Current Savers Blog

President Barack Obama is to announce on Wednesday a plan to permit exploration for oil and natural gas off the coast of Virginia as a way to create jobs and reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

Obama, who wants Congress to move a stalled climate change bill, has sought to reach out to Republicans by signaling he is open to allowing offshore drilling, providing coastlines are protected.

For more than 20 years, drilling was banned in most offshore areas of the United States outside the Gulf of Mexico because of concerns that spills could harm the environment.

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Pearl Jam reckons that 380,000 fans last year drove an average 23.6 mile round trip to the rock band’s concerts.

And two fans travelled in each car, which had an average fuel consumption of 21.9 miles per gallon — roughly what the U.S. government would expect from a Pontiac G6 or perhaps an Audi TT Roadster in a city.

Rather than a bizarre insight from a crystal ball or a step towards a Big Brother society, the figures are part of a complex calculation about the band’s greenhouse gas emissions on a 32-stop tour.

Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard (left) says the band is trying to stress that it is a business interested in combating global warming. (for a related story, click here).

The band is investing $210,000 to improve forestry in urban areas of Washington State. The project will try to eradicate invasive species such as English ivy and favour native trees and plants and help soak up 7,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, above the 5,474 tonnes estimated from the tour.

He says there’s often scepticism about whether such projects work — so here’s the accounting for the 2009 tour (Gossard says he hopes people will be inspired by it, or find flaws to help improve the accounting next time):

 The forestry projects will be concentrated in these four regions:

(Photo at top,  Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard performs during a show at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, June 6, 2003.  REUTERS/Ethan Miller.)

With an oversupply of wind turbines, why are governments subsidizing new manufacturing plants?

In recent years, China has ramped up its efforts to become a world leader in manufacturing and installation of wind turbines.

But the other side of the story is that China has also idled 40 percent of its industrial wind turbine manufacturing capacity as a result of oversupply and plummeting prices.

In Europe, the world’s largest turbine manufacturer, Vestas, announced a bond issue of 600 million euros ($807 million). This is the first bond issue in the company’s history and it was due to slow growth.

Even with an oversupply of manufacturing capacity, and falling prices for wind turbines, taxpayer-funded investment in wind turbine manufacturing by foreign companies in North America has been moving ahead with great fanfare.

In Canada, Ontario signed a $7 billion dollar deal with South Korea’s Samsung to manufacture industrial wind turbines and develop wind energy projects in the province — creating 4,000 jobs.

A Chinese and American business consortium announced plans to develop 1,000 jobs with the support of $450 million in taxpayer stimulus funds as part of recovery spending.

Vestas took the unusual step of announcing that it would consider building a manufacturing facility to build turbines for Ontario Trillium Power – a wind farm proponent without the necessary approvals to install turbines, or sell power into the grid.

Last year Vestas cited an oversupply of industrial wind turbines as justification for laying off 1,900 European wind turbine-manufacturing workers.

China idling 40 percent of their wind turbine manufacturing capacity demonstrates the oversupply is severely impacting even the most competitive manufacturing market in the world.

Under normal circumstances, China’s competitive advantage should allow Chinese-manufactured turbines to meet the demands of the global market at the expense of less competitive jurisdictions.

But these procurement decisions are based on politics, not economics.

North American jurisdictions seeking “green” manufacturing jobs are selling the idea to voters as a means of developing a green manufacturing sector as part of an economic recovery.

The reality, as evidenced around the world, is that these jobs aren’t permanent and could not exist without extensive ongoing government subsidization and therefore involvement in the business decisions of this industry.

Until the industry addresses the oversupply and governments address ever growing subsidization rates, real turbine prices will continue to fall, oversupply will continue to grow and subsidization rates will move this industry even further from market principles other sectors follow.

The impact will be felt by jurisdictions that have embraced and financially supported the technology.

They will surely feel the pressure higher electricity prices place on traditional manufacturing sectors, and the eventual loss of these temporary jobs when the wind turbine manufacturer pulls out.

