Renewable power sources like wind and solar are some of the fastest growing sectors in the energy business.

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?

Can credits traded in the world’s financial centers stop local farmers in Madagascar from burning up a rain forest filled with lemurs and other life found nowhere else in the world?    

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

A recent trip to bicyle-peppered cities Copenhagen and Amsterdam got me thinking about the pedal possibilities in U.S. cities. Alas, New York, the country’s biggest city, has long way to go make biking easier, and that seems true in many other cities in the world’s largest motor fuel consumer.

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.

A California company called E-Fuel  wants you to ferment home brew  — for your car.  It sells a $10,000 portable ”MicroFueler” that plugs into home power and water supplies to ferment sugar into 100 percent ethanol at a rate of 35 gallons ( 132 liters) per week.  

For families that drive at least a combined 34,500 miles (55,520 km)  in cars that get average fuel efficiency, the MicroFueler will pay for itself in less than two years if gasoline prices stay near record levels, says Tom Quinn, the company’s CEO and financial backer.

E-Fuels says it will link buyers to cheap supplies of sugar, such as inedible surplus sweetener from Mexico, and launch a carbon credit system to cut the feedstock cost of regular table sugar.

“This paradigm shift is not going to work unless we can knock out of the ballpark the cost of feedstock,” Quinn said at the unveiling of the MicroFueler in New York. He said the credits could knock down the cost of fueling up to less than $1 per gallon (3.8 liters).

 E-Fuel says the unit will start shipping late this year.

Interesting product, but will it help ease motor fuel prices or fade the black eye corn-made ethanol has gotten for helping to push up grain and food prices? “This could be fun for tinkerers, but unfortunately it’s not a quick solution for our problems,” said Nathanael Greene, a resource specialist at green group the Natural Resources Defense Council.

What do you think? Pricey gadget or fount of bargain fuel?  

Like leaders of several other developing nations, Joe Shirley, the president of the Navajos, wants to build coal-fired power generation as fast as possible.
 
Shirley has been fighting to build a 1,500 megawatt plant in Northwest New Mexico called Desert Rock with a company called Sithe Global, LLC. He says it and associated mining would provide up to 400 long-term jobs for his people and pay more than $50 million annually to the nation.
    
The jobs sound good to some of the nearly 200,000 citizens of the Navajo Nation spread across the desert of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. An opening for a janitorial job at a Navajo college, for example, recently drew about 200 applicants. Many Navajo young men must travel to construction jobs in other states hundreds of miles away.
 
“It’s all about putting food on the table, putting shoes on little feet,” Shirley told reporters about the plant recently at his office in Window Rock, the capital of the Navajo Nation.
 
Unfortunately for Shirley, his nation, unlike other coal-rich nations like China or India, must get permitting for the plant from the United States. 
    
For years the U.S. Environmental Protection Administration has delayed granting the plant an air permit, saying it has not had enough time to review public comments on an environmental filing on the site.
 
As the permitting process drags on, the cost of the plant has risen — to about $3 to $4 billion, depending on the strategy it uses to bury emissions of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, if at all. 
    
And local opposition to Desert Rock has risen. Many Navajos who the plant would push out of their homes south of Farmington, New Mexico have fought it. They said the plant would send most of its power to rapidly-growing Arizona and Nevada while many Navajos would continue to go without power.
    
Opponents said the plant would add to air pollution from two other coal plants in the area, and while strip mining of the coal and unregulated dumping of coal ash would degrade the soil. 
    
One Navajo opponent, Sarah White helped lead a two-week blockade of the earthen roads leading to the proposed site when Sithe dug water wells for Desert Rock. She vows to keep blocking development of the site.
    
Meanwhile, throughout the United States, opposition has grown to plants fired by coal, which emits more CO2 than any other fuel. Plans for coal plants from Texas to Florida have been canceled, while coastal states like California and New York are beginning to regulate greenhouse emissions.
 
Shirley feels entitled to tap his coal, especially because the countries like the United States got rich on the stuff. 
 
But also because China is building several coal fired power plants — every month. He said if the United States is serious about slowing output of greenhouse emissions, it should stop “picking on the poor Navajo Nation quagmired in impoverishment in its backyard” and talk more with China. “Is it because (China) is a nuclear nation?” he asks about the lack of progress.
        
This week the Navajo Nation announced that it plans to build a 500 MW new wind farm, which adds a new twist for their quest for energy development. 
    
What do you think? Should the U.S. speed up approval of Desert Rock? 

Wildlife researchers sent media an early Valentine’s Day card with this thought-provoking photo taken in the Republic of Congo.

Evidently, it’s the first time gorillas have ever been photographed mating face-to-face  in the wild.

One of the researchers, Thomas Breuer, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, said understanding the behavior of the great apes sheds light on the evolution of behavioral traits in humans.

Researchers hope there are even more ape couples getting in the mood. The western lowland gorillas are a critically endangered species, under pressure from human hunters and disease.  

Much effort has focused on greenhouse gases as the main culprit behind climate change. But perhaps not enough attention has been given to something with the potential to be just as dangerous.

