Fewer cigarettes get lit indoors in bars and restaurants because of smoking bans from California to Ireland but something else is going up in smoke from a sidewalk in central Oslo – about $100,000 a year in extra outdoor heating bills.

The heated pavement, installed at a cost of about $400,000, may be the most extreme example of an environmental side-effect of smoking bans: rocketing power use.

“It’s warm out here even when it’s snowing and minus 10 (14 Fahrenheit) on the worst winter day,” said N. Virani, managing director of the Mona Lisa restaurant, which includes an outdoor section named after former health Minister Dagfinn Hoybraten who introduced the smoking ban in 2004.

Virani said he believed it was the only heated sidewalk in Scandinavia. And it’s true — today at a chilly 10 Celsius (50F) outdoors it felt like sitting at a warm outdoor cafe by the Mediterranean.

The strip of heated paving outdoors, and heaters in the roof, represent about 180,000 watts of electricity. Total electricity bills for the large business have almost doubled to 1.2 million crowns ($240,000) a year, Virani said.

 The restaurant had to close down an indoor ”cigar and cognac bar” with turnover plunging after the law entered into force. “Overall, turnover has recovered,” Virani said, even accounting for the extra bills.

In Norway almost all electricity comes from hydropower so the extra use is not doing much to stoke global warming, largely blamed on use of fossil fuels.

But think of all the thousands of extra gas and electricity heaters outdoors spurred by the smoking bans around the world…

I’m a big fan of the smoking bans overall as a way of protecting workers’ health and helping some people to kick the habit. But what can people like Mr. Virani do about the side-effect of soaring power use that in many countries is strengthening what U.S. President George W. Bush once called an ”addiction to oil”?

Solar power companies have been working around the clock to drive down the price of clean electricity from the sun so it can one day be as cheap as the energy we get from dirtier sources, like coal plants.

Until we get there, however, some solar panel installers have come up with a solution that they say will give more people access to solar energy. How are they doing it? By allowing customers to lease, rather than buy, the photovoltaic solar panels for their roofs.

It’s the same idea, really, that has enabled some people to get behind the wheel of a luxury car they could otherwise not afford — low or no upfront costs followed by a monthly bill.

SolarCity, based in Foster City, California, is one company that recently started offering leases to its customers. Chief Executive Lyndon Rive told Reuters he wanted to do away with the hefty cost of buying solar panels — on average about $20,000.

“Even those who really want to make an environmental change can’t part with $20,000… the solution is just too costly for them.”

Under SolarCity’s lease program, customers with a small home could pay as little as $70 a month for a 2.4 kilowatt system, Rive added. The company is also allowing customers who sign up before July 31st to put no money down on their system. After that, upfront costs should be between about $1,000 and $3,000, Rive said.

“We can essentially make it so that everybody can now afford clean power,” Rive said.

The leased projects will be financed through Morgan Stanley, and SolarCity said it will serve as a one-stop shop for both installation and financing.

Right now the program is only available in California, but SolarCity is expanding to Oregon, Arizona and has plans to go to the East Coast.

Looking for clean air and lots of greenery? Los Angeles is probably not the first place that comes to mind.

Still, the city as famous for traffic and smog as it is for sunshine and celebrities is working hard to earn the mantle of the greenest big city in America.

In its latest move, the L.A. City Council this week passed a law that will require all new building projects bigger than 50 units or 50,000 square feet to comply with the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) building standards. The city claims the move will cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 80,000 tons by 2012 — the equivalent of taking 15,000 cars off the road.

Mayor Antonio Villairagosa says the goal is the most aggressive of any big U.S. city. It is part of a broader plan the mayor laid out last year to reduce L.A.’s carbon footprint by 35 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.0

Still, critics point out that L.A.’s plan is not as aggressive as the one being pursued up North, in San Francisco — a debate the “Los Angeles Times” chronicled on Tuesday. In the story, advocates said L.A.’s move will have more of an impact on the environment because it covers so much more ground than San Francisco.

