Vincent Chornet, the president and chief executive, said that Enerkem and GreenField Ethanol has reached a deal with the city of Edmonton to take its trash. "They will pay us to take it away from them," he said. "Fifty percent of what we put in trash is not recyclable." That plant should start making fuel in 2011.

Edmonton will pay less than it normally would for hauling away trash, Chornet said, but he wouldn't say how much his company is making per ton for taking away the smelly stuff.

On Thursday Enerkem announced plans to take the process to the United States, which, it is probably safe to say, has bigger waste bounties.  My city New York, for example, exports tens of thousands of tons per day of trash to states as far away as Ohio on trains and barges.

Enerkem,  which is financed by U.S. venture capital firms Rho Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures and others, plans to build and operate a plant in Pontotoc, Mississippi.  Under an agreement, the Three Rivers Solid Waste Management Authority of Mississippi will supply nearly 190,000 tons per year of unsorted municipal solid waste for the plant to help make some 20 million gallons per year of fuel.

Chornet says the beauty of using trash as a feedstock is that small decentralized plants can make fuel close to where it is needed, which could one day, perhaps, trim reliance on big oil refineries for fuel.

The company plans to gasify the garbage at 400 degrees Centigrade, or higher depending on the feedstock, and then convert the gas into liquid fuels.  Once the process gets started,  the trash itself fuels the plant. Like the process of burning coal, the gasified garbage leaves behind ash waste, which would have to be dealt with through landfilling or as an ingredient for concrete.

A lot of alternative fuel companies, even second generation biofuel companies, have had problems lately, especially as motor fuel demand has waned with the recession. But experts say fuel will be at a premium once brighter economic times come.

Is Enerkem onto an idea that should not be scrapped?

Photo: Daniel Aguilar, Reuters

An Audubon Society study of citizen observations that took place over 40 years found that 58 percent of 305 bird species found on the continental U.S. shifted significantly to the north as temperatures warmed. Forest and feeders birds, like finches and chickadees, moved deep into the Canadian Boreal Forest.

Besides the loss of chittering and chirps, what else do you think might be lost from climate-related migrations?

Photo of Purple Finch/National Audubon Society handout

President Barack Obama set in motion a process on Monday that may eventually allow California and other states to set tougher greenhouse gas pollution and efficiency standards on cars than those mandated by the federal government. 

 Obama's move sends a signal to the world that the United States is beginning to join the rest of the developed countries to act on emissions blamed for warming the planet.

But some say allowing the states to take control of car emissions could lead to complications within the auto industry by forcing them make two sets of cars.  Consumers in California and as many as 18 other states would have to buy one set of cars built according to a set of guidelines and regulations and the other states would have another set of cars that are built differently.

Certainly U.S. car companies have fallen behind in making clean cars that consumers want and the federal government should push them to get on track. But are two sets of rules what the ailing car industry needs right now? 

Bill Bumpers, the director of the climate change practice at the law firm Baker Botts in Washington, D.C. doesn't think so. "These are requirements that would be better off implemented on a national scale," said Bumpers, who does not represent car companies.  He wonders if state-by-state regulations would add expenses for them to comply with the rules.

Many environmentalists have pushed for state-by-state regulation on emissions for exactly the reason that it could pressure companies to lobby for a federal solution rather than go through the headache of complying with a patchwork of regulations throughout the land.

"For a lot of industry players this is going to help them say let's capitulate, let's go to Congress, let's get a comprehensive climate regulatory regime on a national scale," said Bumpers. 

As a sign that the car companies want emissions to be controlled by the government, the Big Three joined earlier this month with other big corporations in lobbying Congress to pass federal economy-wide greenhouse gas regulations.

What do you think, is state-by-state best or should the country act as a whole?

(Photo by Kimberly White)

New York state gave Big Sue, LLC, which has about 3,500 square feet of solar panels on its roof, the OK to sell any extra power it generates from the panels back to the grid.

For years, homeowners who have put solar panels on their roofs have been able to sell a bit of solar power back to the grid, which has helped them deal with the big costs of buying and installing the panels. For homeowners it can take 8 to 12 years to break even on the initial investment.

New York businesses, which have shorter break-even times on their solar investments due to greater availability of  tax breaks and incentives,  have had to wait until now to get net-metering rights.

But eventually commercial net-metering could help New York deal with growing power demand. Gov. David Paterson said in a press release about Big Sue that businesses with solar net-metering will "relieve stress on New York City's overburdened" power grid.