Photo shows the sun rising over a windmill farm in Palm Springs, California November 26, 2005. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Lights will go out around the world on Saturday from Beijing’s Forbidden City to a village in the Arctic where they usually keep street lights blazing to ward off polar bears.

The “Earth Hour” — when everyone is asked to turn off lights for an hour from 8.30 p.m. local time — is meant as a show of support for tougher action to confront climate change. 

Organisers say that hundreds of millions of people last year joined in the annual event that has flourished since it began in Australia in 2007 and has won support from more than 120 nations, with endorsements from companies, government leaders and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Landmarks going dim this year also include Rome’s Trevi Fountain, Big Ben in London, the Sphinx in Egypt, the Empire State Building in New York and the new Burj Khalifa tower — which opened in Dubai this year and is the world’s tallest building at 828 metres. Everyone around the world with electricity is urged to turn off the lights at home.

Last year the target was to involve at least a billion people of the world’s 6.8 billion — electricity consumption dips but there’s no good way of checking exactly how many people turned off the lights. Organisers have concluded that “hundreds of millions” took part. 

Longyearbyen, a Norwegian village about 1,000 kms from the North Pole, has agreed to join in for the first time — the local authorities refused last year, saying that having street lights on is a way to ward off polar bears, said Kathrine Kjelland of organisers WWF.

 No one wants to run into a polar bear in the dark, among the first victims of climate change if the Arctic melts.

(Photo: One year old polar bear Ikor plays at Sapporo zoo in Japan, Jan. 18, 2010. REUTERS/Issei Kato)

- Dr. Ir. Jules B. van Lier is a professor at Delft University. The opinions expressed are his own. -

The international observance of World Water Day, this year on March 22, is an initiative that grew out of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro.  This year’s theme — ‘Clean Water for a Healthy World’ — reflects the fact that population and industrial growth are adding new sources of pollution and increased demand for clean water across the world.

Human and environmental health, drinking and agricultural water supplies for the present and future are at stake, yet water pollution rarely warrants mention as a pressing issue.

It is absolutely right that water quality considerations should be highlighted just as much as water quantity issues going forwards.

However, what is sometimes obscured in this important debate is that, even with a step change in global water treatment efforts, vast amounts of potentially valuable wastewater will continue to be produced for the foreseeable future.

Indeed, in some developing countries some 80 percent of all waste is being discharged completely untreated, because of lack of regulations, resources and control. Globally, it is estimated that 1,500 cubic kilometres of wastewater is produced on an annual basis, whereas the world renewable fresh water reserves amounts to only 40,000 cubic kilometers per year.

Realising that 1 m3 of non-treated wastewater may spoil over 1000 m3 of fresh water for human consumption or other activities, the urgency of the matter is obvious..

My research at Delft University, UNESCO-IHE and my previous employer, Wageningen University, has convinced me that, especially in the developing world, it is crucial that we change our perspective on wastewater for two main reasons:

•    In an era of increasing water scarcity, especially in the developed world, it is increasingly vital that we use all our water supplies efficiently.  As a result of climate change, it is estimated that some 1.8 billion people will live in countries by 2025 with absolute water scarcity.

•    Moreover, in recent years, the treatment technologies for removing the harmful components from wastewater have become increasingly effective.  Thus, far from being a useless by-product which is collected in pipes and gutters and flows into a dump-hole somewhere in the ground, wastewater is actually fast becoming a potential source of valuable raw materials including water and energy that can be reused productively for energy and irrigation.

Going forwards, the potential of wastewater is truly huge, especially in the developing world.

For instance, if we assume only a 50 percent  recovery of the chemical energy enclosed in human excreta the potential energy generation equals about 100 watt-hours (Wh) per person per day. This alone would be enough to light a substantial part of the poorest cities of Africa all night long!