The waste and abuse of water threatens to deplete underground water tables, increase desertification, and even interrrupt the circulation of water around the world, known as the hydrologic cycle, wreaking havoc on rich and poor alike, says Maude Barlow, the author of a new book called Blue Covenant , and the leader of an international water justice movement.

“Not only are we missing half the analysis on climate change, but we’re missing half the answer in not dealing with water,” Barlow told me in a recent phone interview.

Even as people pollute surface water supplies, they are mining underground water way faster than it can be replenished, she said.  In rapidly developing countries, for example, farmers are using technology — first used for drilling oil — to pull water from deep underground. The trouble is much of that water took thousands of years to fill aquifers and once it’s mined it could be gone for thousands more.

Meanwhile, many people in rich countries believe if their water runs out, they can import more water from the developing world.

And as the world urbanizes, many of the meadows and green spaces that absorb water are lost. In coastal megacities that means much of the rain water flows straight to the ocean, where it will eventually evaporate and reach the atmosphere, but may be lost to the land. 

Many hope the power of capitalism can be employed to fight water scarcity similar to the way most countries hope emissions trade will fight global warming.  Some financial players, politicians and non-profit workers think virtual water trade and trading credits generated by not polluting water are some of the answers for an increasingly thirsty world.

But Barlow, a Canadian who has fought free trade agreements saying they will give corporations more power over water than governments, says environmental trade will lead to more problems. “It’s already late in the game for protecting water.  I’m nervous about getting into a system where there are brokers and middlemen in between deciding who has a credit,” she said. Tougher laws putting penalties on polluters and increasing the amount of the world’s urban greenery such as green roofs or forest and meadow zones surrounding megacities are better solutions, she says.

Do you think water waste is as dangerous as greenhouse emissions? If so, what’s the best way to slow it?

For U.S. drivers, motoring has always been about freedom. Now some folks are saying pumps that offer drivers whatever blend of ethanol they like mixed into motor fuel will increase demand for the biofuel. ”The future for the entire country is going to be blender pumps. And that will give the consumer the option to put the blend of ethanol they’d like into their car,” Jeff Broin, the CEO of private ethanol company POET said at the Reuters Global Agriculture and Biofuel Summit this week.

Broin, whose company is the top U.S. ethanol producer, said the so-called blender pumps offer drivers the choice of motor fuel mixed with either 10, 20, 30 or 85 percent ethanol. Currently there are a few blender pumps in his home state, South Dakota, as well as Minnesota.

But the great majority of U.S. drivers only have the option of filling up with E10, while some fuel stations, mainly in the Midwest and Texas, offer E85.

Unfortunately for bargain hunters, ethanol’s lower energy content compared to gasoline makes E85 blends more expensive than regular gasoline.  But other drivers may like to pay up because ethanol has higher levels of octane than gasoline.

More choices could boost U.S. demand for ethanol, an industry whose capacity has grown 45 percent this year, amid government mandates and incentives, he said.

Some blends may even be more economical. A study last month said E20 and E30 blends give drivers better fuel economy than either E10 or E85. 

And the pumps have powerful friends.  U.S. Presidential hopeful Democrat Barack Obama and several other Midwest lawmakers last year threw support behind more freedom of ethanol choice.  

While others say regulations would prevent the pumps from spreading nationwide, Broin  holds out hope, in part because the pumps could make him a tidy profit.  “It allows the ethanol plant to haul the ethanol directly to the station… rather than take it to the terminal and pay the extra freight on it… It is a bonus for station owner as well as the producers,” he said.

Of course, to burn anything higher than E10, you need to drive a “flex fuel” car, which auto makers are producing more of these days.

Would you buy more ethanol blended fuel if there were more choices?

Producer and director Aaron Woolf’s new film “King Corn” has provoked a rich debate among moviegoers about the wisdom of U.S. farm subsidies, but taking on big corn was so difficult  it has left him poor. 

The film profiles two recent East Coast college graduates, who after reading reports of the declining nutritional value of U.S. food,  move to Iowa to grow one acre of corn.

The neophyte farmers attempt to follow the corn they grow from the field to the plate and don’t always like what they see.  Family farmers tell them that U.S. subsidies and competition from big farms cause them to grow “the poorest quality corn the world’s ever seen.”  The two young men visit Colorado feed lots where scientists tell them that corn feed causes so many ulcers in cows that farmers have to pump them full of antibiotics. They go to Brooklyn, New York where doctors tell them that consumption of “liquid candy” soft drinks made with high fructose corn syrup have helped lead to high rates of diabetes in the city where one in eight people suffer from the disease.

Woolf said at a showing of the film at the Reuters Americas headquarters in New York this week that the film is $100,000 debt.  “This was a film that was really really hard to raise money for,” he said.  He said he could not afford to take on agricultural giants like Cargill and ADM in the film because, “It’s very hard to make a documentary in America and get corporate buy-in.”

Now Woolf has to moonlight in order to get back in the black, but he’s still concentrating on food - in a the next few weeks he will open an organic grocery store in Brooklyn.