Current Savers Blog

Jaws needs help.

Nine shark-attack survivors from five countries headed for the United Nations in New York City to plead the case for shark preservation. U.N. member countries could take this issue up this week as part of an annual resolution on sustainable fisheries. They’ll also be reviewing the Millennium Development Goals — a long-range set of global targets that includes stemming the loss of biodiversity, including sharks.

“I’m very thankful to be alive,” said Krishna Thompson, a Wall Street banker who lost his left leg in a shark attack while visiting the Bahamas in 2001.  “I have learned to appreciate all of God’s living creatures. Sharks are an apex predator in the ocean. Whether they continue to live  affects how we as people live on this Earth. I feel that one of the reasons why I am alive today is to help the environment and help support shark conservation.”

Another survivor, Yann Perras of LeMans, France, had his leg severed while windsurfing off the coast of Venezuela in 2003. “Even if the movie ‘Jaws’ has scared entire generations, we have to remember that it is only fiction,” Perras said in a statement.

The nine who survived shark attacks gathered at the U.N. Environment Programme offices in an event organized by the Pew Environment Group, which among other projects aims to conserve shark species.

As many as 73 million sharks are killed each year to support the trade in shark fins, driven by demand for shark fin soup; 30 percent of shark species are either threatened or near-threatened with extinction and there is insufficient data to assess the population status of another 47 percent, the Pew Environment Group said.

Photo credits: REUTERS/Chaiwat Subprasom (A child looks at sharks at Siam Ocean World in Bangkok August 16, 2010.)

Dan Klotz, Pew Environment Group (Shark attack survivors, left to right: Krishna Thompson of New York, Chuck Anderson of Alabama, Mike Coots of Hawaii, James Elliott of Britain, Yann Peras of France at UN Environment Programme office in New York, September 13, 2010)

Bill McKibben, founder of the green group 350.org, is on a quest to convince President Barack Obama to put solar panels back on the roof of the White House.

He’s at the end of a journey to Washington from Maine in a van fired by biodiesel carrying one of the 32 panels Jimmy Carter unveiled in 1979 during the first press conference on the White House roof.

Also in the van are students from Unity College, which got the the panels some time after President Ronald Reagan, no fan of alternative energy, had workers remove the panels during “roof repairs” in 1986.

McKibben had hoped to meet with somebody high up in the Obama administration such as Carol Browner, Obama’s top energy and climate aide. He’s been talking all week with the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) on the plan.

“They keep saying it’s complicated and difficult, but compared with the other tasks they face, we think this one is relatively simple and it would be a great statement,” McKibben said via cell phone from the van.

The White House tells him the administration is greening federal government buildings across the country, which he agrees is a good effort.

But the solar panel couriers want more.

After all, U.S. seed sales shot higher the year after Michelle Obama planted a vegetable garden on the White House grounds. Solar power backers say President Obama could spark a similar reaction in their business if he put panels on top of the most coveted real estate in the country.

A California company called Sungevity has offered to give the White House free up-to-date solar panels that generate electricity.

Carter’s panels still work, but they are the older kind that heat up water for the student cafe at the college.

The CEQ said in an email that a “White House representative will hold a meeting with the group to discuss support for renewable energy.” It was unclear if the panel would be allowed to be brought to the meeting.

Still, McKibben hopes to hand the 120-pound, six-foot-tall panel to somebody running the White House grounds, at least to have the item preserved at its original home.

Like many environmentalists, he would prefer that the country pass a climate bill, but the Senate failed to pass one this year.

“The trick is to get discussion started … and hopefully one day soon the White House will have a big spanking new array on its roof.”

If his group doesn’t succeed they vow to try again. “We have a lot more solar panels back at Unity college, so we might be taking a lot more road trips if we need to,” said Jamie Nemecek, one of the students travelling with McKibben.

Photo: Nancie Battaglia

Royal Dutch Shell and German chemicals maker BASF were dealt a costly blow last month in a court ruling in Brazil that found both companies liable for contaminating groundwater with toxic waste northwest of Sao Paulo.