Moreover, a city with 1 million inhabitants with an average water consumption of 100 litres a day can theoretically irrigate and fertilise between 1500 and 2000 hectares of farmland through wastewater, while nutrients from the wastewater can also be put to good use and the farmland serve as a sand filter to purify the water.

With our world phosphorous mines being depleted in about 60-70 years from now, we simply have to recover our valuable resources from our urban waste streams. In fact, the word ‘waste’ should be replaced by ‘a stream of non-defined resources’ ready for valorisation.

In the past, public sector municipalities, especially in the developing world, have failed to appreciate this potential and have underinvested in sanitary engineering and construction infrastructure and personnel.

Going forwards, however, it is likely that a new generation of developing country entrepreneurs will be able to unlock the value and potential profitability in wastewater and play a key role in the construction and implementation of basic sanitary infrastructure, opening up new opportunities in areas such as micro-financing and environmental engineering.

This would be hugely important in the developing world where 2.6 billion people still have no proper sanitation, resulting in some 200 deaths per hour, with the highest number among children under five.

Indeed, it is perfectly possible in the future that entrepreneurs might, under appropriate regulation, operate municipal-wide sewage treatment systems with investment costs being covered by loans, donations, franchise systems and/or lease contracts, and profit margin coming from sources like sewerage levies, nutrients benefits, stabilised organic matter, and recovered energy.

Such wastewater treatment plants may even eventually become reprocessing plants that produce water suitable for reuse.  This will lend an entirely new impetus to the process that could lead to the application of new reprocessing technologies, especially in areas where waste water treatment is still seen as a ‘Western luxury’.

One final key element that will drive this process forwards is the relaxation of very stringent Western-driven standards that have paralysed construction and implementation of sewerage and waste treatment plants in the developing world.  The resulting costs are often beyond the means of local municipalities, or encourage development of the wrong kind of sewerage and waste treatment plants for their needs.

A good example here is the city of Amman which, driven by Western donors, has built a high-technology treatment plant with costly wastewater treatment systems.  Amman would have instead benefited from a decentralised treatment plant that yields an extra 5 to 6 megawatts (MW) of electrical power which could then be used to drive irrigation pumps, for example, to benefit agriculture in local dry regions.

Unfortunately, what has happened in Amman is a common phenomenon in the developing world where insufficient interest is paid to potential alternative sewerage and treatment plants that would be more robust and suitable for these regions.  The end result is often abandoned or under-performing systems, and or plants that consume so much of the available financial resources that only a fraction of the pollution problems can be handled.

If local entrepreneurs can shift this perspective towards one more focused on adaption towards the local situation and a proper financial cost-benefit analysis, wastewater could easily grow to become an exceptionally valuable source of resource recovery, powering a broader development process in developing countries which still often lack even basic sanitation and water treatment infrastructure.

One more picture that caught my eye during the 24 hours news cycle for the World Water Day is the image of hundreds of hoses providing drinking water to  residents of a housing block in Jakarta.  The grubby plastic pipes supplying a fragile lifeline to families seem to represent the desperation that people face when the water supply is cut off.

Hoses used to supply residences with water are seen hanging across a street at the Penjaringan subdistrict in Jakarta March 22, 2010. Residents in the area say that they have had to construct makeshift water supplies for their homes by attaching hoses to pumps bought with their own money, as the government has yet to repair the original water supply which was damaged. March 22 is World Water Day.     REUTERS/Beawiharta

Today, March 22 is World Water Day and Reuters photographers in Asia were given an open brief to shoot feature pictures to illustrate it.  The only requirement I asked of them is that they included in the captions, the fact that while the Earth is literally covered in water, more than a billion people lack access to clean water for drinking or sanitation. At the same time in China 50 million people are facing drought conditions and water shortages and the two stories seemed to tie in with one another.

Looking at the file today three pictures really stuck home to me as to just how enormous the problem of getting clean water to people in the world is.

