countries, and serve as valuable supplements in diets lacking essential vitamins and minerals.

Meanwhile, international trade in fish is booming. Up to 60% of the total value of the world catch comes from developing-country waters, meaning products of a high commercial value, such as frozen shrimps and tuna, are exported to developed countries.

When global fish prices quadrupled in the 1990s, many producers sold their traditional fisheries on the global market. While developing countries are taking a growing share of international trade, with exports providing valuable foreign exchange, the UN fears that diverting fish and fish products away from local communities and developing regions may be depriving needy people of a "traditionally cheap but highly nutritious food".

The Commission acknowledges that while EU support for the fisheries sector in developing countries has contributed to the industry's development, this aid has not had a significant impact on fighting poverty and achieving the UN's Millennium Development Goals of reducing poverty and hunger.

The EU executive is thus planning to review the external dimension of its Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) to take better account of third countries' food security strategies.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that over 70% of the world's fish species are already either fully exploited or depleted. And while the impact of global overfishing is typically measured in environmental and economic terms, depleted fish stocks also threaten the food security of millions of people who are dependent on fish for food.

While global consumption of fish and seafood will continue to rise, the UN stresses that limited stocks and overfishing mean rising demand cannot be met by catching wild fish alone.

Aquaculture is seen as one way to help satisfy growing demand for seafood and contribute to food security. Many agree that such techniques can pave the way for sustainable fish stocks.

EU fisheries policy under review

Although Europeans have been plundering their seas for decades, the EU's Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) continues to subsidise the fisheries industry, and therefore contributes further to the problem of over-fishing. Indeed, EU support for fleet modernisation has led to overcapacity in the bloc's fishing fleet in relation to the resources available. A recent NGO report showed that Spain tops the Union's overcapacity ranking (EurActiv 25/06/09).

While CFP reform has been long recognised as essential, it is equally clear that changing the policy will require genuine political leadership. EU Fisheries Commissioner Joe Borg says the CFP in its current form "does not encourage responsible behaviour by either fishermen or politicians".

The European Commission is now seeking stakeholders' views on reforms outlined in an April 2009 Green Paper, and will present legislative proposals on resource conservation and fleet policy to member states and MEPs by 2012, with a view to the new CFP's entry into force in 2013.

Spectacular growth in aquaculture

Modern aquaculture - fish and aquatic food farming - is currently the world's fastest-growing food production sector, with an average worldwide growth rate of 6-8% per year. Global aquaculture has increased by a third since 2000, and currently provides around half of the world's seafood for human consumption. According to the Commission, the significant further growth potential of aquafarming makes it "a key part of the solution to meet future demand for fish".

While aquafarming is already a major economic activity in the EU, production by the EU-27 has stagnated since 2000 and the global boom in the sector is mainly driven by spectacular growth in Asia and South America. Amid growing consumer demand in Europe, imports of fish and shellfish now represent more than 60% of EU seafood consumption.

Meanwhile, the Commission believes that aquaculture represents a "golden opportunity" for Europe. "The global developments and the strategic importance of aquaculture in terms of food security contribute to give this sector a promising future," states an April 2009 communication from the EU executive on devloping a sustainable European aquaculture strategy.

However, the EU executive underlines that EU aquaculture development should not be allowed to undermine "the necessity to reduce and eventually eliminate the overfishing of wild stocks" and achieve sustainable exploitation of the ocean.

As for the world's poor, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) suggests that the outlook for fish and food security among the poor "is not especially good," because aquafarming is not likely to provide new employment on a significant scale and "competition for crowded resources is likely to intensify".

Climate change

Climate change is expected to affect food security, and fisheries and aquaculture are no exception. Those facing the most uncertainty are once again poor people who depend on fish for food.

While the impact of climate change on aquatic ecosystems, fisheries and aquaculture is still not fully understood, floods and droughts are expected to affect harvests from lakes and rivers. By impacting on aquatic ecosystems, climate change may also alter the distribution and production of fish, and change fish migration routes, spawning and feeding grounds and fishing seasons.

The Commission notes that climate change is already having an impact on Europe's seas by affecting the abundance and distribution of fish stocks. It stresses that "fisheries depend on healthy marine ecosystems" and says the new CFP can help to facilitate climate change adaptation efforts in the marine environment.

"Growing concerns about food security in the EU and worldwide make it ever more important to manage and exploit natural resources responsibly without jeopardising their future," according to the EU executive.

Next steps:

31 Dec. 2009: Close of Commission consultation on reform of the Common Fisheries Policy.

Eliminating the black-white gap for infant mortality

2009-11-27T06:17:00.005-05:00

Children are our most precious renewable resource. Buckminster Fuller believed that every child born is the Universe's answer to a particular problem. That potential goes unrealized if poor prenatal care results in death or inadequate nutrition early in life prevents the healthy physical and mental development of the child.

In many parts of the country there is an alarming disparity in infant mortality rates between blacks and whites. That gap has been dramatically closed in Madison, Wisconsin. (GW)

Trying to Explain a Drop in Infant Mortality

By Erik Eckholm
New York Times
November 27, 2009

MADISON, Wis. — Seven and a half months into Ta-Shai Pendleton’s first pregnancy, her child was stillborn. Then in early 2008, she bore a daughter prematurely.

Soon after, Ms. Pendleton moved from a community in Racine that was thick with poverty to a better neighborhood in Madison. Here, for the first time, she had a full-term pregnancy.

As she cradled her 2-month-old daughter recently, she described the fear and isolation she had experienced during her first two pregnancies, and the more embracing help she found 100 miles away with her third. In Madison, county nurses made frequent home visits, and she got more help from her new church.

The lives and pregnancies of black mothers like Ms. Pendleton, 21, are now the subject of intense study as researchers confront one of the country’s most intractable health problems: the large racial gap in infant deaths, primarily due to a higher incidence among blacks of very premature births.

Here in Dane County, Wis., which includes Madison, the implausible has happened: the rate of infant deaths among blacks plummeted between the 1990s and the current decade, from an average of 19 deaths per thousand births to, in recent years, fewer than 5.

The steep decline, reaching parity with whites, is particularly intriguing, experts say, because obstetrical services for low-income women in the county have not changed that much.

Finding out what went right in Dane County has become an urgent quest — one that might guide similar progress in other cities. In other parts of the state, including Milwaukee, Racine and two other counties, black infant death rates remain among the nation’s highest, surpassing 20 deaths per thousand in some areas.

Nationwide for 2007, according to the latest federal data, infant mortality was 6 per 1,000 for whites and 13 for blacks.

“This kind of dramatic elimination of the black-white gap in a short period has never been seen,” Dr. Philip M. Farrell, professor of pediatrics and former dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said of the progress in Dane County.

“We don’t have a medical model to explain it,” Dr. Farrell added, explaining that no significant changes had occurred in the extent of prenatal care or in medical technology.

Without a simple medical explanation, health officials say, the decline appears to support the theory that links infant mortality to the well-being of mothers from the time they were in the womb themselves, including physical and mental health; personal behaviors; exposure to stresses, like racism; and their social ties.

Those factors could in turn affect how well young women take care of themselves and their pregnancies.

Karen Timberlake, the Wisconsin secretary of health services, said that in Dane County, the likely explanation lay in “the interaction among a variety of interrelated factors.”

“Our challenge is,” Ms. Timberlake said, “how can we distill this and take it to other counties?”

Only about 5 percent of Dane County’s population is black, and the sharp drop in the mortality rate also tracked larger declines in the numbers of very premature and underweight births for blacks, said Dr. Thomas L. Schlenker, the county director of public health.

A three-year study, led by Dr. Gloria E. Sarto of the University of Wisconsin, is using tools including focus groups and research on pollution to compare the experiences of black mothers here with those in Racine County, which has the highest black infant mortality in the state.

It is not hard to imagine why death rates would be lower in Dane County than in Racine, which is more segregated and violent, or in Milwaukee, a larger city. Dane County has a greater array of public and private services, but pinpointing how they may have changed over the decade in ways that made a difference is the challenge.

Dr. Schlenker, the county health director, credits heightened outreach to young women by health workers and private groups. “I think it’s a community effect,” he said. “Pregnant women need to feel safe, cared for and valued. I believe that when they don’t, that contributes to premature birth and fetal loss in the sixth or seventh month.”

He pointed to services that started in the mid-90s and have gathered steam. For instance, a law center, ABC for Health, has increasingly connected poor women with insurance and medical services. He said local health maintenance organizations were now acting far more assertively to promote the health of prospective mothers.

And a federally supported clinic, Access Community Health Center, which serves the uninsured and others, has cared for a growing number of women using nurse-midwives, who tend to bond with pregnant women, spending more time on appointments and staying with them through childbirth.

County nurses visit low-income women at high risk of premature birth, providing transportation to appointments and referrals to antismoking programs or antidepression therapies. Another program sends social workers into some homes. The programs exist statewide, but in Milwaukee, Racine and other areas they do not appear to have achieved the same broad coverage, said Ms. Timberlake, the state health leader.

And community leaders in Dane County, shocked by high mortality rates, started keeping closer watch on young pregnant women.

“The African-American community in Madison is close-knit,” said Carola Gaines, a black leader and coordinator of Medicaid services for a private insurance plan.

Similar community efforts are now being promoted in other struggling cities.

Brandice Hatcher, 26, who recently moved into a new, subsidized apartment in Madison, spent her first 18 years in foster care in Chicago before moving two years ago.

When she learned last June that she was pregnant, Ms. Hatcher said, “I didn’t know how to be a parent and I didn’t know what services could help me.”

Over the summer she started receiving monthly visits from Laura Berger, a county nurse, who put her in touch with a dentist. That was not just a matter of comfort; periodontal disease elevates the risk of premature birth, increasing the levels of a labor-inducing chemical.

Ms. Hatcher had been living in a rooming house, but she was able to get help from a program that provided a security deposit for her apartment. She attained certification as a nursing assistant while awaiting childbirth.

Under a state program, a social worker visits weekly and helps her look for jobs. And she receives her prenatal care from the community center’s nurse-midwives. A church gave her baby clothes and a changing table.

Ms. Hatcher said she would not do anything to jeopardize her unborn baby’s prospects. She has named her Zaria and is collecting coins and bills in a glass jar, the start, she said, of Zaria’s personal savings account.

"On a good day the meter runs backwards"

2009-11-26T06:03:00.002-05:00

It's difficult for me to understand why renewable energy technologies like wind turbines are held to higher standards than fossil fuel and nuclear power plants when it comes to finding a place to build and operate them.

Some people consider them eyesores that threaten to ruin bucolic and coastal vistas. Others, myself included. see them as iconic symbols of optimism that signal humanity is finally committed to living sustainably on this planet.

There's no question that siting large wind turbines becomes somewhat easier when the energy generated from them directly benefits hosting and abutting communities.

The little island and its big, green victory

The Independent
November 26, 2009

The Danish haven of Samso is one of the world's first industrialised places to become energy self-sufficient - a great boost for a country about to host a summit on climate change. Tony Paterson visits the windy isle

A ferocious force-nine gale whipped across the low grass and pine-dotted hummocks. The sky was all deep grey scudding cloud, the rain horizontal and hard. But in a sodden field, three so-called "harmonious" wind turbines were working flat out and pouring cash into the islanders' bank accounts. The huge blades of the 70ft windmills sliced through the rain like giant revolving scythes, their whooshing sound audible as you stood beneath, even through the howling gale. That the island of Samso is an ideal place to harness the power of the wind seemed blindingly obvious in the midst of this wild storm.

The inhabitants of this Danish isle seized upon wind's potential as a source of energy and money more than a decade ago. Since then the Baltic island has become one of the first industrialised places on the planet to qualify as being totally energy self-sufficient.

It is a major propaganda victory for a country that will shortly be hosting the world summit on climate change - in fact, Copenhagen delegates will be flown or ferried out here next month to see Samso for themselves. The island's inhabitants are proud of what they have achieved. "Being part of a project like this gives you a wonderful feeling of being in harmony with nature," resident Erik Andersen explained.

The 64-year-old cattle farmer has shares in a wind turbine, solar panels on his roof and runs his tractor on home-grown rape-seed oil. He feeds the mush that's left over to his cows. When all of his alternative energy sources are working, he delights in looking at the electricity meter that offsets his own power against what he has to import. "On a good day the meter runs backwards," he said.

One could be forgiven for thinking that Samso's inhabitants are all dyed-in-the-wool muesli-munching Green Party voters, willing to make big personal sacrifices to further the environmental cause. Yet most of the islanders are ordinary Danish farmers, who started out with a sceptical attitude to green power.

