Amazon deforestation in 2009 declines to lowest on record
Annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell below 10,000 square kilometers for the first time since record-keeping began, reported Brazil’s Environment Minister Carlos Minc on Sunday.
Minc said preliminary data from the country’s satellite-based deforestation detection system (DETER) showed that Amazon forest loss between August 2008 and July 2009 would be below 10,000 square kilometers, the lowest level in more than 20 years. Official figures are due out in August or September.
Falling commodity prices and government action to crack down on illegal clearing are credited for the decline in deforestation.
Conversion to cattle pasture accounts for roughly 80 percent of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Pasture is used for beef production as well as to speculate on rising land prices.
Swiss glaciers melting faster than ever before
Switzerland’s glaciers shrank by 12 percent over the past decade, melting at their fastest rate due to rising temperatures and lighter snowfalls, a study by the Swiss university ETH showed Monday.
“The last decade was the worst decade that we have had in the last 150 years. We lost a lot of water,” said Daniel Farinotti, research assistant at the ETH.
“The trend is definitely that glaciers are melting faster now. Since the end of the 1980s, they have lost more and more mass more quickly,” he said….
Swiss glaciers have lost 9 cubic km of ice since 1999, the warmest period of the past 150 years,
Brazil to pay farmers $50/month to plant trees in the Amazon
Brazil will pay small farmers to plant trees in deforested parts of the Amazon under a plan unveiled Friday by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
The Green Arch initiative (Arco Verde) will pay farmers up to $51 per month for reforestation of degraded lands in 43 Amazon municipalities where deforestation is an ongoing problem.
“We need to think about how to make those people feel that they will make more money by planting trees than by cutting them down,” Lula told Reuters on Friday.
The program will also train local officials to prevent illegal logging and land grabbing in the municipalities.
Industry Group Says Solar to Become Cost-Competitive in Italy Next Year
The solar photovoltaic industry has an image problem: The costs of installing solar panels remain high relative to wind power and fossil fuels, and the solar industry is concerned that too many potential users believe that the costs are stuck at those high levels.
But by next year electricity from solar photovoltaic panels will be cost-competitive with power from the grid in parts of southern Europe, a development that would highlight a move toward much greater affordability, said Winfried Hoffmann, the president of the European Photovoltaic Industry Association….
Mr. Hoffmann was in Brussels to present the results of a study conducted in collaboration with A.T. Kearney, a consultancy, showing that photovoltaic power could supply as much as 12 percent of electricity demand in the European Union by 2020, up from less than 1 percent now…..
In Southern Europe, and Italy in particular, sunshine is plentiful and electricity costs are higher than some other parts of the European trading bloc. In parts of Italy, consumers pay about 25 euro cents a kilowatt hour of electricity from the grid, and Mr. Hoffmann said that would be about the same as what some Italian households would pay for running solar panels starting in 2010. However, he acknowledged that Italians still faced a great deal of red tape to qualify for feed-in tariffs “” a factor that was holding back growth in the use of the technology.
US draws line with China on climate technology
Access to green technology is becoming a growing stumbling block in global efforts to fight climate change, with US lawmakers bristling at what they see as China’s attempt to “steal” US know-how.
China and India have led calls for developed nations to share technology to help them battle global warming as the clock ticks to a December meeting in Copenhagen meant to seal a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
The US House of Representatives this month unanimously voted to make it US policy to prevent the Copenhagen treaty from “weakening” US intellectual property rights on a wind, solar and other eco-friendly technologies.
Alternative Feedstocks For Ethanol Production
Scientists say they are forging ahead in developing replacements for petrochemical fuels that will be cost-competitive and renewable while having a minimal impact on the environment, reports Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN). A consensus is emerging that no one technology will reign supreme and that a range of current and novel methodologies will contribute to meeting biofuel needs, according to the June 15 issue of GEN.
“¦Edenspace Systems is working on Energy Corn„¢, a feedstock designed to cut the cost of producing cellulosic biofuels from corn stover. The company’s technology platform, based on identifying promising cellulose genes, transforming crop plants with candidate genes, and evaluating the effects on growth, yield, and cellulose hydrolysis, would be applicable to a variety of energy crops including switchgrass, sorghum, and sugar cane.
World must strive for “green economy”: UN
A green economy backed by a green industry should be the goal of all states as they try to cope with climate change and the economic crisis, experts said Monday at the start of a UN conference.
“The current global financial and economic crisis must be used to our advantage to bring about a green energy revolution,” said Kandeh K. Yumkella, director-general of the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO).