The ruling puts Shell and BASF in the lead position in this installment of The Green Gauge, a breakdown of companies that made headlines Aug. 22 to Sept. 6 for winning or losing credibility based on environment-related activity.

Selections of companies were made by Christopher Greenwald, director of data content at ASSET4, a Thomson Reuters business that provides investment research on the environmental, social and governance performance of major global corporations. These ratings are not recommendations to buy or sell.

Royal Dutch Shell and BASF

A court in Paulinia, Brazil has ruled that Shell and BASF are responsible for the “collective damage” caused by toxic emissions to the groundwater at a large pesticide plant 120 kilometres northwest of Sao Paulo, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reported. Shell built the plant in the late 1970s and BASF controlled it between 2000 and 2002.  The total liabilities are estimated to be $626 million, which include payments of $360 million to over 1,000 individuals who have experienced illnesses believed to have been caused by toxic chemicals at the plant.  BASF claimed that Shell is solely responsible for the problem. Both BASF and Shell said they plan to appeal the ruling.

Greenpeace Brazil originally exposed the problem  of toxic pollution at Shell’s plant in this 2001 report.

PTT Exploration and Production

Indonesia recently revealed plans to pursue damages of $2.2 billion against Thailand’s state-controlled PTTEP as a result of damages from a significant oil spill in 2009 from an oil rig controlled by the company in the Timor Sea.  PTTEP argues that Australia thus far has been unable to prove extensive economic damages resulting from the spill, which would represent more than 200 percent of the company’s annual profit in 2009.

Cairn Energy, Royal Bank of Scotland

The heightened criticism by environmental activists of off-shore drilling in the wake of the BP oil spill was dramatically on display as Greenpeace activists forced a temporary shut-down of Cairn Energy’s drilling activities off the coast of Greenland.  Four Greenpeace activists boarded Cairn’s Stena Don drilling rig last week, forcing a temporary shut-down of the rig’s operations.  The activists had been arrested by the end of the week and would face prosecution in Greenland for their actions.  The financing of Cairn Energy’s off-shore drilling activities by Royal Bank of Scotland was also criticized by activists in Edinburgh, who protested a RBS office in central Edinburgh and spilled fake oil in front of the offices of Cairn Energy.

Exelon Corp.

Exelon announced last week it will purchase Deere & Co.’s wind power business for $860 million.  Deere’s wind farms include 36 projects in eight states, and the transaction will increase Exelon’s capacity for renewable energy by 75 percent, raising the overall proportion of energy from renewable sources for the company from 3.2 percent to 5.5 percent.  The transaction is part of Exelon’s larger “Exelon 2020” strategy to reduce its CO2 emissions by 15 million tons by 2020.

Sony Corp.

Sony has partnered with the WWF to create “Open Planet Ideas,” which is a project to solicit ideas of environmental product innovation from the general public.  The first phase of the project through the end of September allows anyone to describe an environmental challenge or problem that needs to be addressed using available technologies.  Finalists will be selected by a panel of experts in October and will be asked to develop a concept of how existing Sony products can be combined to address the environmental challenge. A finalist will be chosen in January and will be asked to participate in developing a proof of concept for implementation.  The entire project, including the final proof-of-concept white paper will be available on the Internet, which is designed to help Sony gain awareness of how its existing products might be combined in innovative ways to address an environmental issue.

The initiative and the complete results of the submissions are available here.

Timberland, The Gap, Walgreen’s, Levi-Strauss

As controversy continues to swirl around the negative environmental impacts of the Canadian oil sands, Timberland, The Gap, Walgreen’s and Levi-Strauss recently announced they will prioritize using transportation suppliers who avoid using oil imported from the Canadian oil sands.  A campaign to encourage companies to avoid using tar sands oil is being organized by the NGO Forest Ethics.  More evidence of the environmental dangers associated with oil sands production has been recently published in a study by researchers at the University of Alberta who have found concentrations of the EPA’s 13 priority pollutants in the Athabasca River as a result of releases from the oil sands.   A copy of the study is available here.

For more on the campaign, see the Forest Ethics Website.

