Will the guardians of the Nobel Peace Prize make another green award in 2009 to encourage sluggish talks on new U.N. climate treaty due to be agreed in Copenhagen?
Or is it too early after environmental prizes in both 2004 and 2007?
The five-member Nobel panel likes to make topical awards to try to influence the world – a prize announcement on Oct. 9 linked to climate change could hardly be better timed since 190 nations will meet in Copenhagen in December to agree a new pact for fighting global warming.
And the Nobel prize will be formally handed over at a ceremony in Oslo on Dec. 10 — the anniversary of the death of founder Alfred Nobel – giving any winner a global loudspeaker during the the Dec. 7-18 meeting in Copenhagen.
But any would-be green laureate has a big problem — former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore and the U.N. Climate Panel shared the 2007 prize and Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai won in 2004 for her campaign to plant trees across Africa.
And the environment is still a controversial new area for the committee – some critics said that it had nothing to do with peace when Maathai won.
Geir Lundestad, the director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, defends the green choices and says there’s no rotation of themes for peace — disarmament one year, human rights the next, etc.
“When the ice melts in the Arctic, new territorial issues arise. When the waters rise in Bangladesh, hundreds of thousands of people flee to India, creating difficulties. And when the desert spreads in the Sahara it leads to new difficult issues,” he said.
“There will be many different roads to peace and there is no rotation (of themes), as there is no rotation as far as geography is concerned,” he told Reuters.
Even if there is no green prize from a record field of 205 candidates in 2009, maybe concern about the environment could indirectly influence the choice in other ways?
Lundestad said several years ago that the committee should speak out sooner rather than later this century about the lack of democracy in China — so far it hasn’t done so. But the committee might not want to irritate Beijing, for instance by awarding the prize a prize to a dissident, just when China is offering to do more to rein in its greenhouse gas emissions.
((Pictures - top: A large iceberg is seen on the edge of a morning fog over Frobisher Bay, Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic August 21, 2009. The picture was taken from a Canadian Forces Aurora patrol aircraft flying south of Iqaluit and taking part in military manoeuvers in the Canadian north. REUTERS/Andy Clark. Right: The Nobel Peace Prize medal awarded to South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Soweto in 1984, recovered a few days after thieves broke into his home in June 2007. REUTERS/Stringer))
MEDICINE BOW NATIONAL FOREST, Wyoming - From the vantage point of an 80-foot (25 meter) tower rising above the trees, the Wyoming vista seems idyllic: snow-capped peaks in the distance give way to shimmering green spruce.
But this is a forest under siege. Among the green foliage of the healthy spruce are the orange-red needles of the sick and the dead, victims of a beetle infestation closely related to one that has already laid waste to millions of acres (hectares) of pine forest in North America.
“The gravity of the situation is very real,” said Rolf Skar, a forest campaigner with Greenpeace.
The plague has cost billions of dollars in lost timber and land values and may thwart efforts to combat climate change, as forests are major storing houses of carbon, the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.
The beetle outbreak, which has taken a lesser, but mounting, toll on spruce trees, could make it that much tougher to meet the ambitious target to reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 17 percent of 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050.
That is laid out in a climate bill that narrowly passed in the U.S. House of Representatives and waits Senate debate.
Many researchers have also linked the infestation in the U.S. and Canadian West to climate change, notably a dearth of winters cold enough to kill the voracious little bugs.
“Pine beetle infestations are cyclical in nature and have been occurring for thousands of years but what is making things worse now is the effects of global warming,” said Skar.
“If you don’t have the real cold extremes to kill off the larvae under the bark you are going to have extreme infestation events,” he said.
CARBON FOOTPRINT
In the Medicine Bow National Forest, scientists are getting a first-hand look at the carbon implications.
The forest is home to the U.S. Forest Service’s Glacier Lakes Ecosystem Experiments site in a tower with gadgets that, among other things, examine the “carbon flux” of the forest.
The site was established a decade ago, before the spruce beetle infestation, and gives scientists a unique chance to measure the changes to carbon storage wrought by the insects.
“We are getting readings here every half hour,” said Colorado-based U.S. Forest Service scientist Mike Ryan, shouting above the wind as he pointed to an instrument that measures carbon. This gas analyzer resembles a small space capsule on the end of a horizontal metal pole.
