Current Savers Blog

Soaring petrol prices and the credit crunch are forcing British drivers off the roads.

Traffic congestion was 12 percent less in the first half of this year than in the same period a year earlier, a survey has found.

Could this mean that the market might be the answer to the problem of overcrowded roads?

It seems a simpler way of doing it than the elaborate technology used in London to keep cars out of the central Congestion Zone, and being contemplated in other British cities. Despite hefty fines on motorists, the scheme seems to spend much of its income on its own upkeep.

But if high petrol prices do keep the roads clear, it will of course be at the expense of the poor. A dose of austerity could mean fewer old bangers getting in the way of the Mercs and Rollers, but of course low-income drivers will find it even harder to get to work than they do already.

Dozens of vultures landed on the grass the other day outside the building where U.N. climate talks are taking place in Ghana – and more were circling overhead.

“They’ve been attracted by all the delegates falling asleep inside,” one official joked.

(I missed those vultures, but when I tried to get a picture of a group on the grass to try to illustrate this blog they flapped off before I was close enough … The picture on the left is of a vulture in Spain).

The Aug. 21-27 talks among 160 countries working on a new treaty to fight climate change moved at a glacial pace even though the United Nations said they were making progress, for instance, in defining how to give tropical countries incentives to slow deforestation. Burning trees is a big source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Getting countries from Albania to Zimbabwe to agree to a new treaty to fight climate change by the end of 2009 as planned is clearly going to be a gigantic jigsaw, but some things could be simplified.

Many governments say fighting climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing the world, so why not design talks with a bit more built-in urgency?

– How about starting meetings on time? Sessions now start like clockwork — between 15 and 25 minutes after the appointed time.

– Speakers often feel obliged to spend half a minute or more praising the chairman, the host country, donors etc for arranging the talks before they get to the point. Why not streamline the formalities?

Any other ideas?

 Welcome to the front lines of global warming in the United States - the Harding Ice Field in Alaska, the biggest icefield in the United States.
   At the Exit Glacier north of Seward - the only glacier in the Kenai Fjords National Park reachable by foot - the giant cerulean blue ice sheet gives every sign of staying put.
   But one only has to glance at the many signs along the roadway and footpath to the glacier’s edge to mark its retreat  - it hit its peak size in 1815 and has been receding ever since. Signs along a footpath leading to the base of the glacier show just how far it has retreated.
   The glacier lost about 10 feet from its front face over the summer of 2008.
   Since the 1980s, land-based glaciers and ice caps like this one in Alaska have contributed the most to sea level rise than any other source within their category, which includes other land-based glaciers like Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro and the Chacaltaya Glacier near La Paz, Bolivia, said Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
   Unlike the ice cover around the North Pole or giant floating ice sheets, land-based ice contributes directly to sea-level rises.
   According to a 2007 report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, glaciers and ice caps have the potential to raise global sea levels by between .15 meters and .37 meters.
   That pales in comparison to the giant ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, which could raise sea levels by 63.9 meters if they fully melted.
   At the Aialik Glacier in the Harding Icefield - reachable by boat or plane, the living nature of the ice was more evident.
   On a visit to the glacier via tourboat on Aug. 15 on a trip hosted by the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, several chunks of ice broke apart and crashed into Aialik Bay.
   Throughout the visit, the ice cracked and groaned, with a sound like thunder claps that punctuated the still air.

It seems the law of unintended consequences has struck again in Britain, and the environment could be the loser.

In an attempt to stop owners of factories, offices and warehouses from leaving their premises empty in the hope of higher rents, the government imposed a tax on vacant property.

But with the property market now in deep trouble, some landlords are finding they can’t or won’t pay the tax and are demolishing their buildings rather than leaving them empty, according to newspaper accounts here.

Opponents of the levy are calling it the “bombsite Britain tax”, the Financial Times reported, in a reference to the thousands of buildings flattened by German bombers in World War Two.

So how green is that?

Britons are being urged by officials to stop wasting food and start mending their clothes, among other things, in the name of reducing their carbon footprint.

How can a tax that has the effect of encouraging people to demolish perfectly serviceable buildings square with any real concern for the environment?
 

Morality needs a bigger role as a spur to a talks on a new U.N. treaty to slow global warming, according to a group of Christians I spoke to today in Accra, Ghana.

 They were lobbying delegates at 160-nation talks to do more to combat climate change. For the story, click here

Around a table with me in a crowded conference hall in Ghana, they argued that economic and political arguments for action are simply not enough to solve an issue that is already affecting people’s livelihoods, especially in Africa, the poorest continent.

So should ethics and morality have a bigger role in working out international treaties? Or are there risks, for instance of opening the door to differing religious views of how far humans should be stewards of creation?

For those of us who live in Beijing, the air during the Olympics has been a real treat. It smells sweet and breathes in nicely. Even better, I feel like I can see forever — buildings that are more than a mile away, even the purple outline of the Fragrant Hills to the west of the city. 

There were a lot of worries about the Beijing smog expressed by athletes and foreign journalists before the Games began. But for the last week, there has been a lovely salmon tinge to the clouds — real clouds, not smog! — in the evenings.

All this is due to Beijing having booted well over a million cars off the streets, idled construction sites, and closed the worst polluting factories for hundreds of kilometers while requiring the not-quite-so-bad plants to install and actually use emissions reducing equipment.

The weather also helped. After a hot, muggy start to the Games when a heavy fog bank sat smack over the city, some rain and a breeze have cleared things out.  The numbers of days where the air quality is rated excellent have soared.

Unfortunately, most of those measures are temporary, so our eyes and lungs may only be getting a short holiday while the Olympics and Paralympics are going on. You can live with normal Beijing air, in fact I trained for a marathon in it last year, but most people agree it’s a lot more pleasant this way.