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Photo shows a Shell petrol station sign is seen reflected in a puddle in London February 4, 2010.  The photograph has been rotated 180 degrees.  REUTERS/Luke Macgregor (BRITAIN – Tags: BUSINESS ENERGY)

Bjorn Lomborg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” used to argue that concern about climate change was overblown because there were better causes to spend money on such as curing AIDS or malaria.

The Danish political scientist now says in a book coming out later this month called ”Smart Solutions to Climate Change: Comparing Costs and Benefits,”  that global warming is one of the top challenges facing the world and we should spend money on trying to fix it – $100 billion a year.

But true to his contrarian nature, he thinks the way the world is fighting climate change is all wrong. 

First, he thinks that global environment and climate negotiators are trying to put money into the wrong places. Many of them want $100 billion a year by 2020 to go to developing countries to pay for adapting to the worst effects of climate change, like flooding and droughts, and to help them move into alternative energies like solar power. 

“Of course if adaptation money is well spent it can be pretty good money,” Lomborg told me in an interview. “But if you want a solution, the real and only long term solution will be to make green energy much, much cheaper.”

Instead, the money should be spent on research and development of solar panels and other alternative energies, he argues, because the technologies today are more expensive than coal, natural gas and oil.

Some companies say solar panels are approaching parity to fossil fuels, especially when they are put up in the sunny U.S. Southwest. But Lomborg says many countries without stellar sunshine, especially Germany, have moved too quickly into subsidies for expensive alternative energy. “It underscores much of the problem with current climate policy that you want to put up new technology because it looks good and it gives politicians a photo opportunity, but at the end of the day it will do virtually nothing to deal with climate change.”

 He compares the current alternative energy situation to where we were with computers in the 1950s or 1960s. “Computers only got more efficient because we spent large sums of money mainly through the space race on making computers much better,” he said. “But we did not force everyone to buy a huge, inefficient computer in the 1950s and say everyone must have one in their cellar,” referring to mandates some countries and states have passed for minimal amounts of renewable energy.

Still, the space race had in many ways much clearer targets than slowing the world from warming up without hurting economic growth. Many experts say that alternative energies need to be deployed now to work out kinks and prepare for changes to the power grid.

And if he’s wrong, and the world experiences rapid catastrophic warming before alternative energies are perfected, he believes there’s an insurance that could be rapidly deployed – geoengineering. For just $6 billion specially placed ships in the mid-Pacific could generate steam that would whiten marine clouds. He believes that would bounce much of the sun’s rays back into the atmosphere and help keep the world cool.

But few climate experts would consider geoengineering an insurance policy because little is known about how cloud whitening, or other techniques, would change weather systems in the future.   

“We should be wary of any problems with it, but we should investigate so if we need it we have it in our arsenal of options,” he said.

Whatver label you put on Lomborg – skeptic or overly optimistic believer, or something else altogether – it’s hard to say he doesn’t have ideas.

Photo: Tony Gentile/REUTERS

With half a million signatures backing it up, Greenpeace fired off a letter to Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg today calling for the world’s largest social network to cut ties to coal-fired power at its new data center in Oregon.

“Other cloud-based companies face similar choices and challenges as you do in building data centers, yet many are making smarter and cleaner investments,” executive director of Greenpeace, Kumi Naidoo, writes. He points to Google and its a recent agreement to buy wind power from NextEra Energy for the next 20 years to power its data centers.

The letter adds to what’s turning into a miserable week for Zuckerberg, who is also fighting a civil lawsuit by a man who claims to own a huge chunk of the social network site and is seeking to uncover “unnecessary details” about Zuckerberg’s private life.

Greenpeace’s “Unfriend Coal” drive targeting Facebook falls under the environmental group’s larger Cool IT campaign, which aims to influence infrastructure choices behind the cloud-computing boom.

When Facebook broke ground on its center in Prineville, Oregon, last January, it blogged about energy-efficient technologies at the new facility, including cooling the air by bringing in cooler air from outside in an “airside economizer” and re-use of server heat during the colder months.

But Greenpeace says since then Facebook signed a deal to source its energy from PacificCorp, which it says uses 83 percent coal in its energy mix, the Associated Press reports.

