Current Savers Blog

Fred Krupp is president of the Environmental Defense Fund. The views expressed are his own.

It’s as though three mammoth challenges facing America are intertwined like the strands of a rope: reducing our dependence on Mideast oil; creating new American jobs from clean energy; and reducing pollution responsible for climate change.

Together, those strands are a lifeline to the future.

While the House of Representatives passed comprehensive energy and climate legislation last summer, polarization has created gridlock in Washington, paralyzing most major legislative initiatives, including clean energy.

But a new, “tripartisan” partnership has emerged in the Senate that offers a hopeful way forward.

The legislation being crafted now by Sens. John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman is garnering interest on both sides of the aisle.

It will create the certainty our businesses need to invest in a clean energy future, and it will send the signal to American and global investors that our clean energy economy is open for business.

It offers common ground and a good chance at securing bipartisan consensus on energy and climate legislation.

Senator Graham is one of the most conservative voices in the Senate, but he believes a bill is critical to American success in the future, in part because it will spark a new wave of job-creating investment and manufacturing here.

It will create certainty for businesses and investors, moving tens of billions of dollars to now stalled construction projects and mobilizing armies of workers to build them.

The Senator has expressed concern that if we stay on our current trajectory, China will capture most of these emerging jobs.

“Six months ago,” he said recently, “my biggest worry was that an emissions deal would make American business less competitive compared to China.  Now my concern is that every day that we delay trying to find a price for carbon is a day that China uses to dominate the green economy.”

On another occasion last month, he put it more bluntly:  “Every day we wait in this nation, China is going to eat our lunch.”

He’s right to be worried – a majority of Americans are worried too. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll revealed that most Americans believe America’s role in the world economy will diminish in the coming years, and many believe “the 21st century will belong to China.”

The truth is, China is already beating the U.S. to clean energy jobs.

China is quickly becoming the global powerhouse in clean energy manufacturing and innovation, dwarfing the efforts of America.

Backed by huge investment and an industrial policy bigger than the world has ever seen, China has become the worldwide leader in new energy technology markets while the U.S. is quickly falling behind.

Last year, China passed Denmark, Germany, Spain, and the U.S. to become the world’s largest maker of wind turbines.

In the last two years, China also became the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels, a technology invented and long dominated by Americans.

Wind and solar aren’t the only green technologies where China is advancing rapidly.

China is also leading in advanced vehicle and battery technology.

The Chinese firm BYD introduced the world’s first plug-in hybrid vehicle, and China’s production of lithium ion batteries accounted for 41 percent of the global market by 2008.  The number of battery companies in China increased from 455 to 613 between 2001 and 2004.

China is also an emerging world leader in ultra-high-voltage, or UHV transmission technology, which reduces energy losses when electricity is transmitted over long distances.

China now has more than 100 domestic UHV manufacturers and suppliers, and the State Grid Corporation will invest $44 billion through 2012, and $88 billion through 2020, in building UHV transmission lines.

So how can America compete with China in the emerging green economy?

Along with Sens. Graham, Kerry, and Lieberman, I believe we can match the scale of China’s centralized industrial policy by fully deploying the engine of American prosperity: our marketplace. It is the only tool we have with the scale and capital to compete with China.

If the U.S. puts a limit on carbon pollution, we will send a clear signal to the marketplace that will unleash a massive wave of private investment in low-carbon energy sources and technologies like carbon capture and storage that would allow us to compete with the Chinese.

Only when American policy creates a profit motive for investors, inventors and entrepreneurs, will we have a chance to win the race.

President Obama recently made that case to the Business Roundtable, calling for a price on carbon to kick-start America’s efforts to win the clean technology race:

“A competitive America is also an America that finally has a smart energy policy. We know there is no silver bullet here – that to reduce our dependence on oil and the damage caused by climate change, we need more production, more efficiency, and more incentives for clean energy.

“But to truly transition to a clean energy economy, I’ve also said that we need to put a price on carbon pollution.”

The president expanded his commitment to ensuring that legislation passes this year, when he met with a bipartisan group of fourteen senators to discuss their concerns.

This is a sign of real progress – not only because the president has made climate and energy legislation a priority, but because Republicans and conservative Democrats alike are at the table, shaping that legislation together.

Photo shows the U.S. Capitol dome reflected in the glass roof of its underground visitor center in Washington, February 24, 2009.  REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Scientists studying remote Arctic seas north of Siberia have found  high levels of the powerful greenhouse gas methane, in some places bubbling up from the seabed. 

But is it new (extremely alarming as a possible sign of climate change), impossible to know how long it’s been going on (still worrying), or might it have been happening for a long time (less alarming)? Even the scientists involved seem unsure. 

In the worst case, the leaks are recent and caused by global warming — a thaw of the seabed permafrost linked to rising sea temperatures that could go on to release vast buried stores of the heat-trapping gas that would further stoke global warming. In the best case, it may have been going on for thousands of years in an inaccessible area where no one has taken measurements before.

Either way, it’s worrying because a projected rise in temperatures could further erode the permafrost that had previously been considered an impermeable cap and so lead to more releases of methane.

The article in the journal Science  makes clear that you can’t tell whether it’s new or not –more monitoring is urgently needed. 

The University of Alaska, where some of the scientists are based, put out two embargoed press releases. The original said the seabed is “starting to leak” (very alarming)

The second one, which replaced the first about a day before the embargo was lifted, changed the second paragraph to drop the word “starting” and merely say the seabed “is leaking” (worrying):

So let’s hope it’s been going on for ages.