Still, there could be some long-lasting benefit, now that people see what the air could be like. Beijing’s environmental officials have promised to step up monitoring of pollutants and continue imposing new measures to clean things up.

And in the grimy provincial towns that ring the capital, better industrial controls could also mean a better quality of life.

People like to talk about the “legacy” of Olympic Games. A cleaner Beijing would be a nice take-away from this year’s.

PHOTO: Competitors jump during the men’s quarterfinals run for the BMX cycling competition at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games August 20, 2008. REUTERS/Jacky Naegelen

    In a country of more than one billion people, protecting critically endangered species isn’t always a top priority when it comes to making a living and growing enough food.

    In the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, though, a court has halted construction of a major water canal to save one of the world’s rarest birds.

    Only about 50 Jerdon’s coursers (Rhinoptilus bitorquatus) are believed to be left in the wild and are found in scrub-jungle habitat in the Sri Lankamalleswara Wildlife Sanctuary, which the Andhra Pradesh government created to protect the remaining birds.

     The Teluga Ganga Canal, being built to bring water to Chennai, India’s fourth-largest city, will now be diverted around the sanctuary, rather than running straight through as originally planned. The Supreme Court halted construction because of the threat to the birds and local authorities will compensate local villagers for the loss of extra land.

   Dr Panchapakesan Jeganathan, a scientist at the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), said: “This bird is more threatened than the tiger and very few people have ever seen it.

   “People thought the Jerdon’s courser was a block to progress but are now benefiting from the canal’s realignment because their compensation is generous and the only land they are losing is difficult to farm,” he said.

    Officials have agreed in principle to buy 3,000 acres of scrub forest between the new canal route and the sanctuary. The state’s forest department will manage that land to protect and enlarge the bird’s habitat.

      The BNHS and Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which both pressed the Supreme Court to order a halt to the canal, have also been involved in survey work to determine the bird’s true range. 

    “It is crucial we find other sites hosting Jerdon’s coursers and encourage both politicians and the people living nearby to support that work,” said Ian Barber, RSPB’s Asia officer.

    With many species being driven towards extinction by human activities, perhaps the world needs to see more examples such as this Indian bird?

   (Picture credit: Simon Wootton, RSPB)

   A Kennedy may be showing up Al Gore as a small time dreamer. 
   Robert Kennedy, Jr. says the Goracle’s challenge to the United States to generate its electricity entirely from renewable sources within 10 years is not fast enough.
   “Al Gore said the other day we can do this in 10 years, and a lot of people were skeptical about that. But we can do it in less than 10 years,” he told U.S. and Mexico border state governors at a meeting this week., arguing that it would be great for the economy, too.
   In solar energy resplendent border states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, setting up solar plants would prove cheaper than building more conventional sources of energy, he said.  “These are the Saudi Arabias of sun.”
   “We can build those plants anywhere, we can build them cheaper than nuke plants, cheaper than old coal plants, and cheaper than oil plants, and faster than any of them,” said Kennedy a member of the U.S. political dynasty and a senior attorney for the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council.
(Reporting by Syantani Chatterjee)

Is a global ”green revolution” unstoppable, even with an economic slowdown?

That’s what Danish Climate and Energy Minister Connie Hedegaard (left) predicts, saying that a huge shift to renewable energies, such as solar and wind power, from fossil fuels will survive flagging economic growth.

She has to puzzle over the outlook since she is set to be host of a U.N. meeting in late 2009 in Copenhagen at which the world is meant to agree a new climate deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

Many nations have been reluctant so far to spell out what they are willing to do to slow global warming. It’s a bit of the “you first”, “no, you first” trap.

“The green revolution is going to come anyway,” she told me for a story about how far a gloomier economic outlook may dampen action to fight climate change, and how far high oil prices will help.

Is she right? (Many Danes have bet on the revolution – Vestas is the world’s number one wind turbine maker).

In the 1970s the oil crisis spurred huge interest in renewable energies — U.S. President Jimmy Carter even had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House. His successor, Ronald Reagan, took them down, and that ‘revolution’ ran out of steam as oil prices fell (below $10 a barrel in 1986).

Since then, of course, almost all climate scientists have concluded that fossil fuels cause global warming. So a shift to renewables is not just about current high oil prices ($111 a barrel), or worries about smog pollution.

Is the revolution coming?

Cranky kids, mosquito bites, burnt marshmallows and soggy sleeping bags - camping in the summer is an American family ritual right up there with baseball and apple pie.

But like other aspects of American life involving big vehicles it has also been hitting the brakes in the face of  sky-high gas prices.

Statistics released on Thursday by the  Texas Association of Campground Owners showed that the state’s “RVers” — owners of recreational vehicles such as big camper vans – are camping less often and not travelling as far afield.

The association said in a statement that an on-line survey found that ”47 percent of Texas RVers are camping less often and closer to home as a result of rising fuel costs.”

U.S. oil demand during the first half of 2008 fell by an average of 800,000 barrels per day compared with the same period a year ago, the biggest volume drop in 26 years, the Energy Information Administration said earlier this week.

One wonders if there is not a double-edged sword here.

On the one hand Americans driving less is obviously a plus for the environment as it means less green house gas emissions linked to climate change.

Many people will applaud a change in U.S. driving habits including fewer big RVs on the road going shorter distances.

On the other hand data elsewhere has shown declining numbers of visitors to U.S. national parks . There was a small rise in national park visits in 2007 but the overall trend this decade has been down.

If less people are out there camping and visiting national and state parks, will it mean less interest in the outdoors and wild spaces? And will that ultimately be good for conservation?

For some of our coverage on the broader issue of declining oil consumption in America you can click here .

Photo: REUTERS/Dept of Justice U.S. Marshalls handout, May 11,2008