David Buckner, the president of Solar Energy Systems, who installed Big Sue's solar panels, said he has 15 other commercial projects lined up for net-metering, including a bicycle manufacturer and a perfume bottle top maker. (Full disclosure: Solar Energy Systems' COO is the husband of a colleague of mine.)

Small manufacturers stand to gain the most from net-metering because of the way the law is written, he said.  At least 35 other businesses in the region are lining up for net-metering with other solar installers.

Commercial net-metering by itself is probably not enough to boost shares in solar companies that fell after oil prices plummeted and amid surplus panel supplies.  But with optimism that the Obama administration will move quickly on legislation to boost renewable energy demand, it certainly can't hurt.

Susan Boyle, the co-owner of Big Sue, said it's fun to check her solar panel system on Mondays to see how many electrons her panels pushed to the grid over the weekend, when power demand is low from her business and the 24 studios in the building that lease space there.

If the panels have generated more power than her business used at the end of the year she'll get a credit from the power company toward future bills.  She installed compact florescent lighting and took other efficiency steps in the late 19th century brewery to help the chances.

Oh, and she cleared the snow off her panels after a recent storm so they will work better.

"With so much attention on polar bears, where's the concern about the people? What about fellow Americans?" said Alvin Amason, an artist and member of the coastal Alutiiq people, who lives in Anchorage.

Amason and other Alaskan artists hit New York to celebrate the opening of the Alaska House , a nonprofit cultural center that aims to teach people about the challenges and opportunities the state faces.

Not only are temperatures rising faster in the Alaska and the Arctic than in southern parts of the world, but residents in remote regions the 49th U.S. state are facing food and fuel costs that are surging faster too.

And the melting of coastal ice means they can no longer hunt on shore for walrus and other animals that provide them with ivory and bones for carvings.

Now the artists have to hunt by boat, but surging fuel costs in those remote areas are making it harder. "If someone gets $5,000 for a carving from a western buyer, he's not thinking of spending it on a vacation, he's spending it on boat fuel and heating oil and food, " said Amason.

Perry Eaton, a fellow Alutiiq artist, said residents in native communities in and around the Arctic Circle in Alaska are moving in droves to the cities in search of other types of work.

As they do, America stands to lose some of its oldest cultural inheritances.  Most of Alaska's remote native peoples have have remained close culturally to what their ancestors were thousands of years earlier, despite some changes like motorized transport. "It's the only place in America where there was no Indian removal," said Eaton. He was referring to the forced movement of natives on the American continent to reservations and institutions by the U.S. government, where many were forced to give up their cultural traditions.

Eaton said Northern Alaska is a place where the languages shared by the 180 indigenous communities don't have a word for "art" -- it's part of daily life, in the clothes they make, or the masks they craft to help usher loved ones who have died into the afterworld.

Alice Rogoff, the founder of the Alaska House, said she had hoped the Republican nomination of Sarah Palin, for vice-president would have helped shine a light on the plight of native Alaskans. Not yet.

Photo of artist Sylvester Ayek courtesy of the Alaska House. Photo of ice sculpture outside of Alaska House by tpg.

Five Wildlife Conservation Society scientists studying the effects of global warming on shorebirds in Arctic Alaska had to be airlifted away from their remote camp late last month because of the appearance of another species whose life is changing as warming helps erode shores and melt sea ice.
 
The researchers said a polar bear stuck on land forced them to evacuate their camp north of the remote Teshekpuk Lake on the Beaufort Sea --leaving food and tents behind. 
 
The carnivorous bears would normally be out on sea ice this time of year. But with recent warming the ice is miles from shore and polar bears, which were recently listed as "threatened" under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, are becoming increasingly trapped on land well away from their usual seal prey, said Dr. Steve Zack, who leads Arctic studies for WCS
 
"We had no idea how hungry they'd be and thus how ornery they'd be," Zack, who made the decision for the researchers to evacuate even though they had been trained in bear safety, told me by his mobile phone from his current base near Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.
 
"Where there's one polar bear there are usually more," he said, adding that government scientists have seen 32 polar bears stuck on shore this year, up from only one or two in previous years.
 
In subsequent fly-overs over the abandoned camp, the team discovered that bears had eaten all of the food left by the researchers and destroyed two $500 tents.
 
"It was an ironic circumstance that studying climate change issues for our shorebirds put us in harm's way with climate change effects on polar bears," said Zack. 
 

Image by Mark Maftei, WCS 

But this graph forecasts that coal, the dirtiest power source in terms of carbon dioxide and other pollutants, will still dominate global power generation growth for decades into the future.

The forecast, released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the statistics branch of the Department of Energy, shows that global power generated from coal will grow 115 percent to 15.36 trillion kilowatt hours from 2005 to 2030.  It assumes no changes in emissions laws or policy.

Global power generation from renewables including hydropower, meanwhile, will grow 58 percent to 5 trillion kilowatt hours over the same time period.

The world is trying to come to an agreement on a new greenhouse gas regulation pact at a U.N. meeting in Copenhagen late next year. Would a new pact eventually make this coal forecast overcooked?

The New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society is working with the government of Madagascar to sell about 9.5 million tonnes of carbon credits to help save the Makira Forest, which contains 22 species of lemurs, hundreds of bird species and thousands of plants. Many of those species are found nowhere else on the planet. 

 "We want to create incentives so people don't deforest," Ray Victurine, the finance expert at WCS, told me. 

The 9.5 million tonnes is the amount of carbon dioxide stored in existing trees WSC and Madagascar estimate can be saved over 30 years by stopping people from chopping them down.

Victurine said money raised by the credits could encourage farmers to stop slash and burn agriculture through investments in rice cultivation or in taking advantage of cloud formations in the forest to improve irrigation.

In Madagascar about 100,000 hectares (386 square miles) of forest are lost each year by agricultural burning, according to WCS.

The burning of forests by farmers accounts for 20 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions. An agreement at a 190-nation UN conference last year agreed to work on ways to reward countries for slowing deforestation.

Credits in a global climate trade system could generate $2 billion to $14 billion for developing countries, according to a study by EcoSecurities and the University of British Colombia. 

The WCS and Madagascar are hoping to sell their credits in the rapidly developing voluntary credit market. Later, they could adapt them for any post-Kyoto global trading system if the world agrees such credits would save forests in a fair way.  

Victurine said they are working with the Voluntary Carbon Standard and the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance to ensure the credits would be high quality and would pay for actions to save the forest that would not have occurred otherwise.

The higher the perceived quality of the credits, the higher price they may fetch. In today's prices at the EU's compliance carbon market the 9.5 million tonnes would be worth about $291 million, though carbon prices are volatile. In voluntary, unregulated carbon markets the tonnes would be worth closer to $62 million. 

All of which leads to a question.  Are financial instruments the best way to change human behavior and save the planet?

The fate of a Chinese species may rest on whether the turtles in this photo mate.   

Biologists believe only four Yangtze giant softshell turtles are left on the planet.  So this month they shipped a more than 80-year-old female that had been living in China's Changsha Zoo more than 600 miles to the only known male in China, who is more than 100 years old and lives at the Suzhou Zoo.

"I hate to call this a desperation move, but it really was," said Rick Hudson, a conservation biologist at the Fort Worth, Texas Zoo who helped coordinate the move. "With only one female known worldwide, and given that we have lost three captive specimens over the past two years, what choice did we have?"

Biologists blame hunting, pollution and rampant development for leading to the dire situation.

The good news is the female still lays eggs, but not as many as the up to 100 that younger ones do.  And although in this picture she may appear to be ignoring the male, whose head can be seen emerging from the water in the bottom right, biologists say her journey went well and that the two are getting used to each other nicely. 

Photo by Gerald Kuchling/TSA

As gasoline nears $4.00 a gallon throughout the country one might think that U.S. commuters would be jumping on their bikes. Evidently the prices aren't high enough yet.

Here in New York, it's Bike Month and though I live just 7 miles from my office in Times Square, I haven't two-wheeled it in yet, though I did for years. Likely, I won't any time soon because fighting traffic across the avenues isn't appealing anymore.

Granted, NYC has made made biking improvements over the last decade, building and extending bicycle paths on Manhattan's edges and keeping lanes open on most of its bridges, which offer spectacular river views. And New York City has plans to double the number of bike commuters by 2015 and add 200 miles of bike lanes by the end of the decade.

But bike lanes in the bustling parts of the island are probably used as much by darting cabs and other vehicles as much as people who pedal, which can make for a harrowing experience.

Sure, New York City streets will probably always be louder than those in Amsterdam where fenders banging against bike frames can sometimes be the loudest traffic noise one hears, or in Copenhagen, where bike lanes often have their own traffic lights.

But with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's traffic congestion plan defeated and few businesses offering bike parking space, things don't look like they will improve much soon.

Or at least not enough so that New Yorkers will be biking their children around the city in droves like they do in Copenhagen.

What do you think, will New York and other U.S. cities catch up on biking as the price of oil rises?

Pic 1: Kid-moving bicycle in Copenhagen, a common sight. Pic 2: Bicycle parking in Amsterdam. Pic 3: Biking in New York. Photos, Tim Gardner.