Current Savers Blog

(Photo: Procession with Ganesha statue in Mumbai, 15 Aug, 2009/Punit Paranjpe)

Few events can rival the ancient rituals and riotous color of India’s religious festivals. This year, the months-long celebration season is also becoming eco-friendly.  Alarmed by the high levels of pollution caused by firecrackers, toxic paints and idols made of non-recyclable material, schools, environmentalists and some states are encouraging “greener” celebrations.

In Mumbai, where the 10-day festival for the elephant-headed Ganesha (the Hindu deity of prosperity) is underway with giant, colored idols and noisy street parties, radio and TV stations are airing environmental messages and school children are learning to make eco-friendly idols.

The statues, made of brightly painted plaster of Paris, are usually immersed in the sea or a lake after a lively procession that can sometimes take half a day to navigate the choked streets, and which ultimately leaves dismembered idols strewn along the shore.

But a growing number of Indians are opting for smaller clay idols which they immerse in water at home.

“An idol that doesn’t dissolve in the sea is just a tragic end for something you have worshipped for so many days,” said Abhijit Karandikar, a creative director at an advertising agency. “More people are realizing they can be more eco-friendly in our festivals. It’s something that’s in our control.”

Read the whole story here.

(Photo: Devotees touch the feet of Ganesha statie in Hyderabad, 23 Aug 2009/Krishnendu Halder)

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Rodney Russ lives for the times he is at the rudder of a Zodiac.

For the owner of Heritage Expeditions, the New Zealand-based company that is operating the Russian research ship Professor Khromov in the Bering Sea, the more challenging the conditions the better.

“The rougher the waves, the more difficult the landing, the more remote and obscure the place, the more I enjoy it,” Russ said in a corridor on the Khromov.

So it was with disappointment that Russ was forced to put the inflatable boat with the outboard motor away, after he had donned his wet-weather gear and readied the craft for a spin off the Siberian coast in late August.

The plan was nixed by the Russian navy representative on board.

It took months for the joint U.S.-Russian RUSALCA oceanographic expedition to get the necessary clearances to travel through Russian waters in the Khromov, deploying data-gathering moorings, and using a high-tech instrument to take water samples.

There was nothing in the permits about zipping around the ship in a Zodiac. Doing it could jeopardize the RUSALCA mission, which is geared to gauging the impact of global warming on the region over several years.

The next day, the ship’s research path took it slowly back toward the Russian-United States border, which lies between two tiny inhabited islands – Big Diomede and Little Diomede (Little’s on the U.S. side).

The moment the Khromov crossed the border, Russ lowered his Zodiac into the Bering Strait, and invited some passengers to take some pictures of the ship and its cold-water surroundings as it sat just on the U.S. side of the boundary between the two onetime Cold War foes.

The sea was glasslike, so it wasn’t the high-seas adventure it could have been for Russ, who began his career as a wildlife biologist. No matter.

“I was keen for the program to get some photographs,” he said. “I’m always raring to go. If there’s a chance to drive a Zodiac, I’ll go in.”

(Photo – Rodney Russ powers his Zodiac away from the Russian research ship Professor Khromov in U.S. waters of the Bering Strait on August 28, 2009. REUTERS/Jeffrey Jones)

Meet Marshall Swartz. A one-time door-to-door cemetery plot salesman and stage crew member for Grateful Dead and Velvet Underground concerts, he is the go-to guy for oceanographers who rely on the high-tech gear needed to gather and analyze water from the sea.

Swartz, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, lugs pallets of equipment onto research vessels as many as six times a year, at ports around the world, sets it all up and runs it aboard ship for the scientists.

Working for the RUSALCA expedition on the Russian ship Professor Khromov in the Bering Sea, he is responsible for the CTD rosette, a circular array of bottles and other gear attached to a frame the size of a golf cart.

The unit gets lowered into the ocean, where it takes measurements of the water’s conductivity, temperature and depth and relays it to Swartz’s bank of computers. Scientists also use water samples from the bottles, which are filled at various depths, for their own studies.

It’s a task of thousands of details, involving computer data gathering, GPS tracking, electrical engineering and good, old know-how with pliers and wrenches. Swartz, 55, is a details-oriented technician. For this trip he brought 6,700 lbs of gear.

