Current Savers Blog

European industry is suffering under soaring energy costs. Profit warnings are becoming more common and industry leaders predict plant closures and job losses may follow.

Companies say they are doing all they can to improve their game but want government help.

Britain’s Castle Cement, part of Germany’s Heidelberg Cement, is a case in point. Its cement furnace in Stamford, England, is replacing much of its coal with  alternatives  — tyres, bone meal, paper – as $140 a barrel oil sends all fuel costs skyrocketing.   

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= y0l5b5NNBws[/youtube]

Industry says tax cuts and energy market reform is needed. Big energy users also want an easing in EU plans for tough CO2 emissions cuts, arguing the measures will simply put them out of business and shift production to places like China which have less efficient and more environmentally damaging production processes.

So, are governments doing enough to support the continent’s core industrial base?

Should certain sectors of the economy be singled out for special support?

Will planned European CO2 cuts, which are not matched by the U.S. and China, wreck the continent’s industrial core without helping the environment?

Renewable power sources like wind and solar are some of the fastest growing sectors in the energy business.

But this graph forecasts that coal, the dirtiest power source in terms of carbon dioxide and other pollutants, will still dominate global power generation growth for decades into the future.

The forecast, released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the statistics branch of the Department of Energy, shows that global power generated from coal will grow 115 percent to 15.36 trillion kilowatt hours from 2005 to 2030.  It assumes no changes in emissions laws or policy.

Global power generation from renewables including hydropower, meanwhile, will grow 58 percent to 5 trillion kilowatt hours over the same time period.

The world is trying to come to an agreement on a new greenhouse gas regulation pact at a U.N. meeting in Copenhagen late next year. Would a new pact eventually make this coal forecast overcooked?

Slowing economies and tightening domestic budgets are combining to pose a stern test of moral backbone for politicians, many of who have a view of the future that extends to the next election and little further.

Already some voices are being raised to call for a slowdown in actions to curb carbon emissions because of the cost involved, facing politicians with the apparent choice of bowing to the calls from their constituents in the hope of keeping their seats at the next election or standing firm because it is the right thing to do for the long term.

British Energy Minister Malcolm Wicks acknowledged the dilemma at a seminar in the House of Commons on Wednesday, noting that affordability was a tricky issue and urging his fellow politicians to guard against the pressures to take their feet off the climate accelerator.

The issue was thrown into stark relief by a report from the Centre for Policy Studies think tank that said meeting the European Union’s renewable energy target of 20 percent by 2020 could cost more than 4,000 pounds per household.

This is in part because the space in Britain for onshore wind farms is running out, offshore costs more than twice as much and tidal is in its infancy.

But in part at least it is a false choice. Numerous studies show categorically that many actions like improved home insulation, turning down air-conditioning or central heating thermostats, using less water, recycling and changing lightbulbs save more than they cost very quickly and involve little effort.

At the same time there are vast, and as yet largely untapped, savings to be had from improved energy efficiency. The trick is to inform and persuade the public.

As another speaker at the meeting said by way of illustration — it is like two economists walking down the street when one spots a $100 bill on the pavement. “Look,” he says to his companion. “A $100 bill on the pavement”. To which his colleague replies; “There can’t be otherwise someone would have picked it up already.”

The failure to act effectively on energy efficiency is a bit like having pavements strewn with $100 bills, the speaker noted.

Sitting on a restaurant terrace overlooking the Baltic Sea on a warm June evening in Sweden, what better drink than a green summer cocktail?

Perhaps followed by a delicious-looking Baltic farmer’s soup?

And you don’t even have to pay — you can scoop up such liquids for free from the most polluted parts of the Baltic Sea – also bordered by countries including Finland, Latvia, Russia, and Germany.

The images are part of a new campaign by the WWF environmental group to show off the problems of the Baltic – an almost enclosed sea that has suffered badly from pollution, including run-off from fertilisers that provoke big brief blooms of greenish algae that then die and sink to the bottom.

The WWF says that large areas of the Baltic seabed are “dead zones” starved of oxygen — and it says one study shows that 7 of the 10 largest such known zones in the world are in the Baltic Sea.

For years Baltic Sea countries managed to blame each other for pollution — the former Soviet Union spewed large amounts of toxic waste into the sea. But the end of the Cold War should be making cooperation easier.

