Environment Forum

New world wines: now from the north

This article by Paul Ames originally appeared in GlobalPost.

The terrace of the elegant 18th-century chateau offers views over the formal French garden and fields filled with neat rows of vines.

This idyllic scene could be reminiscent of Bordeaux or the Cotes du Rhone … were it not for all the snow.

Wijnkasteel Genoels-Elderen is the biggest and best-known vineyard in Belgium. It is one of a growing number of wineries taking root in parts of northern Europe once considered too chilly to produce drinkable wine.

“We can compare this region with the Champagne region or Burgundy, or the Chablis,” said Belgian winemaker Joyce Kekko-van Rennes. “If you are in period of warming, we are in a fantastic place for winemaking.”

The extent to which global warming has encouraged the expansion of winemaking in northern lands better known for their beer is up for debate.

Clean tech nuclear seduces White House

We’re told that President Obama is getting ready to propose a tripling of government loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors to the tune of more than $54 billion.

The move is likely to win over Republicans who want to see nuclear power playing a larger role in a climate bill for the country. Another group of Senators earlier this week said they would support a comprehensive climate bill based on Obama’s State of the Union speech that opened the possibilities of nuclear expansion.

Certainly, the Nuclear Energy Institute would agree the technology is the United States’ largest source of clean-air, carbon-free electricity, producing no greenhouse gases or air pollutants.

The problem, of course, there’s no such thing as a small nuclear accident, and what are we supposed to do with all that radioactive waste, argue opponents.

More than two decades following the accident at Chernobyl, discoveries are still being made of horrific carcinogenic aftereffects.

And many Americans still remember the Three Mile Island accident of 1979, in Goldsboro, Pennsylvania, with memories awakened just last year with a non-threatening leak of radiation.

Haiti’s tragedy belongs to the environment

This commentary by Stephan Faris originally appeared in GlobalPost. The views expressed are his own.

Most people wouldn’t consider an earthquake to be an environmental issue. But while the tremors that shattered Haiti early this month have nothing to do with the island’s degradation, the extent of the suffering they unleashed is a direct result of the country’s ecological woes.

The reason can be seen from the sky. The devastated nation shares its island with the Dominican Republic, but misfortune always seems to strike on its side of a border that is demarcated by an abrupt shift from lush green to bare brown. While the Dominican Republic has largely managed to preserve its trees, Haiti has lost 98 percent of its forest cover.

In 2004, Hurricane Jeanne struck the Dominican Republic, and killed 18 people. In Haiti, where the storm didn’t even make landfall, more than 3,000 lives were lost under floodwater and mudslides. Deforestation had left the slopes too weak to be able to retain the downpour. But while some of the extra body count can be attributed to barren hillsides giving way, the true cause goes deeper. The country’s environmental troubles have become entangled in its economic and political problems, making all of them harder to fix.

It’s no coincidence that Haiti is both the poorest country in the western hemisphere and the most environmentally devastated. Decades of poverty, population growth and near anarchy have stripped the countryside of its forests and split farms into small, infertile plots. “What you see in Port-au-Prince — the concentration of people in the slums, which creates violence, which creates disease — it’s because the people cannot produce more in the countryside,” Max Antoine, executive director of Haiti’s Presidential Commission on Border Development, told me when I visited the country in 2007.

If deforestation has made the country poor, the resulting destitution exasperates the environmental degradation. Forests disappear. The slopes lose their soil. Farm land slips away. Entire villages disappear under mudslides. Roads and bridges are wiped away. The slums continue to swell. The country sinks deeper into poverty. Pressed to survive, another farmer chops down another tree to sell in the city as charcoal. “It’s not a vicious circle,” said Philippe Mathieu, the Haiti director for the Canadian charity Oxfam-Quebec. “It is a spiral. Each time you make a turn, you have less space.”

Ted Turner returns to solar

U.S. billionaire Ted Turner is taking a shine to solar power — again.

Back in 2007, Turner sold solar developer Turner Renewable Energy to solar panel maker First Solar for $34.4 million — which has since ramped up its push into developing its own solar power projects.

Now Turner is teaming up with Atlanta-based utility Southern Company to develop renewable energy in the United States. To start, they will focus on large-scale solar farms in the U.S. Southwest, where solar development is already heating up in states like California and Arizona.

Some of the projects could end up on Turner’s land. He is the largest individual land owner in North America with more than two million acres.  

The move could expand the reach of Southern Company, which serves customers in Georgia, Mississippi and Florida and has more than 42 gigawatts of generating capacity.

(Photo: Philanthropist Ted Turner speaks during a panel discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York in September 2009. Photo credit: Chip East / Reuters)

Climate bill treads on thin ice

Supporters of a climate bill to cap and price greenhouse gases are losing hope that it will make it into law. But for many, the fight is far from over.

Topping the list of supporters of some form of the bill is President Obama. In his first State of the Union address, he focused on the bill’s potential to fuel a domestic clean tech industry lush with jobs, and said he still supported the bipartisan effort on the climate and energy bill, which would incorporate energy policies favored by Republicans.

(See also: Obama sticks to climate before divided Congress and Obama supports climate bill, but how clean will it be? )

On Thursday, echoes of commitment came from a group of senators including John Kerry, who  said they were looking at possible alternatives to the cap-and-trade plan for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. “People need to relax and look at all the ways you might price carbon. We’re not pinned down to one approach,” Kerry told Reuters.