“It’s what I enjoy doing – making things work with practicality and simplicity to the degree possible,” he said while setting up his station in the lab of the Khromov as it idled just off Russia’s easternmost point on a late August afternoon.

His journey here has not been usual.

In his early years he was a marina attendant, sold “prearrangement” plots and worked as a stagehand for concerts at Duke University, where he studied electrical and mechanical engineering. Swartz did his first oceanographic trip in 1976, also on a Russian ship.

Three years later he got an MBA, and then went to work in sales for General Electric and Allied Signal in California, before getting laid off in 1992. Then, he went back to the ocean research world, signing on with Woods Hole, where he’s been ever since.

He’s become known as the iconoclastic technician, jack of all trades and rock n’ roll buff who comes to ocean-going voyages prepared for anything.

“He’s somewhat of a god in oceanographic circles,” said Kevin Wood, a veteran seaman and scientist with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who’s often worked alongside Swartz.

(Photo – Marshall Swartz of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute talks on his satellite phone on the deck of the Russian research ship Professor Khromov in the Bering Sea on August 27, 2009. REUTERS/Jeffrey Jones)

By Madelyn Fairbanks

U.S.-based company Doe Run Peru and the government of President Alan Garcia are locked in a dispute over how to balance environmental health with saving thousands of jobs at the company’s La Oroya metals smelter.
La Oroya, high in the Andes east of Lima, has been called one of the most contaminated places in the world by the Blacksmith Institute, but it is a top 10 metals exporter in Peru and the economic engine of the central region of the country.

The smelter has been shut down since June after banks worried about plunging metal prices cut credit lines, strangling not only the plant’s ability to buy mineral concentrates for its refinery, but cutting off its ability to pay back other debts. Workers are restless and environmentalists are worried.

Doe Run’s parent company, U.S.-based Renco Group, bought the smelter from Peru in a 1997 privatization auction. The smelter opened in 1922. At the time of the privatization, Doe Run said it would scrub the smelter, while the government said it would mitigate decades of pollution that dusted the town’s hills before Doe Run came to town.

Renco’s CEO Ira Rennert, also owns refineries in the U.S. His company is now arguing with the government about extending an October deadline to finish the smelter cleanup. Getting an extension would allow it to tap loans again.
A 2005 study from St. Louis University indicated that 97 percent of children between 6 months and 6 years of age in the town of La Oroya have toxic levels of lead in their blood. The smelter is the town’s main source of employment.
Critics say the company should have done more to cut air and water pollution before the global financial crisis, when Doe Run Peru and its American parent company had robust profits.
In the meantime, workers at Doe Run threaten to block off area roads starting August 31 if a cleanup extension from Garcia is not given.

The last of the data-gathering moorings to be plucked from the Bering Sea proved to be the most troublesome.

This one was several miles north of the Bering Strait in U.S. waters, and it took a few hours to steam up there in the Professor Khromov, the ship the RUSALCA team is using for the joint U.S.-Russian oceanographic expedition.

Once GPS pinpointed the location, the tech team in charge of retrieving the moorings sent the electronic signal that releases the chain of instruments and floats from the anchor on the ocean floor and waited. And waited. All on deck scanned around the ship for an orange ball on the water’s surface. It didn’t appear.

More beeps. Again, nothing.

After about 30 minutes, the mission’s chief scientist, Terry Whitledge, and Rebecca Woodgate, who is responsible for the mooring operations, put Plan B into action.

The high-tech gear, which has been gathering data on water content, temperature and other things 50 meters below the surface since last October, can’t just be left behind. It is key to the expedition’s mission of gauging the impact of global warming in the region.

This kind of trouble has been known to happen in the Arctic.

The new plan: slowly let out hundreds of meters of steel cable, weighed down by anchors, to scrape the ocean bottom in hopes of releasing the fouled-up mechanism. The Khromov’s captain, Alexander Dyachenko, steered the ship in wide circles. Mercifully, the sea was calm.

After about an hour of dragging the bottom, the buoy popped to the surface. From there, it was a snap to pull the mooring aboard, and the technicians went about trying to figure out what prevented it from releasing.

