Environment Forum

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.

Which way will the wind (power) blow in 2010?

The United States became the No. 1 wind power market in the world in 2008. But under the credit crisis in 2009, the building of new wind farms slackened and the United States ceded its top global spot to China.

With the demand for renewable energy still growing, the American Wind Energy Association is eyeing 2010 as a critical year. Here are some of their top trends to watch for:

Second to natural gas: Wind power generates only 2 percent of the U.S. electrical supply. But new wind power generation in the United States has been second only to natural gas generation in terms of new capacity built each year since 2005. Watch for the industry to work to keep that spot.

Wind turbines ratchet up the power: General Electric won a $1.4 billion contract in December to supply 338 turbines for a massive new wind farm in Oregon being built by energy producer Caithness Energy LLC. The size of the turbines — 2.5 megawatts — forecasts a shift to larger turbines, driven by economics, the wind group said. “Taller turbines with larger swept areas produce more power at a lower cost per kilowatt-hour.”

Market for small projects grows: The trade group predicts small wind projects for homeowners and small businesses will see record growth, fueled by an expansion of a 30-percent investment tax credit.

Industry seeks advice on where to put projects: Wind farm developers have to win regulatory approval for their projects, which have sparked conflict with conservationists at times. To ease the process of clearing those hurdles and finding sites for projects, the industry is working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plus other federal agencies and nonprofits to get more clarity on wildlife surveys and other required studies. Will more guidelines be enough to speed up the development?

States, regions work on transmission: The industry is looking to states and regions to move toward investing in transmission needed to move electricity from often remote wind farms to the cities that use the power. The trade group is eyeing the Midwest in particular and whether its independent system operator that manages the regional power grid for 15 states and one Canadian province follows Texas and the Southwest region in how it invests in new transmission lines.

from Global News Journal:

“Earth to Ban Ki-moon” or how a deal was sealed in Copenhagen

Sweden complained that the recent Copenhagen climate change summit was a "disaster." British Prime Minister Gordon Brown described it as "at best flawed and at worst chaotic." Sudan's U.N. ambassador, Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem, dubbed the outcome confirmation of a "climate apartheid." For South Africa it was simply "not acceptable."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who for over a year had been urging the 192 members of the United Nations to "seal the deal" in Copenhagen, saw things differently. In a statement issued by his press office, Ban said the two-week meeting had a "successful conclusion with substantive outcomes." Speaking to reporters, the secretary-general expanded on that: "Finally we sealed the deal. And it is a real deal. Bringing world leaders to the table paid off." However, he tempered his praise for the participating delegations by noting that the outcome "may not be everything that everyone hoped for."

In fact, the outcome fell far short of what Ban had been calling for over the last year. He had originally hoped the meeting would produce a legally binding agreement with ambitious targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions and funding to help developing nations cope with global warming. Instead it "noted" an accord struck by the United States, China and other emerging powers that was widely criticized as unambitious and unspecific.

That accord set a target of limiting global warming to a maximum 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times -- seen as a threshold for dangerous changes such as more floods, droughts and rising seas. But it did not say how this would be achieved. It also held out the prospect of $100 billion in annual aid from 2020 for developing nations, but did not say where the money would come from. Decisions on fundamental issues such as emissions cuts were pushed into the future.

The South Korean U.N. chief was not the only person to praise the summit. U.S. President Barack Obama said the outcome was an "important breakthrough", but noted that it was only one step on the road towards the emissions cuts needed. The head of China's delegation, Xie Zhenhua, said the meeting "had a positive result, everyone should be happy." (Gordon Brown was clearly placing the blame for the underwhelming outcome in Copenhagen on China and a few other states when he said: "Never again should we let a global deal to move towards a greener future be held to ransom by only a handful of countries.")

Back in New York, some delegations were shaking their heads over Ban's bullish remarks about Copenhagen. "He is talking from Mars," said the Sudanese envoy, who currently chairs the Group of 77 club of developing nations at the U.N. But Ban is not in outer space, several U.N. officials insisted on condition of anonymity. Ban did not see the summit as a failure, but he, too, felt disappointed and would keep on working to "seal the deal" in 2010.

In fact, the U.N. officials said, Ban's personal intervention had helped prevent the summit from falling apart. "He's acutely aware of how much worse it could have been," one official said. He was making phone calls, organizing bilateral meetings and persuading reluctant delegates to join the consensus. "His final intervention at the 11th hour" helped secure that consensus, the official said.

Arctic expedition reaches the ice

    U.S. and Russian scientists exploring the Arctic ocean finally reached ice on Monday, about 435 miles (700 km) northwest of Barrow, Alaska.

    On a year when the Arctic sea ice has receded in the summer to its third-smallest on record, researchers on the RUSALCA expedition got the opportunity to study the water, sea life and the ocean floor at a location where there is rarely open water.

    The mission’s science chief, Terry Whitledge, said it he did not expect explore such a northerly location without an icebreaker. 

    The team took core samples from the seabed, more than 600 metres (1,968 feet) down from the surface.

