Current Savers Blog

The U.S. housing market may be in a serious slump, but competition for big chunks of land in the hot, dry Southwest is heating up.

Developers of solar and wind power projects are scrambling to get their hands on swathes of land in the U.S. West that not only have lots of sun or wind, but are also close enough to critical transmission lines.

“There is a lot of activity staking out that land,” said Dan Kabel, chief executive of Acciona Solar Power, the unit of Spanish building-to-energy firm Acciona that is building solar thermal power plants in the United States. “People keep talking to me about a land rush. They say there is a land rush. The evidence I’ve seen personally is the patchwork effect of all the applications for solar and wind. There is very active prospecting for solar land.”

The U.S. West is in such high demand because not only are the sun and wind resources enormous, they are also located near areas of burgeoning power demand, such as Southern California, Kabel said in an interview at Acciona’s Nevada Solar One solar thermal power plant in Boulder City, Nevada.

But even with all that competition, Kabel said, there is plenty of room for Acciona to grow. So far, it operates one solar thermal power plant in the United States, though more are in the works (he wouldn’t say how many.)

“There is a lot of desert out there,” Kabel said.

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?

Among suggestions for slowing global warming it may be the most radical — countries failing to keep promises to curb emissions should not be allowed to send a soccer team to the World Cup.

June 2-13 talks in Bonn on a new deal to widen the Kyoto Protocol after  a first period ends in 2012 are ending on Friday with few agreements and many criticisms about a lack of progress.

But how do you focus delegations’ minds and get countries to do more to curb greenhouse gas emissions? U.N. reports last year warning the world of rising temperatures, droughts, rising seas and other risks in coming decades have not fully done the trick.

Sanctions under the Kyoto Protocol, the main existing plan for fighting climate change running to 2012, involve imposing stiffer greenhoues cuts in a next period. But does that do the job?

Rarely for a U.N. climate meeting, the Bonn sessions have often ended promptly at about 6 p.m. – and some delegates have been more agitated talking about the Euro 2008 soccer than about the threats to the planet.

  So Alden Meyer, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, has a joking proposal:  ”if countries don’t comply their teams shouldn’t be allowed to go to the World Cup.”

   What do you think?

Can credits traded in the world’s financial centers stop local farmers in Madagascar from burning up a rain forest filled with lemurs and other life found nowhere else in the world?    

The New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society is working with the government of Madagascar to sell about 9.5 million tonnes of carbon credits to help save the Makira Forest, which contains 22 species of lemurs, hundreds of bird species and thousands of plants. Many of those species are found nowhere else on the planet. 

 ”We want to create incentives so people don’t deforest,” Ray Victurine, the finance expert at WCS, told me. 

The 9.5 million tonnes is the amount of carbon dioxide stored in existing trees WSC and Madagascar estimate can be saved over 30 years by stopping people from chopping them down.

Victurine said money raised by the credits could encourage farmers to stop slash and burn agriculture through investments in rice cultivation or in taking advantage of cloud formations in the forest to improve irrigation.

In Madagascar about 100,000 hectares (386 square miles) of forest are lost each year by agricultural burning, according to WCS.

The burning of forests by farmers accounts for 20 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions. An agreement at a 190-nation UN conference last year agreed to work on ways to reward countries for slowing deforestation.

Credits in a global climate trade system could generate $2 billion to $14 billion for developing countries, according to a study by EcoSecurities and the University of British Colombia. 

The WCS and Madagascar are hoping to sell their credits in the rapidly developing voluntary credit market. Later, they could adapt them for any post-Kyoto global trading system if the world agrees such credits would save forests in a fair way.  

Victurine said they are working with the Voluntary Carbon Standard and the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance to ensure the credits would be high quality and would pay for actions to save the forest that would not have occurred otherwise.

The higher the perceived quality of the credits, the higher price they may fetch. In today’s prices at the EU’s compliance carbon market the 9.5 million tonnes would be worth about $291 million, though carbon prices are volatile. In voluntary, unregulated carbon markets the tonnes would be worth closer to $62 million. 