The Baltic countries agreed a plan in late 2007 to clean up by 2021, including an innovative benchmark for “maximum allowable nutrient input” from nitrogen and phosphorus fertiliser polllutants.

Is there hope for a clean-up?

Or will Baltic soup still be green and unappetising in 2021?

We hear a lot of grim news about how sea ice has been melting more than usual in recent summers in the Arctic, how glaciers from the Himalayas to the Andes are melting or how winter sports such as ice hockey in Canada may be under threat from global warming.

So here’s a bit of light relief (assuming it’s not for real):

Defence analysts in South Asia have been saying for so long that India and Pakistan might solve their problems over Kashmir only to end up at war over water that I had almost become inured to the issue. That was until I read the following comment on an earlier blog about Gulf investors buying up farmland in Pakistan to offset food shortages at home:

“Tough challenges await the investors in this sector due to serious water and energy shortages that the country suffers from at the moment,” it reads. “For effective investment in the agriculture sector, the government must clear these impediments first.”

The comment prompted me to hunt around for evidence of growing tension between India and Pakistan over water, needed to irrigate the land to cope with food shortages and for hydroelectric power — an increasingly attractive alternative in view of high fuel prices.

A quick trawl turned up this overview in the asia sentinel: “Water is destined to be a determining factor in the regional conflicts of South Asia in the years to come, particularly between India and Pakistan,” it says. ”While the West is busy concentrating its efforts on securing a ready supply of oil, in South Asia the governments are slowly but surely waking up to the fact that in the not too distant future water is going to be equally, if not more, important to the survival of their people.”

More specifically, Ijaz Hussain in the Daily Times analyses a row between India and Pakistan over Indian plans to build a hydroelectric project – the Kishanganga dam — on a river on its side of divided Kashmir. Pakistan fears the project will disrupt its own plans to build a hydroelectric dam on the same river on its side of Kashmir.

India and Pakistan have successfully regulated their use of the rivers they share in divided Kashmir through the Indus Waters Treaty  (see full pdf document here), signed in 1960 under the auspices of the World Bank. It is the only agreement to have been fully implemented by India and Pakistan; it held through two full-scale wars in 1965 and 1971 and survived a period of intense antagonism which began with the nuclear tests in 1998 and ended with a ceasefire on the Line of Control dividing Kashmir in late 2003. 

How well will it hold up in the current global crisis over food shortages and high oil prices? Relations between India and Pakistan are better than they have been for years, yet the challenges they face in providing food and electricity for their people and their industries are greater than ever.

I shall return to this subject and would appreciate comments offering links or ideas about how far water is going to replace Kashmir as the main irritant between India and Pakistan.

In the meantime, here is an observation to be going on with. The Stimson Center, in a history of the Indus Waters Treaty, attributes the success of the World Bank in brokering the deal to its insistence that the “functional” aspects of sharing water resources for mutual benefit must be separated from the political aspects of the India-Pakistan relationship.

Yet when Indian Power Minister Jairam Ramesh spoke of the row over the Kishanganga dam earlier this month he said: ”This is an issue with geo-strategic and foreign policy implications. The prime minister would have to give it a thought.”

Did he misspeak? Or were his words about the geo-strategic implications of water a sign of things to come?

There are two turtle tales brewing on the coast of Texas at the moment and they’re both good.

First the numbers tale. 

The dedicated folks at the South Padre Island conservation facility Sea Turtle, Inc, report record numbers of nests by endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles.

“We have had record numbers of ridley nests on the Texas coast this year. We have found over 170 so far in 2008 compared to the previous record of 128 for all of last year,” Sea Turtle, Inc, curator Jeff George told Reuters.

This is the fifth straight year that the numbers have increased.

The species still has a few weeks left to its nesting season in the area, so the recorded 2008 total could reach 200.

The other turtle tidbit? Biologists report that for the first time in at least 70 years they have identified a leatherback turtle nest on the Texas coast.

The 203 cm (over six-foot) wide track in the sand was the first clue to the identity of the leatherback which laid two eggs early in June on Big Shell Island on the Padre Island National Seashore.

The eggs are being kept in an incubation facility and should hopefully hatch sometime around early August.

The massive leatherbacks are the largest of all living turtles, making them a wildlife icon.