It took one of their own kind to convince them otherwise. Soren Hermansen, a one-time vegetable farmer is the man behind the island's energy revolution. Nowadays he flits between places as diverse as the United States, the Scilly Isles and Tasmania in his new role as global green-energy guru. The lavatory walls at Samso's Energy Academy, where Mr Hermansen has his office, are covered with cartoons portraying him as a green superman. One has him mouthing the slogan: "Wife, make me a cape".

But back in 1997, Mr Hermansen was a frustrated small farmer trying to earn a few kroner in a market that was becoming dominated by large farming concerns. Samso was in crisis at the time because one of the island's main businesses - a slaughterhouse employing 100 workers - had been forced to close down. "With hindsight, it was the ideal time to start a new project," Mr Hermansen, 50, recalled. "A crisis makes people much more open to new ideas."

That year, the energy ministry, run by Denmark's then green-minded socialist government, announced a competition to find out how much renewable energy could be produced in a single district. The aim was to create an area that was energy self-sufficient. Boroughs and municipalities were invited to put forward proposals and compete against each other.

An engineer called Ole Johnsson from the mainland town of Aarhus became fascinated by the competition. He saw Samso as the ideal place to realise the energy self-sufficiency dream. After studying the island's annual wind-speed and sunshine-hour records, he calculated how much energy the island could produce from wind turbines and other alternative sources and concluded it was possible to beat conventional sources. He sent the plan to Copenhagen and it won.

Mr Johnsson persuaded the Samso islanders to form an energy association to start implementing the plan. Fifty people came to the first meeting, including Mr Hermansen who saw the potential and grabbed it. Within days, he was out and about on the island, canvassing for people's support. "I'd do things like rent a fruit press and announce plans to press apples in a particular village," he said. "We'd get all the fruit done and then start talking about the project and I had to convince them that it was our future."

But there were three elements without which the project would probably never have got off the ground. Firstly, Danish laws oblige the country's energy suppliers to buy wind energy at prices that are higher than it costs to produce. Secondly, back in the late 1990s, Samso just happened to be in the parliamentary constituency of Svend Auken, Denmark's late and hugely popular green-minded Social Democrat energy minister, who made sure that the island got the project.

Thirdly, his government pledged to underwrite bank loans to any Samso resident who opted to take a share in a wind turbine. "Effectively the banks were giving the islanders loans that were completely watertight," Mr Hermansen said. "They knew they couldn't lose."

With half the battle already won by the state, Mr Hermansen then had to persuade people to switch from traditional energy sources. "It only worked because we got people to swap the usual 'Nimby' (not in my back yard) attitude to wind turbines for an 'Imby' attitude," Mr Sorensen said. "People began to realise that they were doing something unique in the very place where they live. It was not something that was imposed from above. It belongs to them."

The island's farmers began to realise that they could make money from the straw that was left over after the harvest because it could be baled up and burned in the island's straw-fired heating plant. Likewise foresters, working in the island's woodlands, began using dead trees to manufacture woodchips for furnaces. "We have just managed to reach our goal of self-sufficiency," said Mr Hermansen. "But it would have been difficult to achieve without generous government funding."

A decade ago, Samso relied heavily on oil imports for heat and power, but now - thanks to its windmills and alternative energy plants - it manages to produce more green-generated power than the amount of "dirty" energy it still has to bring in to run its cars and some of its homes. Three-quarters of the island's heating needs are currently met by alternative energy sources such as wind.

The island - 30 miles long and 15 wide - is reputed to be one of the most successful green-energy projects to have got off the ground since environmentalists started raising the alarm about climate change three decades ago.

Samso has 21 wind turbines - 10 on a sandbank off the island's south coast, half of which are owned by the local council. The other 11 are dotted all over the island and owned by more than 450 residents-cum-shareholders. To make their presence as inoffensive to the eye as possible, the turbines are of the "harmonious" - as opposed to the more offensive "gorilla" - type, which means they are all painted the same colour and have a standard height and blade length.

But wind turbines are just the most visible part of the energy revolution. Samso heats the homes of its 22 villages with power plants that rely on furnaces fired by woodchips and straw. Banks of man-sized solar panels lie in fields, kept trim by herds of bleating sheep. One farmer has even developed a special pump to use the warmth supplied by cow's milk to heat his home.

Another effect of the green-energy boom is that the island's plumbers and carpenters have now all become experts in energy-saving home conversion and insulation techniques. Most of Samso's houses are carefully insulated and equipped with double-glazed windows to minimise heat loss. One of them belongs to Uffe and Else Marie Bach. Their painstakingly restored 150-year-old former school house in the Samso village of Torup is heated by a so-called Maas oven, a white-washed brick construction on the ground floor, which Mr Bach, a retired plumber, fires up for two hours every morning with logs he cuts from the woods with a chainsaw.

The heat generated is so intense that the bricks surrounding the oven stay warm for 24 hours and help to heat most of the house. Hot water is supplied by a pump, powered by electricity from the wind turbine, which sucks in the earth's natural warmth collected from 1,300ft of pipe buried underground in a field next to the house.

A decade ago, the Bachs bought €25,000 worth of shares in one of the island's wind turbines. The upshot has been dramatically reduced electricity bills and a €3,000 dividend payment last year - the profit resulting from the sale of their turbine's electricity. "Finally, we are beginning to make a bit of money," said Mr Bach.

Despite its egalitarian principles, it is the big financial investors in Samso's energy revolution who have come out on top. One of them is Jörgen Tranberg, who owns a 250-acre dairy farm. With help from the bank, the 55-year-old farmer invested €2.5m in wind turbines. He paid €1.2m for the one on his farm he owns outright and he is half-owner of one of the offshore turbines, too. He claims that on a good day the windmills alone can earn him €3,000.

With figures like that, it's not surprising that the project has aroused interest from far beyond Denmark's borders. Mr Hermansen likes to recount the story of the Egyptian ambassador's visit. After taking a tour of the island and examining all its green-energy projects in great detail, his excellency asked how many people lived on Samso. About 4,000 he was told. "That's three city blocks in Cairo!" he exclaimed. "Maybe that's where you should start," came Mr Hermansen's sanguine reply. "Not with the whole of Egypt but by taking one block at a time."

“Sometimes we have to move quickly to get things done"

2009-11-25T06:16:00.005-05:00

The federal government is scrambling to distribute billions and billions of "stimulus funds" as part of President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. States are scrambling to attract their share of those funds which are targeted for projects that are "shovel ready", i.e. must be able to be completed within a specified period of time.

Unfortunately community process and thoughtful project design can be short-circuited in this high stakes competition for federal dollars. As a result some important (and needed) projects face stiff opposition from residents. (GW)

No agreement, no $147m upgrade

State scraps effort to seek US funding for bus line

By Meghan E. Irons
Boston Globe
November 20, 2009

Massachusetts has missed an opportunity to tap into as much as $147 million in grant money available under the federal stimulus package because of a deep disagreement between the Patrick administration and residents of Roxbury and Mattapan.

State transportation officials had applied for the grant over the summer to upgrade public transportation from Dudley Square into Mattapan along Blue Hill Avenue, through two of the city’s most impoverished areas, by dedicating a lane of traffic to rapid bus service.

But the proposal immediately met a strong backlash from residents, who were angry that the state did not heed their views on the project’s design, which called for removal of a median on Blue Hill Avenue for the designated bus lane. The median provides a safe respite for pedestrians crossing the wide and busy street and adds an aesthetic appeal, with its trees and planters, to an area otherwise bound by pavement and concrete.

Under intense neighborhood pressure, the state ultimately withdrew the application and lost any chance of competing for a slice of $1.5 billion in grant money made available for transit projects under the stimulus program.

“We just were not able to get the community support within the time allowed to compete effectively,’’ said state Secretary of Transportation Jeffrey B. Mullan.

Mullan acknowledged that the state’s “rocky start’’ with residents handicapped its chances to seek stimulus money for underserved areas, but said the state had to act quickly to get projects off the ground.

Former transportation secretary James A. Aloisi Jr., who helped devise the plan before leaving office last month, called the neighborhood’s rejection of the proposal “a lost opportunity.’’

“I explained this millions of times,’’ Aloisi said this week in a phone interview. “Sometimes we have to move quickly to get things done. But we are used to delay in this state. When you have people like me saying you had to act fast, people don’t know what do with that.’’

Community leaders say they would rather forgo the chance of getting the money than embrace a project they did not want. They said a designated bus lane in the middle of Blue Hill Avenue would divide their community and create a host of navigation problems for commuters and pedestrians.

“You cannot cross Blue Hill Avenue without that median,’’ said Michael Kozu, a community advocate who offered advice to the state. “What they were going to do is divide our community, so that people won’t be able to cross.’’

While the proposal would have made the trip from Dudley Square to Mattapan much quicker, it would have also eliminated certain stops, parking spaces, and left turns, creating inconveniences for drivers, as well as riders.

But along Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan and Roxbury yesterday, riders who had not previously heard of the proposed project were astonished at the missed chance for stimulus cash in their community, where most residents rely on public transit.

“That doesn’t make any sense to me,’’ said Mary Hines, a Brockton resident who works in Dudley Square and is a regular bus rider. “Why wouldn’t they go for the money to improve bus services?’’

While there is now no clear source of funding, Mullan said that he is convening a team to work with neighborhood leaders to ensure that the proposed project eventually happens and to address issues that arose during a series of community meetings.

Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, commonly known as the stimulus bill, the state received $757 million to use at its discretion for urban and regional transit projects, as well as for highways and bridges. Another $1.5 billion is available through 2011 under the new Recovery Act program, which allows states to compete for grants for public transit projects.

Governor Deval Patrick, with much fanfare but little public notice, first proposed using the first pool of stimulus money to bring speedy bus service to the corridor by 2012. The rapid bus service would replace Bus Route No. 28. In addition to removal of the median, the money would have paid for changes in traffic signals, improved bus stops and stations, and allowed acquisition of 60-foot articulated buses for the route.

But a previous lack of communication with the community required officials to spend their time defending their actions, instead of moving the plan ahead.

As a result, there was not enought time to woo some residents, neighborhood supporters of the proposal say.

“There were people who dug their feet in, and they couldn’t hear much after that,’’ said Pamela Bush, a local transportation advocate who attended the community meetings. “I think they were resolved to say no, regardless of what the state came up with.’’

Transportation officials said they made a valiant effort to sway the community, but facing continued resistance, ultimately decided in July not to use that pool of money to fund the Mattapan part of the project.

The state then scrambled to apply for $147 million under the grant program, putting itself in a pool of 1,400 communities nationwide competing for a piece of the stimulus funds. But that made many neighborhood leaders angrier, because the state proceeded with the same plan that they had been railing against for several weeks.

“The planners came to the community with a preconceived idea of a busway,’’ said state Representative Byron Rushing, “and they didn’t want to change.’’

State lawmakers who represent the affected communities ultimately told the state to either revise the grant application to reflect the community’s desire for safe, reliable bus service or withdraw it altogether.

When the federal government told the state that revisions were not allowed, the state withdrew the application.

“In the end, the [state] did not succeed in making the case . . . that the benefits would be enough to outweigh the detriments to the neighborhoods,’’ said state Senator Sonia Chang-Díaz.

Mullan said that, to be fair, it was never guaranteed that the state would get the federal grant, though he regrets that the communities were not fully on board.

Going forward, he said, he aims to mend fences.

“I hope we haven’t blown it,’’ he said. “My real task is to keep the civic engagement, because what we have is the [heaviest] transit ridership in these neighborhoods.’’

For some riders and local residents, however, the breakdown of the process is difficult to swallow.

“This is just terrible,’’ said Grove Hall business owner Tashawn King. “You’re talking about a whole lot of jobs coming here, especially in this economy.’’

Meghan E. Irons can be reached at mirons@globe.com.

"You don’t have to travel far to change countries"

2009-11-24T04:27:00.009-05:00

I do love cities. I realize that no two cities are alike, so maybe what I love is the idea of the city. That doesn't mean that I don't like rural and wild areas. Given the fact that The world population has been growing pretty steadily since the end of the Black Death around 1400 (and is currently around 6.799 billion), rural and wild areas would be under much greater pressures than they currently are without cities.

Even the so-called mega-cities possess a certain other-worldly, village charm if you know where to look. Discovering the heart and soul of a great one can be a uniquely exhilarating experience. (GW)

What Makes Cities Live

By Roger Cohen
New York Times
November 21, 2009

A couple of blocks and your life changes in this city. New York is worldly but fiercely local. Another borough is as remote as another country. Europe, just across the pond, can seem closer than across town.