The three-day meet was to pave the way “towards a low-carbon global ‘green economy’ powered by ‘green industry’,” he added.
A Sea Change in China’s Attitude Toward Carbon Capture
When European and Chinese scientists first agreed to collaborate on capturing carbon dioxide from power plants and storing it underground, China’s entire carbon capture and sequestration “team” was composed of two Tsinghua University graduate students.
Less than five years later, the landscape is markedly different. China’s first near-zero-emissions coal plant won state approval this month — an apparent formality, since construction already is far under way. Two other pilots are in the works, including one in inner Mongolia that could be the largest sequestration project in the world. Conferences on carbon capture in China now routinely feature high-level government and industry leaders.
Raytheon Tests Carbon Sequestration
Raytheon says it is testing a leak-proof method of keeping sequestered carbon dioxide buried deep in the ground “” using some of the same technology it developed to increase production of oil from shale.
The latest sequestration method involves encasing the gas in gel, pumping it underground, and then heating it with microwaves until the gel solidifies. The extraction technology, for its part, involves heating the shale with microwaves before pumping liquid carbon dioxide into the formations to separate kerogen, an organic precursor of oil, from the rock.
‘Milking’ Microscopic Algae Could Yield Massive Amounts Of Oil
Scientists in Canada and India are proposing a surprising new solution to the global energy crisis “””milking” oil from the tiny, single-cell algae known as diatoms, renowned for their intricate, beautifully sculpted shells that resemble fine lacework.
Richard Gordon, T. V. Ramachandra, Durga Madhab Mahapatra, and Karthick Band note that some geologists believe that much of the world’s crude oil originated in diatoms, which produce an oily substance in their bodies. Barely one-third of a strand of hair in diameter, diatoms flourish in enormous numbers in oceans and other water sources. They die, drift to the seafloor, and deposit their shells and oil into the sediments. Estimates suggest that live diatoms could make 10ˆ’200 times as much oil per acre of cultivated area compared to oil seeds, Gordon says.
Newly Uncovered Enzymes Turn Corn Plant Waste into Biofuel
“Visualize three tons of moldy bread.” It’s not the most appealing image, perhaps, but it’s a description of the moist mound of growth media tended by bioscientist Cliff Bradley and his partner, chemical engineer Bob Kearns at their biofuel facility in Butte, Mont., that could help cut ethanol costs at the fuel pump.
Selected soil fungi that eat cellulose””the hard-to-digest, structural component of woody plants””thrive on the big pile of putrefaction from which Bradley and Kearns harvest certain powerful enzymes. The special enzymes allow standard biofuel plants to produce ethanol at lower cost by replacing some of the high-priced corn (starch) they process with cheaper corn stover “waste”“”the leaves, stalks, husks and cobs of the maize plant itself.
Replacing 35 percent of the corn (which goes for $4.28 a bushel) now used in a typical ethanol plant with inexpensive corn stover (at $65 per ton) could save a quarter on each a gallon of ethanol the facility produces, the researchers calculate. And that’s before any blender’s credit or tax benefits from government for processing cellulose. Bradley and Kearns say that the basic integrated starch-cellulose process also works for biofuels produced in Brazil where ethanol is distilled from sugarcane and bagasse, or highly cellulosic cane plant residue.
500,000 radioactive items unaccounted for in U.S. — GAO
An estimated 500,000 radioactive objects remain left behind across the U.S., according to estimates from the Government Accountability Office.
The U.S. Department of Energy has recovered about 21,000 items as part of its Off-Site Source Recovery Project in New Mexico, but it currently faces a two-year waiting list and 9,000-item backlog — and is considering requests to add an additional 2,000 newly detected items a year.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Does teleworking really cut emissions?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/jun/23/teleworking-carbon-emissions
Working from home and meeting electronically save time and hassle, but the evidence that they reduce emissions is lacking
mmm…
“Little by little,” the Roman historian Livy wrote 2,000 years ago, “we have been brought into the present condition in which we are able neither to tolerate the evils from which we suffer, nor the remedies we need to cure them.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/22/debt-crisis-environment-defence-spending
Its always worth reading the IPCC chairman’s comments…
Where’s the world’s plan of action against climate change?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/jun/23/climate-change-ipcc
The IPCC wants nations to work together to fight climate change – and mitigation could bring economic benefits too
According to the McKinsey and Company report a year or so ago, the carbon dioxide emissions from the transportation sector alone, in the U.S., contributed substantially more carbon dioxide than the net impact of all the deforestation and land use changes in Brazil that same year. So, every time someone thinks to (correctly) raise the issue of deforestation and Brazil and so forth, he/she should also remind him/herself of gasoline-powered autos in the U.S., the confusions that ExxonMobil are conveying on us, the lack of coverage of such issues in the media (e.g., The New York Times), and so forth.