An increase in the use of coal over the past four years was linked to a record 3 percent per year rise in global CO2 emissions,  a recent IPCC report showed.

And Greenpeace is predicting that the rise in data centers and telecommunication networks will mean an increase to 1,963 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity by 2020.

Yes it would be better for acid rain and air pollution if nobody burned coal for electricity.

But with 500 million members propping it up, should Facebook care how its users think its infrastructure should be powered? It’s a free service, after all, one that those 500 million people choose to use. Is the threat of their non-participation in FB networking enough to prompt any action?

As the special envoy on climate change for the World Bank, Andrew Steer might be thought of as the $6 billion man of environmental finance. He oversees more than that amount for projects to fight the effects of global warming.

“More funds flow through us to help adaptation and mitigation than anyone else,” Steer said in a conversation at the bank’s Washington headquarters. Named to the newly created position in June, Steer said one of his priorities is to marshall more than $6 billion in the organization’s Climate Investment Funds to move from smaller pilot projects to large-scale efforts.

While the World Bank is not a party to global climate talks set for Cancun, Mexico, later this year, it is deeply engaged in this issue, Steer said. Acknowledging that an international agreement on climate change is a long shot this year, he said there are still opportunities to make changes to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that spur climate change.

“We do see there are opportunities,” Steer said. “The mistake would be if it’s sort of all or nothing.” The bank is strongly supporting action to limit deforestation, offer quick financing to start climate projects and reform carbon markets to extend them to countries that have been left out so far.

Even though the World Bank won’t be at the negotiating table in Cancun, its members will be there, and 80 percent of them want the bank to focus on climate change, Steer said. It’s all part of a what he sees as a fundamental shift in the international attitude toward dealing with this problem.

“There is a new revolution that’s going on now,” he said . “It’s not only driven by personal commitment, like it would have been 15 years ago … Now it’s driven by just the sheer logic … If you care about long-term poverty reduction, you simply cannot avoid this issue.”

Photo credits: REUTERS/Supri Supri (Andrew Steer (right) then the World Bank’s Indonesia country director, with World Health Organization’s Georg Peterson at a news conference in Jakarta, August 24, 2006)

REUTERS/Mariana Bazo (Deforestation near a gold mine along Interoceanic highway section linking Peru and Brazil in the Amazon region of Madre de Dios, August 20, 2010)

Would you eat a genetically modified fish? What about pork from a pig with mouse genes? Beef from cattle with genes spliced to resist “mad cow” disease?

These are questions Americans may soon have to answer for themselves if the U.S. health regulators allow the sale of a genetically engineered salmon. The company that makes it, Aqua Bounty Technologies Inc <ABTX.L>, expects an agency decision by year’s end.

The biotech says its Atlantic salmon grows nearly twice as fast as normal salmon and could help Americans get more locally farmed fish. That could cut down on U.S. imports of roughly $1.4 billion a year in Atlantic salmon from other countries such as Chile while also easing pressure on wild Atlantic salmon in the nation’s Northeast.

But environmentalists and consumer advocates are concerned about what could happen if such altered fish were to escape or be released in rivers or off-shore salmon farms. They also worry about the health effects of eating such modified fish.

The Food and Drug Administration takes up the issue starting Sept. 19 as part of a three-day public hearing on whether to allow the genetically altered salmon on the U.S. market.

For more on the salmon situation, click here. For other genetically engineered food animals that aren’t far behind, click here.

Photo credit: Reuters/Victor Ruiz Caballero (Workers process farmed salmon at a plant in Chile. The fish shown in the photo are not genetically modified.)

After playing dead on top of oil-black plastic sheets outside a Chevron office, protesters marched through downtown San Francisco on Monday to denounce “oil addiction” on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, as the U.S. Gulf Coast recovers from its more recent disaster.

About 100 marchers, drawn from activist groups ranging from Code Pink to the Rainforest Action Network, took part in the ”Climate Justice” protest to demand that BP pay to clean up the mess in the Gulf and that the industry clean up its act in general. (BP has agreed to set aside $20 billion for spill damage claims and to pay all legitimate losses related to the spill.) Protestors also called for ”real solutions” after briefly blocking the entrance to the headquarters of Chevron Energy Solutions, the oil giant’s solar power arm.