A boy swims in the murky waters of Manila Bay March 21, 2010. The Earth is literally covered in water, but more than a billion people lack access to clean water for drinking or sanitation as most water is salty or dirty. March 22 is World Water Day.    REUTERS/Cheryl Ravelo

A Hindu devotee wraps his cloth after a ritual dip in the polluted Yamuna river in New Delhi March 21, 2010. The Earth is literally covered in water, but more than a billion people lack access to clean water for drinking or sanitation as most water is salty or dirty. March 22 is World Water Day. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui

A floating restaurant is stranded in a branch of the Yangtze River in Chongqing Municipality, March 21, 2010. A severe drought across a large swathe of southwest China is now affecting more than 50 million people, and forecasters see no signs of it abating in the short term, state media said on Friday. REUTERS/Stringer

What is obvious from the pictures I have seen people are worried about water; the pollution, its scarcity and its future. March 22 is same day the U.S House of Representatives gave its final approval to President Obama’s healthcare reform. What will it take to get global approval and the necessary motivation for clean water around the globe?

The Oil Sands, the world’s second-largest proven reserves after Saudi Arabia, hold out the promise of energy security for the United States and economic security for Canada. But environmentalists fear the destructive, energy intensive process of extracting the oil will carry direct consequences for the planet. Despite the doubts, new oil sands projects are again springing up after the financial crisis halted development. How will oil companies balance the quest for more oil with environmental concerns? Mar. 22-23 we’ll put those questions to the oil companies, environmental groups and government officals at the first Reuters Canadian Oil Sands Summit in Calgary.

-Graciela Chichilnisky is the Architect of the Carbon Market of the Kyoto Protocol and the author of ‘Saving Kyoto‘, New Holland Publishers, UK, 2009.  Chichilnisky is a Professor of Mathematics and Economics at Columbia University in New York, Director of Columbia Consortium for Risk Management and Managing Director of Global Thermostat Inc. The opinions expressed are her own.-

We live surrounded by uncertainty. Tsunamis, the eruption of super- volcanoes, violent floods and storms, asteroid impacts that eliminate entire species as the dinosaurs that went extinct 60 millions years ago, the recent 8.8 earthquake in Chile, not to mention the global financial crisis.  Some disasters are worse than others, but they all have one thing in common. They are catastrophic risks.    This means risks that occur very rarely – but when they happen they have truly major consequences.

How should we prepare for the unknown catastrophe - how should we manage catastrophic risks?

In our daily lives we tend to weigh risks by their probability of occurrence. In this view, a 10 percent risk of losing your home is half as important as a 20 percent risk.  This approach is reasonable and prudent and it is how bankers evaluate financial risk of a non-performing mortgage and how the U.S. Congress evaluates budget risks. It is a simple and reasonable approach that was first conceptualized by John Von Neumann as he developed the foundations of risk management that rules our lives today.

But it is the wrong way to evaluate and manage catastrophic risk.

A catastrophic risk is so rare that it can be badly underestimated when we weight the losses by its probability. The global financial crisis of 2009 was one in a 100-year event, and we ignored it because it is so infrequent.  This is a bad mistake, since preparing for a catastrophe can prevent the worst from happening.

New Orleans is a painful reminder of this. Chile’s recent earthquake led to less fatalities than Haiti’s even if it was much more powerful – because the Chileans were well prepared. Preparing for the inevitable financial crisis as it was coming could have spared many people the loss of their homes and the many financial bankruptcies that rocked the world’s financial systems.

So, how to manage catastrophic risks? Here is how. Do not weigh the event by the probability of its occurrence. Consider the worst case scenario and protect against it. The decision of how much to spend should be weighed of course by other considerations – since we all operate within budgets -  but knowing for a fact the frequency of the event and discounting for it is the wrong approach.

Take the case of global warming. The entire world seems stuck in trying to decide the un-decidable – is global warming going to happen, yes or no?

This is the wrong question.

