12 Degrees of Freedom

Challenging the planet's capacity to produce enough food for everyone

2009-07-14T04:40:00.002-04:00

It really is amazing when you think about the extent to which most of us in the industrialized world take food for granted. We are engaged in some very heated debates comparing the virtues of industrialized agribusiness to those of sustainable agriculture. As important as these discussions may be, you can nonetheless imagine how absurdly abstract they must seem to the billions of people who go to sleep hungry each night.

The G8 leaders have pledged €14 billion that will be invested in activities designed to enhance food security. It is unclear to me if the policies they have adopted and plan to support with these funds will lead to the creation of sustainable agricultural systems. (GW)

G8 leaders pledge €14 billion for food security

EurActiv
10 July 2009

Leaders from the Group of Eight (G8) industrialised nations agreed today (10 July) to commit around €14 billion over the next three years to helping the world's poorest countries develop their agricultural sectors.

Background:

As the world's population approaches ten billion, issues like climate change, growing scarcity of oil and the availability of quality land and water are challenging the planet's capacity to produce enough food for everyone.

World cereal prices hit record highs in 2007 and the first half of 2008, fuelling spikes in food prices which in turn triggered riots in some developed countries, along with a series of commodity export bans. Since then, prices have fallen again due to a good harvest in 2008.

In June 2008, finance ministers from the Group of Eight industrialised countries (G8 - Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Britain and the United States) expressed "strong concerns" about soaring crude oil and agricultural commodity prices (EurActiv 16/06/08). The July 2008 G8 summit called on G8 agriculture ministers "to convene a summit to contribute to the development of concrete and sound proposals on world food security".

The first ever meeting of G8 agriculture ministers took place in April 2009. It called for more public and private investment in sustainable farming to boost food supplies and ensure global food security (EurActiv 21/04/09).

"We welcome the commitments made by countries represented at L'Aquila [the summit host town in Italy] toward a goal of mobilising at least $20 billion [€14.3 billion] over three years," reads the declaration.

"We are committed to increasing investments in short, medium and long-term agriculture development that directly benefits the poorest and makes best use of international institutions," it adds.

The declaration does not make clear whether it is all new funds, nor does it give details of individual countries' contributions. It also makes no mention of a trust fund for the contributions to be managed by the World Bank, a proposal put forward by Washington in previous drafts but opposed by the EU.

José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission said "the EU will be contributing with around €3 billion within this Initiative." The EU contribution comes on top of the bloc's €1 billion food facility announced last year (EurActiv 05/12/08).

Funds to tackle chronic under investments in agriculture

The declaration underlines that the combined effect of long-standing underinvestment in agriculture, price volatility and the economic crisis had led to increased poverty and hunger in developing countries.

According to the United Nations, the number of malnourished people has risen over the past two years and is expected to top 1.02 billion this year, reversing a four-decade trend of declines.

The G8 summit kept a strong commitment to ensure adequate emergency food assistance, but its focus on agricultural investments reflects a US-led shift toward longer-term strategies to fight hunger.

The United States is the world's largest aid donor of food - mostly grown domestically and bought from US farmers.

G8 leaders said their approach would target increased agricultural productivity, stimuli for harvest interventions, emphasise private-sector growth, women and smallholders, preserve natural resources, and prioritise job expansion, training and increased trade flows.

The announced funding over three years compares with $13.4 billion [€9.6 billion] which the G8 says it disbursed between January 2008 and July 2009 for global food security.

"The tendency of decreasing ODA [official development assistance] and national financing to agriculture must be reversed," the statement says.

History of unkept promises

G8 summits have a history of making unkept aid promises. In a report last month, anti-poverty group ONE said the world's richest nations collectively were off course in delivering on promises to more than double aid to Africa made at a G8 summit in 2005.

ONE has calculated that sub-Saharan Africa alone needs $25 billion over three years.

"Investment in seeds, fertiliser, roads and other infrastructure is desperately needed," it said.

(EurActiv with Reuters.)

Positions:

The European farmers' lobby Copa-Cogeca welcomed the G8's initiative to commit more resources to investments in farming to help fight world hunger.

"This new policy initiative is highly welcome. Ensuring food security has to be a key objective in the 21st century and there must be optimal use of the contribution from local farmers and agri-cooperatives everywhere. Volatility on agricultural markets and low producer prices have led to many years of underinvestment in farming. If world hunger is to be effectively addressed, this problem must be overcome first," said Pekka Pesonen, secretary general of Copa-Cogeca.

NGO Oxfam argued the G8 promises are "nothing but luke-warm words" and no new money is being committed. "Delivering new money for food means G8 leaders getting their aid back on track – nothing more than emergency plans from all G8 leaders will make this money work for poor people," said Oxfam's Gawain Kripke.

The end of the world as we know it?

2009-07-13T04:56:00.003-04:00

This is the second advance review of the Millennium Project's 2009 State of the Future report. The editors of the Futurist and Jonathan Owen of The Independent both view the problem of global climate change as a tangled web linking economics, environment, energy and (perhaps the most challenging of all) ethics. The report concludes that climate change (or our lackluster response to it ) will lead to the collapse of civilization. Our only hope of averting such a catastrophe is by establishing a "system of world governance—civilizations working better by cooperating with some common rules.”

The only way for humanity not only to continue its presence on this planet, but to be the success that Nature has in mind for us is by designing governance and physical life support systems that acknowledge "It's going to be everybody or nobody" as Bucky Fuller so often reminded us. (GW)

The planet's future: Climate change 'will cause civilisation to collapse'

By Jonathan Owen
The Independent
July 12, 2009

Authoritative new study sets out a grim vision of shortages and violence – but amid all the gloom, there is some hope too

An effort on the scale of the Apollo mission that sent men to the Moon is needed if humanity is to have a fighting chance of surviving the ravages of climate change. The stakes are high, as, without sustainable growth, "billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilisation will collapse".

This is the stark warning from the biggest single report to look at the future of the planet – obtained by The Independent on Sunday ahead of its official publication next month. Backed by a diverse range of leading organisations such as Unesco, the World Bank, the US army and the Rockefeller Foundation, the 2009 State of the Future report runs to 6,700 pages and draws on contributions from 2,700 experts around the globe. Its findings are described by Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UN, as providing "invaluable insights into the future for the United Nations, its member states, and civil society".

The impact of the global recession is a key theme, with researchers warning that global clean energy, food availability, poverty and the growth of democracy around the world are at "risk of getting worse due to the recession". The report adds: "Too many greedy and deceitful decisions led to a world recession and demonstrated the international interdependence of economics and ethics."

Although the future has been looking better for most of the world over the past 20 years, the global recession has lowered the State of the Future Index for the next 10 years. Half the world could face violence and unrest due to severe unemployment combined with scarce water, food and energy supplies and the cumulative effects of climate change.

And the authors of the report, produced by the Millennium Project – a think-tank formerly part of the World Federation of the United Nations Associations – set out a number of emerging environmental security issues. "The scope and scale of the future effects of climate change – ranging from changes in weather patterns to loss of livelihoods and disappearing states – has unprecedented implications for political and social stability."

But the authors suggest the threats could also provide the potential for a positive future for all. "The good news is that the global financial crisis and climate change planning may be helping humanity to move from its often selfish, self-centred adolescence to a more globally responsible adulthood... Many perceive the current economic disaster as an opportunity to invest in the next generation of greener technologies, to rethink economic and development assumptions, and to put the world on course for a better future."

Scientific and technological progress continues to accelerate. IBM promises a computer at 20,000 trillion calculations per second by 2011, which is estimated to be the speed of the human brain. And nanomedicine may one day rebuild damaged cells atom by atom, using nanobots the size of blood cells. But technological progress carries its own risks. "Globalisation and advanced technology allow fewer people to do more damage and in less time, so that possibly one day a single individual may be able to make and deploy a weapon of mass destruction."

The report also praises the web, which it singles out as "the most powerful force for globalisation, democratisation, economic growth, and education in history". Technological advances are cited as "giving birth to an interdependent humanity that can create and implement global strategies to improve the prospects for humanity".

The immediate problems are rising food and energy prices, shortages of water and increasing migrations "due to political, environmental and economic conditions", which could plunge half the world into social instability and violence. And organised crime is flourishing, with a global income estimated at $3 trillion – twice the military budgets of all countries in the world combined.

The effects of climate change are worsening – by 2025 there could be three billion people without adequate water as the population rises still further. And massive urbanisation, increased encroachment on animal territory, and concentrated livestock production could trigger new pandemics.

Although government and business leaders are responding more seriously to the global environmental situation, it continues to get worse, according to the report. It calls on governments to work to 10-year plans to tackle growing threats to human survival, targeting particularly the US and China, which need to apply the sort of effort and resources that put men on the Moon.

"This is not only important for the environment; it is also a strategy to increase the likelihood of international peace. Without some agreement, it will be difficult to get the kind of global coherence needed to address climate change seriously."

While the world has the resources to address its challenges, coherence and direction have been lacking. Recent meetings of the US and China, as well as of Nato and Russia, and the birth of the G20 plus the continued work of the G8 promise to improve global strategic collaboration, but "it remains to be seen if this spirit of co-operation can continue and if decisions will be made on the scale necessary to really address the global challenges discussed in this report".

Although the scale of the effects of climate change are unprecedented, the causes are generally known, and the consequences can largely be forecast. The report says, "coordination for effective and adequate action is yet incipient, and environmental problems worsen faster than response or preventive policies are being adopted".

Jerome Glenn, director of the Millennium Project and one of the report's authors, said: "There are answers to our global challenges, but decisions are still not being made on the scale necessary to address them. Three great transitions would help both the world economy and its natural environment – to shift as much as possible from freshwater agriculture to saltwater agriculture; produce healthier meat without the need to grow animals; and replace gasoline cars with electric cars."

China's sustainability dilemma

2009-07-12T08:41:00.005-04:00

Chinese officials have implemented an aggressive renewable energy plan as part of its strategy to reduce the country's dependence on coal. But even as it is poised to surpass the United States in wind energy production China feels it will have to rely upon nuclear energy if it is to effectively reduce its greenhouse gas emissions in a timely manor and meaningfully address climate change.

The debate over the role of nuclear energy in addressing climate change will continue to be with us for some time.(GW)

Green Power Takes Root in the Chinese Desert

By Keith Bradsher
New York Times
July 3, 2009

DUNHUANG, China — As the United States takes its first steps toward mandating that power companies generate more electricity from renewable sources, China already has a similar requirement and is investing billions to remake itself into a green energy superpower.

Through a combination of carrots and sticks, Beijing is starting to change how this country generates energy. Although coal remains the biggest energy source and is almost certain to stay that way, the rise of renewable energy, especially wind power, is helping to slow China’s steep growth in emissions of global warming gases.

While the House of Representatives approved a requirement last week that American utilities generate more of their power from renewable sources of energy, and the Senate will consider similar proposals over the summer, China imposed such a requirement almost two years ago.

This year China is on track to pass the United States as the world’s largest market for wind turbines — after doubling wind power capacity in each of the last four years. State-owned power companies are competing to see which can build solar plants fastest, though these projects are much smaller than the wind projects. And other green energy projects, like burning farm waste to generate electricity, are sprouting up.

This oasis town deep in the Gobi Desert along the famed Silk Road and the surrounding wilderness of beige sand dunes and vast gravel wastelands has become a center of China’s drive to lead the world in wind and solar energy.

A series of projects is under construction on the nearly lifeless plateau to the southeast of Dunhuang, including one of six immense wind power projects now being built around China, each with the capacity of more than 16 large coal-fired power plants.

Each of the six projects “totally dwarfs anything else, anywhere else in the world,” said Steve Sawyer, the secretary general of the Global Wind Energy Council, an industry group in Brussels.

Some top Chinese regulators even worry that Beijing’s mandates are pushing companies too far too fast. The companies may be deliberately underbidding for the right to build new projects and then planning to go back to the government later and demand compensation once the projects lose money.

“The problem is we have so many stupid enterprises,” said Li Junfeng, who is the deputy director general for energy research at China’s top economic planning agency and the secretary general of the government-run Renewable Energy Industries Association.

HSBC predicts that China will invest more money in renewable energy and nuclear power between now and 2020 than in coal-fired and oil-fired electricity.

That does not mean that China will become a green giant overnight. For one thing, Chinese power consumption is expected to rise steadily over the next decade as 720 million rural Chinese begin acquiring the air-conditioners and other power-hungry amenities already common among China’s 606 million city dwellers.

As recently as the start of last year, the Chinese government’s target was to have 5,000 megawatts of wind power installed by the end of next year, or the equivalent of eight big coal-fired power plants, a tiny proportion of China’s energy usage and a pittance at a time when China was building close to two coal-fired plants a week.

But in March of last year, as power companies began accelerating construction of wind turbines, the government issued a forecast that 10,000 megawatts would actually be installed by the end of next year. And now, just 15 months later, with construction of coal-fired plants having slowed to one a week and still falling, it appears that China will have 30,000 megawatts of wind energy by the end of next year — which was previously the target for 2020, Mr. Li said.

A big impetus was the government’s requirement, issued in September 2007, that large power companies generate at least 3 percent of their electricity by the end of 2010 from renewable sources. The calculation excludes hydroelectric power, which already accounts for 21 percent of Chinese power, and nuclear power, which accounts for 1.1 percent.

Chinese companies must generate 8 percent of their power from renewable sources other than hydroelectric by the end of 2020.

The House bill in the United States resembles China’s approach in imposing a renewable energy standard on large electricity providers. But the details make it hard to compare standards. The House bill requires large electricity providers in the United States to derive at least 15 percent of their energy by 2020 from a combination of energy savings and renewable energy — including hydroelectric dams built since 1992.

Chinese power companies are eager to invest in renewable energy not just because of the government’s mandates, but because they are flush with cash and state-owned banks are eager to lend them more money. And there are few regulatory hurdles.

At the same time, the Ministry of Environmental Protection has temporarily banned three of the country’s five main power companies from building more coal-fired power plants, punishment for their failure to comply with environmental regulations at existing coal-fired plants. China’s renewable energy frenzy has been accelerating recently, especially in solar energy.

Last winter, winning bidders for three projects agreed to sell power to the national power grid for about 59 cents a kilowatt hour.

But this spring, when the government solicited offers to build and operate the 10-megawatt photovoltaic solar power plant here in Dunhuang, the lowest bid was just 10 cents a kilowatt hour — so low the government rejected it as likely to result in losses for whatever state-owned bank lent money to build it.

The winning bidder was China Guangdong Nuclear Power Company, an entirely state-owned business that bid 16 cents a kilowatt hour. (That was still far below last winter’s price, but a two-thirds drop in raw material costs because of the global financial crisis has started to drive down the cost of solar panels, the chief expense for the winning bidder.)

Zheng Shuangwei, the company’s general manager for northwest China, said that 22 or 23 cents would be more fair. The bid of 16 cents “is not a proper price,” he acknowledged. “It’s a bidding rate that is the result of competition.”

By comparison, the grid buys electricity from coal-fired power plants for 4 to 5 cents a kilowatt hour. Wind turbine rates have dropped to 7 cents from 10 cents over the last couple of years because of fierce competition and declining turbine costs.

The solar project still must go ahead, Mr. Zheng said, because China has limited coal reserves — 41 years at current rates of production — and the potential for hydroelectric power is leveling off as most eligible rivers have already been dammed.

But technical obstacles to renewable energy are popping up. Sandstorms in Dunhuang in the spring, for instance, will cover solar panels and render them useless until they are cleaned after each storm by squads of workers using feather brushes to avoid scratching the panels, a process expected to take two days.

And wind turbines are being built faster here than the national grid can erect high-voltage power lines to carry the electricity to cities elsewhere. On the windiest days, only half the power generated can be transmitted, said Min Deqing, a local renewable energy consultant.

Nonetheless, city officials are pushing for more projects.

“It’s the Gobi Desert,” said Wang Yu, the vice director of economic planning. “There’s not much other use for it.”

Bus rapid transit

2009-07-10T08:11:00.008-04:00

Between the time In entered kindergarten until I was a senior in high school, my family did not own a car. I got to everywhere I needed to either by foot, bicycle or bus. There was a rapid transit system but it mostly served the more affluent communities, not inner-city Cleveland.

The buses ran regularly and were well-used -- almost always packed. I must have been impressed by them. One Christmas when most boys my age were asking for race cars and model airplanes, I asked for and got a remote controlled bus.

The bus system in Curitiba, Brazil is the pioneering model for bus rapid transit. Over thirty years ago planners there began integrating mass transit into all elements of urban planning. I find it curious that it is not mentioned in the Times article that follows. (GW)

Buses May Aid Climate Battle in Poor Cities

By Elisabeth Rosenthal
New York Times
July 10, 2009

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Like most thoroughfares in booming cities of the developing world, Bogotá’s Seventh Avenue resembles a noisy, exhaust-coated parking lot — a gluey tangle of cars and the rickety, smoke-puffing private minibuses that have long provided transportation for the masses.