(Photo top: The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer, a high-resolution passive microwave Instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite shows the state of Arctic sea ice on September 10, 2008)

-Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own-

The project involved more than 2,500 scientists. It cost $ 10.5 billion between 1983 and 2009 and it included one of the most bizarre scientific tasks of all time: evaluate whether nuclear waste stored deep inside a Nevada desert mountain would be safe a million years into the future.

That was the safety standard set in September, 2008, by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a condition for allowing nuclear waste to be stored deep in the belly of the Yucca Mountain, 95 miles (155 km) from Las Vegas, long the subject of political debate and a fine example of nimbyism (not in my backyard).

The vastly complex computer models and simulations experts launched to figure out whether Yucca Mountain would be a safe environment in the year 1,000,000 and beyond ended before there was a scientific conclusion.

President Barack Obama has pulled the plug on the entire Yucca Mountain enterprise, million-year safety study and all, by writing it out of his financial year 2011 budget, which begins in October.

Yucca Mountain’s death by budgetary axe defies logic. It coincides with Obama’s stated support for expanding nuclear power. More reactors mean more waste, now piling up above-ground at sites scattered around the country.

In February, Obama announced $8.3 billion in government loan guarantees for two nuclear reactors in Georgia. They would be the first new plants since the 1979 nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, an accident that caused no casualties but became a rallying symbol for the anti-nuclear movement.

Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington watchdog group, described abandoning Yucca Mountain without figuring out what to do, long-term, with the toxic nuclear waste produced by new (and existing) reactors as “patently illogical,” a “politicized and short-sighted decision.”

The group is right.

This is a matter of politics trumping science and it involves a president who pledged, in his inaugural address, to “restore science to its rightful place” from where, in the eyes of many Obama partisans, it had been dislodged by the administration of George W. Bush, routinely accused (and often with good reason) of “politicizing science.”

Yucca Mountain, which rises 4,950 feet (1,510 metres) from the Mojave desert, on the edge of a nuclear test site, was meant to be the central burying ground for radioactive waste now stored at 121 sites in 39 states, some 150 million pounds (68 million kg) of toxic stuff and more piling up. The material is initially submerged in pools of water and then sealed in steel and concrete casks.

The idea of shipping them all to a remote site in the desert has had wide appeal - except for most people in Nevada, where Senator Harry Reid, now the leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, has been waging a relentless campaign against using Yucca.

“I am proud that after two decades of fighting the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, the project is finally being terminated,” Reid writes on his website. “(It) is simply not a safe or secure site to store nuclear waste.”

That’s his opinion. There’s no shortage of scientists who disagree.

AN INSULT TO INTELLIGENCE?

During Nevada stops in his campaign for the presidency, Obama came out strongly against Yucca Mountain, a position that helped him beat his Republican rival John McCain and win the hotly-contested state’s five electoral votes.

McCain has called closing the mountain while encouraging new plants “an insult to intelligence.”

Reid is running for re-election in November and he will no doubt hold up the decision on Yucca Mountain as a triumph of his persistence. His poll numbers have not been good recently and it remains to be seen whether Yucca will lift them. Some Republicans are convinced that Obama’s nuclear waste decision was taken purely for the benefit of Reid.

In an op-ed in the Washington Times late in February, Mark Sanford, the Republican governor of South Carolina, home to a nuclear complex holding 36 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste, said that the Obama administration was “walking away from a $10 billion investment and starting all over because of one man’s race for office in Nevada.”
Starting all over?

That process is meant to be initiated by a 15-member Blue Ribbon Commission, a device not infrequently used in Washington to give the appearance of action while actually delaying it. As Citizens Against Government Waste put it: “The administration is kicking the nuclear can down the road, into the next administration and onto the shoulders of future taxpayers.”

The commission, heavy on Washington insiders and relatively light on scientists, has two years “to provide recommendations for developing a safe, long-term solution to managing the nation’s used nuclear fuel and nuclear waste.” Looking for an alternative site to Yucca Mountain, another deep-underground storage facility, apparently is not part of the commission’s brief.

So then what? Start from scratch? Perhaps a return to the dawn of the nuclear age? The options under discussion then included burying radioactive material in the ocean floor, placing it in polar ice sheets — and even blasting it into space.

Reuters file photo shows the remote Nevada site of Yucca Mountain in 2002. REUTERS/STR New

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters)

American sci-fi blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow warned global audiences about climate change as it showed New York smothered by ice as temperatures plunged worldwide.  But the 2004 movie evidently made little impact on growth-crazy Asia, which has gone ahead spewing pollutants without imagining risks that they might disrupt the climate.

This year a group of filmmakers in newly modernised, consumption-happy Taiwan is going to the densely populated western Pacific island’s public with an hour-long alarmist movie showing the world’s second-tallest building Taipei 101 as an island in a flood that has drowned the capital after a reservoir collapses in a freak super-strength typhoon.

The free film with an obvious mission titled “Plus or Minus 2 Degrees Celsius” began showing in late February, reaching at least 11,000 people so far and with dates to screen for more audiences later in the year.

 It also shows footage from snowstorms, droughts and other real natural disasters around Asia to rub in its point, which has set off critical debate among Taiwan academics.

“A lot of people know about climate change but don’t understand what its impact would be,” said Lu Yu-rou, media specialist with film promoter the Taipei-based Plus or Minus 2 Degrees Campaign Alliance. And after watching the film? “A lot of people actually think it’s pretty shocking. They never expected that such as severe situation could develop.”

- 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.

    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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