“Let’s get power from the sun: oil is over, oil is done,” the marchers chanted, on their way to the local branch of the Environmental Protection Agency and then to a BP office. Some of them wore bright white jumpsuits splattered with molasses to simulate oil stains.

At first, half a dozen motorcycle cops tried in vain to herd the marchers on to the sidewalk amid busy lunchtime traffic, before agreeing on a route and escorting them to the EPA.

Many tourists, out enjoying the mild sunny weather, snapped photos for posterity as the march passed by world-famous cable cars at the end of California Street, with one declaring excitedly: “Oh, a San Francisco protest — I got to get this.”

–Andris (Andy) E. Cukurs is chief executive officer of North American operations of India-based Suzlon Energy Ltd., the world’s third-largest wind turbine manufacturer. Any views expressed here are his own.–

The climate bill may have stalled and, with it, a renewable electricity standard that would promote wind and other renewable-energy sources. But at the same time, wind energy continues to make strong strides.

Just look at the commitment of large corporations, like  Google, purchasing 20 years of wind-generated electricity in Iowa, ostensibly to operate its huge data centers. Or SC Johnson & Son, installing turbines at its Wisconsin headquarters and putting up a windmill at its largest European manufacturing plant – in addition to nearly half its Ziploc plant in Michigan powered with wind.

Is this how the use of wind and other renewables will play out in the States, with corporations leading the way?

Major electric utilities ramp up wind energy gradually alongside long-term incentives, but corporations like Google and SC Johnson are using wind turbines right where they’re needed. The company I work for, Suzlon, started this way in India – by bringing clean, reliable power to businesses that needed it.

What is preventing even broader growth of wind power in the U.S.?

Billions of dollars were spent building our wind capacity over the past decade, yet wind energy still generated just 1.25 percent of our electricity in 2008 (although that’s up from 0.4 percent just four years earlier).

The 1.25 percentage is a far cry from the 20 percent goal the U.S. Energy Department set for wind’s share of the U.S. electric supply by 2030.  It also falls far below the Energy Information Agency’s projection in May 2009 that by 2012 – less than 18 months away – wind energy will generate 5 percent of electricity.

Much more recently, the U.S. added only 1239 megawatts of wind power installations in the first half of 2010, dropping such installations to the lowest level since 2007. Manufacturing investment in wind also continues to lag below levels in the 2008-2009 period.

As for the benefits of wind, they’re indisputable.

Wind promotes national security because it diversifies our energy portfolio. It also has the tremendous potential to create jobs — jobs that deliver clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy to promote economic vitality and environmental quality besides our national security.

Wind-power projects created 35,000 new jobs in 2008, estimates the American Wind Energy Association. And in one state, Illinois, each new wind-turbine project generates 1,473 new jobs during construction, a new Illinois State University study found.

As for clean energy, wind produces no emissions and no dangerous radioactive waste.

Wind-energy generation also doesn’t consume any non-renewable resources, such as oil, natural gas or coal.

Wind is free and with today’s technology advances, it can be captured efficiently, at about one-quarter the cost of solar power. Further, wind turbines come in a wide array of sizes. This means that a range of people and businesses can use them on a self-reliant basis – from single households and businesses to small towns and villages.

Besides, strong consumer support exists for wind.

A survey released in June 2010 by Applied Materials, a capital-equipment maker serving the solar industry among others found that three-quarters of Americans feel that increasing renewable energy and decreasing U.S. dependence on foreign oil are the nation’s top energy priorities.

As for wind alone, an April 2010 survey by AWEA found that 89 percent of respondents – 84 percent of Republicans, 93 percent of Democrats and 88 percent of Independents – believe increasing the amount of energy the nation gets from wind is a good idea.

Wind energy faces challenges, of course; all energy sources do. It’s true that wind can’t provide all of our nation’s energy supply, but that’s why the U.S. requires a portfolio of energy sources, especially of renewable forms. And it’s possible to generate a significant portion of energy from renewable sources.