But a few blocks away, sleek red vehicles full of commuters speed down the four center lanes of Avenida de las Américas. The long, segmented, low-emission buses are part of a novel public transportation system called bus rapid transit, or B.R.T. It is more like an above-ground subway than a collection of bus routes, with seven intersecting lines, enclosed stations that are entered through turnstiles with the swipe of a fare card and coaches that feel like trams inside.

Versions of these systems are being planned or built in dozens of developing cities around the world — Mexico City, Cape Town, Jakarta, Indonesia, and Ahmedabad, India, to name a few — providing public transportation that improves traffic flow and reduces smog at a fraction of the cost of building a subway.

But the rapid transit systems have another benefit: they may hold a key to combating climate change. Emissions from cars, trucks, buses and other vehicles in the booming cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America account for a rapidly growing component of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. While emissions from industry are decreasing, those related to transportation are expected to rise more than 50 percent by 2030 in industrialized and poorer nations. And 80 percent of that growth will be in the developing world, according to data presented in May at an international conference in Bellagio, Italy, sponsored by the Asian Development Bank and the Clean Air Institute.

To be effective, a new international climate treaty that will be negotiated in Copenhagen in December must include “a policy response to the CO2 emissions from transport in the developing world,” the Bellagio conference statement concluded.

Bus rapid transit systems like Bogotá’s, called TransMilenio, might hold an answer. Now used for an average of 1.6 million trips each day, TransMilenio has allowed the city to remove 7,000 small private buses from its roads, reducing the use of bus fuel — and associated emissions — by more than 59 percent since it opened its first line in 2001, according to city officials.

In recognition of this feat, TransMilenio last year became the only large transportation project approved by the United Nations to generate and sell carbon credits. Developed countries that exceed their emissions limits under the Kyoto Protocol, or that simply want to burnish a “green” image, can buy credits from TransMilenio to balance their emissions budgets, bringing Bogotá an estimated $100 million to $300 million so far, analysts say.

Indeed, the city has provided a model of how international programs to combat climate change can help expanding cities — the number of cars in China alone could increase sevenfold by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency — pay for transit systems that would otherwise be unaffordable.

“Bogotá was huge and messy and poor, so people said, ‘If Bogotá can do it, why can’t we?’ ” said Enrique Peñalosa, an economist and a former mayor of the city who took TransMilenio from a concept to its initial opening in 2001 and is now advising other cities. In 2008, Mexico City opened a second successful bus rapid transit line that has already reduced carbon dioxide emissions there, according to Lee Schipper, a transportation expert at Stanford University, and the city has applied to sell carbon credits as well.

But bus rapid transit systems are not the answer for every city. In the United States, where cost is less constraining, some cities, like Los Angeles, have built B.R.T.’s, but they tend to lack many of the components of comprehensive systems like TransMilenio, like fully enclosed stations, and they serve as an addition to existing rail networks.

In some sprawling cities in India, where a tradition of scooter use may make bus rapid transit more difficult to create, researchers are working to develop a new model of tuk-tuk, or motorized cab, that is cheap and will run on alternative fuels or with a highly efficient engine. “There are three million auto rickshaws in India alone, and the smoke is astonishing, so this could have a huge impact,” said Stef van Dongen, director of Enviu, an environmental network group in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, that is sponsoring the research.

Bus rapid transit systems have not always worked well in cities that have tried them, either. In New Delhi, for example, the experiment foundered in part because it proved difficult to protect bus lanes from traffic. And a system that does not succeed in drawing passengers out of their cars just adds buses to existing vehicles on the roads, making traffic and emissions worse.

But with its wide streets, dense population and a tradition of bus travel, Bogotá had the ingredients for success. To create TransMilenio, the city commandeered two to four traffic lanes in the middle of major boulevards, isolating them with low walls to create the system’s so-called tracks. On the center islands that divide many of Bogotá’s two-way streets, the city built dozens of distinctive metal-and-glass stations. Just as in a subway, the multiple doors on the buses slide open level with the platform, providing easy access for strollers and older riders. Hundreds of passengers can wait on the platforms, avoiding the delays that occur when passengers each pay as they board.

Mr. Peñalosa noted that the negative stereotypes about bus travel required some clever rebranding. Now, he said, upscale condominiums advertise that they are near TransMilenio lines. “People don’t say, ‘I’m taking the bus,’ they say, ‘I’m taking TransMilenio,’ ” he added, as he rode at rush hour recently, chatting with other passengers.

Jorge Engarrita, 45, a leather worker who was riding TransMilenio to work, said the system had “changed his life,” reducing his commuting time to 40 minutes with one transfer from two or three hours on several buses. Free shuttle buses carry residents from outlying districts to TransMilenio terminals.

To the dismay of car owners, Bogotá removed one-third of its street parking to make room for TransMilenio and imposed alternate-day driving restrictions determined by license plate numbers, forcing car owners onto the system.

With an extensive route system, TransMilenio moves more passengers per mile every hour than almost any of the world’s subways. Most poorer cities that have built subways, like Manila and Lagos, Nigeria, can afford to build only a few limited lines because of the expense.

Subways cost more than 30 times as much per mile to build than a B.R.T. system, and three times as much to maintain. And bus rapid transit systems can be built more quickly. “Almost all rapidly developing cities understand that they need a metro or something like it, and you can get a B.R.T. by 2010 or a metro by 2060,” said Walter Hook, executive director of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, in New York.

Although TransMilenio buses run on diesel, their efficient engines mean they emit less than half the nitrous oxide, particulate matter and carbon dioxide of the older minibuses. Cleaner fuels were either too expensive or did not work at Bogotá’s altitude, 9,000 feet above sea level.

TransMilenio is building more lines and underpasses to allow the buses to bypass clogged intersections, but for the moment the real challenge is overcrowding. Juan Gómez, 21, a businessman, takes TransMilenio only on days when he cannot drive, and he griped that it was often hard to find a seat.

“It’s O.K., but I prefer the car,” he said.

A new global approach to hunger

2009-07-09T08:41:00.003-04:00

We should never take food and food production for granted. Farming is, bottom line, a technology. It's important that we discover ways of growing food that is as natural (and sustainable) as possible.

Companies in the chemical fertilizer and pesticide business want to develop crops that are resistant to their poisonous products so farmers can spray their crops without killing them. The fact that the chemical residue on those crops may eventually kill those who eat them is beside the point for them.

Breeding crops that are resistant to drought and weeds (and consequently less dependent on chemical inputs) is a more reasonable and sustainable approach to addressing the looming global food crisis. (GW)

Ethiopian Scientist to Receive 2009 World Food Prize

By David Gollust
Voice of America
11 June 2009

Gebisa Ejeta
Ethiopian scientistwas named on Thursday as the winner of the 2009 World Food Prize in an event at the U.S. State Department. Ejeta, a faculty member at Purdue University in the Midwestern U.S. state of Indiana, was honored for his work on drought and weed-resistant varieties of sorghum.

Ejeta is only the second African to win the Food Prize since its creation in 1986 by Nobel Peace Laureate Norman Borlaug, the American agronomist credited with starting a so-called "Green Revolution" with high-yield wheat varieties.

The Ethiopian geneticist and seed-breeder, who joined the Purdue University faculty in 1984, is being honored for his work in developing strains of sorghum that are resistant to drought and the parasitic weed Striga, which has been a plague to farmers throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

Ejeta, who was not present at the State Department event, will receive the award on October 15 in a ceremony by the World Food Prize Foundation in Des Moines, Iowa.

The president of the foundation, former U.S. ambassador to Cambodia Kenneth Quinn, said Ejeta's work with sorghum has benefited millions of people in Africa and beyond.

"He developed and introduced the first sorghum hybrid in Africa in the early 1980s, which was drought tolerant and produced significantly higher yields," said Quinn. "In the 1990s, he conquered the greatest biological constraint to cereal production in Africa - the deadly weed Striga. Having discovered the bio-chemical basis of Striga's parasitic relationship with sorghum, our laureate's breeding program at Purdue produced many sorghum varieties resistant to drought and to Striga with yields 10 times greater than local varieties."

The World Food Prize chief was joined on the podium by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who stressed the Obama administration's commitment to attack world hunger, which affects an estimated one billion people.

She noted that in addition to developing new sorghum strains, Ejeta worked in India and Sudan on ways to get his improved seeds into the hands of farmers, underscoring the need for a comprehensive approach to repairing what Clinton called a broken global supply chain for food.

"The Obama administration is committed to providing leadership in developing a new global approach to hunger," she said. "For too long, our primary response has been to send emergency aid when the crisis is at its worst. This saves lives, but doesn't address hunger's root causes. It is at best a short-term fix. So we will support the creation of effective, sustainable farming systems in regions around the world where current methods are not working."

The World Food Prize, judged by a council of advisers that includes former U.S. Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, carries a $250,000 award. The previous African winner was plant breeder Monty Jones of Sierra Leone who, with Chinese colleague Yuan Longping, was honored in 2004 for work on high-yielding rice varieties.

From a glucose to a clean energy economy

2009-07-08T08:54:00.005-04:00

Many of my politically astute friends were convinced that President Obama would select a big-time politician to head the U.S. Department of Energy. More than a few governors and members of congress were being touted by the media as heirs apparent to this highly important secretariat.

Well, Barack Obama did not select a seasoned politician to head the agency. Instead he opted for a scientist. Not just a scientist -- a visionary scientist!

Now the question is: can Dr. Steven Chu transform both the U.S. Department of Energy and the nation's energy industry? (GW)

The alternative choice

The Economist
July 2, 2009

Steven Chu wants to save the world by transforming its largest industry: energy

WHETHER Steven Chu, America’s energy secretary, would be flattered or horrified by the comparison is unclear, but he and Margaret Thatcher have something important in common.

They are both scientists who have risen to political power. That Mr Chu has a Nobel prize for physics, whereas Lady Thatcher swiftly abandoned chemistry for the more lucrative pastures of the law, does not make the comparison unfair. What matters is that both of them understand something that some politicians from softer intellectual backgrounds often seem to forget: you cannot negotiate with nature. Nor can you ignore it, for it will not go away.

Lady Thatcher showed her mettle in this regard in 1989, when she became the first politician of stature to raise the alarm about global warming. When her adviser Crispin Tickell pointed out to her that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was rising and that carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas, she got the point instantly and alerted the world in a speech to the United Nations. Mr Chu’s job is harder: he is charged with spotting, nurturing and promoting promising energy technologies, thereby helping America to create the tools that the world needs to wean itself off fossil fuels.

He certainly has the qualifications to do so. Barack Obama poached him from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which he had directed since 2004, and which he was busy shaping into a centre for the study of alternative energy. He had, for example, negotiated a $500m deal with BP, one of the world’s biggest oil companies, to base its Energy Biosciences Institute there.

He is also a man who thinks big. While Mr Chu was at Berkeley, he conceived the idea of a global “glucose economy”, to supplant mankind’s dependence on oil. Fast-growing crops would be planted in the tropics, where sunlight is abundant. They would be converted into glucose (of which cellulose, which makes up much of the dry weight of a plant, is a polymer) and the glucose would be shipped around much as oil is today, for eventual conversion into biofuels and bioplastics. That idea might not go down well with energy nationalists, who want America to declare independence from all hot and unreliable countries, whether oil producers or agricultural powers, but it shows vision on the scale needed to deal with global warming.

Another example of his unorthodox thinking is his observation that painting the roofs of buildings around the world white and using light-coloured road surfaces rather than blacktop would reflect a lot of sunlight back into space—possibly enough to have an effect on global warming as big as taking every car in the world off the road for a decade. There are plenty of scientists with such notions, but they are seldom in a position to convert their visions into reality.

That, of course, requires money. Fortunately, Mr Chu has it. Besides his department’s annual budget of $26 billion, he has got his hands on $39 billion of the stimulus package. So he is able to spend like a drunken sailor when he chooses. On June 24th, for example, he announced that Ford would receive a loan of $6 billion to make its petrol-powered cars more efficient, while Nissan and a small Californian firm called Tesla Motors would get loans of $2 billion and $465m respectively to push forward with electric cars. On June 25th he followed this up by saying that $3.9 billion would be made available for revamping the American electricity grid. Building a “smart grid” is an important part of his plan. It will let wind and solar power be transmitted to the cities, and smooth out peaks and troughs in demand—for example by feeding power to the batteries of parked electric cars at night, and sucking it out of them during the day, if their owners agree.

It is not all largesse, though. The budget for hydrogen-powered vehicles, once the darlings of the alternative-energy lobby, has been slashed. Mr Chu does not believe in them. The long-awaited Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste dump has also been axed. He reckons the existing system of local storage is good for a few more decades and is looking into an old idea for dealing with nuclear waste: “burning” it in special reactors that will transmute it into more benign elements, thus eliminating the objection that nuclear power simply dumps the problem of waste in the laps of future generations.

It has not, of course, all been plain sailing. Mr Chu has little role in shaping the most important element of America’s energy policy, the law on climate change now wending its way through Congress (see article). The Department of Energy’s main job is to spend the generous sums Congress has allocated it—yet until recently it had been very slow to do so (see article). And in the shark-infested waters of Washington, Mr Chu’s forthright pronouncements on energy policy, which have not always conformed with Mr Obama’s views, have prompted a feeding frenzy.

On top, not on tap

For decades, the civilian side of the energy department pottered along quietly. Oil, coal and gas were familiar to the point of boredom, and no new nuclear plants were being built (the department also looks after nuclear weapons, but that is another matter). Wags used to say that the one essential qualification for being energy secretary was not to know anything about energy. That was what advisers were for. As no less a politician than Winston Churchill put it, scientists should be on tap, not on top.

Ideally the development of low-carbon technologies would be left to the market, encouraged by a suitable carbon price. But Congress has entrusted much of the work to Mr Chu’s department, and given that many of the choices it confronts are scientific and technological, it helps to have someone who knows the subject in charge. If he can help communicate the immutability of natural laws to America’s almost equally obdurate politicians, then on top, rather than on tap, is where he deserves to be.

Dairy methane cooperatives

2009-07-07T05:04:00.004-04:00

New England dairy farms are high on the list of endangered species these days. Milk prices are plummeting while the cost of doing business continues to skyrocket. Meanwhile, monstrously large dairy operations (I can't call them farms) in the Midwest and California are able to produce milk at prices that it is almost impossible for small family dairy farms to compete with.

But New England farmers are a scrappy lot. Many are also responsible stewards of the land -- a tradition that has been passed along for more than a century in some cases. This combination has farmers in pursuit of ways to manage cow manure in ways that can contribute to their farm's bottom line.

To be able to accomplish that and help mitigate climate change at the same time has got to be a good idea. (GW)

A refreshing idea for barnyard odor

Methane digester may reenergize dairies, if only farmers can afford them

By Tara Ballenger
Boston Globe
July 6, 2009

W hen Deerfield farmer Peter Melnik heard about a machine that would make energy from cow manure, he was immediately intrigued.

Not only would using it make his dairy farm more environmentally friendly, the technology could bring in extra cash by converting methane, an odorous and potent greenhouse gas, into electricity that could be sold to the regional power grid.

The machine, called a methane digester, has been popular in Europe since the 1970s, but the idea is just catching on in the United States. Six farms in Vermont have digesters that produce electricity, and Melnik is hoping to be the first Massachusetts farmer to install the machinery.

But the crash of wholesale milk prices, to about half of what they were a year ago, may put this green innovation out of the reach of many independent New England farmers.

The machines come with a $1.7 million price tag, so Melnik has spent nearly two years devising a way to finance the investment. He has received some grant money and hopes to get more, but he will need a large loan, borrowing against a farm that is seeing its dairy revenue plummet.

Melnik joined with four other Massachusetts farmers who want to install digesters to apply for grants and share resources. Last month, they were awarded a $34,800 grant from the state Department of Agricultural Resources. It did not make much of a dent in the overall cost, however.

“It’s a long-term commitment, and [borrowing] a million dollars per farm is a lot,’’ Melnik said. His farm, Bar-Way, milks 250 cows; the other four are similar in size.

Most of the 135 digesters in the United States are used on dairy farms, but there are none in Massachusetts, in part, Melnik said, because technology and grants are geared to bigger farms that can foot the bill for the installation and operating costs of large-scale digesters.

Agriculture is not the only source of methane. Landfills, natural gas leaks, wetlands, and melting Arctic permafrost all add to the problem.

But if all farms worked to reduce methane emissions, it would have a significant impact on global warming, said Ruth Varner, research assistant professor at the Climate Change Research Center of the University of New Hampshire.

“Any way that we can reduce methane emissions is important,’’ Varner said.