Of course it is worth finding out, if possible, whether climate change is happening. Scientists are doing this right now and we should make every effort to elucidate the question fairly and openly.  But it may be impossible to do so right now since the science is very new. In any case, it does not matter. This is the wrong question for managing the potentially catastrophic risks of climate change.

Everybody I know insures their home against fire, and in fact accident insurance is mandatory for drivers. Yet the probability that one’s home goes up in fire in the near future is rather low – less than one percent in most cases. This is significantly lower than the probability of catastrophic climate change.

Yet everybody buys fire insurance for their homes, a costly form of insurance that bank mortgages require. According to people in the most sceptical nation – the USA – the probability that humans are inducing climate change is almost 25 percent.  We seem to be stuck in requiring a majority to be convinced before we act.

Yet with a 25 percent change of a home fire it would be considered irresponsible and antisocial not to buy fire insurance.

For the same reason we must insure against climate change, and it is irresponsible and antisocial not to do so. Why are we not doing so? Because we underestimate rare events, that’s why.

Of course, the question is cost. How much does it cost to insure against climate change? This is an important question that has been considered by many, and the answer seems to be between one percent and 2.5 percent of the value of the asset - the world economy.

This compares very favourably with the premium we pay for catastrophic risk insurance of homes and buildings – as shown in the book Saving Kyoto I co-authored with Sheeran Kristen.

The issue requires clarification, because with the carbon market that the author created within the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 – international law since 2005 – the net cost to the global economy of protecting against climate change is zero. Some lose and some gain but the net cost is zero.  Since protection against climate change takes the form of investment on renewable energy – which is desirable for other unrelated reasons such as energy security – protecting against climate change today is an obvious solution that cries for action.

This blog can provide step by step solutions to achieve this goal, while helping economic development in the world economy and decreasing the wealth gap between industrialized and poor nations – a win-win solution all around

By Helen Hughes — Special to GlobalPost

SANTIAGO, Chile — Jacquelin Marin has no running hot water at home. For a while, she had no real home at all. But soon she’ll have both, with the sun heating water for her showers.

Marin and her neighbors are part of a pilot program to install solar water heaters in the houses of low-income families. For Chile — a country with stark economic inequality and few fossil fuels — it’s a way to help the poor while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Chile’s drastically different climate zones mean it’s hard to devise any nationwide energy solution. For now the program will begin in three disparate locations: 125 houses in the capital Santiago; 68 houses in Curanilahue, a rainy former coal-mining town 370 miles to the south; and 115 houses in Combarbala, 330 miles north in shrubby desert.

“I never had a water heater before, a husband who could install one, nor the money to fuel it,” said 39-year-old Marin.

In 2002, Marin joined a land takeover on the edge of a shantytown called Vista Hermosa, located in the poor western periphery of Santiago. Riot police, water cannon tanks and tear gas were not enough to dissuade the determined squatters. They stayed, constructing their homes with whatever materials they could purchase or find.

Marin and her neighbors from the shantytown went on to create a housing committee to change their flimsy abodes into real houses. They saved up, organized the neighborhood, staged protests and badgered authorities, until finally 125 families were awarded subsidies from the Chilean housing ministry to start a new housing project.

“Only 20 of the applicants were men,” said Leonardo Dujovne from the Housing Ministry. “All the rest were women.”

It was a long struggle and Marin, president of the housing committee Juntas Podemos (We Women Can), admits to fits of depression along the way, especially when they had to move their shacks down the road so construction could begin.

The squatters endured a prolonged lack of water and electricity at the new site, the cold of winter and rain leaking through tin roofs and flooding the neighborhood.

Some abandoned the project, moving back to swell the households of relatives as poor as themselves. Allegados, “added” relatives under the same roof, is a technical term in the overcrowded slums of Chile. Others, like Jacquelin, her husband and two children, stuck it out.