The episode was inconvenient, but no crisis, Woodgate said.

“I’ve been there before,” the British-born scientist said. “We’ve got a ship that can drag, so I’m not as desperate as I might otherwise be.”

Now, she and her team begin the process of placing new moorings in the ocean between the United States and Russia.

(Photo – Dan Naber, with the RUSALCA mission’s mooring team, readies an anchor to drag the floor of the Bering Sea in hopes of releasing a stuck data-gathering mooring on August 25, 2009. REUTERS/Jeffrey Jones)

Pakistan is running out of water so fast that the shortage will strangulate all water-based economic activity by 2015, a Pakistani thinktank says.  And that pretty much covers 70 percent of the population  who are involved in farming.

This is not a new warning.  In recent months,  as this blog itself has noted, experts have painted an increasingly bleak scenario of Pakistan’s rivers drying up, the ground water polluted and over-exploited and the whole water infrastructure in a shambles.

But Pakistan, as the Islamabad-based Centre for Research and Security Studies says, is not listening.  Pakistan has gone from a “water scarce” country to a “water-stressed” country, worse than Ethiopia, the Centre says quoting a  2006 World Bank study. In 10 years time, it will become a water-famine country.  

Among the 25 most populous countries, South Africa, Egypt and Pakistan are the most water-limited nations, that study said.

According to the World Bank data, Pakistan only stores 30 days of river water, India stores 120 days, while the Colorado river system in the U.S. has storage capacity of up to 900 days of water usage.

The depletion of water resources is unchecked, as the 2009 UN World Water Development Report points out. It says that the total actual renewable water resources in Pakistan decreased from 2,961 cubic metres per capita in 2000 to 1,420 cubic metres in 2005. A more recent study indicates an available supply of water of little more than 1,000 cubic metres per person. 

India and China are not far behind in this plunder of water, with only 1,600 and 2100 cubic metres per person per year. Which as the South Asia  Investor Review points out is itself cause for serious concern, as it raises the spectre of wars over water in the future.

Just to put the numbers in relation to that for the rest of the world, major European countries have up to twice as much renewable water resources per capita, ranging from 2,300 (Germany) to 3,000 (France) cubic metres per person per year.

The United States, on the other hand, has far greater renewable water resources than China, India or major European countries: 9,800 cubic meters per person per year. By far the largest renewable water resources are reported from Brazil and the Russian Federation - with 31,900 and 42,500 cubic meters per person per year.

How did it get here? Pakistan is one of the world’s most arid countries, with an average rainfall of under 240 mm a year as this detailed backgrounder in Pakistan’s Daily Times points out.

The population and the economy are heavily dependent on an annual influx into the Indus river system (including the Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej rivers) of about 180 billion cubic meters of water, that emanates from India and is mostly derived from snow-melt in the Himalayas.

But this single river system on which Pakistan almost entirely relies has been heavily harvested and there is no additional water to be injected into system.

Paksitan needs to conserve its water, use it more wisely and set up new reservoirs on an urgent basis, the South Asia Investor says. Or else the threat posed to the nation’s stability by the battle for water may yet turn out be just as serious as the militants trying to take control. 

[Photographs of dried up lake in Islamabad and a well in Baluchistan]

One of the most popular programs brought in by the administration of President Barack Obama, “cash for clunkers”, which offered rebates of up to $4,500 to trade in older gas guzzlers, wrapped up on Monday.

Some auto dealers are concerned about the slow pace of reimbursements under the program and the low inventories that have followed in its wake.

(PHOTO: A clunker vehicle sits in a parking lot during the last day of the “Cash For Clunkers” auto rebate program at Courtesy Chevrolet dealership in Phoenix, Arizona, August 24, 2009. REUTERS/Joshua Lott)

See the two video clips below. The first is of Cliff Johnson, president of Texas Motors Ford in Fort Worth, talking about his concerns. The other is from his new vehicle director, Jeremy Pirotte, who talks about inventories.

Government and industry officials say they do not expect the auto rebate program to be renewed in the immediate future, even though it has been popular with consumers and is considered a genuine economic stimulus at a time when the nation is in recession.