All of which leads to a question.  Are financial instruments the best way to change human behavior and save the planet?

The annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest evangelical denomination, has paid scant attention to the environment although there have been calls from within to take a more activist stance on issues like climate change.

This stems in part from divisions within the SBC — which are found among the broader evangelical movement – on what approaches to take on green matters.  

The 16-million member SBC is a bedrock of political and cultural conservatism and a key plank in the Republican Party’s evangelical base. So much of its leadership has traditionally seen red when green issues are raised.

But there have been signs of change though they hardly figured on the agenda at this annual meeting which wrapped up on Wednesday.

In March a statement signed by several prominent SBC members including outgoing President Frank Page called for a stronger stance on global warming, blamed by most scientists on greenhouse gas emissions.

That put them in line with more centrist evangelicals who see climate change as a compelling Christian issue because of its perceived impact on the poor. It is also seen as morally wrong to inflict damage on “God’s creation.” 

“Our cautious response to these issues in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring, reckless and ill-informed. The time for timidity regarding God’s creation is no more,” the March statement said.

Newly elected SBC president Johnny Hunt said he felt that most Southern Baptists were still not completely swayed by the notion that human activities were causing climate change.

But he said he thought Southern Baptists needed to pay more attention to environmental issues.

“It should be more on the radar screen than it has been. It is God’s creation, we have no right to violate it … and we ought to be leading the way (on the environment),” he told me.

There had been hope in some SBC quarters that the March statement and other initiatives signalled that the denomination would pay more attention to global warming and related concerns.

But it is an issue that younger evangelicals are keen to embrace as they seek to broaden their movement’s biblical agenda beyond its recent focus on hot button culture issues such as gay marriage and abortion.

So it’s certainly not going away.  

(Photo credit: Reuters, Javier Barbancho, June 4, 2008, Spain)

A handful of activists from People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals (PETA) urged Southern Baptists meeting in Indianapolis on Tuesday to try the vegetarian option. “For Christ’s Sake, Go Vegetarian,” read one of their signs outside the convention center in downtown Indianapolis, where the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), America’s largest evangelical denomination, is holding its annual meeting.

“The Bible’s greatest message is compassion,” said PETA campaign coordinator Ashley Byrne, who said she hoped to convince Southern Baptists to adopt a diet that was compassionate to animals by not eating them.

The SBC, like the broader U.S. evangelical movement, is divided about what action to take on “creation care” or environmental issues such as climate change.

But the culturally and politically conservative SBC, better known for its fondness of “guns and God,” probably does not have a lot of vegetarians in its ranks.

An informal Reuters survey of a few attending the meeting turned up none.

One major nationwide survey in 2006 found that 50 percent of licensed U.S. hunters and anglers were evangelical Christians — hardly rich fishing grounds for coverts to the PETA cause.

Indiana Jones and the World Bank sound like an odd couple to get anything done (”Quick, shoot that robber!” “Wait, we have to do a two-year feasibility study first!”) but are part of a new alliance trying to save the world’s tigers. (Read my colleague Leslie Wroughton’s fine story here)

Will it work? Tigers are under threat from loss of prey and habitats and a black market in tiger skins and bones.

And tiger numbers have plunged to about 4,000 today from more than 100,000 a century ago, according to the new International Tiger Coalition, led by the World Bank with backing from celebrities such as “Indiana Jones” star Harrison Ford, Bo Derek and Robert Duvall. Ford is a board member of Conservation International.

A World Bank report warned that “if current trends persist, tigers are likely to be the first species of large predator to vanish in historic times.”

So far the ideas for saving tigers have obviously failed and tigers raised in farms (there are more tigers in captivity around the world, in countries including the United States and China, than in the wild) often get too flabby and lazy to be introduced into the wild.

And conservationists say fast economic growth in China may raise demand for traditional tiger parts, used as cures for everything from colds to rheumatism.

Trying to make people aware of the threats to wildlife, the Humane Society, for instance, urges you to take a pledge not to buy items made from wild animal parts or to buy them as pets.

