Current Savers Blog

More than 1,200 people have put in orders for their own Tesla Roadster, the all-electric sports car with an eye-popping price tag of $100,000. 

So far, only 27 have been delivered to customers.

Tesla disclosed this latest number in a press release on Tuesday, surprising those of us who remember the company’s chairman, Elon Musk, receiving his car in April.

That’s because for several months, the electric car maker only started production on three or four vehicles a week, according to spokeswoman Rachel Konrad.

In July, Tesla President and CEO Ze’ev Drori told customers that Tesla had “broken the logjam” and was finally delivering cars to its customers.

“You know of course the saying ‘Good things are worth waiting for’… undoubtedly we were trying the truism of this adage longer than warranted,” Drori wrote on the company’s blog on July 12. 

The Silicon Valley automaker originally had planned to start delivering the cars last year, but the company has since been plagued by production delays.

Now, however, Tesla is ramping up production to 10 a week, increasing to 20 by the end of the year, the company said. Early next year, it should be starting 40 cars a week.

By the end of this year, “hundreds” of customers should have received their vehicles, Konrad said.

Tesla’s shapely two-seaters are assembled by Lotus Engineering in England and then shipped to California.

No word, by the way, on who those 27 lucky customers are. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has ordered a Roadster, has not yet received his car, Konrad said.

Actor Matt Damon was spotted driving a baby blue Roadster around Los Angeles in June, but it turns out it was just a prototype.

If you’ve got one, we’d love to know (and take it for a spin).

Can carbon capture and storage (CCS) save the world?

Is this the silver bullet everyone’s been waiting for? Or just pie in the sky? Is capturing and storing carbon dioxide the technology breakthrough to cut greenhouse gas emissions without getting in the way of economic growth and industry’s “addiction” to fossil fuels? Or is it just a “greenwash” — a token gesture by some of the utilities responsible for so much of the world’s CO2 to try to persuade an increasingly green public that the great emitters are doing something to fight climate change?

Those are the questions that were hurled at Vattenfall executives on Tuesday when the Swedish-based utility opened the world’s first CCS plant in a small town south of Berlin called Schwarze Pumpe. The company believes it will be economically feasible before long to capture carbon, liquify it, and store it permanently on a large scale underground. This is only a small pilot plant producing enough power for a town of 20,000. But if it works, Vattenfall plans to build two conventional power plants 10 times larger in Germany and Denmark by 2015 and from 2020 they hope CCS will be a viable option for large-scale industrial use.

Proud as Vattenfall CEO Lars Josefsson and other executives from one of Europe’s largest utilities were at the inauguration of the 30-megawatt lignite-burning plant on Tuesday that cost 70 million euros and removes 95 percent of the CO2 emissions, they were nevertheless pummeled by journalists from across Europe wanting to know about the economics of it (and were told they’re not bad but could be better), whether they have the permits to store the CO2 underground (not yet but expected soon) and whether it was just more “greenwash” (a definite no).

“We take our responsibility seriously,” Josefsson said. “This doesn’t have anything to do with ‘greenwashing’.”

Economists like Nicholas Stern have placed a lot of hope in carbon capture. He told a group of journalists in Berlin last year that with coal so abundant and cheap around the world, it is hard to imagine any solution to climate change without CCS.

But what do the economics of CCS look like? Vattenfall said that CCS will at first cut the efficiency rate from 46 and 43 percent (for hard coal and lignite) by about 10 percentage points — making it roughly 25 percent more expensive to produce the same amount of energy. But they are confident that those efficiency levels would soon be back to their original level before long.

“We aim to show that it’s feasible, that it’s economical,” said Josefsson. “It’s a long-term project. We’ll have to invest many, many billions for the next step. Vattenfall is prepared to invest many billions. We will make electricity clean.”

Vattenfall said the costs of the investment will pay for itself as prices for EU-wide trading in emission rights rise. Tuomo Hatakka, head of the Germany-based Vattenfall Europe unit, said the break-even point is between 30 and 35 euros per tonne — the current price is just under 30 euros but expected to rise.