While it’s good news the deforestation has dramatically slowed in the Amazon, I can’t help but notice that the graph did not start turning down until 2005, when the world started to slide into recession. Chances are if we get an economic recovery going that the deforestation would start accelerating again. Hopefully, programs like the one Brazil has announced to pay farmers to plant trees are things that may help prevent deforestation from reaching the levels it did in the first half t of this decade.
Hey, wait a minute… if Chinais already building a “near-zero emissions” coal plant, doesn’t that mean that the U.S. coal industry does not need the $60 billion that is earmarked for them to “develop Carbon Sequestration technology” in the Waxman-Markey bill? How about we mount a grass-roots campaign to get that money reallocated to build concentrating solar plants instead?
“The US House of Representatives this month unanimously voted to make it US policy to prevent the Copenhagen treaty from “weakening” US intellectual property rights on a wind, solar and other eco-friendly technologies.”
Yeah, that ought to work real well to persuade China and India to play along.
These people don’t have air between their ears, they have solid rock.
[JR: This is a very complicated issue. I don't see it as black-and-white. In case you hadn't noticed, the Chinese in particular are masters at forcing anybody who wants to do business with them to co-manufacture and coproduce with them until they learn how to do it themselves. They are manufacturing all the stuff that we invented here and if we can't figure out a way to keeps manufacturing in this country, then we will increasingly be a nation of consumers, which doesn't strike me as sustainable.]
A Washington company, the Solena Group, also has a carbon-negative plan, which emerged from the decision by regulators in Kansas last year to turn down a permit for two new coal-burning power plants because of the millions of tons of carbon dioxide they would produce. The regulators insisted that the builder of the plants, an electric co-op called Sunflower, had to permanently remove the carbon from circulation.
Solena says it can use the carbon. The company employs a high-temperature process to break up anything organic into a flammable gas. The organic material could be algae, which have an extremely high energy value per pound. And algae eat carbon dioxide.
Solena is in discussion with Sunflower to build a 40-megawatt power plant that would run on gasified algae; the algae would be grown in thousands of clear plastic cylinders, 3 feet wide by 10 feet tall, sitting in the Kansas sun and fertilized with sodium bicarbonate, made with carbon captured from Sunflower’s coal plant. For each 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide, the columns would yield a ton of algae.
A Solena subsidiary has been growing algae at a facility in Alicante, Spain.
We can take CO2 from coal plants and grow algae. The science is in. I guess Spain is a leader.
You’re right, Joe, it isn’t black & white, there are other shades adding complexity.
But there are two main reasons why manufacturing has migrated from the already industrialized nations, and only one of them is lower labour costs (and the lower standard of living that makes the cost of labour cheaper). A rising standard of living will push Asian wages up.
Meanwhile, Peak Oil will eliminate the other reason: cheap ocean transportation of consumer goods and even industrial goods like alternative energy equipment.
Manufacturing will have no choice but to relocate close to markets.
The melting of the Swiss glaciers is drastic, severe, and obvious to anyone. I had the good fortune to visit the small town of Saas Fee in the 1970s and returned in the summer of 2007. The shrinking of glaciers over that period of time was dramatic and clearly visible to the naked eye–this in a kind of glacial trough where the elevation in the town is 1800 meters.
There is also a public safety issue, which has been discussed very little. As temperatures rise, permafrost melts, increasing the chances of landslides, which can block roads, or railways, and crush houses. The landslides can also create flooding if rocks slide into lakes. In 1991 a huge rock slide closed the railway that leads to the nearby resort of Zermatt. See: http://www.planat.ch/index.php?navID=1253
I do not know whether rising temperatures contributed to this particular slide, but rising temperatures can only increase the danger of such events.
UN World Climate Meeting: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=31242&Cr=climate+change&Cr1=
This is the stark and difficult decisions that we will be faced with more and more. What will be the outcome. It smacks of the History of Easter Island.
Climate change causes a loss of biodiversity. We don’t need no stinkin’ biodiversity… oops, yes we do if we want to keep disease pathogens under some kind of control:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/202865
On the Trail of a Solar-Powered Chill:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,631847,00.html
Sorbtion cooling, anyone?