Not so long ago, my office was moved a couple of blocks, a little west and a little south, from 43rd Street to Renzo Piano’s handsome light-filled building between 40th and 41st Streets. It proved to be a change of worlds.

The former headquarters was trapped in the neon tentacles of Times Square, a once seedy part of town re-imagined as the tourist-filled set for a movie called “New York,” a place where people from out of town loiter six-abreast gazing at the flashing lights while New Yorkers try to dodge the phalanxes of flesh.

The new premises, as I’ve gradually learned, placed us just within the garment district, an area where zoning laws have protected apparel manufacturing space and so held off the developers who would otherwise have turned clothes factories into condos and created yet another gentrified district bereft of seediness, tawdriness, community and that strange high-low alchemy essential to any great city’s mystery and charge.

I’ve come to love the dull, solid mid-rise brick buildings of the garment district, a universe away from the high-rise glass-and-neon of that other country two blocks away where Planet Hollywood and M&M’s World strut their stuff.

It’s wonderful to wander far from the movie theaters (or so it seems) past emporiums of buttons, palaces of thread, empires of zippers, long pink gowns, canary yellow chiffon skirts (on sale for $10), trimmings, lace, beads, ribbons, fake pearls, glittering belts, shoulder pads and ruffles — not to mention “Spandex World,” and “Leather Impact.” Stores have names like “Joyce Button and Trims.” They look like they’ve been there forever, or at least the American version of forever.

The pleasure, I think, comes from the sense of something still purposeful and authentic, woven by the years — a slither of town between 35th and 40th Streets where designers, manufacturers, small retailers, showroom owners and others interact and create, and where money, big money, has not swept all in its path.

The area still has pungency. It has not surrendered to the great anaesthetizing march of modernity. It has not chased its working class to faraway suburbs. It has not become a hollow movie-set version of an authentic place — a “garment district” cleansed to quaintness, shaped for the well-to-do, complete with guides relating the rich history of immigrants and their sewing machines.

Unlike Paris — where the horse butchers and the tripe restaurants and the hammering of artisans and the garlic-whiff of the morning Métro are long gone — New York preserves, in small enclaves, its shabby splendor. Its center, unlike London, has not become a near-exclusive preserve of the super-rich.

No — miracle of miracles — people here still buy and use sewing machines! A million square feet or so are devoted to garment manufacturing. The jobs have not all vanished to Bangladesh.

It’s funny how we crave the authentic, the unspoiled, the genuine — the un-globalized and un-homogenized and un-gentrified — only to destroy them. And then, as if in remorse, attempt to create unthreatening Disney versions of the authentic, the unspoiled and the genuine. It’s funny how the rich, tired of grilled tuna or Chilean sea bass, weary of New York generic (never simmered, always seared), want to eat like the poor, while the poor just want to be rich.

Speaking of food, the move has also brought deliverance from theme restaurants and chains to a garment-district diversity as wondrous as the ostrich feathers and sequined robes in store windows. Let’s face it: Dives are the last redoubt of genuine fare in New York.

I’ve found a Balkan cellar whose cevapcici (grilled lozenges of minced meat) take me back to Sarajevo days; a deli whose tongue sandwiches remind me of the tongue my mother prepared; a Chinese hole-in-the-wall with heartwarming oxtail on rice; and a Szechuan joint whose duck tongues on a bed of scallion, dressed in a scallion pesto, are a little miracle of many-layered succulence — the reddish-brown Szechuan pepper imparting a numbing-tingling heat, the duck tongues crunchy (about the consistency of frogs’ legs) and gelatinous and looking, in the pesto-green sauce, a little like asparagus tips. If you wish, you may follow that with a fish-head (carp) stew in spiced chili broth that’s hot enough to ease your eyes from their sockets.

Two blocks away they’re eating burgers and Bubba Gump shrimp and never dreaming of this other land just around the corner. You don’t have to travel far to change countries; and you can travel across the world and still find yourself in the globalized mall of bright lights, bland foods and brands.

I’m grateful for my New York journeys and for the zoning laws that make them possible. Wholesale gentrification deadens. There’s an untamed thread that binds button stores and stir-fried intestines with chili: They’re genuine. The fight for the genuine in the world’s great cities is also a fight for jobs, workers and creativity.

Reality is grimmer than most climate change model predictions

2009-11-23T04:39:00.012-05:00

With all the flak that has been generated over the email messages and documents that were hacked from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit that climate change skeptics claim prove that climate change researchers are fudging data, it's worth pausing to take a look at what we know is actually going on. You know, like sticking your head out of the window to see if it's raining instead of waiting for the weather report on TV.

If global climate change is not behind the disturbing events described in the following article, we should challenge the skeptics to help us find out what is before it's too late.

Business as usual is not an option. (GW)

Effects of warming have worsened since Kyoto

Pace around the world has accelerated

By Seth Borenstein
Associated Press
November 23, 2009

WASHINGTON - Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated, beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made then.

As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages have opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa have been shrinking faster than before.

And it’s not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the years leading up to next month’s climate summit in Copenhagen:

■ The world’s oceans have risen by about an inch and a half.

■ Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe worldwide, from the US West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.

■ Species now in trouble because of changing climate include not just the polar bear, which has become a symbol of global warming, but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs, and entire stands of North American pine forests.

■ Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 of a degree warmer than in the dozen years leading up to 1997.

The reason is that since an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas pollution was signed in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, the level of carbon dioxide in the air has increased 6.5 percent.

“Even the gloomiest climate models back in the 1990s didn’t forecast results quite this bad so fast,’’ said Janos Pasztor, climate adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Officials from across the world will convene in Copenhagen from Dec. 7 to 18 to seek a follow-up agreement. Sixty-five world leaders so far have said they will attend, including those from Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

When the US Senate balked at the Kyoto Protocol and President George W. Bush withdrew from it, that meant that the top three carbon polluters - the United States, China, and India - were not part of the pact’s emission reductions. Developing countries were not covered by the protocol and that will be a major issue in Copenhagen.

From 1997 to 2008, world carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased 31 percent; US emissions of this greenhouse gas rose 3.7 percent. Emissions from China, now the biggest producer of this pollution, have more than doubled in that time period.

In 1997, global warming was an issue for climate scientists, environmentalists, and policy specialists. Now even psychologists are working on global warming.

“We’ve come from a time in 1997 where this was some abstract problem working its way around scientific circles to now when the problem is in everyone’s face,’’ said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate scientist.

The changes in the last 12 years that have the scientists most alarmed are happening in the Arctic with melting summer sea ice and around the world with the loss of key land-based ice masses. Back in 1997 “nobody in their wildest expectations,’’ would have forecast the dramatic sudden loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic that started about five years ago, Weaver said. From 1993 to 1997, sea ice would shrink on average in the summer to about 2.7 million square miles. The average for the last five years is less than 2 million square miles. What’s been lost is the size of Alaska.

Antarctica had a slight increase in sea ice, mostly because of the cooling effect of the ozone hole, according to the British Antarctic Survey. At the same time, large chunks of ice shelves - adding up to the size of Delaware - came off the Antarctic peninsula.

While melting Arctic ocean ice doesn’t raise sea levels, the melting of giant land-based ice sheets and glaciers that drain into the seas do. Those are shrinking dramatically at both poles. Measurements show that since 2000, Greenland has lost more than 1.5 trillion tons of ice, while Antarctica has lost about 1 trillion tons since 2002, according to two scientific studies published this fall.

Worldwide glaciers are shrinking three times faster than in the 1970s and the average glacier has lost 25 feet of ice since 1997, said Michael Zemp, a researcher at World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich.

Net Energy Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society

2009-11-22T06:43:00.005-05:00

Wind, solar and hydrokinetic (wave, tidal and current) technologies are the most viable means for supporting a sustainable energy future according to a new report issued jointly by two California think-tanks. The report also concludes that it is probably impossible for renewable energy sources to completely replace fossil fuels in the short term and possibly the long term as well.

We need to keep reminding ourselves that our renewable energy options do not provide a politically correct justification for continuing our overly consumptive behavior.

Humanity can certainly sustainably support itself by employing design strategies that do more with less. However, there are clearly limits that we cannot exceed and hope to survive. Sustainable development is potentially unlimited. Sustainable growth is an oxymoron. (GW)

Six renewable energy sources judged to be best prospect for future, says report

Renewable Energy Focus
18 November 2009

The best prospects for large-scale renewable energy production and net-energy performance remain wind and certain forms of solar, according to a study released by two California-based think tanks.

“It is reasonable to conclude ... that a full replacement of energy currently derived from fossil fuels with energy from alternative sources is probably impossible over the short term; it may be unrealistic to expect it even over longer time frames,” explains Searching for a Miracle: Net Energy Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society. The report was published by the International Forum on Globalization with content provided by the Post Carbon Institute.

It is the first major analysis to use the new research tools of full lifecycle assessment and net energy ratios to compare future scenarios for how industrial society can face its long term future.

The report analyses 18 power alternatives, from traditional fossil fuels and nuclear, through renewable energies such as wind, solar, wave, geothermal and biomass, to identify their net energy ratios (amount of energy that must be invested in them versus the amount of energy they will be able to produce, as well as their environmental, social and geopolitical impacts).

Certain energy production systems suffer from low or negative net energy gain, including most biofuels and biomass, as well as hydrogen systems, oil shale and tar sands, some of which also present unacceptable environmental problems, the report explains.

The best prospects for large-scale production and net-energy performance remain wind energy and certain forms of solar, although these renewable energies face important limitations due to intermittency, remoteness of good resources, materials needed for large-scale deployment, and scale potential.

The cost to install one kilowatt of new capacity ranges from US$500 to US$1500 for natural gas, US$1900-5800 for coal, and US$4500-7500 for nuclear, to the renewable energies wtih US$1300-2500 for wind, US$2600-3500 for geothermal, US$3000-5000 for solar thermal and US$3900-9000 for solar photovoltaic (PV).

The current cost to generate existing power is US$0.01/kWh for hydropower, US$0.02-0.04 for coal, US$0.029 for nuclear, US$0.04-0.07 for natural gas. For renewable energies, it is US$0.04-0.09 for biomass power, US$0.045-0.10 for wind, US$0.06-0.15 for solar thermal, US$0.10 for geothermal, US$0.10 for tidal, US$0.12 for wave and US$0.21 to US$.83 for solar PV.

“Can any combination of known energy sources successfully supply society’s energy needs at least up to the year 2100?,” the report asks. “In the end, we are left with the disturbing conclusion that all known energy sources are subject to strict limits of one kind or another.”

Conventional energy sources such as oil, gas, coal and nuclear, “are either at or nearing the limits of their ability to grow in annual supply, and will dwindle as the decades proceed but, in any case, they are unacceptably hazardous to the environment,” it explains.

“Contrary to the hopes of many, there is no clear practical scenario by which we can replace the energy from today’s conventional sources with sufficient energy from alternative sources to sustain industrial society at its present scale of operations. To achieve such a transition would require a vast financial investment beyond society’s practical abilities, a very long time - too long in practical terms - for build-out, and significant sacrifices in terms of energy quality and reliability.”

“To say that our current energy regime is unsustainable means that it cannot continue and must therefore be replaced with something else,” it states. “If the transition from current energy sources to alternatives is wrongly managed, the consequences could be severe.”

“While it is possible to point to innumerable successful alternative energy production installations within modern societies (ranging from small homescale photovoltaic systems to large farms of 3 MW wind turbines), it is not possible to point to more than a very few examples of an entire modern industrial nation obtaining the bulk of its energy from sources other than oil, coal, and natural gas,” the report adds. “Thus, for most of the world, a meaningful energy transition is still more theory than reality.”

“The longer the transition to alternative energy sources is delayed, the more difficult that transition will be unless some practical mix of alternative energy systems can be identified that will have superior economic and environmental characteristics,” it concludes. It excludes biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel) from future energy supply and downplays the potential for nuclear, hydro, passive solar and biomass.

That leaves 6 renewable energy possibilities: wind, solar PV, concentrating solar thermal, geothermal, wave and tidal, all of which have challenges such as intermittency or limited growth potential.

“There is no single silver-bullet energy source capable of replacing conventional fossil fuels directly (at least until the problem of intermittency can be overcome) though several of the sources discussed already serve, or are capable of serving, as secondary energy sources.”

“This means that as fossil fuels deplete, and as society reduces reliance on them in order to avert catastrophic climate impacts, we will have to use every available alternative energy source strategically,” it concludes. “Instead of a silver bullet, we have in our arsenal only BBs, each with a unique profile of strengths and weaknesses that must be taken into account.”