The biggest business lobby in the United States wants to hold a public hearing “to put the science of global warming on trial,” The Los Angeles Times reports.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to drive back major emission limits, wants the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to hold the hearing on evidence that climate change is man-made.

“Chamber officials say it would be ‘the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century’ — complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect,” the newspaper reported.

“It would be evolution versus creationism,” William Kovacs, the chamber’s senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs, told the LA Times. “It would be the science of climate change on trial.”

The EPA told the Times that a hearing would be “a waste of time” and called a lawsuit by the chamber “frivolous.”

“The chamber proposal ‘brings to mind for me the Salem witch trials, based on myth,’ said Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist for the environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists. ‘In this case, it would be ignoring decades of publicly accessible evidence.’”

But if the EPA refuses to hold the hearing, the chamber is threatening to take the fight to federal court.

That would bring a modern replay of the famous 1925 Scopes trial. Then three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan and attorney Clarence Darrow fought a courtroom battle over the case of a Tennessee teacher accused of teaching scientist illegally.

The teacher John Scopes, who purposefully tested the Tennessee law, was found guilty in the trial, a verdict that was upheld on appeal.

But, as the LA Times points out — and as many elementary students can attest — the scientists eventually won out in the end and evolution is taught in schools across the country.

(Writing by Laura Isensee)

Photo Credit: Reuters/Daniel Munoz (A woman holds a sign during a protest on climate change in central Sydney)

The research vessel Professor Khromov is just a few kms off the easternmost point of Siberia, and U.S. technologist Kevin Taylor is struggling to reel in an orange buoy that had been deep beneath the Bering Strait for nearly a year.

The first time he tries, the ship veers too far away from the prize and must make a slow, wide turn for another pass. The second time, Taylor’s hook is not quite ready and the float bobs again into the Khromov’s wake. This takes practice, even in calm waters.

A main task of the RUSALCA expedition, a joint-U.S.-Russian scientific effort taking place in August and September, is to retrieve data-gathering moorings that were dropped 50 meters to the bottom during stormy weather last October, and to leave new ones.

It takes technological and navigational know how and, it soon becomes clear, the lassoing skills of a cowboy.

Attached to moorings are instruments that gather data on temperature, currents, salinity and other things tied to RUSALCA’s study of the impact of climate change on the region. Some of the new ones are even equipped with an instrument that listens for whales. They are held to the bottom by weights fashioned from train wheels.

Three are in Russian waters and five are on the U.S. side of the strait.

When the ship gets close to a mooring location the technical team tries to get a signal from the equipment to determine the exact location. If the unit is in the spot where it was dropped — that is, ice did not move it -– then the team sends an electronic pulse to open a mechanism that detaches the anchor, allowing the floats and instruments to float to the surface.

It’s not without its risks.

The technical expert behind the moorings, University of Alaska’s David Leech, said a single barnacle has been known to foul up the release mechanism. That leaves $200,000 worth of high-tech gear stuck on the bottom of the Bering Strait. The ship’s captain must also make sure he does not run over the unit during the recovery.

Once the mooring’s grabbed, the ship’s crane plucks it from the water and puts it onto the deck, where technologists and scientists scrape away the barnacles, separate and clean the gear and get ready to upload the data. Then it’s off to the next location.

A couple more tries and Taylor snags the buoy, to cheers of his colleagues. By the third mooring, the retrieval effort is more like clockwork.

(Picture – Technologist Kevin Taylor gets ready to snag the buoy of a mooring near Siberia’s eastern coast from the deck of the Professor Khromov on Monday, August 24, 2009. REUTERS/Jeffrey Jones)

For most of us, printing e-mails or making copies is just part of the daily routine in the office. But, the paper we use does come from somewhere. Last week, we had the opportunity to visit Stora Enso’s Nymolla Mill in southern Sweden to get an exclusive look at how MultiCopy paper is made. Nymolla is an integrated mill (it produces pulp and paper on the same site) and most of the wood used is sourced locally. Also interesting, the mill is the only one I could find in the world that emits zero carbon dioxide from fossil fuels during the paper making process. Check out my look inside the Nymolla Mill.