Environment Forum

Some good news for a thirsty world

Amid the worry about water and food scarcity, some hints of good news: a five-year, 30-nation analysis suggests there might be enough water – and therefore enough food — for Earth’s hungriest and thirstiest as the human population heads toward the 9 billion mark sometime around mid-century.

Anxiety about food and water supplies stems in part from the effects of climate change, with its projected rise in droughts, wildfires, floods and other events that cut down on food production. Another factor is the increase in population, much of it grouped around water sources in the developing world. But water experts said at a conference this week in Brazil that there could be plenty of water over the coming decades if those upstream collaborate with those downstream and use water more efficiently.

The leader of the study, Simon Cook of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, said this is actually possible. And he said it wouldn’t require the repeal of the more selfish impulses of human nature.

Citing an article in Harvard Business Review, Cook said, “It’s not necessarily human to be totally individualistic. There’s substantial evidence that people can collaborate.”

In fact, Cook said, this kind of discussion between upstreamers and downstreamers — the ones most likely to be at odds over how water should be used — is already taking place. There is evidence that China’s involved in a project to enable hydropower development along the Mekong River, one of several huge river basins examined in the water study. “They’re actually engaged in dialog with the people who will be affected by it” in Laos, Cook said, with a bit of wonder in his voice. “So there are some glimmers of hope.”

That would be different from what has often happened in developed countries, including the United States, where those who use water for irrigation may have scant discussion with those who use it for rain-fed farming, hydropower, aquaculture or other purposes.

The key is to communicate across borders and across sectors, Cook said. One problem is that those who have power tend to want to hang onto it.

A parka with windows, a big box in the sky

Could you find domestic happiness living in an angular white parka with windows? A big box set on top of an apartment building? A turtle-shaped shell? A modular Y filled with triangles?

At the U.S. Energy Department’s Solar Decathlon, visitors can try on — OK, tour — these avant garde houses, knowing at least that they’re supremely energy efficient. And with the solar power industry on the defensive after the Solyndra bankruptcy, it’s a decent showcase for new technologies.

Set up along the Potomac River on a slightly out of the way corner of Washington’s National Mall, the village of 19 solar-powered homes represents the work of collegiate designers from New York to New Zealand, the University of Tennessee to Tongji University in China. The requirements are strict: each house must be between 600 and 1,000 square feet, and no taller than 18 feet, and be powered by the sun. Any power taken from the grid must be offset by solar energy produced by the house. No fireplaces, fire pits or candles allowed.

Officially opened on September 22, the contest judges the homes’ affordability, appliances, architecture, comfort zone, communications, energy balance, engineering, home entertainment, hot water and market appeal.

The CHIP house — the one that looks a bit like a parka or a big down quilt heaped into a mound — was standing room only on opening day, with a waiting line for visitors. It wears its insulation on the outside, swathed in white vinyl, and its unusual shape is meant to help channel cool air in and hot air out, easing fuel costs. Most electric devices in the home are controlled by a system using an iPad and XBOX 360′s Kinect, which means they can be controlled with a wave or a pointed finger. Solar panels cover most of the roof. CHIP (short for compact hyper-insulated prototype) is the work of students from Caltech and the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

The City College of New York decided to build a house suitable for the underutilized urban space on top of mid-sized residential or commercial buildings. The team from the University of Calgary in Canada constructed a tortoise like TRTL house — “technological residence, traditional living” — with solar cells standing in for the turtle’s shell. China’s team featured a modular Y-shaped house dominated by triangles, from the floor to the furniture. The Empowerhouse, by Parsons The New School for Design and Stevens Institute of Technology, has a known future: after the competition ends, it will become home for a family in Washington DC’s Deanwood neighborhood.

Photo credits: SCI-Arc/Caltech’s CHIP house, September 23, 2011; Parsons The New School for Design/Stevens Institute for Technology’s entry, September 22, 2011; Team China’s Y house, September 23, 2011 (all photos by Stefano Paltera/U.S. Department of Energy)

from Entrepreneurial:

Innovation is how we make our living: Is China buying?

-- Tom Lyon is the director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, and Peter Adriaens is a professor of entrepreneurship at the Zell Lurie Institute of Entrepreneurial Studies, both at the University of Michigan. The views expressed are their own. --

President Barack Obama, in his State of the Union speech, called for America to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” But who is the competition, exactly? Who is presenting “our generation’s Sputnik moment”? Who are we racing against to put a million electric vehicles on the road? The president’s answer: China.

Encouraging American innovation is a major piece of the president’s strategy to win the future. And a global leadership position in innovation is ours to lose.