Already, wind power supplies more than 20 percent of the energy consumed in Denmark and more than 11 percent in Spain and Portugal.

Many of the perceived disadvantages are just myths. Wind energy isn’t universally more expensive; it’s very competitive with fossil sources of generation.

While the upfront capital cost of wind energy is more expensive than some traditional power sources, such as natural gas, there are no fuel costs with wind.  Further, in good locations, the cost of capital and other “levelized” costs are now very competitive with other energy sources, research studies show.

It’s a myth, too, that insurmountable transmission issues emerge trying to get wind energy from remote areas to customers elsewhere.

A recent Stanford University study found that about one-third of the electricity that wind farms generate will become a reliable source of around-the-clock power to customers in various U.S. regions through electricity grid interconnections.

Another myth concerns the dependability of wind – that it may not blow during periods of peak demand and it’s difficult to store. It’s true that wind turbines generate electricity 65 percent to 80 percent of the time, so the output amount is variable.  But no power plant generates at its maximum 100 percent potential. Because of the electricity grid’s intelligent design, no need exists to back up every megawatt of wind energy with a megawatt of fossil fuel or dispatchable power.  The reality is that while wind energy is naturally variable, it’s not unreliable. In addition, wind won’t supply all of our electricity anyway; that’s the reason wind should serve as one portion of a diversified energy portfolio.

Let’s discard several other untruths.  Wind turbines are noisy. A Lawrence Technological University study found that it’s difficult to distinguish the sound of a turbine from the rustling of corn stalks.

Wind turbines kill birds. Yes, an estimated 28,500 a year – while buildings kills 550 million; power lines, 130 million; cats, 100 million; autos, 80 million; and pesticides, 67 million, estimates the U.S. Forest Service.

Wind projects require more concrete and steel than other power sources. Wind towers do need concrete and steel for their foundations, but simply consider the gargantuan amount of concrete and steel required for a nuclear plant or a hydroelectric power plant.

Add up the scorecard and it’s hard to question that the advantages of wind far outweigh the negatives.  That’s why it’s disheartening to see such a dark political climate for renewable energy in general and wind specifically.

The U.S. needs a national renewable-electricity standard that would set a percentage, say 15 percent by 2020, of electricity generated for utilities that would have to come from wind and other renewable energy sources.

A growing number of major countries in Europe, Asia and elsewhere, as well as several states in the U.S. such as California and Texas, already have set ambitious standards.  For the U.S., a national RES is essential to foster stable, long-term investment in wind energy.

Tom Friedman of the New York Times contends that if Congress doesn’t pass a serious energy bill, “we may not have another shot until … we get a “perfect storm” – a climate or energy crisis that is awful enough to finally end our debate on these issues but not so awful as to end the world.”

Will it take another crisis before we wake up to the clear value of wind energy? Let’s not find out. It’s time to re-energize the broader growth of wind energy in America.

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Photo shows a state-of-the-art wind turbine at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) spins on a sunny day near Boulder, Colorado July 21, 2010. REUTERS/Rick Wilking

The drugged tiger cub (left) hidden among cuddly toys in a bag at Bangkok airport  ranks as one of the most bizarre smuggling tricks.

Imagine the shock of X-raying the bag — as airport workers checking luggage did — and finding a live tiger among the fluffy tiger toys. Maybe it moved, or they spotted the outline of its skeleton among the other toys?

For a story about the two-month-old cub (photo courtesy of wildlife trade monitoring group Traffic) click here. A 31-year-old Thai woman was about to board a flight to Iran when they found the cub in her oversized bag.

It highlights how smugglers find extreme ways of packing away live creatures.

In July, officers at Mexico City’s airport arrested a man trying to smuggle 18 small monkeys from Lima wrapped inside his socks.

Women smugglers have several times been caught with endangered bird eggs hidden in their bras — an aid to incubation and far easier to hide on an international flight than a flapping, squawking parrot.

But Traffic says it’s no joke: smuggling is pushing species of some animals and plants towards extinction. And while it’s hard to pin down the scale of wildlife smuggling, some estimates are between $10 and $20 billion a year, it says.