In the meantime, L.A. might have to take on an even bigger challenge — convincing the public that it can really go green.

As one LAT reader commented: “Los Angeles green? Only with paint.”

Kenyan blogger Juliana Rotich is the editor of Green Global Voices, which monitors citizen media in the developing world, and will be a regular contributor to these pages. ReutersThomson is not responsible for the content — the views are the author’s alone. We welcome her first blog:

Environmental bloggers and activists around the world are increasingly using web 2.0 tools to bring attention to issues ranging from deforestation, conservation and global warming. These are some of the innovative projects I have linked to recently as environment editor on Global Voices Online.

Blogs and video

The global network of Wildlife Direct blogs are a strong example of how to use multimedia in defense of endangered species. Their chairman, Richard Leakey, a conservationist, frequently records video clips from across Africa on his blog

The views of the younger generation on Wild Life Direct are exemplified by the postings on the Wildlife Clubs of Kenya blog. This mobile education unit visits schools in Kenya, recording videos of their conversations with children about the need for conservation and appreciation of the natural environment.

The Gorilla Protection blog uses the internet to provide environmental news from war torn Democratic Republic of Congo. They provide constant updates and photos from the rangers in Virunga National Park, who risk their lives daily to protect mountain gorillas from extinction.

Flickr

On photo-sharing website flickr, an environment photos group pools together images from over 960 members, creating a global visual treasure trove of pictures of flowers, animals, windmills and more.

The flickr photos of the organization Foko-Madagascar show the organization’s efforts plant trees and encourage a sustainable way of life in rural Madagascar.

Data mashups

Some of the most creative environmental activism online happens through “mashups”, where different sets of data are crossed to illustrate an environmental trend. Floodmaps, for instance, graphically illustrate on a Google world map what will happen if sea levels rise.

On Terrapass, travelers can easily calculate their CO2 emissions from airplane travel. The site gives advice on how to bring down your carbon footprint and balance it by purchasing “carbon offsets”.

Another mashup is Explore our Planet. It layers data from satellites over Google Maps to display information about the planet, such as annual CO2 emissions by region/country and tropical storms.

Mobile phones

There are many more examples of how activists are taking their issues to the internet frontlines. The mobile phone landscape is also growing fast. See for instance this experimental initiative by Ken Banks, the founder of Kiwanja.net and Frontline SMS. Ken developed a free downloadable game called Silver Backers. The game educates players about Gorilla conservation, and invites them to join and support the cause.

The Maldives has a dilemma — it fears that rising seas caused by global warming could wipe the country off the map but it doesn’t want to restrict tourists who visit the Indian Ocean coral islands in aircraft whose emissions are a cause of climate change.

Read Melanie Lee and Neil Chatterjee’s story about the problem faced by President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who is writing a book about ”Paradise Drowning” but wants to keep the tourist-dependent economy going.

What should countries like the Maldives do?

Ending poverty is the overriding goal for developing nations, but how far should they take part in fighting global warming, caused by people in rich nations on the other side of the world?

Would high green taxes on visitors help? Or would that be just a symbolic pinprick in the problem of global warming that could drive holidaymakers to pick another tropical destination?

What do you think?

The symbolic color associated with environmentalism is obviously “green.” 

From ‘green movement,’ ‘Green Party,’ ‘green collar jobs,’ to ‘Greenpeace,’ the color reference is to plants, chlorophyll, the green pigment central to photosynthesis, which is the basis of all life. Quite often, however, the chief environmental goal being advocated has little to do with plants, but rather promoting low-impact technologies, practices and lifestyles.

This is the case with “green building design” which is receiving growing attention because of the under-appreciated magnitude of building emissions worldwide. Recently, New York City audited the source of all its CO2 emissions and found that nearly 80 percent is from building energy consumption. Worldwide the estimate is closer to 45 percent, making “buildings the biggest single contributor to anthropogenic climate change - a worse offender than all the world’s cars and trucks put together.”