Do you have any good ideas to halt the slide? Please tell us.

    The UN’s climate surgery opening hours this week in Bonn, Germany, are 10am-1pm and 3pm-6pm.

    Several times they’ve finished early — lack of demand?

    “That’s good. Often they just go on and on. Next week it may be a bit later,” a UN spokesperson told me.

    Welcome to a new round of talks to find a successor to the UN-administered Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Bonn is the second of eight meetings of 190 countries and 2,000 people or so to agree a new climate pact by December 2009.

    All right, on the two-week agenda there’s also a lot of side events, lobby group huddles and so on, while delegates wake up very early to attend busy, ad hoc sessions, one told me.

    But from the outside at least there’s no sense of rush - the plenary sessions are often dry presentations from government bureaucrats, re-hashing well known positions with erudite allusions to climate convention text written 16 years ago.

    UN chairmen tried on Friday to steer talks towards “concrete proposals” for a new pact, to discuss in more meetings.

    Some NGOs said ideas were emerging to fund efforts to prepare for global warming and cut greenhouse gas emissions which are rising several percent annually. Scientists want emissions to peak within 10 years to avoid dangerous warming.

    Those ideas included a Swiss-proposed carbon tax, the UN’s shipping organisation’s suggestion for a carbon auction and Norway’s proposal to sell emissions rights to rich countries.

    Nevertheless talks are slow. Last December was a more dramatic meeting — ministers struggled in Bali, Indonesia, but finally succeeded to agree to launch these post-Kyoto talks.

    Why isn’t there more urgency here in Bonn, I asked a UN official. 1.) it’s not our fault, the United Nations is a facilitator, he said, 2.) some meetings are more technical than others, and 3.) you need leadership, and one country can provide that.

    That was a swipe at the United States, the only industrialised country not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and the world’s top or second biggest emitter of the planet-warming gas
carbon dioxide (after China). The United States hugely lags many countries’ ambition, for example President George W. Bush plans to halt emissions growth by 2025, while the EU says it will cut its greenhouse gases by 20 percent by 2020.

    But I still have sympathy with the U.S. delegation.

    Some ideas may be naive, like one from a major developing country that we compel Western entrepreneurs to sell their intellectual property rights, to speed up emissions cuts.

    “The private sector is private property. I think this process could use some common sense and honesty because it’s still out of touch with the world as it is,” the U.S. delegate
told me. I could agree.

    But where does that leave urgency?

At the Reuters Global Energy Summit this week, Reuters reporters and editors spent a lot of time talking to energy CEOs and other top industry executives about soaring oil prices, carbon caps, and the outlook for renewable energy sources like solar and wind.

Then, we got personal.

Before we let them go, we asked the Summit guests what they were doing to reduce their own carbon footprints.

Predictably, the CEO of solar power company SunPower, Tom Werner, said he had solar panels on his house. OK, that was a no-brainer. But Werner is also an avid gardener who throws his groceries in the back of his car rather than use the supermarket’s plastic bags.

Other answers were more surprising, including when Steve Leer, CEO of coal company Arch Coal, said he was in the market for an electric car. Or, maybe that’s not so surprising, considering plug-in electric cars are recharged by power from the grid, much of which is generated by coal-fired plants. Hmmm. Food for thought, at least.

For our complete list of what energy executives are doing to reduce their carbon footprints, click here.

As California goes, so goes the nation — or at least that appears to be the case when we’re talking about San Francisco and the increasingly out-of-favor plastic shopping bag.
 
San Francisco became the first and only U.S. city to ban the bags in April 2008. Now it seems that the rest of the country is also ready to outlaw the offending carry-alls, which environmentalists say endanger wildlife and can take up to 1,000 years to decompose.
 
More than half, 54 percent, of Americans believe that plastic, non-compostable shopping bags should be banned, according Deloitte’s Retail “Green” Survey.  
 
That survey of 1,080 Americans, also found that nearly one-third say they take reusable shopping bags to food stores. 

Scores of other countries from Bangladesh to China have already banned the bags.

(Photos: Reuters)