“It shouldn’t lead to any additional costs,” said Josefsson. “We’re taking the fight against climate change seriously in Europe and we’ve got a market. This is only the start of a long process. There are incentives to solve the problem.”

So is carbon capture a silver bullet — or just ‘greenwash’? I’m not sure it’s the silver bullet, not yet anyhow. But the 70 million euros they spent on Schwarze Pump isn’t chicken feed either. Seeing some tangible steps taken like in Schwarze Pumpe is certainly a better way to spend a day than listening to politicians talking about what needs to be done.

City-dwelling, bike-riding recyclers are finally getting the recognition they deserve for their environmentally friendly lifestyles.
 
A researcher at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development argues in a journal article published on Friday that many city residents actually pollute less than families in rural areas.
 
“People who live in the suburbs or commute actually have much higher greenhouse gas emissions per person than people living in (the London district of) Chelsea for the same income level,” David Satterthwaite told Reuters.
 
That’s because country-dwellers tend to have larger homes that need to be heated or cooled and higher car use per household.
 
The study in the journal  Environment and Urbanization says cities are often blamed for producing most of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions but actually generate just two-fifths or less.
 
Satterthwaite argues that cities in wealthy nations can set an example for low carbon living by providing good public transport and energy-efficient buildings. He singles out Barcelona - which has a third of Spain’s average emissions per person - and other historic compact cities like Amsterdam which are easy to walk around. 
 
Culture is also an ally in the fight against climate change. “There’s so much in London or Paris that isn’t high greenhouse gas-emitting: the culture, the art, the buildings, the theatre, the music, the museums, the libraries,” Satterthwaite said.
 
But while cities are often unfairly blamed for producing 75 to 80 percent of the world’s greenhous gas emissions, their responsibility creeps back up when you look at it from a consumption perspective. 
 
Satterthwaite believes it would be fairer to allocate greenhouse gas emissions according to the location of the people who consume the goods and services responsible for the emissions rather than to the place they are produced. 

So if you live in Berlin and buy a Chinese-made T-shirt or digital camera, the emissions caused by the manufacturing process would go into your city’s pot, not Guangzhou’s.
  
On this measure, Satterthwaite estimates city emissions would account for between 60 and 70 percent of the global total. Breaking that down, richer cities would be the clear culprits.
 
Some parts of poor cities - like the inner-city settlement of Dharavi in Mumbai where 600,000 people live and work crammed into an area around 2 km square - might even have a negative tally, especially if they’re home to poor people who survive by reclaiming and recycling waste. 
 
“Allocating emissions to consumers rather than producers shows that the problem is not cities but a minority of the world’s population with high-consumption lifestyles,” Satterthwaite said.
 
“But I can see the huge - or probably impossible - political difficulties of getting that accepted, if suddenly the responsibility of the rich world goes up even further,” he admitted.
 
What do you think? How could your city cut its carbon emissions? Should we measure emissions from the perspective of production or consumption?

Emissions of the main greenhouse gas are rocketing — despite international efforts to slow them down, according to a study today.

Read my colleague David Fogarty’s worrying article about carbon dioxide emissions — China has definitely overtaken the United States as top emitter, India is catching up with third placed Russia.

What’s alarming is that the rate of growth of gases blamed for stoking global warming is quickening. And the fastest growth is in the developing world.  

The Global Carbon Project said in its report carbon dioxide emissions by mankind are growing about four times faster since 2000 than during the 1990s, despite efforts by 37 rich nations to rein in emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.

Ouch! The report confirms that the developing countries are now producing more greenhouse gases than rich nations which have been burning fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution.

Any ideas about how the world can slow the rise, without shutting down the economy?

U.S. President George W. Bush upset some delegates by failing to mention “climate change” or “global warming” in his final speech to the United Nations — in which he referred to terrorism 32 times.

Exactly a year ago, the United Nations held a special summit about climate change – U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon calls fighting global warming his “signature issue” and many governments see it as the biggest long-term challenge.