During another era of innovation, the dot-com boom of the 1990s, the U.S. was perhaps the best market in the world for the launch of the Internet. Now, China is arguably the best market today for deployment of clean technology. China is adding energy production capacity, cars on the road, and new cities faster than any other country in the world. Plus, it has the financial and political power to direct the market to move away from cheaper, legacy technologies.

So how can U.S. researchers, inventors and entrepreneurs profit from the market in China while preserving innovation leadership? That’s a question we first explored during the University of Michigan’s Clean Tech Symposium this past December. In our view, the overwhelming message of the symposium was that the U.S. and China are well matched in bringing together the supply and demand for cleantech innovation.

Keynote speakers Peggy Liu of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy (JUCCCE), and Professor C.S. Kiang of Beijing University described a cash-rich China hungry to address ballooning energy demand and rampant environmental degradation. At the same time, they said, a shift is occurring in China towards greater acceptance of foreign innovation.

Hu’s visit is over, but China’s ecological footprint lingers

The Chinese flags have disappeared from Washington’s wide avenues after China’s President Hu Jintao’s visit this week, but one statistic is still in the air: the rapidly expanding size of the Chinese ecological footprint, compared to the huge but slowing impact U.S. consumers have on global supplies of food, water, fuel — everything, really.

China and the United States are generally considered to hold the top two spots in the world for emissions of climate-warming greenhouse gases. But how do they compare when consumption of all goods is taken into account?

A report by Global Footprint Network indicates both countries are living beyond their means, ecologically speaking.

The Ecological Footprint measures the land and sea area needed to produce the resources a population consumes and absorb its carbon dioxide emissions. By this measure, it would take just under 3 billion global hectares (about 7.4 billion global acres) to produce what China’s people consume. If everybody on the planet lived as the Chinese do, it would take the resources of 1.2 Earths.

(The numbers are a bit different when focusing just on Hong Kong, where it would take 2.2 Earths to supply the world’s demand if everybody lived as people do in Hong Kong. A new report with this focus is here.)

The total U.S. ecological footprint is 2.5 billion global hectares (about 6.1 billion acres) — substantially less than China, but far higher for each individual U.S. consumer. If the whole world used as much stuff as people in the United States do, it would take five Earths to provide it.

However, the Global Footprint Network notes another difference between these two economic powers: China’s ecological footprint is growing faster than that of the United States. Between 1992 and 2007 (the most recent year for which data is available), China’s total ecological footprint grew 74 percent, more than triple the U.S. growth of 23 percent over the same time span.

from Tales from the Trail:

Panda diplomacy: the remix

The latest chapter in the long story of panda diplomacy was written at Washington's National Zoo, where the Chinese government agreed to lengthen the "loan" of popular panda pair Mei Xiang and Tian Tian for another five years. Actually, the loan is conditioned on whether they produce a new heir or heiress to the cuteness of panda-dom in the next two years;  one or both could be exchanged for more fecund substitutes.

They have a good track record: Washington native Tai Shan, born in 2005, headed back to China last year.

This was a big enough deal for President Barack Obama to mention it at an elaborate state dinner at the White House for Chinese President Hu Jintao.

“Today, we’ve shown that our governments can work together, as well, for our mutual benefit,” Obama told the glittering gathering. "And that includes this bit of news: Under a new agreement, our National Zoo will continue to dazzle children and visitors with the beloved giant pandas."

In the United States, panda diplomacy started soon after President Richard Nixon's 1972 trip to China. But the idea that China might be able to export, or at least loan, this cuddly symbol to further diplomatic ends may date back to the Tang Dynasty, when 7th century Chinese Empress Wu Zetian sent a pair of pandas to Japan.

For some reason, Washington has gone disproportionately gaga over pandas. In 2004, the PandaMania exhibition put fancifully painted panda sculptures around town; there's still one near the hotel where the Chinese government set up its press operations for President Hu Jintao's visit. Asked why people in the United States are so smitten, Chinese conservation official Zhang Shanming told reporters it just might be that, when pandas sit on their hind quarters, eating, they look like human babies.

To be honest, Tian Tian and Mei Xiang didn't look so much like babies in that distinctive pose; they looked more like furry beanbags as the big deal was unveiled. But pandas are pandas and Washingtonians are likely to continue the love affair with them.

from Reuters Investigates:

Solar energy vs wildlife

Sarah McBride reports on brewing battles between environmentalists in her special report: "With solar power, it's Green vs. Green."

It turns out the perfect place to build a big solar plant is often also the perfect place for a tortoise or a fox to live. This means developers of large-scale solar plants are running into legal challenges from people who one would expect to be natural allies of alternative energy providers.

Here's a map of some of the more contentious projects.