Desert winds

2009-11-21T04:43:00.009-05:00

According to the African Wind Energy Association (AfriWEA) "Much of Africa lies within the equatorial belt which, due to the effects of atmospheric heating and the earth's rotation, has a lower wind resource compared to countries in more extreme latitudes."

However, wind energy has begun to take hold of the imaginations and landscapes of a number of African nations. Kenya has become the continent's green energy leader as it now adds a major wind farm to its renewable energy portfolio that previously included significant contributions from hydro and geothermal. (GW)

The wind may carry a solution for Kenya

Desert will be site of major project to help boost energy supplies

By Christopher Vourlias
Washington Post
November 21, 2009

NAIROBI -- Kenya's Chalbi Desert is a bleak, forbidding stretch of coarse sand and ash-gray ridges broken by clusters of tiny huts. It is also one of the windiest places on Earth, experts say, and it soon will be the site of Africa's largest wind farm.

In January, a consortium of Dutch and Kenyan investors will begin construction on the $760 million project, which envisions more than 350 wind turbines towering over desert expanses near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. When completed in 2012, the wind farm is expected to boost the power supply in this nation by almost 30 percent.

Kenya is one of the continent's greenest countries, with nearly three-quarters of its power coming from hydroelectric and geothermal sources. But its efforts to harness the wind have put it at the forefront of a budding movement in Africa, ahead of a global climate change conference in Copenhagen next month.

Ethiopia inked a $300 million deal last year with the French company Vergnet to build a wind farm. Tanzania is constructing two facilities that will boost its power supply by nearly 10 percent. And South Africa, the continent's largest economy, hopes to complete 18 wind farms by 2014.

Kenya's first wind farm, in the Ngong Hills outside Nairobi, began feeding into the national grid in August. Additional sites are being scouted near Lake Naivasha, a popular tourist retreat northwest of Nairobi, and in the blustery northeast near Ethiopia.

"What you see in Africa is a severe shortage" of power, said Phylip Leferink, sales and marketing manager for Vestas, the world's leading supplier of wind turbines. "They have an urgent need for bringing up the capacity as soon as possible."

Power shortages have forced blackouts from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Johannesburg this year, but the shortages have been especially acute in Kenya. A prolonged drought has dried up riverbeds and crippled the country's hydroelectric plants. Officials have imported fossil fuels as an emergency stopgap, raising concerns among environmentalists. Energy prices have soared.

The effects have been felt from the industrial centers to the sprawling shantytowns and the suburbs of the capital. Rationing has brought rolling blackouts to Nairobi, and manufacturers have been forced to scale down production because of power cuts. In the aftermath of last year's post-election violence, the power shortages have been a further burden for a country struggling to regain its footing as East Africa's economic powerhouse.

"We are paying for the sins of our leaders," said Geoffrey Machariah, a taxi driver, who endures frequent power cuts in his Nairobi home. "Since last year, we are all suffering."

The Turkana project is this country's most ambitious energy venture to date. The site encompasses 25,000 acres on the edge of the Chalbi Desert, an area chosen for the "natural, low-level jet stream" blowing south from the Sahara and the Ethiopian highlands, said Nick Taylor, chief operating officer of the Lake Turkana Wind Power consortium. It is part of a broader initiative to introduce nearly 500 megawatts of wind power within five years.

Leferink, the Vestas marketing manager, estimated that the Ngong Hills project took two years to complete, whereas "more traditional generating methods, like coal-fired power plants, need a long lead time to be realized."

However, the technology required to build large-scale wind farms involves substantial investment. In addition to its on-site costs, the Turkana consortium invested in extensive road upgrades to transport equipment from Nairobi to the site, Taylor said.

But Hermann Oelsner, president of the African Wind Energy Association, said the long-term benefits outweigh the short-term costs. "In the beginning the cost appears high, but if you calculate the electricity costs over the whole lifetime of a project, then it is cheaper than fossil fuels."

Sub-Saharan Africa still lags far behind the developed world as a source of wind power. But the prospects south of the Sahara are improving, in part because of access to better and cheaper technologies, and because of growing uncertainty, in the face of climate change, that traditional energy sources will be sufficient to meet growing demand.

As governments turn to newer technologies to shore up their energy supplies, Oelsner and others say wind will play an increasingly vital role.

"Wind will be a big part of the energy mix . . . as we run out of fossil fuels," he said. "But we must start now."

Vourlias is a freelance journalist based in East Africa.

Kilometer tax

2009-11-20T06:31:00.004-05:00

The Dutch have introduced a revolutionary idea to pay for road upkeep that will hopefully also reduce traffic congestion and carbon emissions at the same time. Automobile owners will be taxed based on the distance they drive.

What a novel idea: creating a tax that's actually designed to encourage behavior that benefits society!

According to the following story, the Dutch parliament should have voted on this legislative proposal last week, but I could not find a recent update. I'll continue to follow this and provide updates. (GW)

Dutch plan to charge car drivers by the kilometre

EurActiv
17 November 2009

Dutch drivers will be first in Europe to start paying according to the kilometres they drive rather than for owning a car, if a legislative proposal submitted to the lower house of the country's parliament on Friday (14 November) goes through.

The kilometre charge would replace road tax and purchase tax in 2012. The idea is to cut CO2 emissions while halving traffic jams in what is one of Europe's most congested road networks.

The transport ministry expects the number of kilometres travelled to drop by 15% as the charge on the distance driven will lead people to opt more readily for public transport. This would reduce carbon and fine particle emissions by over 10%, it estimates.

The amount of the tariff will depend on the CO2 emissions produced by a passenger car, or on weight for other vehicles. Certain vehicles like taxis, buses and motorcycles will be exempt from the charge, while an alternative system will be set up for foreign vehicles.

A driver of a standard car would initially be charged three cents per kilometre, increasing to 6.7 cents in 2018, according to the proposed law. Legislation introducing rush-hour surcharges specific to a location could be introduced later on, the Ministry of Transport said.

The kilometres will be tracked with a GPS device to be installed in every vehicle. This will record each journey and send the information to a billing agency.

Nevertheless, most people will end up paying less, as the charge will not exceed current taxes and the abolition of the purchase tax will slash a quarter off a car's price, the ministry argues. All the revenue collected from the charge would go directly to building roads, railways and other transport infrastructure.

The kilometre charge has been hotly debated for years due to privacy concerns, but the transport ministry offered assurances that information sent via the GPS would be "legally and tecnically protected".

"The authorities will not have access to any journey details and will not be able to track any vehicles. So the privacy of road users will be guaranteed," it said in a statement.

But environmentalists argued that future transport IT to help cut emissions will ultimately not be any more invasive than the ability to send a text via mobile phone.

"People will worry that the system heralds the arrival of Big Brother, but our mobile phone handsets already double as a highly-effective means of tracking our movements," said the UK Environmental Transport Association (ETA).

The incredible edible wall

2009-11-19T06:17:00.003-05:00

My last few posts have all fallen under the category of "downers". While problem identification is an important part of Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science, it's equally important that we talk about successful solutions to pressing problems as well -- perhaps even more important. Design science solutions are sources of optimism. Bucky Fuller defined optimism as our awareness that viable options for humanity's success on Spaceship Earth do exist. In fact, an abundance of such options are available to us if we only adopt a way of looking at and working in the world that is more in tune with Nature's way of doing things.

That's a perfect lead-in to today's post on edible walls. Together with community and rooftop gardens, growing food vertically on building walls offers another option for growing food in crowded urban environments.

Cities are where most of the people in the world live today. It only makes sense that they become sources for sustainably grown fruits and vegetables. (GW)

The Rooftop Garden Climbs Down a Wall

By Ken Belson
New York Times
November 18, 2009

ROCHESTER

IN most ways, the Barthelmes Manufacturing Company is a typical sheet metal fabricator. Five days a week, machines here stamp out thousands of computer cases, electrical patch panels and other items for companies like United Technologies.

Yet a growing part of the company’s business is being devoted to something decidedly unindustrial: edible walls — metal panels filled with soil and seeds and hung vertically.

They may sound like a piece of Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory. In fact, they are the latest development in green roof technology. Like green roofs, edible walls include a thick layer of vegetation on the outside of buildings to provide insulation and reduce heating and electricity costs.

But unlike green roofs — and their vertical cousins, green walls — edible walls also produce fruit, vegetables and herbs in far less space than typical gardens. That’s why advocates of urban farming have embraced them as a way to lower food costs, increase nutritional quality and cut fuel consumption and carbon emissions by using fewer delivery trucks.

“The traditional metal fabrication industry is shrinking, and green is an emerging area,” said Larry Lehning, the chief executive at Barthelmes, whose sales of green products have doubled this year and make up 15 percent of the company’s revenue. Edible walls — descendants of espalier, or trees grown against walls that were popular during the Middle Ages in Europe — are just one small attempt to grow food in cities. For instance, Valcent Products builds greenhouses filled with hundreds of trays of hydroponic vegetables stacked on conveyor belts. Sky Vegetables hopes to build commercial farms on the flat roofs of hospitals, schools and food banks.

Dickson D. Despommier, the director of the Vertical Farm Project at Columbia University, envisions entire skyscrapers turned into indoor farms capable of growing 100 different crops.

All of these solutions, though, require large investments and considerable technology. Edible walls, by contrast, can be built for a fraction of the cost, do not need computers or greenhouses and require far less maintenance.

The leader in this niche area is Green Living Technologies, another company in Rochester that has built edible walls here, in New York City, Los Angeles, Detroit and elsewhere.

“Instead of bringing food to the city, we’re bringing the whole farm,” said George Irwin, the chief executive and founder of the company. “What we’re implementing is back to basics.”

The idea for the edible wall, which is often portable and hung from a structural wall, was inspired by Mr. Irwin’s young son and daughter about five years ago. Mr. Irwin, who was installing green roofs and green walls, was asked by his children if they could plant some lettuce seeds in a wall. Not expecting much, Mr. Irwin plopped the seeds into the soil in a panel that he was using for a sloped green roof. A few days later, they sprouted.

Mr. Irwin saw the potential for these vertical planters in cities where space is tight and food costs high. They can be hung in backyards, parking lots and other spots. He has sold them mostly to homeowners and schools, but he hopes to persuade restaurants and supermarkets to buy them so customers can pick their own food.

Uninterested in being a manufacturer, Mr. Irwin has contracted with Barthelmes and other companies for 2-foot-by-2-foot stainless steel and aluminum panels and other products.

The panels have intersecting slats inside that create 24 cells for seeds to be planted. The slats have long holes in them so roots can migrate between the cells, strengthening the soil and plants.

Mr. Irwin, who has an online column as the Green Wall editor, holds two-day seminars where landscape designers pay $800 to learn how to install products made by Green Living Technologies. One of the nearly 500 resellers is Kari Elwell Katzander, a landscape designer in New York City. She comes up with designs for her customers and then calls Plant Connection, another of Mr. Irwin’s partners, which recommends plants to grow and then cultivates them for two to five months at its nursery on Long Island.

In early November, Ms. Katzander installed three panels, each four inches deep, for Brad Zizmor, who has a backyard deck at his first-floor apartment in Manhattan.

Ms. Katzander and Plant Connection decided on 10 plants, including strawberries, lettuce, chives, oregano, parsley, rosemary and thyme. The panels, which weigh about 50 pounds each when filled, were hung on a wooden wall that surrounds the deck.

To irrigate the plants, a quarter-inch hose with tiny holes was draped across the top of the panels and attached to a larger hose. Ms. Katzander figured out how often to feed the plants to avoid runoff and to ensure that the plants would not be too dry or wet.

“What’s nice is you can be surrounded by the food you’re eating,” Mr. Zizmor said.

Mr. Zizmor is considering whether to keep several panels cultivating on Long Island so he can swap them out each season.

AT about $125 a square foot, or $500 per planted panel, plus more for design, delivery and maintenance, edible walls do not make sense for every home, or even cities where there is open land.

Still, Mr. Irwin has shown that edible walls can work on a larger scale. At four locations in the Skid Row area of Los Angeles, there are walls with more than 4,000 plants growing: tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, spinach, leeks, even baby watermelon. At one location, a homeless shelter, residents tend to a six-foot-high, 30-foot-long wall, eating some food they harvest and selling the rest.

The project, urban farming advocates say, is just the start of something larger.

“We have 30 miles of rooftop in New York City and maybe 3,000 miles of walls,” said Paul Mankiewicz, the executive director of the Gaia Institute in New York. “It’s basically about maximizing the productivity per square foot.”

Is humanity prepared for its final exam?