Bush clearly has a lot to worry about such as the global financial crisis, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Yet while he spoke a lot about terrorism in his speech on Tuesday, he did also refer to other problems such as human rights in Burma, violence in Darfur, the Doha trade round and the fight against malaria.

Climate change didn’t get a mention, even though Bush has called it a “serious problem” and signed up at the Group of Eight nations in Japan in July to a vision of halving world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. China and the United States are the main emitters of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels.

“It was a surprise and a shame that President Bush didn’t once mention climate change,” the Norwegian daily Aftenposten quoted Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg as saying, adding that he was pleased that both candidates to succeed Bush in January — Barack Obama and John McCain — were making it a priority.

So was it just Bush, often accused by many of his closest industrial allies of failing to take climate change seriously enough?

Or perhaps it’s impossible to list everything in a speech without making it a dull shopping list of the world’s woes?

Or is a speech by a U.S. leader that omits to mention global warming a sign that the world is turning to other issues?

What do you think?

Will the world be a slightly less messy place by Monday?

Organisers of an annual “Clean up the World” campaign say that up to 35 million volunteers in more than 110 countries will be cleaning up trash, planting trees, working out better ways of recycling and taking part in other ways to stop pollution.

 Of course it will take a lot more than just the Sept. 19-21 blitz but beaches from Vanuatu to Brazil, or cities from Buenos Aires to Sydney may benefit a bit.

And it illustrates a wider problem about the environment – nothing much happens unless a lot of people get involved in sorting out problems such as piles of stinking rubbish or global warming.

“We are faced with a unique challenge…about how we get practical about climate change,” said Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Programme which backs the clean-up campaign. “Climate change is not just something that others have to address.”

The clean up campaign was founded in 1993 by Australian Ian Kiernan, a yachtsman shocked by the amount of trash even in remote areas such as the Sargasso Sea in the Caribbean.

So get out your mops, your bins, your rags, your scrubbing brushes, your brooms…

                                               Native Alaskan artists visited New York this week with a message not so much about art, nor a species that’s struggling as rising temperatures melt its habitat from under its paws.

“With so much attention on polar bears, where’s the concern about the people? What about fellow Americans?” said Alvin Amason, an artist and member of the coastal Alutiiq people, who lives in Anchorage.

Amason and other Alaskan artists hit New York to celebrate the opening of the Alaska House , a nonprofit cultural center that aims to teach people about the challenges and opportunities the state faces.

Not only are temperatures rising faster in the Alaska and the Arctic than in southern parts of the world, but residents in remote regions the 49th U.S. state are facing food and fuel costs that are surging faster too.

And the melting of coastal ice means they can no longer hunt on shore for walrus and other animals that provide them with ivory and bones for carvings.

Now the artists have to hunt by boat, but surging fuel costs in those remote areas are making it harder. “If someone gets $5,000 for a carving from a western buyer, he’s not thinking of spending it on a vacation, he’s spending it on boat fuel and heating oil and food, ” said Amason.

Perry Eaton, a fellow Alutiiq artist, said residents in native communities in and around the Arctic Circle in Alaska are moving in droves to the cities in search of other types of work.

As they do, America stands to lose some of its oldest cultural inheritances.  Most of Alaska’s remote native peoples have have remained close culturally to what their ancestors were thousands of years earlier, despite some changes like motorized transport. “It’s the only place in America where there was no Indian removal,” said Eaton. He was referring to the forced movement of natives on the American continent to reservations and institutions by the U.S. government, where many were forced to give up their cultural traditions.

Eaton said Northern Alaska is a place where the languages shared by the 180 indigenous communities don’t have a word for “art” — it’s part of daily life, in the clothes they make, or the masks they craft to help usher loved ones who have died into the afterworld.

Alice Rogoff, the founder of the Alaska House, said she had hoped the Republican nomination of Sarah Palin, for vice-president would have helped shine a light on the plight of native Alaskans. Not yet.

Photo of artist Sylvester Ayek courtesy of the Alaska House. Photo of ice sculpture outside of Alaska House by tpg.

Ice getting bigger hardly sounds like a sign of global warming but that’s apparently what is happening in the seas around Antarctica.