The vast bulk of green building design focuses on efficient heating, cooling, lighting,  insulation and window technologies. All of these are great things of course, but what’s not mentioned in the Nature article is a truly ‘green’ building technology - living green roofs and living walls. These are technologies that introduce plants into building facades, especially rooftops.

Typical dark rooftop temperatures in summer sunlight can reach extraordinary levels of 150 degrees F (~65 degrees C) or more. It makes little sense not to address such an extreme building heat source in green building design. Moreover, in cities, rooftops, among other dark, impervious surfaces like streets and parking areas are a chief contributor to the “urban heat island” effect which elevates the temperature and climate in cities well above surrounding suburban and rural areas. This extra heat can be deadly during heatwaves, especially if air-conditioning is not available or fails during blackouts. Resident proximity to high-floors and rooftops was a risk factor in both the deadly 1995 Chicago and 2003 European heat waves.

Green roofs harness the unrivaled power of plants to remain cool when exposed to sunlight during the summer, as I showed in my last post. There is an ever-increasing palette of plant choices available, but the most common and reliable are “sedums.”  They are members of the succulent family of plants and are very tough in surviving all sorts of weather conditions, including extreme heat and droughts.  The plants grow in a porous medium that is usually a few inches deep, depending on the building structural support.

Green roofs give back to the urban environment in multiple ways however. Along with urban heat source reduction they are great at reducing storm-water runoff from buildings as well. This runoff leads to a ubiquitous problem in cities known as “combined sewer overflow” where combined sanitary and runoff water is released to nearby waterways because of limited water treatment capacity. Green roofs can also create new ecological habitats that are generally limited in urban areas. It’s estimated that New York City may have 10 or more times the area of Central Park available for green roof adoption. 

Green living walls, including ivies and vines, are a more challenging technology and will take longer to develop into a common building practice. But already fascinating potential properties of living walls are being noted, such as how in summer they can provide shade to cool buildings down, while in the winter they will allow light to penetrate and warm the building.

If these green building facade technologies catch on, along with traditional street trees, plants will partially re-conquer the urban spaces they originally occupied, and make cities much more liveable for us in the process.
 

A plan by President George W. Bush to set a distant 2025 ceiling for rising U.S. greenhouse gases has triggered criticisms by Germany that he is coming up with a “Neanderthal” solution to the problem – too little too late.

Most other delegates at 17-nation U.S.-led climate talks in Paris on Thursday and Friday have been far less damning, welcoming the fact that Bush is setting a ceiling for emissions, albeit one that will be a generation after most other rich nations.

German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel’s office called it a plan for losers rather than leaders and denounced it as ”Neanderthal”.

But who is right? 

The United States is isolated among developed nations in opposing the Kyoto Protocol, under which 37 countries are trying to cut emissions by at least 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. Global warming, we are always told, will only be contained if all countries work together.

“Neanderthal” was obviously meant as an insult but it strikes me that a Neanderthal solution is what the world needs — global warming was not a problem back in the Stone Age when people relied on renewable energies such as burning wood.

So who has the best strategy to fight global warming? — Bush with his belief in heavy investments in new technologies? Or Kyoto-style cuts embraced by the rest of his industrial allies? And how will the U.S. approach change after Bush steps down in 2009?

Puffins may look like clowns but have just proved once again that they’re excellent time-keepers.

April 14 is traditionally the day when thousands of the seabirds land on the cliffs at Lovund island off north Norway at the start of the mating season. They sometimes land a day or two on either side of the date, first gathering in vast flocks after the long winter spent out at sea, but April 14 is so reliable that it has become a tourist attraction.

“It’s just instinct,” says Torill Olaisen, who works at the local hotel on the island. “It could be the length of the day, it could be the amount of moisture in the air, it may be access to food. No one knows how they do it.”

She said that, once the eggs hatched, the puffin colony on Lovund could total 200,000 birds, one of the biggest along the coast.

This year they arrived like clockwork, at 7.15 p.m. in the evening on April 14 (I originally wrote this blog in the morning, wondering if they’d be arriving on time this year…I shouldn’t have doubted them: they were).

Warmer sea and air temperatures in the Arctic region in recent years, apparently part of global warming, do not seem to have disrupted their arrival date so it may be steered by other factors.

So how did they manage to figure out that 2008 is a leap year and humans have added an extra day to the calendar?

Any ideas how they do it?

Greens are seeing red this week after the World Bank approved partial financing for a $4.2 billion coal-fired power station in India.

   The 4,000 MW plant will provide crucial power for millions of Indians, prove a much-needed boost for industry and use “super-critical” technology that will make it India’s most-efficient coal-fired plant.

   The Bank’s board approved $450 million in loans through its International Finance Corp for the Tata Mundra project and the IFC said it looked at many alternative ideas, including wind and solar, but found the giant coal power station was the best solution.

   The volume of emissions from the plant will be about 40 percent less than existing coal-fired plants in India but it will still produce up to 23 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year.

   And that’s angered environmental groups who say the World Bank is failing to help fight global warming by backing polluting projects. The Bank said using solar or wind for the project instead of coal would have been just too expensive to meet India’s vast appetite for electricity.

  Greens say much more investment and willingness needs to go into clean energy to help poor nations prevent the polluting mistakes of richer nations. Otherwise we’re all doomed to face a warmer world with rising seas and more chaotic weather.

  But who’s going to take that chance and start backing giant renewable projects in poorer states to wean them off coal and oil? Or will the sharp rise in coal and oil prices generate the needed political and financial shift anyway?

   No one disputes India’s right to develop. But should lenders such as the World Bank impose a ban on involvement in future coal plants as a way to focus global investment on clean energy? For the Tata Mundra project, the IFC said coal was the least expensive option and that using solar or wind would have required billions in subsidies.

Scientists have joined forces to save magical Madagascar by using a new method they hope to apply to other hot spots of biodiversity. For full details you can check my colleague Deborah Zabarenko’s story.

As someone who has had the great privilege of visiting this island continent twice I can only say: “Right on!”

Madagascar is a classic example of natural selection at work: most of its species have evolved in splendid isolation because the island broke free from the rest of Africa tens of millions of years ago. 

This is what evolution and natural selection are all about. It is no coincidence that Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace separately stumbled upon this profound notion in the 19th century while observing life on islands — or, more specifically, the difference to be found in life on islands often only a few miles apart. 

Madagascar, because of its size and the length of time it has been a cast away, is a prime an example of natural selection run riot.

Its snakes have no venom because that is an evolutionary trait they picked up after Madagascar and the rest of Africa went their separate ways.

It has boa constrictors (which I have observed in its forests) which are found nowhere in Africa but are found in South America. Why? How? Because, or so goes one theory I have heard, Madagascar and South America BOTH broke free from Africa at one point. So it stands to reason that they might both keep something that died out in Africa and vice versa.

That is the dynamic of natural selection.

I could go on and on and on. Madagascar is most famous for its roughly 70 species on lemurs, dainty primates that come in all shapes and colors. The largest among them, the indri, has a haunting cry that belies its small stature and which sent tingles down my spine the first time I heard it.

Much of the indri population is now restricted to a fragment of isolated habitat in a protected reserve. An island on an island.

For a good popular introduction to the study of island life I would recommend David Quammen’s superb book “The Song of the Dodo.” It inspired me to go to Madagascar in the first place with my wife when I was a Johannesburg-based correspondent.

And if you really want to see natural selection at work on an island, go to Madagascar yourself. Eco-tourism can help preserve species by giving rural people an economic incentive not to hunt them or destroy their habitat.  And that can only help the scientists and their new efforts to save this cradle of weird and wonderful evolution.