2009-11-18T05:59:00.009-05:00

Scientists report that civilization is headed toward the worst-case climate scenario that has us rapidly headed toward a six-degree centigrade average global temperature increase. They warn that this will certainly lead to an unprecedented mass extinction that could claim us among its victims.

Ready or not it appears that humanity really is about to take its final exam that will determine our fate here on Spaceship Earth. It unfortunately appears to have become a pass/fail affair due to our procrastination.

Will this news have any impact on the U.S. and other nations as officials prepare for next month's UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen?

What are our options now? (GW)

World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists

By Steve Connor and Michael McCarthy
The Independent
November 18, 2009

Fast-rising carbon emissions mean that worst-case predictions for climate change are coming true

The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. Such a rise - which would be much higher nearer the poles - would have cataclysmic and irreversible consequences for the Earth, making large parts of the planet uninhabitable and threatening the basis of human civilisation.

We are headed for it, the scientists said, because the carbon dioxide emissions from industry, transport and deforestation which are responsible for warming the atmosphere have increased dramatically since 2002, in a way which no one anticipated, and are now running at treble the annual rate of the 1990s.

This means that the most extreme scenario envisaged in the last report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2007, is now the one for which society is set, according to the 31 researchers from seven countries involved in the Global Carbon Project.

Although the 6C rise and its potential disastrous effects have been speculated upon before, this is the first time that scientists have said that society is now on a path to meet it.

Their chilling and remarkable prediction throws into sharp relief the importance of next month's UN climate conference in Copenhagen, where the world community will come together to try to construct a new agreement to bring the warming under control.

For the past month there has been a lowering of expectations about the conference, not least because the US may not be ready to commit itself to cuts in its emissions. But yesterday President Barack Obama and President Hu Jintao of China issued a joint communiqué after a meeting in Beijing, which reignited hopes that a serious deal might be possible after all.

It cannot come too soon, to judge by the results of the Global Carbon Project study, led by Professor Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, which found that there has been a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available.

On average, the researchers found, there was an annual increase in emissions of just over 3 per cent during the period, compared with an annual increase of 1 per cent between 1990 and 2000. Almost all of the increase this decade occurred after 2000 and resulted from the boom in the Chinese economy. The researchers predict a small decrease this year due to the recession, but further increases from 2010.

In total, CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased by 41 per cent between 1990 and 2008, yet global emissions in 1990 are the reference level set by the Kyoto Protocol, which countries are trying to fall below in terms of their own emissions.

The 6C rise now being anticipated is in stark contrast to the C rise at which all international climate policy, including that of Britain and the EU, hopes to stabilise the warming - two degrees being seen as the threshold of climate change which is dangerous for society and the natural world.

The study by Professor Le Quéré and her team, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, envisages a far higher figure. "We're at the top end of the IPCC scenario," she said.

Professor Le Quéré said that Copenhagen was the last chance of coming to a global agreement that would curb carbon-dioxide emissions on a time-course that would hopefully stabilise temperature rises to within the danger threshold. "The Copenhagen conference next month is in my opinion the last chance to stabilise climate at C above pre-industrial levels in a smooth and organised way," she said.

"If the agreement is too weak, or the commitments not respected, it is not 2.5C or 3C we will get: it's 5C or 6C - that is the path we're on. The timescales here are extremely tight for what is needed to stabilise the climate at C," she said.

Meanwhile, the scientists have for the first time detected a failure of the Earth's natural ability to absorb man-made carbon dioxide released into the air.

They found significant evidence that more man-made CO2 is staying in the atmosphere to exacerbate the greenhouse effect because the natural "carbon sinks" that have absorbed it over previous decades on land and sea are beginning to fail, possibly as a result of rising global temperatures.

The amount of CO2 that has remained in the atmosphere as a result has increased from about 40 per cent in 1990 to 45 per cent in 2008. This suggests that the sinks are beginning to fail, they said.

Professor Le Quéré emphasised that there are still many uncertainties over carbon sinks, such as the ability of the oceans to absorb dissolved CO2, but all the evidence suggests that there is now a cycle of "positive feedbacks", whereby rising carbon dioxide emissions are leading to rising temperatures and a corresponding rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

"Our understanding at the moment in the computer models we have used - and they are state of the art - suggests that carbon-cycle climate feedback has already kicked in," she said.

"These models, if you project them on into the century, show quite large feedbacks, with climate amplifying global warming by between 5 per cent and 30 per cent. There are still large uncertainties, but this is carbon-cycle climate feedback that has already started," she said.

The study also found that, for the first time since the 1960s, the burning of coal has overtaken the burning of oil as the major source of carbon-dioxide emissions produced by fossil fuels.

Much of this coal was burned by China in producing goods sold to the West - the scientists estimate that 45 per cent of Chinese emissions resulted from making products traded overseas.

It is clear that China, having overtaken the US as the world's biggest carbon emitter, must be central to any new climate deal, and so the communiqué from the Chinese and US leaders issued yesterday was widely seized on as a sign that progress may be possible in the Danish capital next month.

Presidents Hu and Obama specifically said an accord should include emission-reduction targets for rich nations, and a declaration of action plans to ease greenhouse-gas emissions in developing countries - key elements in any deal.

6C rise: The consequences

If two degrees is generally accepted as the threshold of dangerous climate change, it is clear that a rise of six degrees in global average temperatures must be very dangerous indeed, writes Michael McCarthy. Just how dangerous was signalled in 2007 by the science writer Mark Lynas, who combed all the available scientific research to construct a picture of a world with temperatures three times higher than the danger limit.

His verdict was that a rise in temperatures of this magnitude "would catapult the planet into an extreme greenhouse state not seen for nearly 100 million years, when dinosaurs grazed on polar rainforests and deserts reached into the heart of Europe".

He said: "It would cause a mass extinction of almost all life and probably reduce humanity to a few struggling groups of embattled survivors clinging to life near the poles."

Very few species could adapt in time to the abruptness of the transition, he suggested. "With the tropics too hot to grow crops, and the sub-tropics too dry, billions of people would find themselves in areas of the planet which are essentially uninhabitable. This would probably even include southern Europe, as the Sahara desert crosses the Mediterranean.

"As the ice-caps melt, hundreds of millions will also be forced to move inland due to rapidly-rising seas. As world food supplies crash, the higher mid-latitude and sub-polar regions would become fiercely-contested refuges.

"The British Isles, indeed, might become one of the most desirable pieces of real estate on the planet. But, with a couple of billion people knocking on our door, things might quickly turn rather ugly."

"The absolute tragedy of childhoods lost"

2009-11-17T04:50:00.005-05:00

Bookstore browsing is one of my very favorite pastimes. Not in the familiar haunts, but small (and sometimes large) local booksellers. And there's no greater pleasure than to surprised by a wonderful book that I didn't even know about. That happened about a month ago while I was browsing in the Harvard Coop. The book is "The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia" by James C. Scott. This amazing book is about peoples throughout history who made (and are still making) the conscious decision to avoid being part of state-based civilizations. That's because they understood full well what state-making entails: submission, assimilation, taxes, conscription, corveé, child labor, slavery. And history books refer to them as "barbarians".

In case you hadn't noticed, governments do incredibly terrible things in the name of nationalism/imperialism. (GW)

Apology for Kids Shipped From Britain

Children As Young as 3 Were Sent to the Colonies

By Jill Lawless
Associated Press
November 16, 2009

CANBERRA, Australia (Nov. 15) - Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued a historic apology Monday to thousands of impoverished British children shipped to Australia with the promise of a better life, only to suffer abuse and neglect thousands of miles from home.

At a ceremony in the Australian capital of Canberra attended by tearful former child migrants, Rudd apologized for his country's role in the migration and extended condolences to the 7,000 survivors of the program who still live in Australia.

"We are sorry," Rudd said. "Sorry that as children you were taken from your families and placed in institutions where so often you were abused. Sorry for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold absence of love, of tenderness, of care. Sorry for the tragedy — the absolute tragedy — of childhoods lost."

The apology comes one day after the British government said Prime Minister Gordon Brown would apologize for child migrant programs that sent as many as 150,000 poor British children as young as 3 to Australia, Canada and other former colonies over three and a half centuries.

The programs, which ended 40 years ago, were intended to provide the children with a new start — and the Empire with a supply of sturdy white workers. But many children ended up in institutions where they were physically and sexually abused, or were sent to work as farm laborers.

Rudd also apologized to the "forgotten Australians" — children who suffered in state care during the last century. According to a 2004 Australian Senate report, more than 500,000 children were placed in foster homes, orphanages and other institutions during the 20th century. Many were emotionally, physically and sexually abused in state care.

Some in the audience wept openly and held each other as Rudd shared painful stories of children he'd spoken with — children who were beaten with belt buckles and bamboo, who grew up in places they called "utterly loveless."

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"Let us resolve this day that this national apology becomes a turning point in our nation's story," Rudd said. "A turning point for shattered lives, a turning point for governments at all levels and of every political hue and color to do all in our power to never allow this to happen again."

At that, the audience erupted into loud cheers and applause.

John Hennessey, 72, of Campbelltown, 40 miles (70 kilometers) southwest of Sydney, struggles to make himself understood through a stutter — a never-healing scar from a thrashing he received from an Australian orphanage headmaster 60 years ago.

Hennessey was only 6 when he was shipped from a British orphanage to an institute for boys in the country town of Bindoon in Western Australia state.

At 12, he was stripped naked and nearly beaten to death by the headmaster for eating grapes he had taken from a vineyard without permission because he was hungry.

"What terrified me most was that in my mind I thought: 'That's my father. What's he doing?' — I had nobody else and he was the one I'd looked up to," Hennessey said. "Before that I didn't have a stutter. I've sought medical advice since and they've said, 'John, you're going to take that to the grave with you.'"

After the apology, an emotional Hennessey approached Rudd with a photograph of his late mother May Mary Hennessey, whom he was reunited with in England in 1999 as a guest of the British government when she was 86.

"I can't believe it, mate, I'm still shaking," Hennessey told The Associated Press. "But the one I'm waiting for is the British apology. That's the icing on the cake."

The Forgotten Australians also welcomed the apology. Rod Braydon, 65, said he was raped at the age of six by a Salvation Army officer on his first night in a boys home in the city of Melbourne.

"When we reported this as kids, we were flogged to within an inch of our lives, locked up in dungeons and isolation cells," said Braydon, who has received a cash settlement from the Salvation Army for the abuse and is suing the Victoria state government for neglect.

British High Commissioner Valerie Amos said that while the Australian government had ruled out paying compensation, her government had not yet decided that issue.

She declined to say which government was more to blame for the children's suffering.

"This is a matter of us all acknowledging that we need to say 'sorry' for what was a terrible period in our history," Amos told reporters.

The British government has estimated that a total of 150,000 British children may have been shipped abroad between 1618 — when a group was sent to the Virginia Colony — and 1967, most of them from the late 19th century onwards.

After 1920, most of the children went to Australia through programs run by the government, religious groups and children's charities.

A 2001 Australian report said that between 6,000 and 30,000 children from Britain and Malta, often taken from unmarried mothers or impoverished families, were sent alone to Australia as migrants during the 20th century. Many of the children were told that they were orphans, though most had either been abandoned or taken from their families by the state. Siblings were commonly split up once they arrived in Australia.

Authorities believed they were acting in the children's best interests, but the migration also was intended to stop them from being a burden on the British state while supplying the receiving countries with potential workers. A 1998 British parliamentary inquiry noted that "a further motive was racist: the importation of 'good white stock' was seen as a desirable policy objective in the developing British Colonies."

Australia had an immigration policy that favored British and white immigrants until the 1970s.

"We were used as white fodder," Hennessey said. "The Archbishop met us at Fremantle (in Western Australia) and I can still remember his words. He said, 'Welcome to Australia. We want white stock because we're terrified of the yellow peril.'"

British Children's Secretary Ed Balls said the child migrant policy was "a stain on our society."

"The apology is symbolically very important," he told Sky News television. "I think it is important that we say to the children who are now adults and older people and to their offspring that this is something that we look back on in shame," he said.

Britain has been trying to make amends since the late 1990s by funding trips to reunite migrants with their families in Britain.

Brown's office said officials would consult with representatives of the surviving children before making a formal apology next year.

Associated Press writer Jill Lawless reported from London.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. Active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.

Conservation's dark side

2009-11-16T04:56:00.002-05:00

The eviction of indigenous communities from their homelands in the name of conservation is a practice that has been going on for centuries. As Mark Dowie points out in his important book "Conservation Refugees"(which should be the required "companion book" to Ken Burns' latest PBS Series "The National Parks"):

"Since 1900, more than 108,000 officially protected conservation areas have been established worldwide...About half of these areas were occupied or regularly used by indigenous peoples. Millions who had been living sustainably on their lands for generations were displaced in the interests of conservation."