(See more from Ryan in the video below)
In the terminology of trees and carbon, a healthy forest is a net “sink,” with trees storing carbon as they grow. When they die and rot they “emit” carbon back into the atmosphere, and so a dead or dying forest becomes a “net source” of greenhouse gas, meaning it emits more carbon dioxide than it stores.
Ryan said the net carbon storage in this patch of woods is about half of what it was three or four years ago. In another three or four years, he believes it will become a net source.
A SEA OF GREEN TURNS ORANGE
This scenarios is being replayed across the West.
In Colorado, aerial surveys show that from 1996 to 2008 Colorado lost almost 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) of pine forest to the beetle outbreak, Wyoming 677,000 acres and South Dakota 354,000 acres.
Over the same period of time, the spruce beetle, which has also ravaged forests as far north as Alaska, took out 374,000 acres of spruce trees in Colorado and 340,000 in Wyoming.
That cumulative total of over 6 million acres (2.5 million hectares) is an area larger than Israel or South Africa’s Kruger National Park.
A composite picture above, shot from 2003 to 2008 by the Forest Service, shows trees dying over time in an Engelmann spruce stand in southeastern Wyoming due to a spruce beetle epidemic.
Farther north in Canada, the pine beetle has attacked trees over an area of about 39 million acres (14.5 million hectares) in British Columbia since the 1990s.
The sheer scale of the damage can be seen northwest of Denver in Colorado’s Yampa Valley. Vast tracts of formerly evergreen forest now have huge splashes of orange running through them.
Vast tracts of formerly evergreen forest now have huge splashes of orange running through them.
According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, a third of the United States’ land area is covered in forest but it is only expanding at a rate of about 0.1 percent per year.
Under “cap and trade” provisions in the U.S. climate bill, additional forest growth may be encouraged through a market mechanism that will allow reforestation efforts by landowners and other groups to be counted as “carbon offsets.”
Such projects could generate cash through “carbon credits” paid by polluters who want to exceed their own emissions caps.
A forest can recover, but that can take decades.
“Most forests will recover the carbon they lose but if the next 50 to 100 years is important we may not have that much time. It’s setting back carbon storage efforts,” said Ryan.
Forest growth in the United States currently sucks up about 12 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. “That’s a big number. To get another 10 percent you would have to convert a third of U.S. agriculture land to forest,” said Ryan.
The outbreak has other consequences. It is creating huge fire hazards as it leaves mountains of combustible wood in its wake. In a worrying trend, it also has spread from lodgepole pine to ponderosa pine.
There are expenses for landowners as well.
On his ranch in northern Colorado, mountain realtor Bill McClelland points to a dying tree and says: “A week ago that tree was green. I’ve lost another one.”
In May, he had to cut 476 pines on his property and then have them ground into wood chips — an expensive operation that is one of the few ways to contain the outbreak. He reckons an infestation will generally shave about 20 percent of the value off a private wood lot or ranch.
Past beetle outbreaks have been stopped by very cold winters but recent winters have not been cold enough.
Another factor scientists attribute to the outbreak is past forest clearance and fires that saw large areas cleared.
Often when this happens, the forest that regrows in its place will have huge patches of trees the same age and this makes them susceptible to a collective attack when they mature at the same time into the older trees that the bugs favor.
The beetles may collectively wreak havoc by nesting and feeding in the trees but they look harmless enough as individuals, not least because they are so tiny.
At Medicine Bow, Ryan points to a few writhing in a glass jar that have been trapped on the trunk of a spruce tree.
“Until we get a big cold spell they are going to go on until they have nothing to eat,” he said.
Nokia has retained the top spot in Greenpeace's latest ranking of 17 consumer electronics companies over their environmental practices, while Philips and Apple made strides up the list.
Philips leaped to 4th place from 11th and Apple moved up to 10th place from 14th -- best among the top 5 PC makers -- in Greenpeace's latest "Guide to Greener Electronics" report. Companies are ranked based on a number of criteria related to chemicals, e-waste and energy, and Greenpeace uses the report to help pressure companies to change.
Samsung moved up to second place from fourth, while Sony Ericcson dropped a spot to third. Sony rounded out the top five.
Greenpeace said it penalized Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Dell for "backtracking" on their commitment to eliminate toxic vinyl plastic (PVC) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) by the end of 2009. The environmental group said only Apple and Acer are sticking by pledges to phase out the substances.
Todd Tod Arbogast, director of sustainable business at Dell, said Dell scores well on other portions of the Greenpeace scorecard but that doing away with PVCs and BVRs is challenging.
"Dell continues to commit to eliminating those materials, however as many in our industyr have also acknowledged, its challening to find viable, scaleable substitutes."
Acer ranked 11th on the overall list, with Dell 13th, Lenovo 14th and HP 16th.
"For decades HP has been a leader in environmental responsibility and has adopted practices in product development, operations and supply chain that are transparent and help to reduce its environmental impact," HP said in an e-mail statement. "The Greenpeace report confirms that the electronics industry as a whole continues to make progress bringing more environmentally friendly products to market."
Greenpeace said many consumer electronics companies have shown improvement in the area of climate change. Samsung and Philips have publicly demonstrated support for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while Dell, Nokia, HP and Philips have committed to "substantial" cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from their operations.
Though a financial crisis and global recession have left many of the world's biggest companies uncharacteristically humbled, that didn't stop NGOs from taking shots at a few of them at the World Economic Forum.
Newmont received two awards -- the Global Award and People's Award -- for its mining project in eastern Ghana. According to the NGOs, Newmont "is ignoring the environmental and social damage" the planned mine will create.
"If the project goes ahead, 10,000 farmers will lose their land and livelihood and cyanide, used to extract the gold, will poison the soil, water and wildlife," they said in a statement.
Bernische Kraftwerke, on the other hand, received the Swiss Award "for pushing for the construction of a coal-fired power plant in Germany... Its plans blatantly contradict its self-promotion as a forward-looking company that promotes renewable energy and energy efficiency."
There was one positive award given out on Wednesday, for "most courageous employee of the year." Two Colombian union leaders, Jairo Quiroz Delgado and Freddy Lozano, shared that award for their fight for workers' rights at Colombia's El Cerrejon coal mine.
Many people hope to come back from a wildlife safari with close-up pictures of lions or elephants – this picture below is my best attempt from a search for the largest land animals in Antarctica.
If you look hard you can see a reddish blob at the tip of the thumb — it’s Antarctica’s most aggressive land predator, an eight-legged mite known as Rhagidia.
Pete Convey, a biologist at the British Antarctic Survey (that’s his thumb), says that such tiny creatures evolved in Antarctica over tens of millions of years — they can freeze their bodies in winter in an extreme form of hibernation.
Penguins, seals and whales are the best known animals in Antarctica, but none live year-round on land, where the biggest creature is a flightless midge whose name is ”Belgica antarctica” and who’s about 0.5 cm long.
Global warming could mean problems for some of these tiny creatures if it keeps going — the Antarctic Peninsula where Pete showed us the creatures has warmed by about 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) over the past 50 years, the fastest rate in the southern hemisphere.
Some other creatures might be able to survive in a warmer climate and threaten mites like Rhagidia.
Pete is a genius at finding the creatures — the second rock he picked up had one of these red mites on it…I picked up about 50 and found none.
Here is Pete on his hunt being filmed by my colleague Stuart McDill of Reuters TV: (for a text story, click here)
And here’s a much better close-up of a monstrous Antarctic mite, related to Rhagidia:
Several exhibitors took up the “green” theme at CES 2009 as the “Pre” party continued. Any chance Dell had to upstage Palm disappeared in a cloud of secrecy with the “Adamo” laptop it briefly presented, but gave no details about.
Fuji said its EnviroMAX alkaline batteries were made of more than 90 percent recycled materials, had no mercury, cadmium and were PVC free.
Singapore-based Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies said their “HydroPack” water-activated and portable power system HydroPak could provide 4 to 5 hours of 50 watt emergency power without pollution or noise.
Design conscious Areaware showed off a retro and playful radio called “Magno”, that it said was made in Indonesia with sustainable harvest timber.
And Greenpeace held a press conference praising gadgets by Lenovo, Sharp, Samsung, Nokia and Toshiba in its 2008 Green Electronics Survey.
Intel rolled out the next generation of its netbooks aimed at the education sector and emerging markets. The third generation Classmate PC netbook is actually a netbook tablet, adding a touch screen and powered by Intel's Atom processor.
Check out this slideshow for a look at some of the shiny new toys in various shades of green and grey featured at CES 2009.
(Photos: Fuji's EnviroMAX batteries, HydroPack system by Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies)
Will the guardians of the Nobel Peace Prize make another green award in 2009 to encourage sluggish talks on new U.N. climate treaty due to be agreed in Copenhagen?