George said both tales are good signals which show that conservation efforts from less destructive fishing practices to beach preservation and public education are working.

“The hope is that there are more turtles in the Gulf of Mexico that will use Texas as their breeding ground,” said George.

(Photo credit: Tim Wimborne, Reuters, April 12, 2006)

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

A retrospective exhibit about the life and inventions of R. Buckminster Fuller (a.k.a. Bucky) is about to open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City . Fuller was truly one-of-a-kind-an iconoclastic architect, inventor, engineer, and philosopher.

I still have vivid memories of a public talk he gave at Columbia University in the late 1970’s. He died in 1983. He is best known as the leading proponent, if not inventor, of the geodesic dome, the sturdy spherical structure, composed of triangular elements, that closely approximates a sphere.

It’s hard to imagine Bucky not being engaged by the modern problems of global warming. It would have attracted him on all fronts: the energy challenges, the technological challenges and the ‘geo-engineering’ challenges.

Geo-engineering is the term used to describe large-scale human interventions that could possibly offset climate change such as deliberate releases of particles into the stratosphere to block sunlight, or the capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and power plants.

Certainly, Bucky thought on such scales. For example, he envisioned covering mid-town Manhattan with a large geodesic dome as a way to create a controlled climate!

How this would work is puzzling to me. For example, if the dome was clear to sunlight, the greenhouse effect inside in summer would be astounding and I can’t imagine it would require less electricity to cool it off than it does now-it would likely need vastly more electricity.

Still, as an urban climate scientist, I don’t like to dismiss such conceptual ideas completely out of hand because if a geo-engineered way were found to cool cities down this would be of enormous socio-economic value. Cities are where the world’s population will increasingly live and we are going to have to find ways to make them more habitable as summer heat waves become more brutal and common.

Right now the main ‘technologies’ we have to do so are tree planting, light-colored surfaces and green roofs. However, if large-scale initiatives were found that could artificially shade large sections of cities or increase wind ventilation during heat-waves, that would be much more effective, saving vast amounts of energy and lives. I’ve heard anecdotally of Japanese researchers orienting new buildings to channel winds in certain directions and even of trying to bring cold bottom water up from Tokyo Bay.

Any Fuller-esque ideas out there?

As part of my job covering the world of alternative fuels, General Motors last week gave me the keys to a hydrogen-powered SUV, the Chevrolet Equinox.  You won’t find the Equinox in any showrooms, and in fact, the car I drove for four days is one of just 100 such vehicles in the United States.

Despite their small numbers, GM and others hope hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles will be critical to reducing greenhouse gases and our dependence on ever-costlier gasoline. Hydrogen can be produced by breaking apart water molecules, and it is also made by stripping hydrogen from fossil fuel natural gas. To see an animation of how a fuel cell works, click here.

I had fun driving emissions-free for a few days, but refueling once I had run low on hydrogen wasn’t so fun. That’s because there are just four places in the L.A. area where you can refuel a hydrogen car, and the lack of that infrastructure is one of the biggest impediments to getting them in the mass market.

Below is a brief video of my few days driving on hydrogen.

Video produced and edited by Syantani Chatterjee
  

Deborah Brosnan swears she doesn’t court disaster. But it does seem to follow her around and she has cultivated expertise in what might be called environmental “disaster-ology.”

A marine biologist who specializes in the impact of natural disasters on ecosystems and people, Brosnan narrowly survived a plane crash after working on coral reefs in Asia and a volcanic eruption on the Caribbean island of Montserrat.

“I was out studying coral reefs, so I was even underwater and the mountain blew on me,” she wrote of her run-in with the volcano. “But being positive — it gave me a lot of information on how exploited ecosystems cope with these events and what it means for humans, knowledge we can put to good use.”

She turned disaster into opportunity earlier in her career after a major storm wiped out the mussels she was studying for her doctoral thesis.

“I thought it was a total disaster for my thesis … and then I thought, wow, here was an opportunity to find out how systems respond and to see what happens to the whole ecology of the shore.”

She is the founder and president of Sustainable Ecosystems Institute, an Oregon-based ecological organization of scientists and others. Read about her work in the world’s river deltas — which she sees as at high risk from natural disasters spurred by climate change — here.