One local resident of the Panoche Valley, Sallie Calhoun, had this to say:

"I am passionate about preserving open space," she says, adding she believes the solar plant achieves that goal. "The idea that we're going to protect every lizard, every drainage, seems counterproductive."

Robots rule at Silicon Valley solar factory

Solyndra, a Silicon Valley solar module maker, took some heat in November when it decided to close a factory, lay off workers and delay expansion of a new manufacturing plant that was built with a half-billion-dollar federal loan guarantee.

In making the move seven weeks after opening the new factory, called Fab 2, the company cited the need to rein in capital expenditures in the face of aggressive competition from low-cost Chinese manufacturers.

Still, the $733 million plant is up and running and Solyndra this week released a video of the automated factory. It’s obviously a commercial for the company but the video also shows how in the long run U.S. companies may be able to compete against China in the global market.

Fab 2’s robots outnumber workers of the flesh-and-blood variety. Driverless carts and automated cranes shuffle photovoltaic parts across the 300,000 square-foot factory, handing them off to large orange robots that look like the machines in the Terminator movies.

The robots feed long glass cylinders into large devices that coat them with advanced thin-film photovoltaic materials. Other robots assemble the tubes into solar panels before they’re loaded onto trucks to be shipped to customers who will install them on large commercial rooftops.

“A lot of capital has gone into the factories but once they’re running our labor costs are quite low and allow us to operate here,” Bob Bierman, Solyndra’s executive vice president for operations and engineering, told me when I visited Fab 1 and Fab 2 in September.

China ramps up solar manufacturing

China’s increasing domination of a rapidly expanding solar module industry is revealed in a report that shows that Chinese companies are expected to account for nearly 72 percent of new photovoltaic manufacturing capacity this year.

For instance, China’s LDK Solar will add the most new capacity in 2010 with 1,420 megawatts coming online, according to iSuppli, an El Segundo, Calif., technology research firm.

Norway’s REC took second place with 1,090 megawatts of manufacturing capacity expected to be added by year’s end.

But Chinese companies held seven of the top 10 positions on iSuppli’s list, representing 6,445 megawatts of manufacturing capacity.

Suntech Power Holdings will add 1,025 megawatts while JA Solar will expand manufacturing by 1,000 megawatts. Yingli Green Energy will add 800 megawatts of capacity by the end of the year while Trina Solar Energy will install an additional 700 megawatts.

“I go to Shanghai every six weeks and the scale of the operations is just jaw dropping, absolutely jaw dropping,” Conrad Burke, chief executive of Innovalight, a Silicon Valley solar company, said in a recent interview.

from MacroScope:

Will China make the world green?

Joschka Fischer was never one to mince words when he was Germany's foreign minister in the late '90s and early noughts. So it is not overly surprising that he has painted a picture in a new post of a world with only two powers -- the United States and China -- and an ineffective and divided Europe on the sidelines.

More controversial, however, is his view that China will not only grow into the world's most important market over the coming years, but will determine what the world produces and consumes -- and that that will be green.

Fischer, who was leader of  Germany's Green Party, reckons that due to its sheer size and needed GDP growth, China will have to pursue a green economy. Without that, he writes in his Project Syndicate post, China will quickly reach limits to growth with disastrous ecological and, as a result, political consequences.

This will have serious consequences on the the way the West lives.

Consider the transition from the traditional automobile to electric transport. Despite European illusions to the contrary, this will be decided in China, not in the West. All that will be decided by the West’s globally dominant automobile industry is whether it will adapt and have a chance to survive or go the way of other old Western industries: to the developing world.

This is not the usual view of China. Many greens have long feared the impact of a huge leap in Chinese growth on the global environment -- refrigerators in a billion homes, cars in a billion garages etc.

Dalian oil spill is all cleaned up

The Chinese government this week announced the oil spill is all cleaned up in Dalian harbor, off the north coast of Liaoning province in China.

That was fast.

Not even two weeks ago, on July 17, a blast hit two oil pipelines and spread an estimated 1,500 metric tons of crude oil (462,000 gallons) into the Yellow Sea.  (Update: Greenpeace on July 30 said as many as 60,000 metric tons could have been spilled.)

It’s a minute fraction of the amount of crude that has spilled into the Gulf of Mexico since the BP Deepwater explosion of April 20, with an estimated 414,000–1,186,000 tons — but it’s still significant enough for 8,000 workers and 800 fishing vessels to dive in to clean-up efforts, some literally.

At least one person was killed in the cleanup efforts. Firefighter Zhang Liang, 25, drowned July 20 after a wave threw him from a vessel and pushed him out to sea, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.