Today, Marin earns the minimum monthly wage of about $300 as the key keeper at the construction site of the 125 new homes that will go to as many families from Vista Hermosa. Her job is to ensure that fixtures and other finishes on the new homes stay put until she and her neighbors move in next April. “It’s like getting a brand new car,” she said, “and this one is a Mercedes!”

The basic unit has two stories, two bedrooms, and a floor space of just over 500 square feet. But it can be enlarged to three stories, up to four bedrooms and more than 750 square feet. Interior walls can be moved or removed, and floors added or subtracted.

Outer walls feature aerated concrete blocks with central cells, like cinder blocks, and millions of minute air bubbles in their walls for extra thermal insulation. The ceilings and bathroom walls are insulated with sheets of polystyrene foam covered by drywall.

To top off these cozy improvements, thermal-siphon solar water heaters crown the roofs.

The water heaters include a a flat solar collector and a holding tank for sanitary hot water, plus a kit to connect the water, pre-heated by the sun, to an auxiliary water heater. Fueled by conventional gas, the second heater can maintain or increase water temperature in the winter. The cost of each solar package with the auxiliary heater is $2,250.

The construction of an additional 297 houses nearby is planned to begin this year nearby. The per-house investment is close to $21,500.

For a family of four, using 10.5 gallons of water per day at a temperature of 115 degrees Fahrenheit, consumption of gas for heating water should drop by 62 percent. The new insulation standards should reduce energy demands for heat in winter by 45 percent and cooling demands in summer by 35 percent, said Minister of Energy Marcelo Tokman, while touring the site with then-President Michelle Bachelet.

Chile is a particularly poor country regarding fossil fuels. Almost three-quarters of its energy consumption during 2007 was based on fossil fuels: crude oil, natural gas and coal. The same year, the country had to import almost 100 percent of the crude oil and coal used, and most of its natural gas.

Petroleum products in Chile are as high as $4.35 per gallon of gasoline. Of course, with Chile’s minimum wage set at about $2 an hour, most laborers use public transport to get to work and, increasingly, bicycles to save on fare costs.

Solar water heaters are already popular in China, Israel and Spain. California recently approved rebates for switching from gas or electric water heaters to solar units, and beginning this year Hawaii will make solar water heaters mandatory on all new homes.

The first housing project in Chile with these energy savers will be christened “We Woman Can.” Jacquelin Marin said she regrets that Bachelet won’t be president when ribbons on her new neighborhood are cut, but she intends to invite Bachelet to the opening anyway. Maybe even to try her new hot shower.

Read the original story at GlobalPost.com

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A women’s group is criticising the United Nations for appointing only men to a 19-strong panel of experts to work out how to raise billions of dollars to fight climate change.

“A planet of men? Since when?” asks the German-based Gender CC — Women for Climate Justice in a statement. (An update — since the list was announced, U.N. officials say that a woman has been added — French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde)

The new panel, to be co-chaired by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, will look into ways to raise at least $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing countries combat climate change. The panel includes Guyana’s president, Norway’s prime minister, finance ministers, investors and leading economists: all men.

Marion Rolle of GenderCC says U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon could expand the panel and add some well-qualified women before a first meeting planned in London for March 29. “There’s still time” she told me.

Rolle says Ban’s next test will be the appointment of a successor for Yvo de Boer, the top U.N. climate change official, who stands down on July 1 after four years in the job. His predecessor was a woman,  the late Joke Waller-Hunter.

“The important thing is to look at the qualifications of both men and women. It must not be a woman at any price,” Rolle said. Many studies show climate change is harsher on women in developing countries than men, partly because mothers usually have to stay in areas affected by droughts, deforestation or crop failure.

Strong female candidates for de Boer’s job might be Kenya’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai or Dessima Williams, Grenada’s ambassador to the United Nations, she said.

Yet so far, nominees for the post are all … men.

(Picture: United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon speaks next to U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer (R) at a news conference during the U.N. Climate Change Conference 2009 in Copenhagen December 15, 2009. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins)