It’s summer at the G8 media centre in Hokkaido. Yet underneath the building are tonnes of snow to keep journalists cool as they write about global warming.

Japan budgeted $283 million for security at the summit and $30 million to build a temporary, low-emissions media centre far from where the G8 leaders are meeting in a luxury hotel.

The centre took five months to construct next to a ski resort and the company that built it says 95 percent of the materials will be recycled or reused once the building is torn down in the weeks after the G8 meeting.

During construction, tonnes of snow were scooped up from the resort’s car park and dumped into an insulated area under the floor. Of the 5.5 metres of snow, more than 4 metres remain, which is used to chill the air circulating around the cavernous two-storey building. Large arrays of solar panels also help power the centre and cut emissions.

Journalists can walk over glass panels to see the snow underneath.

 Jun Oishi of Takenaka Corporation, which designed and built the centre, says it will save 6,ooo tonnes of carbon dioxide over its short life compared with a conventionally designed building.

It’s a revelation compared with the media tents at last December’s climate talks in Bali, which were basically sweat boxes filled with large and inefficient air conditioners battling the tropical heat.

Green though the new building is, the fleets of cars ferrying journalists between the airport and Sapparo, both two hours from the media centre, has raised doubts about how much carbon will ultimately be saved. A case of style over substance?

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?

I have a confession to make — I’m glad gas prices in the United States, as elsewhere, are rising. And I’m quietly hoping they’ll keep going higher because there may possibly be no more effective way to promote conservation and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
 
Higher pump prices might be the only way that we Americans will ever even begin adjusting our driving habits and reducing fuel consumption — when it hits you in the pocketbook. The price of gas in the United States may be cresting at over the $4 per gallon level but it is still far lower than it many other countries where fuel taxes are much higher.

In Germany, gasoline is now up to about 6 euros ($9) per gallon. German think tanks have forecast that it would take prices of 10 euros ($15) per gallon to radically change driving habits.
 
Certainly there are fewer mass transit options in the United States than in Europe and elsewhere. And higher fuel prices are especially problematic for people with low or no income. What’s nevertheless disheartening in the United States is that any suggestion of alleviating the price squeeze in the United States through the conservation of fuel by driving less or by driving smaller, more fuel-efficient cars or by using public transportation seems to get drowned out by a strange political debate about temporarily suspending the federal fuel tax for a few months during the summer holiday season.

That seems to be sending the wrong message to Americans, who already use about one quarter of the world’s gas. It’s a wasted opportunity, in the age of climate change, to help a global campaign for conservation.
 
I spent an illuminating week recently driving around in California. It was amazing that so many people are still driving enormous SUVs even though fuel prices are high and rising. It was also amazing that people drive their enormous SUVs and other gas-guzzling cars at such high speeds and with such jack-rabbit acceleration.

I was in my mother’s 10-year-old sub-compact and tried to keep to the 60 mph speed limits on the freeways. It sometimes felt like I was standing still. Speeding cars, trucks and busses were passing on the left, on the right and some wanted to run right over me (it seemed). Even at 60 mph I was evidently a traffic nuisance.
 
Some especially fast cars can go from zero to 60 in 10 seconds or less. Admittedly I’m a bit obsessed with saving fuel. It takes me about 40 seconds to get to 60 mph. Even getting to 30 mph takes about 20 seconds. To save fuel, I try to avoid braking and never step hard on the gas. I got nearly 50 miles per gallon with that car.

A relative who lent me her mid-sized car was amazed when I went twice as far (600 miles) on a tank as she does. She wanted to know the secret. It’s no secret. It’s just common sense. But with political leaders tripping over themselves with promises of a summer fuel tax holiday, few in America seems to be getting that message. 

What do you think about high gas prices? 
 
 

So what happened to global warming?

It’s not just that it’s disappeared from media headlines this year - shoved off by the credit crunch and natural disasters, for example. It can’t be ignored that 2007 came and went as another very warm year - the 7th hottest on record since 1850 according to the World Meteorological Organization.

But it wasn’t a record. In fact that was 1998, a full 10 years ago — the year of an exceptional El Nino, a Pacific weather pattern which heats the whole globe. So is global warming not living up to the hype?

Two weeks ago Leibniz Institute’s Noel Keenlyside stirred an academic hornet’s
nest by saying that we may have to wait longer - a decade or more - for another
peak year, because a natural weakening in ocean currents may be cooling sea
temperatures.

Many scientists flatly rejected the idea, saying Keenlyside had over-estimated the effect. But some pointed out that a recent switch in a weather pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation could indeed cool temperatures globally.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said last year recent warming was
“unequivocal” and most of it ”very likely” manmade. And almost all scientists in the latest debate, including Keenlyside, agree that any temporary cooling doesn’t alter that - blips due to natural effects are to be expected.

But how long is a blip? No-one knows.

It could be many years before there’s an El Nino as bad as 1998, scientists say. And in the meantime the doubts will grow, just as policymakers try to negotiate one of the most complex global treaties ever. A new Kyoto Protocol will affect issues of equity and poverty: in the case of poor countries the right to grow, for island states perhaps the right to exist, and for rich countries the right to compete on a level economic playing field.

Meanwhile one or two doubters are already saying the present lull in warming
casts doubt on just how far manmade greenhouse gases are influencing the climate. MIT’s Richard Lindzen reckoned that if it was as bad as all that temperatures would be rising faster.

What do you think?

There are plenty of ways to get around New York City, not all of them savory — subway, bus, car, taxi, bike, shoe-leather — but few offer the environmental cachet of the plug-in electric motorbike. Sleek, slim and silent, the Vectrix two-seater owned by filmmaker Michael Bergmann is definitely preferable to rocketing around town under almost any other kind of power. The ride from the East Side to the West Side one recent evening was an absolute pleasure, with less ambient noise than a golf cart as we zoomed across Central Park.

“I’ve always felt that enjoying life in New York to the fullest requires a way to get around New York,” Bergmann said later in an e-mail. “A way that’s quiet and up on the surface so you can enjoy the varied life and changing neighborhoods as you travel. That requires a vehicle that’s street legal (so I don’t worry about being stopped or having it confiscated), always available, that isn’t hard to park, that doesn’t contribute to congestion or pollution (air or noise), that can carry the amount of stuff one ordinarily carries, and carry a passenger as well. So as soon as I found out about the Vectrix I wanted one.”

Vectrix, headquartered in Rhode Island, first started selling its electric plug-in motorbikes in Europe and is now expanding in the U.S. market. The company bills its plug-in model as “an advanced zero-emission, battery-powered motorcycle,” with comparable performance to a 400cc gas-powered motorcycle.

Bergmann and his wife Meredith, a sculptor, use the bike as their principal mode of transport around Manhattan. The Vectrix gets parked and plugged in in the underground garage at their apartment house, where they pay for half a parking space, with electricity included. It gets about 40 miles (65 km) to a charge, which is enough to get around New York’s five boroughs, and Michael figures the company’s claim that it can get up to 62 miles (100 km) per hour is accurate, since he’s been able to accelerate uphill on the FDR Drive, no mean feat.

Bergmann has always been an early adopter of new technology, and he’s no exception here. You can see what he’s done in the film world.

He admits there’s one drawback: the price. His model cost $11,000. But he reckons that, because of where and how he and his wife live, “it will pay for itself in taxis not taken in two years.”

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and will be a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. Reuters is not responsible for the content — the views expressed are the author’s alone.

The root cause of all environmental problems-from beer cans floating on a lake to global warming-can be explained using the following two contrasting scenes:

Scene 1: We are sitting in an automobile inside a small, closed garage.

You are in the passenger seat and I am at the wheel. We are waiting for a third passenger from inside the building. Suddenly I reach for the ignition and turn the engine on. Alarmed by the thought of being poisoned by the exhaust, your eyes widen in amazement as you say, “What are you doing?” When you reach to turn the ignition off, I block your hands and soon a life-and-death struggle begins for control of the vehicle. You are screaming: “Are you crazy! You’re going to kill us both!”  If we manage to survive the episode you will seek to have me put under psychiatric care. Heck, I might even end up in prison for attempted manslaughter. My days as an ordinary law-abiding citizen are over.

Scene 2: Exact same situation except that now the car is sitting a mere ten feet back on the driveway outside the garage.

I reach for the ignition and turn the car on. You might look over but you say nothing. The engine could idle 15 minutes or more, but we sit calmly in silence. Our passenger arrives and we drive off. I remain a perfectly well-respected citizen. Indeed if you happened to question me the next day about the engine idling, you’re the one who would probably feel strange.

Economists explain the remarkable difference between scene 1 and 2 as “the tragedy of the commons.” When we pollute a seemingly vast reservoir like the atmosphere (a “common space”) the rapid dilution of our pollution makes us oblivious to what we are doing. Since everyone acts the same self-interested way (the “tragedy”), the pollution accumulates, including carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) . If instead, we were forced to inhale all of our own emissions, we would stop this behavior immediately. Since this is never the case, the economic solution is a pollution tax.

Throwing a beer can on a lake is the same thing-the can soon floats away so you don’t have to look at it. But if everyone were to toss empty cans into the same lake, it would soon be blanketed in tin. Who would be responsible for cleaning up the lake? Would it be fair to ask all residents to foot the bill, or just the individual polluters? The same question exists with global warming and greenhouse gas emissions: If rich countries alone were forced to absorb all the impacts of their emissions, we’d have seen a lot more action by now. Instead, less developed countries have the dubious privilege of sharing the impacts.

What makes the oblivion brought on by the commons so extreme that, like with an engine idling, the polluting behavior becomes the “norm” and questioning it feels almost “abnormal”? 

For example, how would you feel asking a stranger to turn off his idling car? How would you react if you had to pay for how much pollution your car emitted while you were idling?