Today's post is a case in point. (GW)

Forest People May Lose Home in Kenyan Plan

By Jeffrey Gettleman
New York Times
November 15, 2009

MARASHONI, Kenya — With the stroke of a pen, the last of Kenya’s honey hunters may soon be homeless.

Since time immemorial, the Ogiek have been Kenya’s traditional forest dwellers. They have stalked antelope with homemade bows, made medicine from leaves and trapped bees to produce honey, the golden elixir of the woods. They have struggled to survive the press of modernity, and many times they have been persecuted, driven from their forests and belittled as “dorobo,” a word meaning roughly people with no cattle. Somehow, they have always managed to survive.

Now, though, the little-known Ogiek, among East Africa’s last bona fide hunters and gatherers, face their gravest test yet. The Kenyan government is gearing up to evict tens of thousands of settlers, illegal or not, from the Mau Forest, the Ogiek’s ancestral home and a critical water source for this entire country. The question is: Will the few thousand remaining Ogiek be given a reprieve or given the boot?

“Tell Obama and his men to help us,” pleaded Daniel M. Kobei, an Ogiek leader, who still seems almost stunned that the Ogiek may have to leave a forest they have battled for decades to conserve. “It’s not that we’re special, but this forest is our home.”

No doubt the Mau Forest is crucial. It is — or more accurately, used to be — a thick, staggeringly beautiful forest in western Kenya, capturing the rains and the mist and, in turn, feeding more than a dozen lakes and rivers across the region, even contributing to the flow of the Nile.

But in the past 15 years, because of ill-planned settlement schemes (the government essentially handed out chunks of forest to cronies), 25 percent of the trees have been wiped out. Much of the forest is now simply meadow. The Ogiek say there are fewer antelope and bees. They constantly use the Kiswahili word “haribika,” which means spoiled. Scientists say the environmental destruction has led to flash floods, micro-climate change, soil erosion and dried up lakes.

The results were painfully obvious this summer when East Africa was hit by one of the worst droughts in years. In Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, the water taps went dry for weeks. And because Kenya gets a lot of electricity from hydropower, the water shortage meant blackouts, which many Kenyans believe contributed to the recent spike in crime and unemployment.

Suddenly, the Kenyan government seemed to spring into action, commissioning hefty environmental reports and insisting on ejecting all settlers from the Mau Forest so that the government could plant millions of trees and get the country’s water sources churning again. But the sudden environmental altruism has bred suspicion as well. Many Ogiek wonder if Kenyan politicians, notorious as among the world’s most corrupt, are driven by another kind of green.

“The government wants that forest for economic reasons, not conservation reasons,” said Towett Kimaiyo, an Ogiek leader. “The only people who are going to benefit are the saw-millers.”

Almost as if to prove his point, beyond the bird chirps and cow bells tinkling across the smooth green hills was a different noise, a deeper, steadier noise, like a growl: bulldozers, many of them. Upon closer inspection, it was clear that timber companies are continuing to chew up large tracts of the Mau, knocking down giant trees and turning them into doors and plywood for export.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” said Julius Kavita, this area’s district commissioner, when asked what was going on.

Mr. Kavita said it was “complicated” and left it at that. But Kenyan environmental groups contend that powerful politicians control the timber companies, just as they control the dairies, the tea farms and other engines of Kenya’s economy.

To the Ogiek, all this is sadly familiar. Though they are among the oldest communities in East Africa, many were marched off their land by British colonists in the 1930s and herded into “native reserves” where countless Ogiek died from diseases they had no natural resistance to, like malaria. The British felled their forests and planted pine trees, good for commercial logging, though in the Ogiek’s eyes, for little else.

The persecution continued after Kenya’s independence in 1963, with the Kenyan police burning down Ogiek huts to drive the people out of the woods. In the 1990s, the government began handing out thousands of acres in the Mau Forest to political friends, which squeezed the Ogiek even further. The Ogiek sued in Kenyan courts, and the Ford Foundation helped pay their legal bills, but their forest continued to melt away.

Mr. Kavita said the Ogiek, compared with the outside settlers who have chopped down trees to make cornfields, were “so kind to the forest.” But he was noncommittal on whether the Ogiek would get a special exemption from the planned evictions.

Nowadays, many of the same people who used to derisively refer to Ogiek as dorobo are claiming to be Ogiek themselves, “Ogiek originals,” in the hope they might get a break, too.

This could be a problem because the Ogiek are not great record keepers. Recent reports indicate that 8 of 10 Ogiek cannot read. Their total population is estimated at 5,000 to 20,000, many of them balancing their traditions with the trappings of modern life. It is not uncommon to see an Ogiek man with a quiver of eagle feather arrows in one fist and a cellphone in the other.

“I have one question,” said an Ogiek boy in a village near Marashoni. “Will the government evict us or not?”

Another young man tramped off into the woods to check a honey trap at the top of a tall tree. He was carrying a smoking coconut — “to make the bees sleep,” he explained — and wearing an antelope skin pouch and a pair of muddy sneakers. The last thing he did before shimmying up the bark and disappearing into the leaves was to kick off his shoes, a symbol of the world he was leaving behind, however fleetingly.

What does it mean to be "Googled"?

2009-11-15T07:49:00.012-05:00

I love Google. I use it all the time. I have installed "Google Earth" on both my desktop and laptop.

I think it was the introduction of "Google Desktop" that first raised some concerns in my mind about how ubiquitous Google had become and some potential consequences of this phenomenon.

Clearly other people have been thinking about this as well. (GW)

Google’s Earth

How a search-engine startup became a global powerhouse - and why you should be worried about it

By Michael Fitzgerald
Boston Globe
November 15, 2009

It wasn’t so long ago that all of Google fit into a two-car garage and a couple of spare rooms, with space enough for a few forlorn appliances and an unused ping-pong table. How did this tiny company with a quirky name become not only a verb but perhaps the most influential company on the planet in just a decade? Can it possibly achieve both its ambitious goals and its lofty ideals? These two questions frame “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It’’ by longtime New Yorker writer Ken Auletta. The answer to the first becomes vividly clear; the answer to the second haunts the author, and he tries to make it haunt us, with mixed success.

Google is something of a media obsession, in part because of its success, in part because many people in the media think it is killing their livelihoods. Besides the mounds of daily coverage it gets, at least a half dozen books on it have already been published. But Auletta typically defines the topics he writes about, not least because of the depth of access he gets. In this case, he spent 13 weeks over the course of two years in and around Google’s Silicon Valley digs, seeing its founders in action up close. Auletta delivers richly detailed looks at the lives of the company’s remarkable young creators, the brilliant, bouncy Sergey Brin and the laconic, intense Larry Page.

Those seeking a formula for raising children who will grow up to be billionaires will learn that “larryandsergey,’’ as the duo are known inside Google, both went to Montessori schools, had mothers (and fathers) with advanced scientific jobs, and intense family dinner debates. Auletta tells us, however, that the young Brin and Page “were - no other word will do - odd.’’

Odd, yes, but also brilliant, bold, and with a personal bond that seems jealousy free. They also share a spectacular ability to focus. Auletta notes that the founders drive their company “with a clarity of purpose that would be stunning if they were twice their age.’’

Despite the talent of the pair, Google was not an instant hit. The company had no business plan when it started and was not much of a profit machine for several years after, a source of real friction between larryandsergey and the top-notch venture capitalists they attracted. Two people even turned down opportunities to become the company’s chief executive before Eric Schmidt came on board in 2002.

The turning point happened in 2000 when Google, which had created one of the industry’s best search engines, developed its groundbreaking advertising program Adwords (or stole the idea; Auletta presents both cases). Success would eventually follow.

Auletta reminds us that while Google so far has avoided becoming ensnared in the schemes of media heavies like Viacom’s Sumner Redstone or News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch, it is only 11 years old and won’t necessarily live happily ever after. He raises myriad threats that could damage or destroy Google, from wily old media competitors to rivals like Microsoft to government regulators.

But the threat that Auletta frets over most is whether Google will become its own worst enemy - and ours. Most of us use Google as a verb meaning to search for something on the Web. Auletta uses Googled as in “hammered’’ or “conquered.’’ The advertising business has been Googled. The software business is being Googled. So is book publishing. The telephone and cellphone businesses face Googling. In fact, we see how any company that functions as a middle man, be they retailer, travel service or what have you, could wake up one day and find themselves Googled. Then there is the prospect that we might all be Googled, as the firm gathers more and more information about us.

Currently, Google, whose motto is “don’t be evil,’’ is playing the fairy prince, but its growing sphere of influence is cause for alarm. This paradox preoccupies Auletta, who spends a good part of the book telling us what different important people think about Google’s potential for abusing its power. He himself cannot tell which way things will go, just as he cannot resolve whether Brin and Page are naïve or arrogant. Brilliant, yes. “Whether they are also wise is not as clear-cut,’’ he writes.

Through the intimate portraits painted in “Googled,’’ one comes to suspect that Auletta came to sincerely dislike Brin, Page, and Schmidt. For instance, he works in digs about larryandsergey, like their penchant for wandering off to kite surf during the day, in ways that feel catty. And he highlights Schmidt’s 2005 fit of temper when a CNET tech reporter published information about his personal life that she’d found via a Google search. An irate Schmidt banned Googlers from talking to CNET for two months. Fair game when discussing Google’s inherent threat to everyone’s privacy? Sure. But Auletta fails to note that Schmidt is far from the first CEO to react this way. For instance, the revered former head of IBM, Lou Gerstner, once froze out Fortune magazine for far longer than a mere two months over an article he disliked, a story Auletta must know.

For all its pluses, “Googled’’ does not always read crisply. Its details sometimes feel like clutter - must we hear of Page’s long-term relationship with a high-level Google employee nearly every time she is mentioned? In some places Auletta does a clumsy job of weaving in comments about Google today with events that happened years ago.

Readers without much interest in the media business will tire of Auletta’s extensive digressions on the subject. They’ll want to skip the first two chapters of the book’s final section and go directly to the last one. It summarizes all the challenges Google presents, the problems it faces, and then acknowledges that they are what-ifs that may never be.

These criticisms aside, “Googled’’ presents us with a comprehensive look at an immensely influential company yet to hit its prime.

GOOGLED: The End of the World as We Know It
By Ken Auletta
Penguin, 384 pp., $27.95

Michael Fitzgerald, a freelance writer in Millis, can be reached at michael@mffitzgerald.com.

Biodiesel energy islands

2009-11-14T07:18:00.007-05:00

Is there a sustainable strategy for biofuels development and deployment? Many critics worry that the widespread adoption of biofuels will pit fuel vs. food as farmers substitute crops better suited to power vehicles than people.

One California company is convinced that not only can appropriately designed biodiesel systems be sustainable but that they may be the only hop some isolated communities have for approaching clean energy independence. Biodiesel Industries is addressing this challenge by carefully and thoughtfully focusing on crops that minimize land and water use, a community's land base to successfully integrate food and fuel needs. and the scale of the projects.

Power to the Far-Flung People

Jatropha-fueled entrepreneur bringing biodiesel and self-reliance to both the military and the world's forgotten corners.

By Ben Preston
Miller-McCune
November 11, 2009

Imagine being able to produce fuel on a small scale near your home. With a facility no bigger than a shipping container, enough diesel fuel could be processed for your community using crops that neither compete with food crops nor use a lot of water.

Perhaps that sounds crazy in the context of developed nations, where energy is generated and consumed at a tremendous rate and often transmitted hundreds or thousands of miles through expensive cables and pipeline, but there are many remote places in the world where large-scale production facilities are unheard of. These are places that still do not have access to electric power.

Biodiesel Industries, a small company based in Santa Barbara, Calif., says it has a solution to that quandary. Dubbed ARIES (Automated Real-time Remote Integrated Energy System), the system consists of self-contained biodiesel production plants using computer automation to produce a consistent grade of biodiesel fuel from a variety of feedstock.

And while the benefit to the Navy is apparent — energy independence at bases and battlefields worldwide — what works for a sailor will also work for a poor family living miles off the grid.

While there is flexibility with regard to the types of plants used as feedstock, much of Biodiesel Industries' emphasis is on jatropha and algae, both of which are resilient, don't use much water, produce high yields of fuel-grade oil and can be grown near the intended recipients of fuel and electricity.

"Instead of having a huge plant with wires everywhere and transmission costs, every community can utilize local resources to provide energy," said Russ Teall, the company's founder.

While ARIES offers flick-of-a-switch operability, it took awhile for Biodiesel Industries to get where it is. In 1993, Teall, a longtime boat owner, wondered how biodiesel could be made available for the boating community. Nobody seemed to know, so he took it upon himself to find out. Over the next few years, his quest turned him into a de facto expert in the burgeoning biofuel industry.

By 1997 he had formed Biodiesel Industries, and a year later he secured a Department of Energy contract to investigate the properties of cooking oil. The company's big break came in 2003 when it signed a cooperative research and development agreement with the U.S. Navy, which, aside from being the world's most prolific consumer of diesel fuel, gave the company access to the Naval Facilities Engineering Service Center in Port Hueneme, Calif. A treasure trove of engineering talent, it facilitated rapid improvement of the small company's technology.

Projects in the United States and Australia have been a major part of Teall's work for the past decade, but he also has focused on smaller projects in developing countries — India, Mexico, and within the past year, Haiti and Bolivia — to create "energy islands" for isolated communities with a need for self-sufficiency.

Biodiesel Industries starts at square one, beginning every project with a multipurpose agricultural project aimed at feedstock production, economic stabilization and whatever is needed by the specific community it's working with.

Stabilizing Haiti, Empowering Bolivia

The only nation in the world born of a successful slave revolt, for much of its history, Haiti has been bathed in political turmoil and corruption. Today, it has what is arguably the weakest economy in the Western Hemisphere. Violence is common, infrastructure is unreliable and within the last century, massive deforestation has denuded most of the mountainous nation's steep slopes, leaving it vulnerable to devastating flooding and mudslides during wet weather — all too common during hurricane season.

Although Haiti shares Hispaniola — one of the Caribbean's largest islands — with the Dominican Republic, satellite images reveal a dramatically different landscape on opposite sides of the border. Juxtaposed against the lush green Dominican rainforest, Haiti's barren landscape is a reflection of its voracious hunger for charcoal, its primary source of fuel. Since 1925, Haiti's forested area has fallen from 60 percent of the country to 2 percent.

Biodiesel Industries was recruited by a U.N.-affiliated, nongovernmental agency in May to initiate a grassroots project in Haiti. Already, the company is successfully growing jatropha crops with Haitian farmers in Port-au-Prince and Gonaives.

"The approach is feedstock first. There's no reason to build a plant if you don't have a good source of feedstock," said Teall, adding that in Gonaives, a large city in the north of Haiti where more than 2,000 people were killed in the mudslides brought by Hurricane Jeanne in 2004, feedstock crops will help stabilize eroding hillsides. "In Haiti, people see a tree and they see charcoal. We're trying to shift perception to something productive. They won't want to cut down jatropha trees, because they can sell the nuts."

Endemic to the Caribbean, jatropha can also be intercropped with other plants to maintain diverse subsistence agriculture.

Although it has the second-largest natural gas reserves in South America, landlocked Bolivia also has the one of that continent's lowest gross domestic products ($17.4 billion in 2008, compared with $1.5 trillion in Brazil or $14.2 trillion in the U.S.). The Bolivian state of Santa Cruz, in the south of the country, is a rich producer of mineral and agricultural resources, but the region's native population sees little of it. While natural gas pipelines bypass their communities, along with accompanying revenues, indigenous people there have a major factor working in their favor. Situated on an interior plateau 12,000 feet above sea level, Santa Cruz is fed by snowmelt from the Andes, giving it access to the second-largest aquifer in the world. Still, without money for infrastructure, native communities in the region have been largely dependent upon state assistance.

Working in the eastern part of Santa Cruz, Teall reached out to one of the beleaguered native communities this year, launching a biodiesel production setup, starting with a jatropha nursery and working up to a full crop.

"It's been a welfare society for years," Teall said, "but the tribal leaders want to be self-sufficient." By growing feedstock with other useful crops, he said they can produce enough biodiesel to produce electricity. Jatropha doesn't use much water, but he said the community has access to plenty of water by pumping the aquifer. All it took to get them going was a different approach using resources they already had.

Pressing Forward

With sights set on creating a more diverse fuel supply that has less of an impact on resources and can still be economically attractive to consumers, Teall said that Biodiesel Industries is constantly looking to improve its technology.

In addition to the projects in Haiti and Bolivia, two projects in rural Mexico and one in Mysore, India, a partnership with the Santa Barbara-based nonprofit Growing Solutions Restoration Education Institute also has led to 250 jatropha trees being planted in Santa Barbara. As in Haiti and Bolivia, the other projects are all still in a feedstock production phase, but, eventually, the plants will be used to make biodiesel in portable, container-sized plants — like those in operation at Port Hueneme and in Australia.

Once production begins, Teall said that the two byproducts created when brewing fuel batches — methane and carbon dioxide — can be reused. Methane, which makes up about 50 percent of the byproduct, will be used to power heat and lighting in each plant, while the remaining carbon dioxide can be routed into an onsite algal pond. Algae absorb CO2 and, by most estimates, produce more than 6,000 gallons of usable oil per acre.

There is no doubt that Biodiesel Industries is a business, but Teall seems to be in the game for other reasons. The technology that his company has developed is adaptable and, when applied, addresses a variety of problems. Although he has a background as an environmental lawyer, his eyes light up with an engineer's zeal when he explains various solutions he and his team have come up with.

In light of what they have discovered over the past 16 years, he has remained open-minded about potential fuel supplies, looking at beef fat from cattle operations, restaurant grease trap sludge; anything that can potentially be burned to create energy without taxing air quality and food supply. As for his company's projects in developing countries, even though the projects are small, he's thinking big. "The ARIES system really makes it possible to do these rural projects," he said. "Otherwise there would be no way to do it — not on the scale that needs to be done."

And now for something completely scary...

2009-11-13T07:00:00.008-05:00

On the eve of the U.S. theatrical release of "2012" -- a movie depicting the apocalyptic end of the world, the British government's television public service advertisement describing the potentially catastrophic consequences of global climate change has been determined to be inappropriate because it is misleading and too scary for children. (GW)

Global warming: Are Britain’s TV ads too scary for children?

Britain's 'Bedtime Stories' TV ads aim to make parents feel guilty about the impact of global warming on their children. But critics say that fear tactics don't work.

By Ben Quinn
Christian Science Monitor
November 12, 2009

LONDON – Warnings that time is running out for the fight against global warming raises the question: Is frightening the public into changing their behavior really the world’s last hope?

In Britain, a costly government television advertisement has fallen foul of regulators investigating complaints that it is misleading and too “scary” for children.

But it’s not just hundreds of parents who are unhappy with the commercial, which aims to make adults feel guilty about the impact their carbon emissions are having on their children’s future. Environmentalists and green PR experts say scare tactics just don’t work.

“Bedtime Stories,” a minute-long, £6 million ($10 million) production, features a father telling his daughter a story about “a very, very strange” world with “horrible consequences” for children. Cutting to cartoon scenes of streets and houses underwater, it shows animals and people drowning and a looming monster representing global warming. (Scroll down to watch the video.)

However, consultants who helped the British government draw up climate change communication strategies in the past warn that engendering guilt merely “shuts down” people. Criticizing home and family is also unproductive.

“They both lead to what’s called psychological reactance … especially when the messenger is an unpopular government,” according to Henry Hicks, a consultant at the green PR firm, Futerra.

Futerra warns against relying on concern about children’s future. It pointed to surveys that had in fact found that childless people may care more about climate change than those with children.

Nevertheless, the government is standing by “Bedtime Stories,” which was launched after its research suggested more than 50 percent of Britons did not think climate change would affect them. Three-quarters (74 percent) also said they would make lifestyle changes now if they knew climate change was going to affect their children.

Britain’s energy and climate change minister, Joan Ruddock, defended the campaign, insisting: “The ad is directed at adults, but we know that the proposition to ‘protect the next generation’ is a motivating one.”

Nevertheless, critics suggest better strategies could be based on behavioral economics, “nudge” philosophy, and ideas on how design can influence behavior.

Fears have long been leveraged in advertising by environmentalists, such as a World Wildlife Fund ad depicting giant sharks circling a stormy New York skyline. Fear and an appeal to parental instincts have, meanwhile, also been employed by Greenpeace in an advertisement produced in Finland featuring a baby left alone in a bath filling up with water.

In the United States, advertisements by the Ad Council and the Environmental Defense Fund featured a man standing with his back turned to an oncoming train. He says the consequences of global warming won’t affect him, and at the last moment steps off the tracks to reveal that a small girl is now in the path of the train.

More recently however, there has been criticism of what some perceived to be an overly depressing message in films such “The Age of Stupid,” a docudrama about a ruined Earth of the future.

George Marshall of the Climate Outreach Information Network (COIN), a British charity working to raise climate-change awareness, says that people change their behavior on the basis of what those around them are doing. COIN, for example, is helping trade union members to give workplace presentations and talks about climate change.

To help viewers feel that they can do something positive, the environmental activists behind “The Age of Stupid” film threw their weight behind a British campaign known as the 10:10 initiative, aimed at cutting carbon emissions by 10 percent in 2010.

Others are also not short on ideas for how to connect with the public without scaring them. David Turnbull, the Washington, D.C.,-based director of Climate Action Network International, an umbrella for hundreds of nongovernmental organizations, says a need remains both for campaigns that can startle and those that have more positive messages.

“It’s important to convey, for example, the benefits of stimulating a greener economy. At the same time, with the increased speed of global warming, it’s important to show that there is a serious urgency.”

Mick Hulme, founder of Britain’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, suggests that connecting with people’s personal experiences can ultimately be much more productive than “dressing climate change up as an impending catastrophe for the planet.”

“If, for example, you talk about flooding in their locality, or air quality, that can be much more effective,” Professor Hulme says. “You have to start off with things that are local, tangible, and near term in order to really engage with people.”

Power drought

2009-11-12T04:51:00.001-05:00

Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay have all suffered blackouts during the past four weeks. Elected officials and utility workers are working hard to trace the cause of the outages. Some suspect that recent drought conditions may have had some impact given the countries' heavy dependence of hydroelectric power.

This problem could clearly escalate if efforts to mitigate climate change are not implemented immediately. Other fingers point to the transmission system. This could turn out to be a major problem as megacities continue to sprout and with them an increase in the demand for electricity. (GW)

The night the lights went out

Gary Duffy
BBC News
November 11, 2009

The lights flickered on and off and the popular soap opera showing on a TV screen in the corner suddenly vanished.

I was in a restaurant near my home in the heart of Sao Paulo when the power failure happened and along with dozens of other customers I suddenly found myself sitting almost in the dark.

It was not instantaneous - for quite a while the lights held a faint glow

At first I thought it was my neighbourhood which was affected - but I decided to head for home to check on whether my office computers had been damaged.

I had seen this kind of "virtual" power cut before when the electricity surges and then fades away again. Brazilians had told me forlornly of the damage this caused to TV sets and computers.

Nervous drivers

On the streets it was immediately obvious this was something more substantial. As far as I could see around me towering apartment blocks and busy streets were without light.

A nervous motorist pulled over to the side of the road to ask a passing pedestrian what had happened - even the normally aggressive Sao Paulo drivers seemed subdued.

It soon became clear - perhaps the only thing that was clear - that the scale of this blackout, which seems the right word, was breathtaking.

Major population areas were affected, with Rio de Janeiro, the proud winner of the 2016 Olympics, almost totally without light as well.

In fact, virtually the whole of the state of Sao Paulo was said to be in darkness - in other words, it affected some 40 million people or around 21% of the Brazilian population.

Subway trains halted

The blackout is said to have partially or totally affected at least 10 Brazilian states, and the geographical spread of the problem in this vast country was also amazing. One radio station estimated that at one stage 50 million people were without power.

“ Luckily I got out of the lift about a minute before everything shut down... [and] at least we managed to have a romantic candlelight supper. ”
Patrick Schurt, Sao Paulo

Problems were reported from the city of Recife in the north-east of Brazil, to the southern tip of the country in the state of Rio Grande do Sul.

In Rio de Janeiro, subway passengers were reported to be walking along tracks to get to the nearest stations after metro systems ground to a halt.

Pedestrians were said to be negotiating their way around darkened streets using candles. Radio stations appealed to motorists to slow down and drive with care while extra police officers were on the streets to try to prevent opportunistic crime.

Transport bosses urged bus drivers to return to work so they could provide a more extensive service.

Storm theory

With the authorities searching for answers, the immediate focus of attention was the massive hydro-electric plant at Itaipu which provides 20% of Brazil's electricity.