Methane’s role in the atmosphere is not as well understood as that of carbon dioxide, she said, but scientists agree that methane traps heat at least 20 times more efficiently than carbon dioxide does. Though it stays in the atmosphere only 12 years, compared with 100 for carbon dioxide, it is still considered to have a long life.

In Vermont, six farms sell energy from their methane digesters to Central Vermont Public Service through Cow Power, a 13-year-old program that businesses and residents can opt into by paying 4 cents extra per kilowatt hour on their electricity bills. The 4 cents, plus the wholesale cost of the electricity, goes back to the farmers.

At Green Mountain Dairy in Sheldon, Vt., Bill Rowell has been turning manure into electricity for two years. The floor of the barns where his 1,500 Holsteins eat and sleep is mechanically scraped, and the manure is channeled into an underground tank, where heat and bacteria produce a gas that is used to turn an electrical generator.

After 21 days in the tank, the remaining manure is separated into solids and liquids, with the liquid flowing to a nearby lagoon and the solid manure dried and used for bedding for the barn or sold as compost.

The digester will pay for itself in about four more years, Rowell said. Meanwhile, finances are too tight to consider other green projects.

“Milk prices are half of what they were last year,’’ Rowell said. “If you have another project that’s a drag on the farm, you can’t really sustain it, and we’re having to recognize that.’’

In Swanton, Vt., Earl Fournier is getting help to reduce the methane emitted when cows burp, another major agricultural source of the gas. Yogurt company Stonyfield Farm is sponsoring a program that helps 15 farmers feed cows flax high in Omega-3 fatty acids, which, according to scientists working with Stonyfield, reduces the methane produced through belching. Fournier’s cows produced 18 percent less methane on the flax.

“I have children; I have grandchildren,’’ Fournier said. “Their future is important, and what we do is going to have a huge impact on their future.’’

Growing power

2009-07-05T17:21:00.010-04:00

I met Will Allen many years ago when I was working at the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative. That's just about the time when he was thinking about building urban greenhouses. We were speaking at a conference on community building although I can't quite remember where it was held. I do remember Will's amazing presence. I remember him being a very imposing, large man -- tall and fit with an intense gaze. Once engaged in conversation, I was taken aback by his gentle manner that conveyed a sense of confidence whose source was his vision for city farming.

A lot of people talk about the critical role urban agriculture must play in the creation of sustainable communities. Will is making it happen and in the process is demonstrating most effectively that we have more options than we think. He is an inspiration. (GW)

Street Farmer

By Elizabeth Royte
New York Times Sunday Magazine
July 5, 2009

Will Allen, a farmer of Bunyonesque proportions, ascended a berm of wood chips and brewer’s mash and gently probed it with a pitchfork. “Look at this,” he said, pleased with the treasure he unearthed. A writhing mass of red worms dangled from his tines. He bent over, raked another section with his fingers and palmed a few beauties.

It was one of those April days in Wisconsin when the weather shifts abruptly from hot to cold, and Allen, dressed in a sleeveless hoodie — his daily uniform down to 20 degrees, below which he adds another sweatshirt — was exactly where he wanted to be. Show Allen a pile of soil, fully composted or still slimy with banana peels, and he’s compelled to scoop some into his melon-size hands. “Creating soil from waste is what I enjoy most,” he said. “Anyone can grow food.”

Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.

And this is why Allen is so fond of his worms. When you’re producing a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food in such a small space, soil fertility is everything. Without microbe- and nutrient-rich worm castings (poop, that is), Allen’s Growing Power farm couldn’t provide healthful food to 10,000 urbanites — through his on-farm retail store, in schools and restaurants, at farmers’ markets and in low-cost market baskets delivered to neighborhood pickup points. He couldn’t employ scores of people, some from the nearby housing project; continually train farmers in intensive polyculture; or convert millions of pounds of food waste into a version of black gold.

With seeds planted at quadruple density and nearly every inch of space maximized to generate exceptional bounty, Growing Power is an agricultural Mumbai, a supercity of upward-thrusting tendrils and duct-taped infrastructure. Allen pointed to five tiers of planters brimming with salad greens. “We’re growing in 25,000 pots,” he said. Ducking his 6-foot-7 frame under one of them, he pussyfooted down a leaf-crammed aisle. “We grow a thousand trays of sprouts a week; every square foot brings in $30.” He headed toward the in-ground fish tanks stocked with tens of thousands of tilapia and perch. Pumps send the dirty fish water up into beds of watercress, which filter pollutants and trickle the cleaner water back down to the fish — a symbiotic system called aquaponics. The watercress sells for $16 a pound; the fish fetch $6 apiece.

Onward through the hoop houses: rows of beets and chard. Out back: chickens, ducks, heritage turkeys, goats, beehives. While Allen narrated, I nibbled the scenery — spinach, arugula, cilantro.

If inside the greenhouse was Eden, outdoors was, as Allen explained on a drive through the neighborhood, “a food desert.” Scanning the liquor stores in the strip malls, he noted: “From the housing project, it’s more than three miles to the Pick’n Save. That’s a long way to go for groceries if you don’t have a car or can’t carry stuff. And the quality of the produce can be poor.” Fast-food joints and convenience stores selling highly processed, high-calorie foods, on the other hand, were locally abundant. “It’s a form of redlining,” Allen said. “We’ve got to change the system so everyone has safe, equitable access to healthy food.”

Propelled by alarming rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity, by food-safety scares and rising awareness of industrial agriculture’s environmental footprint, the food movement seems finally to have met its moment. First Lady Michelle Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack have planted organic vegetable gardens. Roof gardens are sprouting nationwide. Community gardens have waiting lists. Seed houses and canning suppliers are oversold.

Allen, too, has achieved a certain momentum for his efforts to bring the good-food movement to the inner city. In the last several years, he has become a darling of the foundation world. In 2005, he received a $100,000 Ford Foundation leadership grant. In 2008, the MacArthur Foundation honored Allen with a $500,000 “genius” award. And in May, the Kellogg Foundation gave Allen $400,000 to create jobs in urban agriculture.

Today Allen is the go-to expert on urban farming, and there is a hunger for his knowledge. When I visited Growing Power, Allen was conducting a two-day workshop for 40 people: each paid $325 to learn worm composting, aquaponics construction and other farm skills. “We need 50 million more people growing food,” Allen told them, “on porches, in pots, in side yards.” The reasons are simple: as oil prices rise, cities expand and housing developments replace farmland, the ability to grow more food in less space becomes ever more important. As Allen can’t help reminding us, with a mischievous smile, “Chicago has 77,000 vacant lots.”

Allen led the composting group to a pair of wooden bins and instructed his students to load them with hay. “O.K., you’ve got your carbon,” he said. “Where are you going to get your nitrogen?”

“Food waste,” a young man offered, wiping his brow. Allen pointed him toward a mound of expired asparagus collected from a wholesaler. As the participants layered the materials in a bin, Allen drilled them: “How much of that food is solid versus water weight?” “Why do we water the compost?” The farmers in training hung on every word.

If Allen at times seems a bit weary — he recites his talking points countless times a day — he comes alive when he’s digging, seeding and watering. His body straightens, and his face brightens. “Sitting in my office isn’t a very comfortable thing for me,” he told me later, seated in his office. “I want to be out there doing physical stuff.”

Which includes basic research. Warned by experts that his red wrigglers would freeze during Milwaukee’s long winter, Allen studied the worms for five years, learning their food and shelter preferences. “I’d run my experiments over and over and over — just like an athlete operates.” Then he worked out systems for procuring wood chips from the city and food scraps from markets and wholesalers. Last year, he took in six million pounds of spoiled food, which would otherwise rot in landfills and generate methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Every four months, he creates another 100,000 pounds of compost, of which he uses a quarter and sells the rest.

Uncannily, Allen makes such efforts sound simple — fun even. When he mentions that animal waste attracts soldier flies, whose larvae make terrific fish and chicken feed, a dozen people start imagining that growing grubs in buckets of manure might be a good project for them too. “Will has a way of persuading people to do things,” Robert Pierce, a farmer in Madison, Wis., told me. “There’s a spirit in how he says things; you want to be part of his community.”

Allen owes part of his Pied Piper success to his striking physicality and part to his athlete’s confidence — he’s easeful in his skin and, when not barking about nitrogen ratios, incongruously gentle. He told me about his life one afternoon as we drove in his truck, which was sticky with soda and dusted with doughnut powder, to Merton, a suburb of Milwaukee where Growing Power leases a 30-acre plot. “My father was a sharecropper in South Carolina,” Allen said. “He was the eldest boy of 13 children, and he never learned to read.” In the 1930s, he moved near Bethesda, Md. “My mother did domestic work, and my father worked as a construction laborer. But he rented a small plot to farm.”

A talented athlete, Allen wasn’t allowed to practice sports until he finished his farm chores. “I had to be in bed early, and I thought, There’s got to be something better than this.” For a while, there was. Allen accepted a basketball scholarship from the University of Miami. There, he married his college sweetheart, Cyndy Bussler. After graduating, he played professionally, briefly in the American Basketball Association in Florida and then for a few seasons in Belgium. In his free time, Allen would drive around the countryside, where he couldn’t help noticing the compost piles.

“I started hanging out with Belgian farmers,” Allen said. “I saw how they did natural farming,” much as his father had. Something clicked in his mind. He asked his team’s management, which provided housing for players, if he could have a place with a garden. Soon he had 25 chickens and was growing the familiar foods of his youth — peas, beans, peanuts — outside Antwerp. “I just had to do it,” he said. “It made me happy to touch the soil.” On holidays, he cooked feasts for his teammates. He gave away a lot of eggs.

After retiring from basketball in 1977, when he was 28, Allen settled with his wife and three children in Oak Creek, just south of Milwaukee, where Cyndy’s family owned some farmland. “No one was using that land, but I had the bug to grow food,” Allen said. As his father did, Allen insisted that his children contribute to the household income. “We went right to the field at the end of the school day and during summer breaks,” recalled his daughter, Erika Allen, who now runs Growing Power’s satellite office in Chicago. “And let’s be clear: This was farm labor, not chores.”

Allen grew food for his family and sold the excess at Milwaukee’s farmers’ markets and in stores. Meanwhile, he worked as a district manager for Kentucky Fried Chicken, where he won sales awards. “It was just a job,” he said. “I was aware it wasn’t the greatest food, but I also knew that people didn’t have a lot of choice about where to eat: there were no sit-down restaurants in that part of the city.”

In 1987, Allen took a job with Procter & Gamble, where he won a marketing award for selling paper goods to supermarkets. “The job was so easy I could do it in half a day,” he says now. That left more time to grow food. By now, Allen was sharing his land with Hmong farmers, with whom he felt some kinship after concluding that white shoppers were spurning their produce at the farmers’ market. Allen was also donating food to a local food pantry. “I didn’t like the idea of people eating all that canned food, that salty stuff.” When he brought in his greens, he said, “it was the No. 1 item selected off that carousel — it was like you couldn’t keep them in.”

After a restructuring in 1993, P&G shifted Allen to analyzing which products sold best in supermarkets. He was good at that too: “I won sales awards six times in one year.”

Driving across his Merton field, Allen smiled. Suddenly, I got it: Allen was a genius at selling — fried chicken, Pampers, arugula, red wrigglers, you name it. He could push his greens into corporate cafeterias, persuade the governor to help finance the construction of an anaerobic digester, wheedle new composting sites from urban landlords, persuade Milwaukee’s school board to buy his produce for its public schools and charm the blind into growing sprouts. (“I was cutting sprouts in the dark one night,” Allen said, “and I realized you don’t need sight to do this.”)

After parking his truck at the field’s edge, Allen made an arthritic beeline for a mound of compost. “Oh, this is good,” he said, digging in with his hands. “Unbelievable.” He saluted a few volunteers, whom he had appointed to pluck shreds of plastic from the compost under the hot noonday sun. He turned to scan the field, dotted with large farm-unfriendly rocks.

The rocks gave me pause: didn’t millions of Americans leave farms for good reason? The work is hard, nature can be cruel and the pay is low; most small farmers work off-farm to make ends meet. The appeal of such labor to people already working low-wage, long-hour jobs — the urban dwellers Allen most wants to reach — is not immediately apparent. And there is something almost fanciful in exhorting a person to grow food when he lives in an apartment or doesn’t have a landlord’s permission to garden on the roof or in an empty lot.

“Not everyone can grow food,” Allen acknowledged. But he offers other ways of engaging with the soil: “You bring 30 people out here, bring the kids and give them good food,” he said, “and picking up those rocks is a community event.”

Of course, if rock picking or worm tending — either here or in a community garden — doesn’t attract his Milwaukee neighbors, it’s easy enough for them to order a market basket or shop at his retail store, which happens to sell fried pork skin as well as collard greens. “Culturally appropriate foods,” Allen calls them. And the doughnuts in his truck? “I’m no purist about food, and I don’t ask anyone else to be,” he said, laughing. “I work 17 hours a day; sometimes I need some sugar!”

This nondogmatic approach may be one of Allen’s most appealing qualities. His essential view is that people do the best they can: if they don’t have any better food choices than KFC, well, O.K. But let’s work on changing that. If they don’t know what to do with okra, Growing Power stands ready to help. And if their great-grandparents were sharecroppers and they have some bad feelings about the farming life, then Allen has something to offer there too: his personal example and workshops geared toward empowering minorities. “African-Americans need more help, and they’re often harder to work with because they’ve been abused and so forth,” Allen said. “But I can break through a lot of that very quickly because a lot of people of color are so proud, so happy to see me leading this kind of movement.”

If there’s no place in the food movement for low- and middle-income people of all races, says Tom Philpott, food editor of Grist.org and co-founder of the North Carolina-based Maverick Farms, “we’ve got big problems, because the critics will be proven right — that this is a consumption club for people who’ve traveled to Europe and tasted fine food.”

In 1993, Allen, looking to grow indoors during the winter and to sell food closer to the city, bought the Growing Power property, a derelict plant nursery that was in foreclosure. He had no master plan. “I told the city I’d hire kids and teach them about food systems,” he said. Before long, community and school groups were asking for his help starting gardens. He rarely said no. But after years of laboring on his own and beginning to feel burned out, he agreed to partner with Heifer International, the sustainable-agriculture charity. “They were looking for youth to do urban ag. When they learned I had kids and that I had land, their eyes lit up.” Heifer taught Allen fish and worms, and together they expanded their training programs.

Employing locals to grow food for the hungry on neglected land has an irresistible appeal, but it’s not clear yet whether Growing Power’s model can work elsewhere. “I know how to make money growing food,” Allen asserts. But he’s also got between 30 and 50 employees to pay, which makes those foundation grants — and a grant-writer — essential. Growing Power also relies on large numbers of volunteers. All of which perhaps explains why other urban farmers have not yet replicated Growing Power’s scale or its unique social achievements.

So no, Growing Power isn’t self-sufficient. But neither is industrial agriculture, which relies on price supports and government subsidies. Moreover, industrial farming incurs costs that are paid by society as a whole: the health costs of eating highly processed foods, for example, or water pollution. Nor can Growing Power be compared to other small farms, because it provides so many intangible social benefits to those it reaches. “It’s not operated as a farm,” said Ian Marvy, executive director of Brooklyn’s Added Value farm, which shares many of Growing Power’s core values but produces less food. “It has a social, ecological and economic bottom line.” That said, Marvy says that anyone can replicate Allen’s technical systems — the worm composting and aquaponics — for relatively little money.

Finished with his business in Merton, Allen sang out his truck window to his plastic-picking volunteers, “Don’t y’all work too hard now.” The future farmers laughed. Allen predicts that because of high unemployment and the recent food scares, 10 million people will plant gardens for the first time this year. But two million of them will eventually drop out, he said, when the potato bugs arrive or the rain doesn’t cooperate. Still, he was sanguine. “The experience will introduce those folks to what a tomato really tastes like, so next time they’ll buy one at their greenmarket. And when we talk about farm-worker rights, we’ll have more advocates for them.”

At a red light on Silver Spring Drive, Allen stopped and eyed the construction equipment beached in front of a dealership. “Look at that front-end loader,” he said admiringly. “That thing isn’t going to sell.” He shook his head and added: “Maybe we can work something out with them. We could make some nice compost with that.”

Elizabeth Royte is the author of “Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle over America’s Drinking Water.”

Working toward energy independence

2009-07-05T09:29:00.007-04:00

If national energy independence is a realistic goal, it can only be achieved by developing and nurturing strong regional interdependencies that acknowledge and design for the synergistic complementarity of renewable energy sources. Who knows, success at the national level might be an incentive for the U.S. and other countries to take another look at the world-around elecgtric grid proposed by Bucky Fuller. (GW)

A global clean energy New Deal

By John Guerrerio
Energy Examiner

July 3, 2009

The opportunity to shape a global clean energy New Deal is taking shape. Countries across the globe have pumped billions into their respective economies to help recovery efforts; an international climate agreement structurally led by the U.S. can create a regulatory framework that paves the way for the necessary six-fold increase in investment needed to grow renewables to 40% share of the power generation.