Senator Lindsey Graham supplied Climate Progress with their quote of the week: “The idea of not pricing carbon, in my view, means you’re not serious about energy independence. The odd thing is you’ll never have energy independence until you clean up the air, and you’ll never clean up the air until you price carbon.”

And the New York Times last week published their editorial on the case for a climate bill, weighing in favor of the cap and trade system. “The only sure way to unlock the investments required to transform the way the country produces and delivers energy is to put a price on carbon.”

from Davos Notebook:

Failure of Copenhagen cannot be repeated, SAP chief says

Failure to agree a successor to the Kyoto protocol would lead to countries pursuing their own objectives and expose world economies to protectionism, CEO of business software company SAP Léo Apotheker said while in Davos to attend the World Economic Forum.

"Copenhagen was supposed to be the big successor of Kyoto but, as we all know, it was not a big success," Apotheker said. "I felt already at Copenhagen that this was midnight. Now it is probably already a minute past midnight and we cannot afford yet another failure."

"The danger of not coming to an agreement is that many countries will go on a unilateral path to achieve their own objectives at which point in time we might fall into protectionism," Apotheker added. This situation, combined with the effects of climate change, would be a "double whammy disaster."

Apotheker went on to say that regulation within a global framework was needed before the Kyoto agreement runs out. Watch the video clip at the top of the page for more.

Apotheker also said that SAP had reduced its carbon footprint by 15 percent by adopting responsible business practices and embracing the need to adapt. "This, by the way, saved us 80 million euros so it's good for business and it's easy to do," he said.

In the video clip below Apotheker calls for businesses to move their agenda forward and do what world leaders were not able to do in Copenhagen -- "take their responsibilities seriously."

from Davos Notebook:

Africa feels the heat on climate change

It may have contributed less than any other continent to CO2 emissions, but Africa is on the front line when it comes to the impact of climate change.

Just ask Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete.

"It is a threat for us," he told a panel at the World Economic Forum.  "On Kilimanjaro the snow is fast disappearing, sea levels are rising -- we have one island that has already been submerged -- and we've towns around the coast where we have to incur huge costs of adaptation to erect walls."

In theory, Africa is also in a strong position, given its virgin forests that represent one of the world's great carbon sinks. But setting up workable offset-trading schemes is easier said than done.  "I can assure you, it is so difficult to access these facilities," Kikwete said.

Reuters photo: A truck passes Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania's Hie district

Factbox: Renewable energy targets around the world

(Reuters) – Several countries have introduced subsidies or incentives to encourage clean energy production, such as feed-in tariffs or green certificates. Listed below are countries which have established renewable energy targets from 2013 to 2020.

Source: Reuters, Renewable Energy Policy network (www.ren21.net) (1) See individual EU member state targets here

http://ec.europa.eu/energy/renewables/targets_en.htm)

(2) The Japan target may be subject to change as the Japanese government plans to submit Climate Change Law to parliament in coming months (3) In pending climate change legislation, the United States has proposed a target of 15 pct by 2020. Twenty-nine out of 50 U.S. states have set targets for minimum amounts of electricity generation from renewable sources, while another five states have voluntary goals. (Compiled by Nina Chestney; Editing by Sara Ledwith)

Reuters East Antarctic Bureau shuts up shop … fast!

In January 1912, Sir Douglas Mawson finally made his way back to Cape Denison, missing his ship, the Aurora, by about three hours.

Some of his colleagues had waited at the hut hoping he would arrive back safely. When he appeared, they sent a radio message to the ship asking them to turn around, as they could see it lying offshore in Commonwealth Bay.

However, the winds were too strong to risk coming back, so they were stranded at Cape Denison for another 12 months of hardship.

I don’t remember what the book “Home of the Blizzard” says about it, but I came close the other day to understanding how they must have felt, as a few days ago I feared that our team, the Mawson’s Huts Foundation Expedition would face the same fate.

We received a radio call to say our ship L’Astrolabe would collect us within hours. In record time we pulled down our tents, packed our bags, emptied the toilets, disposed of food, tidied our base, the Sorensen Hut, and brought our baggage to an open space to prepare for a helicopter landing to airlift us out to the ship.

Just as we were finishing, we received radio contact from the ship to say bad weather had rolled in at Dumont D’Urville making it unsafe for the helicopter to make the 200 kilometre journey up the coast.

We could see the ship lying in the bay just waiting to collect us, so close yet so far without the support of a helicopter. No one said anything. We just unpacked some of the equipment and quietly settled back in.

Apple plugs iPod into the sun

Apple apparently has applied for a patent that would allow its megapopular iPods to run on solar power.

The patent drawings suggest the entire surface of the iPod would be covered in solar paneling, save the display screen and click wheel, Geeksmack.net and GreenBeat report.

And before you point out how annoying it would be to have to pull out your iPod for some sunbathing, it doesn’t need direct rays — the technology enables it to function even when covered by your hand. (The jury is still out on if it works when it’s buried in the inside pocket of your windbreaker or backpack, but whatever.)

Nothing worse than when your iPod runs out of juice right in the middle of your favorite song or exercise routine so this could be a nice backup power source to keep it (and you?) running.

What do you think? Would you buy it?

(Image  shows patent application diagram of entire surface of the iPod, except for the screen and click wheel, covered in solar panelling, from Geeksmack.net)