But officials there insisted that the plant itself was working normally and suggested instead that the problem lay with a difficulty in the electricity transmission system.

The Brazilian Energy Minister, Edison Lobao, said there had been a strong storm near Itaipu when more than 17,000 megawatts of power was lost and he pointed to this as a possible reason for the power failure.

There was also renewed interest in a news story which emerged in the US this week claiming that computer hackers had disrupted the Brazilian power system in the past.

While nothing is certain, for the moment few people here are identifying this as a possible cause.

Officials began to talk of a "domino effect" to explain the vast spread of the power cuts.

Sensitive issue

In neighbouring Paraguay, virtually the whole country was said to be without light but for less than half an hour.

Power supplies have been a sensitive issue in Brazil ever since the apagao , or blackouts, of 2001 and 2002, which affected large parts of the country.

Power shortages then were made worse by a drought which had a severe impact on Brazil's extensive system of hydro-electric power.

The government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has always made it a priority to ensure this controversial episode in the country's history, which happened under a previous administration, was not repeated.

With the lights back on, ministers will be anxious to show that this latest massive power failure was not due to any mistake on their part.

Brazilians will also want to know why their country, which on so many fronts is racing ahead, was so drastically caught out on this occasion.

Roam home to a dome

2009-11-11T06:41:00.002-05:00

Geodesic domes are by most demonstrative illustration of what Buckminster Fuller meant when he urged humanity to adopt design solutions that "do more with less". Domes optimize surface area-to-volume ratios which means that they can enclose the specific volumes with the least amount of materials. That fact was not lost of Bucky in his development of affordable, resource-efficient and structurally sound housing systems.

The U.S. armed forces and the National Science Foundation were also aware of the high performance characteristics of geodesic domes which is why they were employed in some of the world's harshest environments over the years. (GW)

Stateside Home Is Proposed for South Pole Dome

By Henry Fountain
New York Times
November 10, 2009

A geodesic dome that sheltered scientists and support workers at the South Pole for three decades is due to be demolished in the next few months, having outlived its usefulness at the bottom of the world.

But a small group of polar veterans is trying to preserve the dome, arguing it is a signature feature of the United States Antarctic program. They want the 55-foot-high aluminum structure taken apart the same way that Navy Seabees assembled it — bolt by bolt and panel by panel — for reassembly stateside.

“If you saw anything about the South Pole, that dome would always be the symbol that you saw,” said Billy-Ace Baker, a former Navy radio operator in Antarctica and a founder of the Old Antarctic Explorers Association, who is involved in the effort.

Lee Mattis, who as a young engineer working for a California company came up with a way to erect the structure and served as project engineer during its construction over two Antarctic summers, said the dome “was a big part of the N.S.F. effort down there.”

The National Science Foundation, or N.S.F., the federal agency that oversees polar programs, has agreed to disassemble the top three rings, or about 45 triangular panels, for eventual installation at a Seabee museum being built in Port Hueneme, Calif. The bulk of the dome, which has 904 panels and 1,448 struts in all, held together by about 60,000 bolts, would be cut apart.

Brian W. Stone, a deputy division director in the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs, said the agency had been talking with the Seabees for two years about ways to preserve part of the dome. “The Seabees feel it has historical significance, as do we and others who have worked at the South Pole,” Mr. Stone said.

But as part of a long-term modernization plan at the site, the agency had to have the dome removed by next March, he said.

The windowless dome, which is about 165 feet in diameter, was the main structure at the site, the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Inside it were modular buildings for the station’s residents — as many as 200 in summer, 50 or so through the harsh polar winter. It has been largely unused for the past few years, replaced by a two-story elevated building.

Mr. Mattis, who returned to the pole in 2005 to inspect the dome, estimated that disassembling the entire structure bolt by bolt and shipping it stateside would cost about $500,000 above the $150,000 the National Science Foundation has budgeted for the project.

Mr. Mattis said his group hoped to have demolition delayed for a year and to use the time to interest private groups or individuals in providing the additional money to bring the whole dome back, with the idea that museums or other institutions would be interested in displaying parts of it. “In that way, we’d preserve the memory of it in multiple locations,” he said.

But Mr. Stone said the agency had made no secret of the project’s timeline. “We’re sensitive to the fact that it’s been an iconic structure for a lot of people for a long time,” he said. “But we are somewhat bound by the logistics and the need to wrap this up.”

Government snakeoil

2009-11-10T05:12:00.003-05:00

The Paris-based International Energy Agency is an intergovernmental organization established by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1974 in the wake of the oil crisis. It was created to serve as a clearinghouse and objective source of information on international energy markets. The IEA publishes an annual "Energy Outlook" that many nations use to help shape their energy policies. According to the following story in today's Guardian, the IEA has -- under pressure from the United States -- been cooking the numbers on global oil reserves for years. Their actions were designed to obscure the realty and nearness of peak oil and avoid a global panic. (GW)

Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower

Exclusive: Watchdog's estimates of reserves inflated says top official

By Terry Macalister
guardian
November 9, 2009

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation's latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies.

In particular they question the prediction in the last World Economic Outlook, believed to be repeated again this year, that oil production can be raised from its current level of 83m barrels a day to 105m barrels. External critics have frequently argued that this cannot be substantiated by firm evidence and say the world has already passed its peak in oil production.

Now the "peak oil" theory is gaining support at the heart of the global energy establishment. "The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030 although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year," said the IEA source, who was unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals inside the industry. "The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today's number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.

"Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources," he added.

A second senior IEA source, who has now left but was also unwilling to give his name, said a key rule at the organisation was that it was "imperative not to anger the Americans" but the fact was that there was not as much oil in the world as had been admitted. "We have [already] entered the 'peak oil' zone. I think that the situation is really bad," he added.

The IEA acknowledges the importance of its own figures, boasting on its website: "The IEA governments and industry from all across the globe have come to rely on the World Energy Outlook to provide a consistent basis on which they can formulate policies and design business plans."

The British government, among others, always uses the IEA statistics rather than any of its own to argue that there is little threat to long-term oil supplies.

The IEA said tonight that peak oil critics had often wrongly questioned the accuracy of its figures. A spokesman said it was unable to comment ahead of the 2009 report being released tomorrow.

John Hemming, the MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on peak oil and gas, said the revelations confirmed his suspicions that the IEA underplayed how quickly the world was running out and this had profound implications for British government energy policy.

He said he had also been contacted by some IEA officials unhappy with its lack of independent scepticism over predictions. "Reliance on IEA reports has been used to justify claims that oil and gas supplies will not peak before 2030. It is clear now that this will not be the case and the IEA figures cannot be relied on," said Hemming.

"This all gives an importance to the Copenhagen [climate change] talks and an urgent need for the UK to move faster towards a more sustainable [lower carbon] economy if it is to avoid severe economic dislocation," he added.

The IEA was established in 1974 after the oil crisis in an attempt to try to safeguard energy supplies to the west. The World Energy Outlook is produced annually under the control of the IEA's chief economist, Fatih Birol, who has defended the projections from earlier outside attack. Peak oil critics have often questioned the IEA figures.

But now IEA sources who have contacted the Guardian say that Birol has increasingly been facing questions about the figures inside the organisation.

Matt Simmons, a respected oil industry expert, has long questioned the decline rates and oil statistics provided by Saudi Arabia on its own fields. He has raised questions about whether peak oil is much closer than many have accepted.

A report by the UK Energy Research Council (UKERC) last month said worldwide production of conventionally extracted oil could "peak" and go into terminal decline before 2020 – but that the government was not facing up to the risk. Steve Sorrell, chief author of the report, said forecasts suggesting oil production will not peak before 2030 were "at best optimistic and at worst implausible".

But as far back as 2004 there have been people making similar warnings. Colin Campbell, a former executive with Total of France told a conference: "If the real [oil reserve] figures were to come out there would be panic on the stock markets … in the end that would suit no one."

Britain to fast-track nuclear power plants

2009-11-09T05:22:00.003-05:00

Despite its very aggressive plans to construct gigawatts of offshore wind power, British officials feel that the development of nuclear power plants must be fast-tracked in order to achieve the level of greenhouse gas emission reductions necessary to avert catastrophic climate change.

The goal is to act on new plant proposals within a year of their application. For those here in the U.S. who have been waiting nine years for a decision on Cape Wind -- the nation's first proposed offshore wind farm, this must seem a cruel irony indeed. (GW)

Ed Miliband to unveil plans to fast-track new nuclear power stations

Government will identify sites around Britain suitable for building nuclear plants as part of new energy policy

By Hélène Mulholland, David Teather and agencies
Guardian
November 9, 2009

Hélène Mulholland, David Teather and agencies Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change secretary, insisted today that nuclear power has a "relatively good" safety record in this country as he prepared to unveil plans to fast-track a new generation of nuclear power stations.

The government will later identify further sites around Britain that could be suitable for building a nuclear plant amid Tory cries that the plans lack "democratic legitimacy".

Miliband will unveil a series of national policy statements setting out the need for new energy infrastructure including renewables, fossil fuels and gas, as well as an overarching energy statement which will include climate change policy. A separate strategy statement on the nation's ports will also be published.

"The basic message here is: we can't say no to all of the nuclear or all of the low carbon fuels that are out there," the energy secretary told GMTV.

"We need nuclear, we need renewables, we need clean coal, we need all of those things if we are going to make that transition to cleaner energy."

Miliband said it would not be his decision about whether a new nuclear power station is built in an area.

"It is going to be a decision for an independent commission that will take a view about what the local feeling is," he said.

He insisted that there would be consultation with local people both before the planning application was submitted by the commission, as well as after and said that there was "public enthusiasm" in most areas being considered.

The policy statements, which run to 3,000 pages, will be open for consultation until early next year and will act as guidelines for the Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC), a new central authority which will start accepting planning applications in March.

The aim is to speed up planning decisions and give answers to developers within one year, to end what one official described as the current "long and tortuous" process of winning approval for schemes.

It took six years to steer the Sizewell B power station through the planning process, and officials believe red tape is discouraging investment.

Under changes to the planning laws, the IPC will be able to speed through the proposals for new schemes if it decided they fitted in with the policy statements.

But the shadow energy secretary, Greg Clark, said that a simple ministerial statement on the issue was inadequate and called for a Commons vote to give the process "democratic legitimacy".
"It is a national emergency and it's been left far too late – we've known for the last 10 years that most of our nuclear power fleet would come to the end of its planned life," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"So whatever happens with these statements we've got a black hole, but actually we do need a different planning system, we need a fast track for major items of infrastructure.

"The trouble with the way the government's doing it is, it has no democratic component. The statements will just be read out to MPs without a vote and the decisions will be taken by an unelected, unaccountable official.

"We think it should be a minister taking that decision, accountable to parliament, with the necessary time limit, about three months, so it doesn't delay the process. But it does need to have democratic legitimacy otherwise people will find this an imposition that they will rail against."

But the energy secretary said the government had made the "right distinction" on what politicians and the planning commission should be concentrating on.

He told the Today programme: "Under the planning reforms, we separate the question of need and the question of specific developments, so we are in a sense making the right distinction between what politicians should make a judgment on, which is the question of need, and specific weighing of a particular development, which the IPC will do."

He rejected Clark's claims that the government should have addressed the matter earlier.
"We are making the decision in a timely way," he said. "The lights aren't going to go out. We do have security of supply in this country but as we move towards low carbon alternatives we need to go down the nuclear route..."

Miliband will later today stress what the government believes to be the importance of a diverse energy supply. But the most detail will given in the nuclear policy statement, which will include a forensic assessment of the 11 sites already nominated by energy firms as well as identifying alternatives.

"Because nuclear is controversial, we wanted to make it quite clear where the sites we consider suitable are," said one official.

The policy statements are expected to be a drawing together of already stated policy. As well as the public consultation, which ends in February, a commons select committee has been formed to scrutinise the statements. Other government departments are set to produce similar policy statements on subjects including the water supply and airports.

The IPC will be kept away from the government in an attempt to remove politics from the planning decision. The official said it was not about "concreting over the countryside" but making the system "less labyrinthine". The IPC would, he added, be "inquisitorial rather than adversarial".

Utility firms keen to build plants in Britain, including EDF and E.ON, have long argued for a more certain planning regime.

Energy firms and industry experts have warned of an impending energy gap in Britain unless more large scale projects are hurriedly built.

But green groups expressed dismay at the prospect of new nuclear power and warned that the government could be open to legal challenge if the statements do not properly consider climate change.

They have also raised concerns that people will not be able to influence decisions on major projects because schemes covered by the statements will not be subject to public inquiry.