Only the initial stimulus in the industry will come from government funds; if market conditions take over guided by an energy policy highlighting domestic renewable sources, America can both lead the global clean energy revolution and develop energy independence.

Transitioning toward a position where renewables are mass-marketed for utility-scale integration requires predictable and stable policy. 50% by 2050 would require that kind of investment and growth in order to bring down domestic emissions and bring up renewable energy's power generation share to half of all domestic energy consumed.

Climate change mitigation efforts and energy security improvements are born from the same policy framework. Drafting an national energy policy should be part of a larger plan of working toward energy independence; living off of energy created right here on our own soil.

Working toward energy independence requires policy that adds renewable sources of power to the ETS; this may serve as a catalyst for plug-in EVs and reduce our overall imports of petroleum. By expanding wind energy resources, we can then give ourselves the option of controlling emissions from coal. Replacing coal-fired power plants with wind farms and turning offshore drilling rigs into wind turbine platforms both show better potential for renewables to both keep up as the population expands, reduce international competition, lead an economic growth industry into the 21st century, and reduce overall carbon emissions. Our recent domestic efforts can simply slowball along or they can fast track and serve as a model for other countries to follow. The speed of that will depend upon how much instability, conflict, and resources truly remain in the world's oil markets.

Last year, toward the beginning of the financial tsunami, before it truly began swelling, the International Energy Agency put out a guide on principles for effective energy policies. At stake are numbers like 450 ppm and 40 billion metric tons of global CO2 emissions and 20 million barrels of oil per day and the percentage of renewable energy's share in global power generation. The numbers shift, but policy should guide an industry as integral as energy; policy that is aligned with sustainable global principles.

IEA is working toward a clean and secure energy future for America, but also believes societal action comes about from effective policy being put in place; a policy that fosters private investment over long-term investment windows. The correct policy timed with the right market directional winds can produce conditions that will aid in renewables being fast-tracked into the mainstream. Those winds have yet to blow.

A global climate treaty, or clean energy New Deal, will allow the global energy market to transition more easily to more sustainable methods. Right now, it seems that developing and industrial nations remain divided over certificates of responsisbility. In addition, BRIC countires, or Brazil-Russia-India-China, are non-OECD, or non-Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Key measurements of emission reduction usually separate the stabilization of emission into OECD emissions and non-OECD emissions. Other measurements esewhere show a significant increase in non-OECD emissions over the next two decades and should be a cause for concern, that means if clean energy is to have a significant impact on global emissions, it is necessary that China, India, Russia, and Brazil join any cooperational agreements where emissions are going to be reduced.

Drafting a global energy treaty aligned with sustainable principles will create a global energy partnership designed to improve technological efficiencies, GDP figures, and environmental quality. To try to expand the energy industry rather than struggling to continue for control in the shrinking fossil fuel arena.

Quoting a few more OECD and IEA figures again says that a 40% share of renewables would yield a reduction in emissions that will result in atmospheric concentrations of CO2 stabilizing at 450 ppm. It seems like somewhere between 450-550 ppm is where international bodies are headed in terms of agreement. What does an internatinal treaty of 450 ppm mean in the business community; a 40% share for renewables is what it will mean.

Under a 40% renewables share scenario, wind grows from 1-9%; hydrogen pops into the picture at 1%; solar and geothermal share 4%; biomass and waste grow from 1-5%; hyrdo-electric grows to 22%; nuclear to 18%; natural gas shrinks to to 18%; oil falls to 2%; and coal use drops to only 21% of global electricity generation. In this scenario, dams to create hydro-electric power are considered part of the 40% renewables. This happens by 2030; if it proves to work well, extended out to 2050.

This buildup of the renewable energy sector is mostly in the form of grid applications. As the electricity supply is increased and cleaned, room will be made for an EV rollout, complete with the newly fuel-efficient, muscle-car designs of the past.

Stabilizing emissions using regional resources can provide a policy path forward; one in which the whole world can embrace. Improving standards of living globally through sustainable energy development is key to stabilizing energy markets and producing less global conflict overall. Policy is aligning with public opinion and the direction of business, and that direction is toward clean energy. 2008 was a good year for renewable energy investments, in spite of the crisis; over $150 billion was invested in clean energy globaly. 2009 has slowed down tremendously with the intensified Recession and lack of available capital for lending, but $183 billion of the $787 billion stimulus is slotted for sustainable energy investments.

Conditions are ripe for a global clean energy New Deal to take shape. Domestic legislation is moving forward, and U.S. government grants and loans are available to finance clean energy initiatives. The financial crisis created conditions whereby countries around the world injected stimulus packages into their economies; many of these packages had clean energy components. This global injection together with an opportunity for an international climate treaty agreement is what might bring 2009 clean energy investment levels back up to levels where investors take over and turn over the profits necessary to finance the buildout of assets to 50% of the total global energy use. The United States can lead that charge.

“We don’t need to have a million dollars to improve our environment”

2009-07-04T05:08:00.005-04:00

The environment and environmental quality have always been relevant to people of color living in cities.

The environmental movement has not.

Early in its history the U.S. environmental movement was, for the most part, viewed as being the exclusive domain of affluent white suburbanites in search of "feel-good" cause. Environmentalists seemed more concerned with the plight of endangered snails and beetles than they were with fellow humans who were suffering under the weight of poverty and political injustice.

When I embraced the environmental movement back in the late 60's, I was roundly criticized by my African American classmates who by that time considered the movement to be not only irrelevant but counterproductive to the civil rights movement. Calls for "limits to growth" didn't appear to offer any options for poor folks here and around the world to achieve any measure of economic equality with the already rich and powerful.

The connections between environmental quality, personal health, quality of life, renewable energy and green jobs has begun to change that. (GW)

In Public Housing, Talking Up the Recycling Bin

By Mireya Navarro
New York Times
July 4, 2009

Wearing a purple sweatsuit and leaning on a cane, Gloria Allen, 82, was hobbling down a hallway in a public housing project in Morningside Heights, knocking on doors and shouting, “Recycling education!”

There was no answer at the next apartment, but as soon as she detected movement inside, Ms. Allen, a retired printing-company worker, began her pitch.

“Please come out, baby,” she purred. “Please come out so we can educate you on how to recycle.”

The typical neighborhood environmentalist is often pictured as young and affluent, the kind of person who can afford a hybrid car and screen-printed hemp fabrics. But at General Grant Houses, a sprawling public housing development off West 125th Street in Manhattan, the eco-conscious are mainly people like Ms. Allen and Sarah Martin, who as leaders of the residents’ association fret as much about backed-up pipes as they do about recycling.

Proselytizing on the issue in housing projects is an enormous challenge but crucial, environmentalists say, given the incentive to cut back on energy and garbage disposal costs and a housing authority’s power to impose recycling rules building by building.

In New York, the incentive may be greatest of all. Only 17 percent of the city’s household waste makes it into recycling bins, and New York has the largest public housing system in the country, with 2,600 buildings, 174,000 apartments and more than 400,000 residents in five boroughs.

Yet the effort initiated by Ms. Allen and Ms. Martin originated as a grass-roots crusade of their own.

Margarita Lopez, the city housing agency’s environmental coordinator, said that residents who step up and organize the efforts defy cynical clichés about public housing. “There are people who think we’re not able to do this, who look at public housing as second-class citizens,” she said. “People would be surprised about how in tune the residents are.”

Polls show that concern about the environment is sometimes broadest in low-income communities because residents bear the brunt of problems like air pollution.

Ms. Allen and Ms. Martin say they see recycling as a way to address the health and quality-of-life issues associated with trash, including the emissions from abundant garbage-truck pickups.

“If we could reduce the amount of garbage in our community, it would reduce the diesel in the air,” said Ms. Martin, 72, a former medical assistant and school food preparation manager who wears hoop earrings under a baseball cap.

So she and Ms. Allen, who each live alone but have 6 children, 14 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren between them, have taken time from their full plate of tenant complaints to introduce, or reintroduce, the development’s 4,500 denizens to recycling, building by building.

While recycling is required by law, it had failed to take root at General Grant because the bins were not conveniently located and residents found it easy to ignore recycling signs, the women say.

Education is crucial, they insist, so they recruit volunteers and train them in which kinds of metal, glass and plastic items can be recycled. Then they guide them from door to door, distributing color-coded bags as they impart the fundamentals to neighbors who can be welcoming, indifferent or hostile.

“It’s not easy,” Ms. Martin said. “It’s not like you slap a flier on a door and say: ‘Recycle. It’s the law.’ It takes time, patience and energy.”

Some residents refuse to budge when Ms. Allen and Ms. Martin knock. And some object to their campaign. During one of their rounds, they were berated by a neighbor who insisted that recycling bins would attract vermin and should not be placed in front of the buildings.

“People are going to put garbage in there,” the neighbor warned.

But many readily embrace the effort. “This saves public housing work and money and it contributes to the general hygiene,” said Jose Morales, 51, an unemployed plumber and widower with two children who correctly chose a green recycling bag when Ms. Allen tested him with a flattened cereal box.

On other environmental fronts, efforts are under way by the city housing authority to make the apartment units more energy-efficient, using federal stimulus money to replace old boilers, water heaters and appliances. More than two dozen resident “green committees” have also been formed to help with projects like planting trees and recruiting workers for green jobs.

The recycling project at General Grant Houses got under way in 2007 under the auspices of the Morningside Heights/West Harlem Sanitation Coalition, a partnership that was founded in 1994 when residents of Grant and nearby co-ops realized they shared the same problems, from uneven trash collection to substandard grocery stores.

Ms. Martin and Joan Levine, an 80-year-old former teacher from Morningside Gardens, a six-building co-op just across the street on Amsterdam Avenue, are the coalition’s co-chairwomen.

Ms. Levine, who wears her gray hair in a Beatles bob and carries a handbag made of recycled juice box labels, said she was motivated partly by a resolve to confound stereotypes. “I’ve heard comfortable white middle-class people say, ‘Oh, public housing. They’ll never recycle. They don’t care,’ ” she said. “That really galled me because that wasn’t the case.”

Two years into the recycling program, General Grant Houses has five buildings down, one in training and three more to go. It has also evolved from a grass-roots effort into a pilot program with city and state financing that the city housing authority plans to expand to other residential projects.

Ms. Martin and Ms. Allen report promising results in the five buildings that are already recycling. Each now produces at least 10 fewer bags of trash a day, they said. Residents no longer leave mousetraps or car tires in recycling bins, as they did in the past when the city instituted recycling without an education program.

As president and vice president of the residents’ association, the two women also organize collections of electronic waste, from computers to TV sets, and lead workshops on topics like nontoxic cleaning products. Next on their agenda is finding a way to pay a stipend to resident monitors who will make sure that only recyclables go into the bins.

While they have to plead with the city to fix broken door locks and drafty windows, Ms. Martin said, “recycling we can control.”

“We don’t need to have a million dollars to do that and improve our environment,” she said.

VIDEO

China's tradeoff: Less coal, more nukes

2009-07-03T07:03:00.005-04:00

China is serious about reducing its global carbon footprint. The world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide has been challenged to balance its aggressive economic development agenda -- which has been highly dependent on coal -- with its commitment to significantly reduce those emissions.

China's leaders have responded with an ambitious alternative energy program that includes massive deployments of both onshore and offshore wind farms. The program also calls for a nearly ten-fold increase in nuclear power plants. (GW)

Nuclear power to rise 10-fold by 2020

China Daily
July 2, 2009

China is planning for an installed nuclear power capacity of 86 gigawatts (gW) by 2020, up nearly 10-fold from the 9 gW capacity it had by the end of last year, two people familiar with the matter said.

The revised target for nuclear power is part of the government's efforts to increase the share of alternative energy in the predominantly coal-based energy mix.

The goal, which is part of an alternative energy development roadmap covering 2009-20, seeks to have at least 12 gW of installed nuclear power capacity by 2011, the sources said.

The plan "will call for the government to accelerate nuclear power development in coastal provinces and autonomous regions, namely Liaoning, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangxi, Jiangsu, Shandong and Hainan," the sources said.

In order to achieve the goal, the government will also set up a "reasonable number of nuclear power plants in inland provinces in Jiangxi, Anhui, Hunan and Hubei", they said.

The target, which the people said had still not been finalized, was substantially bigger than earlier goals.

China, the world's second-largest power market, now has 11 working nuclear reactors, producing 9.1 gW as of the end of last year.

The country, which had previously planned to have 60-70 gW of nuclear power capacity by 2020, or about 5 percent of the total anticipated capacity then, had 22.9 gW of nuclear power capacity under construction as of last year.

China is now adding more than 24 reactors, which includes five plants scheduled to start construction this year.

According to the draft alternative energy development stimulus plan, the government is also planning to have 150 gW of installed wind power capacity by 2020, of which 30 gW will come from offshore wind farms, the people said.

Installed wind power capacity should reach 35 gW by the end of 2011, of which 5 gW will come from offshore wind farms, according to the draft plan.

China, which is now the fourth largest wind power producer in the world, had 12.17 gW in installed capacity as of the end of last year.

It plans to build seven huge wind farms with a minimum capacity of 10 gW each by 2020, Shi Pengfei, vice-president of Chinese Wind Energy Association, said earlier this week.

The seven bases, once completed, will have a combined capacity of around 120 gW, according to Shi.

Construction of these bases, which is spread across six provinces, would require an investment of around 1 trillion yuan, the official said.

The industry would attract investment worth 2.97 trillion yuan by 2011, creating 5 million jobs, according to the draft.

And, total investment in the sector would touch 13.5 trillion yuan and create 20 million jobs by 2020, it outlined.

China National Nuclear Corp, the biggest nuclear power operator in the country, China Guangdong Nuclear Power Holding Co Ltd and China Power Investment Corp, the parent company of the Hong Kong-listed China Power International Development Ltd, are currently the only players in the nuclear power sector.

Bringing the web and books closer together

2009-07-02T05:02:00.001-04:00

As a kid I was fascinated by astronomy and cosmology -- a genuine geek. In the early sixties the discovery of quasi-stellar radio sources (precursors to black holes) created quite a buzz among professional astronomers and amateur geeks. I spent many a winter Saturday morning (summer Saturday's were reserved for baseball) going back and forth between Kay's Book Store and the Cleveland Public Library searching for any books that may have existed on the topic.

Well someday there may be a web page for every book that has ever been published. If that idea excites you, you're probably as big a geek as I am. (GW)

The library that never closes

By Bobbie Johnson
Guardian
July 1, 2009

The Open Library hopes to unite the net and the printed word by creating a web page for every book. Bobbie Johnson talks to the audacious project's leader.

Ambitious archiving projects by the Open Library and Google will provide easy access to millions of books online.

The internet's relationship with books, it is fair to say, has been a tumultuous one. Ever since the digital revolution started changing our relationship with information, the printed word – one of the most successful technologies in history – has been on the back foot.

Amazon has altered the face of the industry twice – first in the 1990s by changing the way books are sold and then, more recently, the way they are consumed, with its Kindle electronic book reader. Google has caused its own earthquake in the print world with its Book Search scheme – a plan to suck the text of millions of books into its search engine that has raised the hackles of publishers and authors alike.

Talk to workers at either of these technology companies and there is a feeling of technological inevitability: that the printed book is a stepping stone in the evolution of information, and now lies ready to be devoured by its hi-tech successors.

Not everybody thinks that way, however, including the Open Library – a project with an audacious goal that it hopes can bring the web and books closer together.

The scheme is to create a single page on the web for every book that has ever been published; an enormous, searchable catalogue of information about millions of books. It is still in beta, but already more than 23m books are in its system, drawing information from 19 major libraries and linking to the text of more than 1m out-of-copyright titles.

That is admirable work for just a handful of staff at the library, an arm of the non-profit Internet Archive (which itself has the vast objective of trying to keep a historical record of the web for future generations). But with information about books already being processed by hugely popular websites such as Google and Amazon, the question remains – why bother?

George Oates, the newly installed project leader, says it's a way to preserve book records for history and, crucially, make the information usable by anybody.

"It's remarkably difficult to unify this information," she says, when we meet at the Internet Archive building in San Francisco's leafy Presidio park, a former military outpost that is, rather aptly, historically preserved. "As much as the libraries attempt to have similar standards and orders, there are always gotchas and nooks and crannies that have to be worked out."

The locus position

More than simply bringing together cold lists of books from isolated libraries, however, she also believes OL can breathe life into books by grabbing information from around the internet.

"Imagine books more as a networked object, rather than a single entity," she suggests. "We start with this kernel and then we see what we can pile onto it … it's a locus for all the information about a book that's on the wider web."

In a way, it's like a Wikipedia for printed material (indeed, it runs on wiki software, allowing anyone to add their own notes on different books or editions). And Oates, who took over the project this year, is hoping to turn it from a skilful attempt to ingest vast amounts of data into something that is useful to ordinary people.

The site can potentially pull information from all over the web – retailers, reviews, book clubs, forums and enthusiast sites – as well as from social networks that already exist for bibliophiles, such as LibraryThing or GoodReads.

"It is about sharing as openly as possible – and that's really liberating … we're almost a non-threat to the rest of the web, because we're not keeping the property."

Oates knows a thing or two about sharing objects online. For the past few years, the Australian was one of the leading lights at the popular photo website Flickr – spending four years as lead designer, before moving to a role that included projects such as the Commons: a scheme to use Flickr as a window on publicly held photography collections.

Journey of discovery

The lessons from her previous work are carrying through to the project in obvious ways – a redesign is being mooted to make more palatable to those who don't have a degree in library science. But she is also hoping to introduce some of sense of serendipity or exploration to the records.

"Right now it's about search and retrieve, and there's no sense of browsing or skipping around," she says. "In the future we can start to do queries like 'show me all the popular subjects that were written about in 1934'. You can start to trend that over time, look at peaks and troughs in areas of interest. The data's all there, but it's about making connections that are inferred by the data itself – I'm really excited by that."

Propagating that idea could be made more difficult by Google, which last week revamped its book search to make it a more sleek and social experience. Oates says she doesn't see that in adversarial terms, however.

"The book search on Google is awesome – they've thrown a shitload of computing power at it, and you can see books that mention things, websites that mention those books and books on a map. It's useful, but it's really clinical." Oates won't say any more about Google, but her colleagues are less reticent. Peter Brantley, the archive's director of access, has been a vocal critic of the company's plans – even going as far as calling Google's attempt to gain exemption against future copyright claims as "disgusting".

There is certainly a tension between the two schemes, partially because their intentions are so similar while their approaches are so different. But, while Google has the backing of many publishers, who see the chance to make some extra cash in the deal, one crucial ally for Open Library may be the academic world.

If the scheme gives researchers and students the chance to use Open Library in their work – referring to an OL page as a citation source, or building a bibliography using its tools – they could get a core audience that spreads the concept. Plus, of course, the idea is that Open Library will remain just that – open – for ever. "The longevity of the work that we're doing is a bit of a culture shock, and a really curious solution to provide," she says. "How do we write stuff to disk that's going to be retrievable in 1,000 years? This is a very new problem for my brain – not that the systems I've worked on before would go up in smoke, but this is designed explicitly not to."

Neutral success?

Still, regardless of long-term vision, the scheme's success is not clear cut. Despite its meek appearance, the library world is big business – and it is not clear that big libraries are particularly keen on giving away the keys to anyone just yet. Organisations such as the British Library have their own projects to archive their vast collections for the web.

Still, Open Library is hoping that it can succeed by being a neutral space, without agendas or commercial imperatives.

"I want it to be a place where people can love books and contribute information about books," Oates says. Perhaps, in the face of the onslaught of digital information, the printed word has found a new way to evolve.

The angels are in the details

2009-07-01T04:55:00.004-04:00

How serious are European Union leaders about combating climate change? Not content with simply setting renewable energy targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the European Commission has developed a template designed to gather details about how each member state will actually achieve their renewable energy commitments within the next decade.

This is another example of EU leadership on climate change that we're hoping U.S. leaders might take notice of and emulate. (GW)

EU issues template for national renewables plans

EurActiv
1 July 2009

The European Commission yesterday (30 June) adopted a template for national renewable energy action plans (NREAPS), requiring member states to detail how they intend to reach their national targets for the share of renewables in their energy mix.

The action plans are a feature of the new Renewables Directive, which entered into force last month, setting a binding target to source 20% of the EU's energy consumption from renewables by 2020 (see EurActiv LinksDossier). Member states must now fill in the template with sectoral targets for the share of renewable energy in transport, electricity, heating and cooling, and offer a trajectory for getting there.

The EU executive hopes that the common template will guarantee the completeness of the national plans, while making them comparable with each other and future implementation reports that member states will need to submit every two years.

European Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said the template would help member states to produce a "credible plan which in turn will help the EU to meet its targets on time".

A progress report published in April showed that the EU was falling short of its 12% renewables target for 2020, and the Commission had initiated 61 legal proceedings since 2004 (EurActiv 30/04/09).

The 40-page document asks member states to specify what policies they plan to enforce on biomass resources and on implementing sustainability schemes for biofuel. National action plans will also have to include details on "enabling measures", such as revision of building codes, information campaigns, support schemes and the planned use of flexibility measures.

Member states will also have to state what steps they are taking to cut red tape on administrative procedures and to spell out any "unnecessary obstacles". To further help the integration of renewable electricity into the grid, infrastructure development plans should be reported, including reinforcement of interconnections with neighbouring countries.

Each member state will now have a year until 30 June 2010 to submit its plan to the Commission, which will assess whether it reflects national targets and trajectories. Should the EU executive rule a plan insufficient, it can start infringement proceedings against the member state concerned.

The wind industry welcomed the template, saying it would allow for the anticipation of new wind energy installations. "What the filled-out template will do is to effectively provide the wind energy sector with 27 national roadmaps for its development up to 2020, and show the expected share of the different technologies year on year," said Christian Kjaer, chief executive of European Wind Energy Association (EWEA).

Kinship networks that span the centuries

2009-06-30T04:41:00.003-04:00

Philosophy matters. Ideas influence how we think about the world -- whether we are consciously aware of our world views or not. Many believe that western philosophy is out of sync with the notion of humanity being in harmony with Nature. The discoveries and writings of Newton, Malthus and Darwin among others contributed to the creation of a world view that celebrates the virtues of economic growth fueled by competition and a belief that the "fittest" deserve to survive (even if that is not what Darwin actually said).

One thing in particular that western philosophies are virtually devoid of is language suggesting a commitment to future generations. In China, leaders are looking inward to build their own arguments about the wisdom of sustainability based on intergenerational linkages that extend backward and forwards in time . (GW)

How Confucianism could curb global warming

China openly debates the role of Eastern thought in sustainability.

By James Miller
Christian Science Monitor
June 26, 2009

Kingston, Ontario

Now here's a curveball to secular Western policy experts: China's intellectuals are openly debating the role of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism in promoting the Communist Party's vision of a harmonious society and ecologically sustainable economic development.

Nowhere is the question of what to do about the environment more vital than in China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases – especially because scientists agree that climate change disproportionately affects the poor and the disenfranchised and that climate change will affect future generations far more than the present.

Yet the general impression of China's role in issues relating to environment is one of foot-dragging because it hasn't bought into a Western model to address it.

But Pan Yue, China's vice minister for environmental protection, is calling for China to capitalize on traditional Chinese religions in promoting ecological sustainability.

He says, "One of the core principles of traditional Chinese culture is that of harmony between humans and nature. Different philosophies all emphasize the political wisdom of a balanced environment. Whether it is the Confucian idea of humans and nature becoming one, the Taoist view of the Tao reflecting nature, or the Buddhist belief that all living things are equal, Chinese philosophy has helped our culture to survive for thousands of years. It can be a powerful weapon in preventing an environmental crisis and building a harmonious society."

And this just might work.

As The New York Times recently reported, China is in the midst of a transformation to cleaner forms of energy.

Although much of China's energy needs are still met by inefficient, coal-fired power stations with poor track records in terms of emissions, China has begun to invest heavily in cleaner coal technology in an effort to improve efficiency and reduce emissions.

Because of this, the International Energy Agency reduced its estimate of the increase in Chinese emissions of global warming gases from 3.2 percent to 3 percent even as the same agency raised its estimate of China's economic growth. China is managing to increase its economic output at a greater rate than its emissions.

This is good news for everyone.

But buried innocuously in the middle of this report was the startlingly frank statement of Cao Peixi, president of the China Huaneng group, China's largest state-owned electric company.

When asked about his company's decision to invest in more expensive but cleaner technology he replied: "We shouldn't look at this project from a purely financial perspective. It represents the future."

The $64,000 question facing economists and politicians across the world is how to make decisions that take into account the big picture beyond the "purely financial perspective."

This is a hard question for Western economic and political theorists to answer, because their theories are based on the Enlightenment view of the self as an autonomous, rational individual.

But how are we to make decisions that take into account the interests of those who have not yet been born?

Being respectful to the interests of past and future generations is key to the Confucian view of the self and groups. To the question, "Who am I?" the Confucian answers, "I am the child of my parents and the parent of my children."

Confucianism begins from the proposition that human beings are defined by kinship networks that span the centuries. From this perspective the interests of the individual are bound up with the interests of the kinship group as it extends forward and backward across the generations.

This will be a key factor in the way China handles present and future environmental issues.

Consider the views of Jiang Qing, a leading Confucian intellectual. According to a recent report by Daniel Bell, a political theorist at China's Tsinghua Univeristy, Mr. Jiang proposes a political system that can take into account the interests of those who are typically ignored in modern democracies, such as foreigners, future generations, and ancestors.

"Is democracy really the best way to protect future victims of global warming?" he asks.

As China assumes a greater leadership role on the world stage, we can expect the emergence of a variety of models of sustainable development rooted in a plurality of cultural traditions, including Confucianism.

The time when Westernization was the only credible model of development is over.

James Miller is a professor of Chinese studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Queen's University, Kingston. He is currently researching the relationship between religion, nature, and modernization in China.

Rooftop revolutionaries

2009-06-29T04:53:00.005-04:00

Back in 1970 Gill Scott-Heron recorded his classic "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised". Positive, creative examples of how to build a sustainable society are cropping up all over - literally. Some of these are being covered by the mainstream media. Even when they are reported they are rarely, if ever, connected -- to each other or to the larger sustainability movement.

But the design revolution is underway. It's up to all of us who are participating in it to reach out, connect with and support each other and take advantage of all possible venues to communicate what's going on.

That will create more than a buzz. It will generate levels of synergy capable of creating a world that works for everyone. (GW)

Urban Farming, a Bit Closer to the Sun

By Marian Burros
New York Times
June 17, 2009

THIS summer, Tony Tomelden hopes to be making bloody marys at the Pug in Washington, D.C., with tomatoes and chilies grown above the bar, thanks to the city’s incentives for green roofs.

Mr. Tomelden, the Pug’s principal owner, says he’s planting a garden to take advantage of tax subsidies the city offers in his neighborhood if he covers his roof with plants.

“If I can do something in my corner for the environment, that seemed a reasonable thing to do,” he said. “Plus I can save money on the tomatoes.”

There won’t be bloody marys at P.S. 6 on New York’s Upper East Side, but one-third of its roof will be planted with vegetables and herbs next spring for the cafeteria. The school is using about $950,000 in city funds that it has put aside, and parents and alumni are providing almost a half-million dollars more.

“For the children, it’s exciting when you grow something edible,” said the school’s principal, Lauren Fontana.

Aeries are cropping up on America’s skylines, filled with the promise of juicy tomatoes, tiny Alpine strawberries and the heady perfume of basil and lavender. High above the noise and grime of urban streets, gardeners are raising fruits and vegetables. Some are simply finding the joys of backyard gardens several stories up, others are doing it for the environment and some because they know local food sells well.

City dwellers have long cultivated pots of tomatoes on top of their buildings. But farming in the sky is a fairly recent development in the green roof movement, in which owners have been encouraged to replace blacktop with plants, often just carpets of succulents, to cut down on storm runoff, insulate buildings and moderate urban heat.

A survey by Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, which represents companies that create green roofs, found the number of projects its members had worked on in the United States grew by more than 35 percent last year. In total, the green roofs installed last year cover 6 million to 10 million square feet, the group said.

Steven Peck, its president, said he had no figures for how many of the projects involved fruits and vegetables, but interest is growing. “When we had a session on urban agriculture,” he said of a meeting of the group in Atlanta last month, “it was standing room only.” Mr. Peck said the association is forming a committee on rooftop agriculture.

Tax incentives have accelerated the plantings of green roofs, particularly in Chicago, which has encouraged green roofs for almost a decade. The Chicago chef Rick Bayless uses tomatoes and chilies he grows atop his restaurant Frontera Grill to make Rooftop Salsa.

New York State has subsidies both for roofs with succulents spread out over a thin layer of soil and for edible plants covering a smaller area. A proposed amendment to New York City’s tax abatement for some roof projects would include green roofs. Most roof gardeners aren’t in it for the money, though.

After her Lower East Side co-op refurbished the 1,000-square-foot roof of its six-floor walk-up, Paula Crossfield persuaded fellow board members to spend $3,000 to put a 400-square-foot garden on it. They built planters and paved part of the roof so people can walk easily among the plantings.

Ms. Crossfield, managing editor of the Civil Eats blog, about sustainable agriculture, is paying for the seeds and will do the harvesting, sharing the bounty with her neighbors. (She and her husband live on the top floor.)

In the process, she estimates she carried up 500 of the 1,500 pounds of soil they bought and put in planters.

“My decision to start a garden is an extension of my work,” Ms. Crossfield said. “Growing my own food helps me understand better what I write about: how food gets to our table, the difficulties it entails.” It’s not all about agricultural policy, she added.

“The bottom line,” she said, “is that I harbor a secret desire to be a farmer, and my way of doing that is to use what I have, which is a roof.”

Two weeks ago Ms. Crossfield transplanted seedlings from her apartment onto the roof: golden zucchini, oakleaf lettuce, brussels sprouts, butternut squash, watermelon, rainbow chard, cucumbers, nasturtiums, calendula, sunflowers, amaranth greens, tomatoes and herbs.

In San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, Maya Donelson has filled planter boxes with vegetables on a 900-square-foot patch of roof at the Glide Memorial Church. For the last two years she has managed the Graze the Roof Project at the church’s Glide Center, a neighborhood social service provider.

The food goes to the center’s volunteers and children in the neighborhood who work in the garden one day a week and learn to cook what they grow.

“I’ve never had one kid who hasn’t wanted to get his hands dirty,” said Ms. Donelson, who studied architecture and environmental design. “They are willing to try anything if they see it growing and pull it out of the ground. We juiced the purple carrots and the kids drank that.”

Sustainable South Bronx, a nonprofit environmental organization, said it will help Alfred E. Smith High School plant a roof garden and has helped a company in Hunts Point put strawberry plants on its roof. (The owner likes strawberries, an official of the group said.)

One of the more ambitious projects is a 6,000-square-foot roof farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which will grow food for local restaurants and shops.

Ben Flanner, a transplanted Wisconsinite who’s running it, said he became fascinated with organic agriculture and was set to take an internship on a rural farm but then had a change of heart.

“I wanted to farm but I didn’t want to leave the city,” he said.

Mr. Flanner was lucky to find an environmentally aware company — Broadway Stages, a stage and lighting company — that wanted a green roof on one of its buildings. It paid to prepare the roof for planting and agreed to let him grow food on it. Mr. Flanner and his partner, Annie Novak, did the planting and will be able to keep all the profits from their organic vegetables.

“People are knocking on my door to buy the stuff,” he said. Andrew Tarlow, a partner in four nearby restaurants, including Marlow & Sons, has agreed to buy anything Mr. Flanner grows.

The roof cost $6,000 to prepare, according to Lisa Goode, who with her husband, Chris, owns Goode Green, a company that designs edible roof gardens. There are at least 1,000 seedlings planted in 16 beds, each about 60 feet long.

“A smaller roof would cost more per square foot,” she said. Mr. Flanner’s costs for the garden itself were less than $2,000, but Ms. Goode said it will take more than one roof for him to make a living.

“This is sort of a pilot to see if it can become a viable business model because he isn’t going to make any money from this,” she said. “If we can get the owner to do more roofs, he can then make a profit.”

Not long ago, edible rooftop gardeners were less likely to be thinking about sustainable food systems or the environment.

Lee Utterbach wanted to recapture summers on his grandmother’s farm. But there was no land around his house in the Mission district of San Francisco. So when he bought the building where he lives and runs a photo equipment rental shop, he turned the roof into a vegetable and flower garden. Since the roof slopes, all the planting was done along its perimeter. Some of it, like the rosemary, is so well established, it hangs over the front of the building.

Reaching the roof means a trip through the kitchen window, then up an incline. A small ladder takes visitors to his wife’s greenhouse and a hot tub, a deck , a composting toilet and the future guest room. In one area that his wife, Aly, describes as his “man cave,” Mr. Utterbach watches his 17-inch TV screen from a comfortable chair.

“I was probably eight or nine years ahead of the curve when I built this,” he said. “I just enjoy watering plants and digging in the soil.”

Peter Bergold, a neuroscientist who teaches at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn, was also inspired by the past. Memories of the first asparagus and carrots he ate from a garden years before led him to start growing produce on the roof of his landmarked brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, six or seven years ago.

“That was my epiphany,” he said of the sweetness he was trying to recapture. “I assumed asparagus grew with a rubber band around them.”

Environmental awareness came slowly. “One of the things that got me interested,” he said, “was that between global warming and the thermal bubble of cities you can start things much earlier so you have a much longer growing season.”

Another benefit gardeners get from planting well above the ground is that they face fewer pests.

But roof gardeners also have to think about winds that can knock over tender vines. And while concentrated heat on top of city buildings can help tomatoes ripen, it also means more frequent watering, even if irrigation requires lugging watering cans up stairs.

Though rooftop gardens go back at least to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the modern green roof movement has made its way here from Europe, where for years government policies have encouraged or required green roofs.

The government benefits take into account the fact that gardening on the roof requires much more preparation than gardening on terra firma.

First, it must be determined whether the roof can support the weight of the soil, the plants and the water. It may need to be retrofitted. Barring that, gardeners can place planters around the perimeter, which is generally its strongest part.

The containers can be almost anything: ready-made planters; boxes made of reclaimed wood, old milk cartons, children’s wading pools. A screen at the bottom holds in a lightweight substance, like packing peanuts for bulk, topped with a barrier fabric so the soil can’t go through. Potting soil, mixed with ingredients to lighten it, is put on top.

When gardens are planted directly on the roof, a waterproof membrane is laid down first, followed by insulation and a root barrier. (A guide to roof gardening is available at baylocalize.org.)

All this work can be off-putting for landlords. Five years ago, Ms. Crossfield said, the owner of an apartment building on Sixth Avenue in the West Village told one of his tenants to get rid of a garden she had planted.

“He told the woman to take it off the roof,” she said, “because he didn’t see any benefit in it.”

That’s not so likely these days.

“Several years ago you might have seen a certain amount of resistance,” said Miquela Craytor, executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, “but now people are coming to us saying they want one.”

Playing for and Paying for Change

2009-06-28T10:10:00.010-04:00

Change Is Gonna Come

Playing for Change

It has been a very rainy and dreary month of June here in Massachusetts. That trend continues today -- but with the promise of sunshine later this week. If you're experiencing a similar dreary Sunday (or even if you aren't) why not consider a good movie or some great music?

I posted a story on the incredibly inspiring project called "Playing for Change" about six months ago. The creators have now produced a CD that includes performances from around the world from both well-known professionals and equally talented but less well-known street performers.

Do yourself a favor and check it out. By the way, the video takes a while to load. You may want to pause it right after starting and then hit the play button after about a minute to avoid stops and starts.

If it you're more in the mood for a movie, how about giving "Food, Inc." a try? It's a documentary about factory food. I realize that summer and the last thing you probably want is to feel guilty about those grilled hamburgers and ribs you're planning to consume on the 4th of July, but watching this film just may inspire you to celebrate a healthy and sustainable Independence Day.

Go easy on the buttered popcorn.(GW)

2009-06-28T09:16:00.002-04:00

Food, Inc.

"Food, Inc.'' serves up some righteous indignation

By Wesley Morris
Boston Globe
June 19, 2009

As you might gather from the title, Rob Kenner’s documentary “Food, Inc.’’ is, in part, concerned with the extent to which industrial food production has replaced farming in America. It’s part activism, part school-assembly lecture. If you’re told where most fast-food chains’ ground beef comes from, how much E. coli is in it, how much ammonia has been added to kill the E. coli, and how many illegal immigrants the meatpacking companies recruit, underpay, and leave prey to police raids, will you still want to eat that double cheeseburger? The filmmakers are guessing no. The whole thing is as subtle as a watermelon in a bowl of Cheerios but necessary, nonetheless.

Kenner takes us up and down the food industrial complex. He has hidden-camera footage of a hog-farm kill floor and pastoral images of Joel Salatin and his employees working on his modest, seemingly all-natural farm in the Shenandoah Valley. He tags along as Barbara Kowalcyk, a food-safety advocate and mother who lost a young son to toxic beef, makes the rounds on Capitol Hill. The film photographs Eduardo PeÃ±a, a union organizer in North Carolina, as he watches cops bang down the doors of Mexicans who work in Smithfield Foods’ slaughterhouse. We meet Carole Morison, a poultry producer for Perdue until she refused to make expensive Perdue-mandated upgrades to her chicken house that, she says, would have kept the birds in total darkness (by her own admission, they had it pretty awful in the first place). This is food and its vast discontents.

The movie covers all the bases, from possible government corruption to the bad consequences of good economic sense. With regard to the latter, Kenner finds a family of four whose mother says she buys fast food because its cheaper than fresh food. There’s not much room to argue with her. Almost everywhere, a pound of broccoli costs more than anything on the McDonald’s value menu. Her husband is a diabetic whose diet, like a lot of Americans’, includes foods loaded with high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener that helps use up the country’s abundant government-subsidized corn crops. But the mother is in a bind since they have to pay for his medical needs, in addition to their other expenses, while praying his poor health doesn’t cost him his job as a trucker.

One imagines a movie devoted almost entirely to the hard issue of eating and class, how processed foods are cheaper than fresh food. Of course, some nights the drive-thru is the easiest thing on earth. None of the heroes in “Food, Inc.’’ - and I’m sure Kenner finds all his human subjects heroic - is likely to buy that excuse. This isn’t a movie terribly big on listening to why you just ate that Baconator.

Folks like Salatin, Kowalcyk, and Gary Hirshberg, the founder and CEO of Stonyfield Farm yogurt (it’s organic), have specific but complementary points of view. And Kenner allows them their righteousness. In college Hirshberg was a hippie environmentalist, and he explains that his environmentally conscious company’s relationship with Wal-Mart (there’s a funny scene of some doofy Wal-Mart executives visiting a Brattleboro dairy farm) isn’t selling out. He’s doing good for everybody. He’s probably right, but like many of the people in this film, he so knows he’s right.

The movie itself is cleanly made and features the sort of imaginatively conceived graphic design that, lately, a lot of documentary directors use in lieu of actual filmmaking. A more visually expansive, soul-chilling, and lecture-free cousin of “Food, Inc.’’ is Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s “Our Daily Bread,’’ a 2005 documentary that requires you to think for yourself about your relationship to what you eat. “Food, Inc.,’’ while more optimistic, doesn’t care for art or letting you make up your own mind. Time, it says, is of the essence.

Most of what Kenner tells us has been documented in other films and published to famous effect in Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation’’ and the books of Michael Pollan, both of whom appear in the film and consulted with Kenner on its making. That activist spirit extends all the way to the closing minutes, which feature a pamphlet-load of advice (“Plant a garden,’’ “Buy locally’’) while Bruce Springsteen sings “This Land Is Your Land’’ (I know, I know). As a blunt instrument of civic, moral, and social responsibility, the movie works, anyway. Releasing it during the summer seems like an iffy idea, though. This is a school-trip movie if ever there was one.

"We are creating the world we want"

2009-06-27T04:59:00.003-04:00

The Design Revolution that Bucky Fuller predicted is humanity's only chance to save itself from itself is unfolding in a variety of ways, places and at various scales. Individuals are making a difference by making important lifestyle changes with regard to the food they eat, what they drive and how they power their homes. State and federal governments are providing incentives that support these efforts in addition to the construction of utility-scale renewable energy projects like windfarms.

Perhaps the most encouraging signs that we just might make it are efforts that are taking place at the municipal level. When entire communities pull together toward the common goal of sustainability, the resulting synergies are likely to be that much more profound. (GW)

Auto-ban: German town goes car-free

By Tony Paterson
The Independent
June 26, 2009

Vauban hopes to forge a model community without that great staple of modern life – the car. Now the sound of birdsong has replaced the roar of traffic and children can play in the street

The Germans may have given the world the Audi and the autobahn, but they have banished everything with four wheels and an engine from the streets of Vauban – a model brave new world of a community in the country's south-west, next to the borders with Switzerland and France.

In Vauban, a suburb of the university town of Freiburg, luxuriant beds of brilliant flowers replace what would normally be parking outside its neat, middle- class homes. Instead of the roar of traffic, the residents listen to birdsong, children playing and the occasional jingle of a bicycle bell.

"If you want to have a car here, you have to pay about €20,000 for a space in one of our garages on the outskirts of the district," says Andreas Delleske one of the founders and now a promoter of the Vauban project, "but about 57 per cent of the residents sold a car to enjoy the privilege of living here." As a result, most residents travel by bike or use the ultra-efficient tram service that connects the suburb with the centre of Freiburg, 15 minutes away. If they want a car to go on holiday or to shift things, they hire one or join one of the town's car-sharing schemes.

Because it has no cars, Vauban's planners have almost completely dispensed with the idea of metalled roads. Its streets and pathways are cobbled or gritted and vehicles are allowed in only for a matter of minutes to unload essential goods. Being virtually car-free is only the start of what has been hailed as one of Europe's most successful experiments in green living and one which is viewed increasingly as a blueprint for a future and perhaps essential way of living in an age of climate change.

Vauban is a southern suburb of Freiburg and home to 5,300 people. Its elegant, weather-boarded, four-storey homes are painted in subtle tones of blue, yellow and red or left as natural wood. They have wide balconies and large French windows that look out on to quiet, park-like gardens. The overall impression is of being stuck in a never-ending IKEA advertisement.

But if the district's surface texture is eminently middle class, an eco-revolution is bubbling beneath the surface. The windows of all the homes are triple-glazed. An intricate ventilation system fitted with heat exchangers ensures that apartments are kept constantly topped-up with fresh air at room temperature, even when the windows are shut. Most homes are powered by solar panels and smart co-generator engines that run on wood chips which provide domestic heating and electricity for lighting and appliances. One of the consequences is that most of Vauban's homes generate a surplus of electricity and sell what they don't need to the power companies that run the national and regional electricity grids.

With their 35cm thick walls, the homes are so well insulated that the temperature inside is directly affected by the number of people in each apartment. "If it gets too cold in the winter, you have the choice of turning up the heating or inviting a couple of friends round to dinner," Delleske says. He is immensely proud of the fact that his 90sqm, four-roomed "Passive house," which is almost environmentally perfect, costs a mere €114 a year to heat. "Most people pay that kind of money for heating each month," he says. The "Passive house" has even managed to dispense with drains for the toilets and showers. The waste is reduced to compost in special biological toilets and shower and washing-up water is filtered and used to water the garden.

Word about the Vauban experiment is spreading. Each day, six or seven busloads of visitors roll up – parking on the outskirts, needless to say – to witness the suburb's environmentally friendly living. At the entrance, they are greeted by slogan in big letters that reads: "We are creating the world we want."

Yet the suburb's origins were very remote from such idealistic themes. It started life in 1937 as the Leo Schlageter army barracks, a collection of three-storey stone buildings to house Adolf Hitler's expanding Wehrmacht army. It was named after a German hero from the First World War who was executed by the French in 1923. At the end of the Second World War, the barracks were requisitioned by the French army and renamed Quartier Vauban, after a noted 17th century military architect. After Germany's re-unification, the French withdrew and the district was handed over to the city of Freiburg in 1994, to be promptly occupied by squatters.

Soon after, a group of ecologically minded and mostly middle-class people became interested in the quarter. Many had taken part in the anti-nuclear movement as students in the 1970s and 1980s. They set up the Forum Vauban, which began negotiating with the city government.

Vauban's founders explain that much of the eco-friendly technology that has gone into the complex was conceived and developed around Freiburg as an alternative to nuclear power. The upshot was the formation of a series of loosely structured housing associations which commissioned architects to design new and ecologically sustainable homes on the site. Most of the old Nazi-era barrack buildings were torn down and more than 60 architects were engaged to reconstruct Vauban. Its three- to five-storey buildings contain apartments of varying sizes and 80 per cent are privately owned. A four-bedroom unit costs about €250,000.

The project is a reminder of the strength of Germany's green movement. Freiburg's city government is run by a coalition of conservatives and Green Party councillors and the Greens hold the most seats. During the European elections, the Green Party won up to 60 per cent of the poll in Vauban's constituencies.

The district also bucks Germany's reputation for having one of the world's lowest birth rates: nearly 30 per cent of its inhabitants are aged under 18. Ute and Frank Lits moved to Vauban five years ago. Their children, aged six and 10, can walk out the front door of their four-bedroom apartment into a communal garden equipped with a playground and a wood-fired pizza oven. "We wanted to buy our own home and we liked the eco-friendly principles of the place," Mrs Lits said. "But the main reason is that Vauban is prefect for children. They enjoy the kind of freedom that it would be difficult to find in a normal town apartment." The couple owns a car, but neither mind having to park it in a communal garage eight minutes' walk from their home.

If Vauban's brave new world suffers from anything, it is its own peculiar brand of middle-class monoculturalism. Sitting outside a former Nazi barrack building that now functions as an organic restaurant selling ricotta-filled ravioli and ostrich meat, its is difficult to spot anyone who is non-European, old or poor.

Wolfgang Konradi, a youth worker who spent years working in less sophisticated urban areas before coming to Vauban, says the district's teenagers behave like normal people of their age. "The problem is mainly the parents, they go around expecting their offspring to be perfect citizens, but that's just not realistic," he laments. Ina, his wife, said that since having their son, she had learned to appreciate the advantages that Vauban offered for children. But she added: "It's very nice here, but a bit like living under a bell jar. I certainly wouldn't want to live here forever."

Nuclear energy gaining friends in Washington.

2009-06-26T04:58:00.006-04:00

The the Obama Administration is firmly committed to renewable energy and has made great strides in translating that commitment into tangible policies and programs. While most of the activity around renewables has been highly publicized, efforts to resuscitate the nation's dormant nuclear industry have been moving forward with little fanfare.

In fact, by seizing the opportunity to capitalize on public concerns about climate change nuclear energy industry leaders have successfully positioned nukes to play a prominent role in energy secretary Steven Chu's clean energy/climate change plans. (GW)

Duke Considering First New U.S. Nuclear Plant in 30 Years

by Laura Shin
Solve Climate
Jun 19, 2009

For the first time since the Three Mile Island meltdown, U.S. interest in nuclear power is heating up.

In southern Ohio yesterday, a coalition of energy companies, including Duke Energy, announced that it is considering ordering the nation's first new nuclear plant in more than 30 years.

Duke's group will have some competition: So far, 17 applications have been submitted to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission for 26 new reactors, reflecting how concern about energy supplies and climate change have changed the debate over nuclear power.

The plant discussed yesterday would be built near the site of an inoperative uranium enrichment plant in Piketown, about 100 miles east of Cincinnati. Duke's coalition, called the Southern Ohio Clean Energy Park Alliance, brings together nuclear companies USEC, Unistar and French AREVA, plus the Southern Ohio Diversification Initiative, a group working for the economic stability of the area.

They plan to seek funding from the Department of Energy, and they could find that federal support.

Nuclear energy has been gaining friends in Washington in recent months.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu is a strong supporter of nuclear power, and there has been discussion in Congress of financing new nuclear energy projects as the government's emphasis shifts toward cleaner sources of energy. The federal stimulus package proposed earlier this year initially offered a $50 billion loan boost for nuclear power, though that measure was dropped in the final negotiations.

The DOE is now preparing to award $18.5 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear facilities, and earlier this week, Chu announced $9 million for scholarships and grants for university research into nuclear energy.

“America’s leadership in nuclear energy research will be critical in addressing the country’s longterm energy independence and climate change goals," Chu said in announcing the scholarship program. He referred to nuclear power as an "important zero-carbon energy source.”

A look at nuclear construction under way around the world right now offers a cautionary tale, though.

A survey by analyst Mycle Schneider of the more than three dozen nuclear plants currently under construction found they long lead times, with plants taking over a decade to come online, and that about half ended up with construction delays and several had significant cost overruns. Finland's 3 billion Euro Olkiluoto-3 nuclear plant, which submitted environmental assessments in 1998 and saw the first concrete poured in 2005, was 1.5 billion Euros over budget by 2007.

In the U.S., while some state lawmakers have called for more nuclear power, they haven't been as quick amid the economic crisis to allow those project costs to be passed on to consumers, creating another funding challenge. That tripped up AmerenUE's plans for an Areva nuclear reactor in Missouri, where it wasn't allowed to raise its consumers' rates before the plant was completed. AmerenUE announced that it was suspending its Missouri nuclear plans in April.

Currently, nuclear power generated by the 104 existing reactors in 31 states accounts for 10 percent of all the installed electric capacity in the United States. That number jumps to 20 percent of the overall electricity supply and 75 percent of all carbon-free energy, according to Steve Kerekes, spokesperson for the Nuclear Energy Institute.