Leading climate scientists say that a tiny trend towards bigger ice in winter floating on the oceans around the frozen continent since the late 1970s — the maximum extent is around now, in September — is consistent with models of climate change that predict harsher winds and less warmer water at the surface.

It may even be that there’s more snow and rain falling onto the southern oceans because of climate change — that can raise the amount of fresh water on the surface and, hey presto, fresh water freezes at a higher temperature than salt water.

At Reuters News my colleagues and I often write stories about the shrinking of summer ice at the other end of the world, in the Arctic, as one of the clearest signs of global warming that is blamed by the U.N. Climate Panel on human use of fossil fuels.

In response to those stories, I often get e-mails from people sceptical about climate change who say that ice at the other end of the earth, around Antarctica, is expanding.

But it turns out that leading scientists at NASA, the British Antarctic Survey and Norway’s Nansen Center say the two things are not contradictory — the world reacts to greenhouse gases in different ways.

Antarctica is a gigantic frozen continent and winds sweep around it in the southern oceans, without drawing in much warmer air from further north. The Arctic is an open ocean ringed by continents, and more vulnerable to currents and winds blowing up from the south.

So you really can have your ice and melt it, depending on which pole you’re talking about.

What do you think?

California environmentalists are in tizzy this week, accusing Republican Vice Presidential candidate and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin of telling their governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, how to do his job.

At issue is a letter Palin sent to Schwarzenegger last month, asking him to veto a bill that would raise shipping container fees to pay for pollution-reduction programs at three major California ports.

The letter, which Palin sent to Schwarzenegger a day before she was announced as John McCain’s running mate, began circling on the Web on Thursday.

In it, Palin argues that the fees would hurt Alaskans, who rely heavily on marine cargo to receive goods.

“Shipping costs have increased significantly with the rising price of fuel and these higher costs are quickly passed on to Alaskans,” Palin wrote. “This tax makes the situation worse.”

Palin also argued that the $30 fee per 20-foot container would “harm California by driving port business away.”

California’s three biggest ports — Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Oakland — are responsible for nearly half of the nation’s imports.

“Gov. Palin needs to visit Southern California and understand that we are the tailpipe of the nation, ” said the bill’s author, California State Senator Alan Lowenthal. “By getting cheap goods from Asia to Alaska, we are subsidizing Alaskans with our health.” 

Environmentalists also countered the letter swiftly, saying the bill was critical to reducing the number of pollution-related deaths in California.

“We’re counting on the governor to stand up for California and not out-of-state interests,” Martin Schlageter, campaign director for California air quality group the Coalition for Clean Air, said of the letter.

The bill has received the approval of the California legislature, but the Governor himself has yet to sign it or comment on his plans.

McCain, whose presidential bid Schwarzenegger has endorsed, toured the Los Angeles port area with the California Governor in February of last year. At the time, he called for a nationwide roll-out of California’s low carbon fuel standard.

A 1917 sign in Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska shows where the end of the Exit Glacier used to be — a mile from the current edge of a receding wall of ice.

Read my colleague Ed Stoddard’s fascinating tale from the park about the U.S. ‘environmental wars’ since Republican presidential candidate John McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Would a Vice President Palin sway a President McCain away from his long-standing drive for tougher action on climate change if the Republican pair win November’s election?

Palin favours expanded drilling for oil, opposes a Bush administration decision to list polar bears as threatened and doubts that human activities cause climate change, which is warming the Arctic twice as fast as the rest of the globe. The aptly named Exit glacier, like almost all glaciers around the world, is shrinking.   

And Palin’s environmental views aren’t just about the climate – Ed writes that she has also clashed with environmentalists by favouring shooting wolves from helicopters.

McCain was, among other things, the author of the “Climate Stewardship Act” with Sen. Joe Lieberman in 2003. The Act, which would have capped U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, was defeated in the Senate by 55-43 votes.

So will Palin’s views — here is a link to her Alaska policy – swing McCain away from toughening U.S. climate policies, which have been slammed by many U.S. allies around the world as too weak?