It's been years since a new nuclear plant was ordered, though, and there have been no new orders since before March 28, 1979, when a coolant leak led to a partial reactor core meltdown at the Three Mile Island Generating Station near Harrisburg, Pa. (More than 40 plants that had already been ordered were completed in the 1980s and ’90s.)

Kerekes says the lack of new construction isn't entirely attributable to the Three Mile Island meltdown.

“Certainly Three Mile Island had an influence on our industry, but the primary reason thus far is that we haven’t had to build new plants because we’ve been getting electricity from what we have,” he says.

He cites gains in efficiency and the flattening of demand:

“We have operated plants so much better and have done so over the last 15 to 20 years, increasing our electrical output by the equivalent of 29 reactors since 1990 from existing resources. We've increased our overall electrical output from 25 percent to 30 percent."

He also notes that new U.S. power plant construction in recent years has been for medium-sized natural gas plants, not from the kinds of coal and nuclear plants that create baseload electricity.

In terms of climate impact, nuclear power is negligible. One University of Wisconsin study determined that, per Gigawatt-hour, nuclear power emitted less than 2 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted by coal – and about the same amount as wind, geothermal and hydroelectric power.

The likelihood that the federal government will put a price on carbon emissions in the near future is also spurring companies like Duke to investigate nuclear energy as a source of future electicity. About 70 percent of Duke's power right now comes from coal, with 27 percent from nuclear, 2 percent from natural gas and oil, and 1 percent from wind and hydro combined.

"At this point, there’s uncertainty with how federal regulations will address greenhouse gases, so we've got to look for ways to serve our customers in the future – clean energy ways," says Rita Sipe, a Duke spokeswoman.

While nuclear power could cut the nation's greenhouse-gas emissions if it replaced coal plants, it still has waste issues throughout its lifecycle, from the uranium mines it relies on for raw materials to the disposal of its spent fuel, which remains hazardous for thousands of years.

A few environmentalists, notably the Greenpeace co-founder-turned-nuclear booster Patrick Moore and James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia theory that the earth is a super-organism, support nuclear for lowering greenhouse gas emissions. However, most environmental groups still question the risks nuclear power and its waste pose to the environment and humanity. Greenpeace outwardly opposes new nuclear plants.

Kerekes, meanwhile, envisions a wave of construction, with about 30 new nuclear plants being built in the United States over the next 20 to 25 years. The first four to eight of those he expects to come online between 2016 and 2018.

Laura Shin is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and other publications.

The largest centralized solar power production project on Earth

2009-06-25T04:42:00.001-04:00

I first posted a piece on Desertec in June 2007. Back then the project was better known as TREC (Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation). The basic concept then and now is to "put technology and deserts into service for energy, water and climate security". The idea of developing an international renewable energy network or grid makes sense as a way of addressing the the variability of solar and wind energy resources. Interconnect a large enough geographic area and you can be certain that the sun will be shining and the wind will be flowing somewhere within the system.

What appears to be different in this latest incarnation of the concept is the plan for European Union investors to develop solar resources in African nations. What made the original strategy so appealing was the fact (or at least the impression) that each participating nation would develop their own resources and contribute to supporting a supergrid that connected them all together. (GW)

Europe Looks to Africa for Solar Power

By Tom Zeller, Jr.
New York Times
June 22, 2009

NEW YORK — The European project known as Desertec is nothing if not ambitious.

It aims to harvest the sun’s energy — using a method known as concentrating solar power, or C.S.P. — from the vast North African desert and deliver it as electricity, via high-voltage transmission lines, to markets in Europe. Eventually, its backers say, it could satisfy as much as 15 percent of the European Union’s power needs.

The idea, which has been bouncing around for years, arises out of an alphabet soup of organizations, formal multinational partnerships and regional acronyms like TREC, for Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation; Eumena, or European Union, the Mediterranean and North Africa; the Union of the Mediterranean; and the Club of Rome.

As James Kanter reported in our Green Inc. blog, the project took a step forward last week when a consortium of German businesses announced plans to pursue financing and otherwise hammer out details for Desertec, which is expected to cost about €400 billion, or $555 billion.

Munich Re, the large German insurance company, is leading the charge to bring the concept to fruition, and a meeting is scheduled for mid-July to formalize the coalition, which includes companies like Siemens, Deutsche Bank and the energy giant E.On.

“The time now is perfect to start this initiative,” Alexander Mohanty, a Munich Re spokesman, said in an e-mail message Friday, “as climate protection has become an urgent issue and our economies need new impulses.”

Large-scale C.S.P. projects — essentially expansive fields of solar collectors, or mirrors, that concentrate rays from the intense desert sun to heat water, generate steam, drive turbines and produce electricity — are not revolutionary. Such projects have been undertaken in the U.S. Southwest, Spain and elsewhere.

This would take things to a whole new level, however, and as conceived, Desertec would be the largest centralized solar power production project on earth.

That such an ambitious, clean-energy megaproject should be taking a step forward, however incremental, might suggest that deep-pocketed investors have truly seen the writing on the wall with regard to legislated carbon abatement and the slow phase-out of fossil fuels.

In a collection of reactions gathered by Spiegel Online, several observers seemed to welcome the development.

“The project is sending a strong signal that investments in renewable energies don’t just make ecological sense,” wrote The Financial Times Deutschland, “they make economic sense as well.”

A reader at Green Inc. simply said: “Europeans need energy and have cash. Africans have sun and territory. It is quite logical to combine all this.”

But not everyone was convinced.

Some scratched their heads at the idea of spending billions of dollars to harvest sunlight and transmit electricity thousands of kilometers, when it can be produced increasingly efficiently in European backyards.

“It must once again be pointed out that the most successful method of harvesting solar power is with rooftop panels,” wrote the German daily Die Tageszeitung. “In just three to five years, power from the roof will be cheaper than electricity from the wall plug. The economic bar for desert power is, in other words, high. Solar power produced in a decentralized manner will likely always be the cheaper variety.”

The German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, meanwhile, quoted Frank Asbeck, the chief executive of SolarWorld, the largest German solar company, as saying, “Building solar power plants in politically unstable countries opens you to the same kind of dependency as the situation with oil.”

Or in the somewhat more blunt vernacular of a Green Inc. reader: “If this project is built, Europe will shortly become dependent on it, and the Islamic world will have a second, and much tighter, noose to add to the oil one.”

That Mr. Asbeck’s interests lie with a competing solar technology — photovoltaics — is of no small consequence, but there were still other critics who complained that the project smacked of Euro-imperialism — particularly given the history of resource exploitation on the African continent.

“Haven’t we already been here before?” wrote Agatha Koprowski at Green Inc. last week. Ms. Koprowski is a graduate student of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a resident, with her husband, of Morocco — one of the African countries likely to become a hub in the Desertec system.

“Europeans covet Africa’s wealth of natural resources,” she continued, “so they make economic investments for the benefit of Europeans and the detriment of Africans.”

Gerhard Knies, the coordinator of TREC and chairman of Desertec’s supervisory board, suggested by telephone Friday that all of these concerns were misplaced.

Ownership of the facilities, for example, would follow several different models, Mr. Knies said, but in every case, local needs would come first. The main obstacle, he said, is money, which is where European investors come in.

“They can go 100 percent on this source of electricity,” he said, referring to potential North African partners like Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt and Libya, “and there is no coupling to what they might build for export.”

As for political stability, Mr. Knies was dubious.

“Well, when you look at the Mediterranean region, the most unstable country is Italy,” he said, adding that in any case, the investment in large-scale energy projects in these areas would provide income, jobs and the creation of a new industry — all of which, Mr. Knies said, were “a contribution to stability.”

He also suggested that the additional transmission costs of such a project would be smaller than the gains associated with improved solar radiation in the African desert. The additional power yield, Mr. Knies said, would more than compensate for the cost of transmission to European markets.

Whether or not those economics pan out, and however realistic Mr. Knies’s portrayal of the mutual benefits that might accrue to the project’s member countries, the sheer size and scope of the Desertec plan seemed to stir passions far and wide last week.

An American organization supporting the perennial fringe presidential candidate, Lyndon LaRouche, for example, called Desertec — rather inexplicably — a “genocidal, Malthusian, energy plan.”

Setting aside such unhinged broadsides, Mr. Knies was philosophical — and suggested that critics of the plan were simply missing the larger implications of an international cooperative like Desertec.

“I think they overlook the positive side of this interdependence, which creates win-win situations for the participating sides,” he said. “And that is how neighbors become friends.”

Food or forests?

2009-06-24T05:20:00.003-04:00

Last year China announced a highly ambitious and laudable reforestation plan designed to halt desertification, address severe water shortages and help mitigate climate change. Unfortunately, it would appear that the plan has been derailed by a more immediate crisis: food shortages.

China is also experiencing one of the largest migrations (from the countryside to cities) in the history of humankind. When the government's massive industrialization effort intended to propel its economy into 21st century leadership is taken into consideration, it is clear that China is in the midst of a very tumultuous and unpredictable period -- with global implications.

If ever there was a time for new ways of thinking about and dealing with what appear to be conflicting priorities, this would be it. For example, might there be a role for the concept of permaculture, i.e. perennial agriculture including tree crops in China's future? (GW)

China suspends reforestation project over food shortage fears

Environmental restoration plan scrapped to grow crops as concerns increase over feeding world's largest population

By Jonathan Watts
Guardian.uk
June 23, 2009

Food shortage fears have prompted the Chinese government to suspend the reforestation of marginal arable land, a senior government official said today.

The sacrifice of a key environmental restoration project for crop production highlights the growing problem of feeding the world's biggest population as cities expand into farmland and urban residents consume more meat and vegetables.

Lu Xinshe, deputy head of the ministry of land and resources, said the country was struggling to hold the 120 million hectare "red line" considered the minimum land areas needed for food self-sufficiency.

With industrialisation eating into the countryside, he said the government would halt plans to restore arable land to nature.

"We will not plan any new large scale projects to return farmland to its natural state, beyond those that have already been planned," he was quoted as saying by the Reuters news agency.
Any change in the balance of food production causes unease in a country where the elderly still remember the devastating famines of the early 1960s that killed between 15 million and 40 million people.

But the decision to halt many environmental restoration programmes is likely to have a knock-on effect. The government has been compensating farmers in the north and west of China to give up farmland as a central pillar of its strategy to fight desertification and water shortages.

The end of ploughing helps stabilise the soil, while stopping irrigation alleviates water shortages.
Tree planting has also helped the country offset the increased emission of carbon dioxide from factories.

But food is the more immediate priority. By the end of last year, the amount of arable land in China had decreased to within 1% of the "red line."

Against the backdrop of rising global food prices, Chinese companies have bought the rights to farm swaths of land in the Philippines, Laos, Russia, and Kazakshstan. They have invested in biofuel crops in Zambia and the Congo. By one estimate there are now one million Chinese farmers in Africa.

But the government is committed to self-sufficiency, which requires the production of 500 million tonnes of grain a year. To maintain this level, prime minister Wen Jiabao has said the state would increase spending on agricultural production by 20%, well above inflation.

He has also asked advisers to recommend new areas where cultivation can be expanded. Among the areas suggested is the Sanjiang region in Heilongjiang, a protected wetland.

But as The Guardian reported last month, the pressure to industrialise the far western province of Xinjiang is likely to further erode food output, reducing the government's options. With industrialisation set to continue for decades, the shrinkage of land is likely to increase the pressure to use more fertiliser and genetically modified crops. A fifth of the nation's paddy fields now grow hybrid strains of rice, according to a report today by the Xinhua news agency.

You are more than you eat

2009-06-22T18:50:00.009-04:00

Sweden is getting serious about foods that that emit gasses. No, not those kind of gasses. I'm talking about greenhouse gas emissions. The Swedish government wants their citizens to think about how the food they consume is produced and to take their ecological footprint into consideration when making dietary decisions.

Advocates of eating locally-grown organic foods will find much to support their positions in a recently released European Union report on environmentally smart food choices. We need to dramatically reduce our consumption of meat and dairy products to avoid eating ourselves to a climatically unstable planet. The one surprise for me is the fact that rice makes the list of foods to consume less of. Methane is a by-product of its production. (GW)

Sweden promotes climate-friendly food choices

EurActiv
22 June 2009

Guidelines for climate-friendly food choices developed by the Swedish authorities recommend citizens to reduce their meat and rice consumption as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The first of their kind, the guidelines are now being sent out for reactions and inspiration from other EU countries.

Background:

According to the European Commission, the food and drink sector contributes to some 23% of global resource use, 18% of greenhouse gas emissions and 31% of acidifying emissions.

The European Environment Agency notes that agriculture puts most pressure on the environment during the food chain lifecycle, with beef and dairy production causing the highest emissions. Food processing is not seen as a significant contributor.

The main climate impact of the beef and dairy industry is methane produced by enteric fermentation from cattle. Methane is said to be over 20 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

A recent report by the Joint Research Centre shows that meat and dairy products contribute on average 24% to the environmental impact of total final consumption in the EU 27, while constituting only 6% of the economic value. The main improvement options identified lie in agricultural production and food management by households (avoidance of food wastage), and are related to power savings.

"Meat – beef, lamb, pork and chicken – is the food group that has the greatest impact on the environment," state the guidelines, jointly drafted by the Swedish National Food Administration and the country's Environmental Protection Agency.

The authorities note that Swedes' meat consumption has grown by an average ten kilos per person over the past ten years and now totals 65 kilos.

According to the World Bank, demand for food is expected to increase by 50% by 2050, and demand for meat by 85%, mainly as emerging economies like China and India become richer and adopt Western-style eating habits, rich in meat and dairy products.

The document, entitled 'Environmentally-smart Food Choices', recommend eating meat less often and in smaller quantities. "Try to exchange one or two meat dishes a week against vegetarian meals or decrease the quantity of meat," the document reads, explaining that such behaviour will lower people's climate-change footprint.

The document further lists various facts on the environmental impact of different foods. For example, one kilo of beef contributes up to 15-25 kilos of greenhouse gases - which is ten times more than the carbon footprint of the equivalent amount of chicken.

"Eating less meat, and making careful choices about what you eat, is therefore the smartest environmental choice you can make," the authorities state.

In addition to information on climate and the environment, the guidelines list the health aspects related to different foodstuffs, their recommended daily intake and the consequences of over-consumption. "With a few exceptions, healthy food choices can also go hand in hand with choices that are good for the environment," the guidelines read.

Foods covered include meat, fish, seafood, fruits, berries, starches, fats and even water. Recommendations range from eating seasonal, locally-produced fruits, vegetables and berries, avoiding bottled water, soda and palm oil and limiting rice consumption as its cultivation produces methane.

The Swedish authorities are the first in Europe to develop such recommendations. They will be sent out to other EU countries to guage reactions before being released.

"Provided there are no serious objections," the process should be completed within three months, the authorities noted, hoping that the guidelines will inspire authorities in other countries to follow Sweden's example.

"Consumers make important environmental choices when they are food-shopping, so they need a sound basis on which to make their decisions. Food production accounts for roughly a quarter of Swedish consumers' climate-impacting emissions, and also contributes to other harmful environmental effects, for example through the use of pesticides," said Inger Andersson, director-general of the National Food Administration.

Not near my air base

2009-06-22T05:46:00.004-04:00

By now everyone who follows the development of renewable energy technology in the United States is very familiar with the trials and tribulations of trying to site large-scale windfarms. Issues ranging from birds and bats to views and vistas have been the topic of challenges and lawsuits as individual turbines have grown in size and the number of turbines per project grow in order to achieve economies of scale.

Solar energy has, for the most part, has been able to avoid these kinds of controversies. That's in large part due to the fact that solar projects have tended to be scaled more towards individual use -- on the rooftops of homes and businesses where the electricity generated will be used.

However, there are some very large solar thermal projects on the board out west. Siting is proving to be as much an issue for them as 400 foot tall wind turbines. (GW)

Solar Project Meets Bigger Foe Than Cloudy Skies: The Air Force
Opposition to Plant Highlights Hurdles Facing Renewable Energy

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post
June 20, 2009

On a vacant piece of land near Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, the promise of solar energy has collided into the demands of military training. And a solar project that would have featured a vast field of mirrors, a molten-salt storage facility and a 600-foot "power tower" appears to be heading for defeat.

In 2007, a Los Angeles firm called SolarReserve proposed the construction of a $700 million solar thermal power plant, covering two square miles near the Nevada Air Force base, where the sun shines brightly virtually all year long. There aren't issues with wildlife, the company said. Moreover, it could hook up its solar-powered turbines to existing transmission lines left behind by a defunct mining operation.

But Col. Howard D. Belote, installation commander at Nellis, said this week that the plan won't fly and is urging the government to turn it down.

The Air Force's opposition demonstrates some of the conflicts and delays that could lie ahead as renewable-energy projects search for places to put big wind turbines or solar collectors, even in Western states where the federal government is a major landholder. SolarReserve has been negotiating with the Air Force for 18 months and has already revised its plans once to move the plant 25 miles away from the base, at the Air Force's suggestion.

The Nevada plant was supposed to be a showcase for SolarReserve: one of the largest solar plants in the world, using heat-transfer technology developed for space rockets by United Technologies. A field of mirrors would focus sunlight on a receiver on a tall tower, where it would heat the molten salt to 1,050 degrees Fahrenheit, much hotter than other solar plants using similar technology. The molten salt would then flow to a storage tank, where its heat would generate steam and power conventional steam turbines similar to those in coal plants.

By using the molten-salt method, the plant could store 16 hours of power supply, easing concerns about the ability of solar plants to provide power when it is dark or cloudy. It would have a capacity of 100 megawatts, enough to power about 50,000 homes.

"We're trying to build a facility that runs 24 hours a day," said Kevin B. Smith, SolarReserve's chief executive.

But Belote said the solar plant would compromise classified aspects of the Air Force's training range and would interfere with radar. He said the Air Force would tell the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management, which owns most of the land in the state, to reject the proposal. (The bureau controls more than 20 million acres of land with wind energy potential and more than 30 million acres with solar potential.)

SolarReserve officials "did a lot of [research] with publicly available tools," Belote said. "But when they came back for an official look the answer was, 'Man, that's still too close.' And because of the sensitivity [of information], I can't tell them why. . . . Unfortunately for them and us, there's stuff on the Nevada testing range we don't tell anyone about." Belote suggested they try another site, either 100 miles to the southeast or about 80 miles to the northeast, near the town of Mesquite.

Top executives at SolarReserve said they were upset and disappointed. They feel that the Air Force pointed them toward the second site before rejecting it. Moreover, the Nellis base boasts of its own photovoltaic panels -- the nation' largest solar photovoltaic power plant; on May 27, Belote hosted President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who toured the solar facility.

Obama "got a nice tour of the facility, but I expect he had not been informed that Nellis was resisting renewable-energy facilities in the surrounding area," Smith said. "The fact that Nellis AFB allowed someone to build a PV [photovoltaic] facility on the base and sell them the power is great, but they are hiding behind it while they try and stop other development in the region."

The Air Force has a history of balking at buildings near the 2.9-million-acre flight-training range in Nevada, which makes up 41 percent of the Air Force's total training acres worldwide. In the past, the service has objected to tall hotel projects in nearby Las Vegas and to wind turbines.

But SolarReserve's chief executive Smith said "we tried to make sure we had a site the Air Force wouldn't object to." The company's plan would place a lone solar-power tower below a 2,000-foot-tall mountain range that separates their location from the base. The base sits well above the height of the tower.

In addition, the project would create many construction jobs, Smith noted.

SolarReserve is still hoping it can prevail upon the Air Force to approve the site near Nellis and has appealed to members of Congress for help. Belote has arranged for classified briefings to explain his objections to select Senate staffers, and he has promoted the project to the mayor of Mesquite, a small town just on the Nevada side of the Arizona border, 87 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

"Our community is very, very interested in alternative energy and the thought of being green," said Mesquite Mayor Susan M. Holecheck. "Historically, our economic base has been gaming and tourism." Another solar company has already proposed a project using similar technology. Holecheck said the town would have to study whether a SolarReserve site would interfere with plans for moving the town's airport. And the Bureau of Land Management would also need to agree to provide land.

Smith hasn't had time to pursue the Mesquite idea. He said the Air Force just mentioned the alternative a month ago. "The difficulty with moving to a new site is you start over again," he said. "It is certainly something we can do if we fail at the current site but it will delay the project 12 to 18 months."

Post a Comment

The year of a long-beleaguered river

2009-06-21T08:35:00.008-04:00

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio during the fifties and sixties. Cleveland's Chamber of Commerce slogan was "The Best Location in the Nation".

Cynics called it "The Mistake By the Lake".

I remember when our mayor's hair caught fire when he attempted to cut the ribbon at the opening of a new factory with a blowtorch instead of a pair of scissors. I sat and shivered through Cleveland Indians games in the nearly-empty Municipal Stadium in late April as Lake Erie-effect snow flurries fell.

I was also there when the "Mighty Cuyahoga River" caught fire forty years ago. That probably did more than anything else to put us in the international spotlight.

It's nice to see that things have changed dramatically since then. (GW)

Tainted Cuyahoga River sees sporadic return of recreation

By Michael Scott
Cleveland Plain Dealer
June 14, 2009

This is one of a series of stories The Plain Dealer will print this year as a part of "The Year of the River," a recognition of the Cuyahoga River's return to health 40 years after it caught fire.

CUYAHOGA FALLS -- Mike Larkin's snub-nosed kayak has just been shot from an unseen underwater cannon.

The lightweight and slender one-man boat springs out from a craggy jumble of rocks, then appears to briefly hover above unruly waters.

When the little, red plastic craft smacks loudly into the frothy pool at the bottom of the rapids, Larkin whoops and waves his paddle. A few fellow kayakers holler their appreciation along with several whitewater watchers on a ledge high above the banks of the Cuyahoga River.

That's right, the Cuyahoga River.

That's right, whitewater kayaking.

And in The Year of the River -- marking the 40th anniversary of the June 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga and its ongoing ecological recovery -- Larkin's leap is much more than a brief but wild ride down Cuyahoga rapids.

It's also high-flying evidence of advances along a much lengthier journey: restoration of recreation on a river known mostly to outsiders for its fires than its waters.

Kayaking on the Cuyahoga River

While a work in progress (we're still reminded not to eat too many fish and not to ingest any water if we fall in), the return of recreation on the Cuyahoga has people excited.

"There are a lot of things you can do on this river -- this is just the most extreme," said whitewater kayaker David Hill, director of environmental safety for ParkOhio and unabashed river-recreation evangelist.

None are more spectacular than kayaking, however, in the rough-and-tumble middle section of the Cuyahoga, making it a destination for kayakers from around the region. In fact, an eighth-of-a-mile stretch near Cuyahoga Falls is considered expert-class (class IV) whitewater.

"We have geography here more extreme than the Niagara River -- over a stretch of 2.32 miles, the river falls over 208 feet," said Elaine Marsh of Friends of the Crooked River. "That's an unheard of drop in most of the Great Lakes region -- OK, maybe around Lake Superior, but not anywhere else around here."

That is why the Cuyahoga -- already designated a Heritage River along its entire length and a state Scenic River along 25 miles of its upper reaches -- is unique, Hill said.

"Sure, it's been the poster child for a number of years because of the Clean Water Act and the fires," Hill said. "But when you look at the Cuyahoga, you have to look at all the different facets of it.

"It's not characterized by one event -- or even just one type of environment."

Recreation returns

The Cuyahoga is best understood as a three-part river.

The upper reaches -- from the headwaters in Geauga down to Lake Rockwell near the city of Kent -- are mostly pristine, if slow and casual.

The middle section becomes wild, especially in rapids through Kent and Cuyahoga Falls and near the Gorge Dam in Summit County -- though the waters there also become more tainted by Akron's wastewater and suburban runoff.

And the lower end, where water quality and fish populations are improving dramatically in places like Cuyahoga Heights, remains urban and gritty, especially at the mouth.

On-water recreation there is limited to mostly boats and jet skis passing through the shipping channel near Lake Erie.

And it is that very lowest section -- the 6-mile-long shipping channel and steel-mill, oil-refinery-lined urban waterway that caught fire June 22, 1969 -- which many outsiders still imagine when they think of the Cuyahoga River.

But that was 40 years ago.

And, of course, that description was never true of the rural upper reaches of the river in Geauga and Portage counties, where it meanders lazily through marsh and forest.

And the middle section -- drastically less foul than it once was -- had always featured the rapids and riffles where Larkin and Hill and friends play all summer.

There are, of course, many natural parks along the nearly 100-mile river that have improved along with the quality of water in the river -- most notably the sprawling 33,000-acre Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

The park formed during the course of the Cuyahoga cleanup. President Gerald Ford signed the legislation that created Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area in 1974, and it was redesignated a National Park in 2000.

But there are others, from Headwaters Park in Geauga County where the Cuyahoga is born out of a series of small streams and swamps, to the Gorge Metro Parks in Summit County to the Ohio & Erie Canal Reservation in Cuyahoga Heights.

But while those parks and others allow visitors to experience the Cuyahoga from land, on-water activities are harder to find.

Fishing and boating

The general goal of the 1972 federal Clean Water Act was to bring America's waterways back from the brink of death toward being "fishable and swimmable." The Cuyahoga River is not there just yet but is getting closer, according to EPA standards.

It's certainly not swimmable -- except unofficially in the upper portions of the river. Even up there, however, there are no designated swimming holes, just canoers who turn into swimmers.

"This is probably the only place on the Cuyahoga where most people would consider swimming," said Kendra Hazlatt-Becker at Camp Hi Canoe Livery in Hiram.

But the Cuyahoga most certainly is fishable. Recent environmental reports have chronicled great numbers of healthy fish species (and the macro-invertebrates they feed upon) to the river.

For that reason, officials expect that the crucial middle portion -- from just north of Kent through Akron all the way up to Harvard Avenue in Cleveland --will meet U.S. EPA standards for aquatic life habitat (fish and bugs) in time for the river fire commemoration this month.

Even so, that 45-mile section continues to struggle with industrial pollution, sewage and suburban runoff.

And the Ohio EPA still advises against eating too many fish from portions of the Cuyahoga -- only one smallmouth bass caught anywhere on the river in Summit and Cuyahoga counties because of excessive mercury, for example. (To see the entire list, go to www.epa.state.oh.us/dsw/fishadvisory/waters/Cuyahoga.html)

Still, park officials and anglers will tell you that there is good sport fishing -- catch and release -- on the river.

Fly-fishermen line the riverbanks in the National Park just below the Ohio 82 bridge in Brecksville. In Summit County, the park district suggests Cascade Valley Metro Park and Deep Lock Quarry.

As for boating, the river still lacks a great number of public access points. You can put in at places in Mantua and Hiram in Portage and Burton Township in Geauga, where you can also rent a canoe or kayak.

Downstream, however, you will rarely see canoes or kayaks on the Cuyahoga -- even though it courses its way down the center of the gorgeous national park.

That's because up to 2 billion gallons of Akron sewage still end up in the river each year.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency filed a lawsuit this year seeking more than $100 million in penalties from the city, claiming that it had violated the Clean Water Act for the last 15 years.

Until that sewage is treated completely before reaching the river, it is unlikely that canoeing and kayaking would thrive in the park. In fact, the National Park Service "discourages using the river at this time, however, due to highly variable water quality."

But pioneers like Marsh and her husband do it, and so do others -- thrilled to boat on the river but cautious not to go in it.

It's a fitting contradiction for the crooked Cuyahoga.

But that recreation exists at all along a river with a legacy of filth and fire is evidence of how far the river has come in 40 years, and how far it has to go. It also is proof that we no longer consider the waterway as a place to dump things, but as a natural resource to enjoy.

"The recreational benefits of a river are exceedingly important in determining the value of the river to the people around it," Marsh said.

Weather Info For All

2009-06-20T04:50:00.001-04:00

It's easy to criticize weather forecasters as we try to reconcile their predictions with the weather events that actually unfold daily. Who hasn't muttered beneath their breath at some point after being caught in a rainstorm without an umbrella: "that's the job I want in my next life...must be nice to be paid and be wrong so often."?

Actually tools for weather monitoring and prediction have improved greatly over the years and, in fact, can be the difference between life and death for hundreds of thousands of people in regions like the Sub-Saharan Africa. (GW)

Mobile communications to revolutionize African weather monitoring

MarketWatch

June 18, 2009

The Global Humanitarian Forum and its President, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, together with Ericsson, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), mobile telecommunications company Zain, and the Earth Institute at Columbia University, today announced a major initiative, dubbed "Weather Info for All", to radically improve Africa's weather monitoring network in the face of the growing impact of climate change.

A recent Global Humanitarian Forum report estimated that climate change is responsible for some 300,000 deaths each year and over USD 100 billion worth of economic losses, mainly because of shocks to health and agricultural productivity. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for close to a quarter of these losses, and is the region at the most immediate risk of droughts and floods. Agricultural yields in some areas are expected to fall by 50 percent as early as 2020.

The Global Humanitarian Forum initiated this collaboration in response to Africa's severe gap in weather information highlighted at the Forum's first annual event. The members of the initiative will deploy up to 5,000 new automatic weather observation stations across Africa, intending to provide a massive increase in crucial information to predict and manage climate shocks.

Africa has a network eight times below the WMO minimum recommended standard, and less than 200 weather stations that meet WMO observation requirements, compared to several thousand each in Europe, North America, and parts of Asia. The 5,000 weather stations will be installed at new and existing mobile network sites throughout the continent over coming years, in what promises to save lives and bring increased economic opportunity to tens of millions of people.

An innovative public-private partnership on a unique scale, the initiative relies on the core business of telecom. Ericsson, the world's leading provider of telecommunications equipment and services, will tap relationships with African operators such as Zain, who will host the weather equipment at mobile network sites being rolled out across Africa. Achieving the 5,000 target would require additional operator commitment and external financing.

The launch was held at the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, where Kofi Annan said: "The world's poorest are also the world's most vulnerable when it comes to the impact of climate change, and the least equipped to deal with its consequences. Today you find cell phone towers in almost every part of Africa. We have never been able to establish weather monitoring on that scale, until now. By bringing together the expertise and resources of different public and private actors, this project may help to save lives and improve the livelihoods of communities in Africa living on the frontlines of climate change."

Also present at the launch, Carl-Henric Svanberg, President and CEO of Ericsson, said: "As the leading provider of telecommunications in Africa and active on the continent for more than 100 years, we are driving the rapid expansion of mobile communications. This initiative presents a unique opportunity to simultaneously help mitigate the impact of climate change for those most affected and to strengthen weather networks and systems across the continent. We look forward to having more operators come on board to realize the full impact of the initiative."

Mobile networks provide the necessary connectivity, power and security to sustain the weather equipment. Through its Mobile Innovation Center in Africa, Ericsson will also develop mobile applications to help communicate weather information developed by national meteorological and hydrological services (NMHSs) via mobile phones. Mobile operators will maintain the automatic weather stations and assist in the transmission of the data to national met services.

The initial deployment, already begun in Zain networks, focuses on the area around Lake Victoria in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The first 19 stations installed will double the weather monitoring capacity of the Lake region.

Zain CEO Saad Al Barrak commented: "It is truly wonderful that many communities across Africa will now have accurate meteorological information readily available. Here we can see how mobile communications can play a key role in helping to improve both the quality of life and safety for people in the remotest parts of the world."

Approximately 70 percent of Africans rely on farming for their livelihood, or close to 700 million people, and over 95 percent of Africa's agriculture depends on rainfall. Changing weather patterns due to climate change render obsolete traditional knowledge relating to agriculture otherwise reliable for centuries, creating a great need for meteorological information.

Also present at the Geneva launch was Michel Jarraud, Secretary-General of the WMO, the United Nations System's authoritative voice on Weather, Climate and Water, which is coordinating involvement of NMHSs participating in the initiative. Jarraud said:

"For food production, almost every decision is linked to weather, climate and water parameters. We see the Weather Info for All initiative as a major pan-African effort to empower our 188 Members to provide enhanced weather information and services. Working through NMHSs, WMO will identify weather information needs, advise on technical requirements and help disseminate the information. This initiative may prove to be one of the most important for African meteorology in decades. The project will also therefore support the goals of the WMO-organized World Climate Conference-3, to be held from 31 August to 4 September 2009 in Geneva."

The initiative will have an impact far beyond agriculture and disaster preparation as it also includes assistance to national meteorological services in training and technical capacities. Better weather information will also make possible the development of services, such as microinsurance, which can be based on weather data indexes, such as rainfall. The initiative will also increase the volume of information useful for scientists, as well as for the water, transport and energy industries.

While the weather information gap is particularly acute in Africa, the initiative would be open to later expansion into other affected regions.

A further partner in the initiative is Columbia University's Earth Institute, headed by Jeffrey Sachs. To help with distribution to some of the most vulnerable and poorest parts of Africa and in partnership with the Earth Institute, automatic weather stations will also be installed in Millennium Villages - rural development projects spread throughout 10 countries and focused on achieving the Millennium Development Goals. By leveraging the expertise of Earth Institute scientists on climatology, agriculture, and health, the project hopes to identify key areas where there can be an immediate impact contributing a sizable knowledge bank to the effort.

"The Earth Institute is a proud partner in this highly innovative program," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the institute. "Once the switch is turned on, a flow of extensive weather data will become available throughout Africa, with benefits extending from the national policy makers to the smallholder farmers. The Millennium Villages is a perfect launch site for the practical and timely application of weather data to bolster resilience and sustainable development in sub-Saharan Africa."