    “We think that is our biggest scientific gain,” Whitledge, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said by satellite phone from the bridge of the research vessel Professor Khromov.

    The scientists are on a six-week expedition through the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea, coordinated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Russian Academy of Sciences, to gauge the impact of climate change on the region.

    The weather has been mostly moderate for the time of year, but one recent Russian cold front made work on the ship tough by icing up the deck and freezing up some gear used to lower equipment into the ocean, Whitledge said.

‘Not enough ice to make a margarita’

Scientists aboard the Russian research vessel Professor Khromov spent the weekend collecting samples of water, sealife and ocean-floor mud at a spot in the western Arctic Ocean that in most years would be covered with sea ice.

The ship, carrying researchers for the six-week RUSALCA expedition, was in its most northerly planned sampling stop, or “station,”  a location nearly 350 miles (563 km) northwest of Barrow, Alaska. During the mission’s last cruise in 2004, the most northerly accessible location was 345 miles (555 km) south of the weekend’s station.

Mission coordinator Kevin Wood, of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,  writes from the ship that the water is open on all sides. “There isn’t enough ice here to make a margarita,” Wood said.

The joint U.S.-Russian expedition is carrying out research to gauge the effects of global warming on the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea through the end of the month.

The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported last week that the Arctic’s sea ice thawed to its third smallest on record. This is up slightly from from the last two years, but continues an overall decline that is symptomatic of climate change. The smallest summer ice pack on record was in 2007.

Dredging the sea floor, researchers scooped up small tube-like organisms that resemble plastic cocktail stirs. So far, they have yet to be identified, Wood said.

The Khromov is preparing now to steam another 46 miles (74 km) to where radar images show the ice edge to be.

Tasty find for Russian researchers in Alaska

You have to be creative when you’re a Russian scientist, bad weather is preventing your research ship from picking you up for your expedition and you’ve got time to kill in Nome, Alaska.

Such was the case for a group waiting to begin a joint mission with U.S. researchers in the Bering Sea in late August.

But a side trip into the rolling, lichen-covered hills around Nome, the one-time gold rush town on the Alaskan coast, proved to be more than worth their while for the prize they stumbled upon — mushrooms.

A hillside was spotted with the large, red-topped variety Russians crave in soup or fried with onions and potatoes. Thrilled, the team fanned out to gather armfuls of the fungi.

The scientists are part of the RUSALCA expedition, brought together by the Russian Academy of Sciences and U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They will spend the next month and a half studying the impact of climate change on the water, air and organisms in the body of water between the two countries.

But today is about mushrooms, and there’s no concern whatsoever about anyone mistakenly plucking a poisonous one. “Russians know what these mushrooms look like,” said Elizaveta Ershova, a zooplankton specialist.

The plan is to give them to the chefs on the research ship Professor Khromov, after it finally enters port to load people and gear, to whip up a dinner with the delicacy.

Environmental research in an age of Arctic sovereignty

In an age of angst about security and Arctic sovereignty, it’s no mean feat piecing together an oceanographic expedition involving scientists from the United States, Russia and elsewhere and launching the whole affair from a northern U.S. port.

In the choppy waters of the Bering Sea just off Nome, Alaska, the Russian research ship Professor Khromov is waiting to come in to port, where strict security protocols will be adhered to under the watchful eye of U.S. authorities.

As many as 50 scientists are teaming up for two legs of study in the Bering Strait and northward in August and September, and those without special U.S. Transportation Security Administration clearance cards will be escorted aboard by people designated to do so. No exceptions.

The mission is called RUSALCA, or Russian-American Long Term Census of the Arctic. During the voyage, the multinational team will gather data on water, air and lifeforms in the only place where the Arctic and Pacific oceans meet. It’s a follow up to the initial RUSALCA expedition in 2004 and the data will be gathered and compared to help gauge the impact of climate change in the region where the former Cold War foes previously studied each other’s movements.

But before any of that happens, last-minute preparations are taking place in Nome, the town best known as the finish line for the Iditarod dogsled race. The town’s no-nonsense harbor master, Joy Baker, must be sure that all security issues and logistics are dealt with for the passengers and their thousands of pounds of high-tech gear.

Also, conditions on the Alaskan Coast — the region is being hit with wind, rain, rough water — have to improve for the Khromov’s safe loading.

That’s much less regulated.

from Global News Journal:

Norwegian memo sparks PR crisis for UN’s Ban Ki-moon

Ban Ki-moon isn't having a good year for public relations. Halfway through a five-year term as U.N. secretary-general, he's been hit with a wave of negative assessments by the Financial Times, The Economist, London Times, Foreign Policy and other media organizations. In a March 2009 editorial entitled "Whereabouts Unknown," the Times said Ban was "virtually inaudible" on pressing issues of international security and "ineffectual" on climate change, the one issue that Ban claims he has made the biggest difference on. The Economist gave him a mixed report card, assigning him two out of 10 points for his management skills while praising him on climate change (eight out of 10 points).      This week, Norway's Aftenposten newspaper made an unpleasant situation much worse. It published a confidential memo assessing Ban's 2-1/2 years in office from Oslo's deputy U.N. ambassador, Mona Juul, to the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. Juul's report is scathing -- and it comes from a representative of one of the world's body's top financial contributors. She says the former South Korean foreign minister suffers from a "lack of charisma" and has "constant temper tantrums" in his offices on the 38th floor of the United Nations building in midtown Manhattan.      She describes Ban as a "powerless observer" during the fighting in Sri Lanka earlier this year when thousands of civilians were killed as government forces ended a 25-year civil war against Tamil Tiger rebels, trapping them on a narrow strip of coast in the country's northeast. In Darfur, Somalia, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Congo, she wrote, Ban's "passive and not very committed appeals seem to fall on deaf ears." She says that his recent trip to Myanmar was a failure and that some people in Washington refer to Ban as a "one-term" secretary-general.      Juul's letter could hardly have come at a more inopportune time. Ban is planning to visit Norway in the coming weeks, where he intends to meet with government officials and visit the Arctic circle to see for himself the effects of global warming and the melting polar ice. Now U.N. officials fear reporters will be more interested in what he says about Juul's memo than climate change.

So far Ban has not reacted to the letter. However, a Norwegian diplomat told Reuters that Ban's press office had been instructed to hold off on confirming his visit to Norway shortly after the news of Juul's memo began to spread.      Ban's PR difficulties didn't start this year. In March 2008, his chief of staff Vijay Nambiar sent a memo to U.N. employees explaining how to say his boss's name. "Many world leaders, some of whom are well acquainted with the Secretary-General, still use his first name mistakenly as his surname and address him wrongly as Mr. Ki-moon or Mr. Moon," Nambiar complained.   Then came Ban's own speech to senior U.N. officials in Turin, Italy last year, in which he described how difficult it was to improve the working culture inside the United Nations. The secretary-general seemed to acknowledge that his internal management style had failed. "I tried to lead by example," Ban said. "Nobody followed."      Ban's aides vehemently defend him, saying he's being treated unfairly by the press. One senior U.N. official suggested privately that Ban could very well turn out to be "the greatest secretary-general ever." They complain that people continue to compare him to his predecessor Kofi Annan, who was a very different U.N. chief and relied less on "quiet diplomacy" than Ban. Annan became a hero to many people around the world for standing up to the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush over the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Annan called the March 2003 invasion illegal. U.N. officials also complain bitterly about the indefatigable blogger Matthew Lee, whose website Inner City Press regularly accuses Ban and other U.N. officials of hypocrisy and failing to keep their promises to reform the United Nations and root out corruption. (Some U.N. officials accuse Lee of not always getting his facts right, but his blog has become unofficial required reading for U.N. staffers around the world.)      Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, diplomats in New York say, is among those supporting a campaign against a second term for Ban. Juul's memo said Helen Clark, New Zealand's former prime minister and current head of the U.N. Development Program, "could quickly become a competitor for Ban's second term." But diplomats say they expect the United States, Britain and other major powers to reluctantly back a second term for Ban, if only because there appears to be no viable alternative whom Russia and China would support.      A recent article in the Times of London said the best U.N. chief in the organization's 64-year history was not Swedish Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dag Hammarskjold but the Peruvian diplomat Javier Perez de Cuellar, who held the top U.N. post for 10 years until 1992. Nicknamed "mumbles" because he was so difficult to understand, Perez de Cuellar kept a low profile and, like Ban, preferred backroom diplomacy, not Annan's bully pulpit. Among the Peruvian diplomat's successes were managing the end of the Cold War, leading a long-delayed revival of U.N. peacekeeping and encouraging member states to back a U.S.-led military operation to drive Iraq's invading forces out of Kuwait in 1991.      Will Ban's preference for quiet diplomacy make him as good or better than Perez de Cuellar? That remains to be seen.

U.S. and Mexico to work on border conservation

When the United States and Mexico talk of cooperation over their shared border, that usually means working to stamp out drug trafficking and gun running. But this week the two neighbors put their shoulders behind a gentler effort: safeguarding a unique area of wilderness straddling the Rio Grande River.

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar  and Mexico’s Environment and Natural Resources Minister Juan Elvira on Tuesday announced a plan to enhance conservation in the area around Big Bend, in Texas, and El Carmen in the northern Mexican states of Chihuahua and Coahuila.

The area of adjoining parks and protected areas includes high desert, rugged mountains and plunging canyons that together form one of the borderland’s most haunting natural landscapes, far from troubled cities where drug-related killings are rife.

The area includes the Rio Grande River – known as the Rio Bravo south of the border in Mexico — and 3 million acres of parks and protected areas. It is home to more than 450 species of birds, a number of them unique to the borderlands, including the Mexican duck, the Lucifer hummingbird, the Mexican jay and the Colima warbler.

The joint announcement revives a bilateral conservation effort begun in 1944, when the presidents of the United States and Mexico exchanged letters on the creation of the Big Bend National Park in Texas, which envisaged the conservation of the shared ecosystems on both sides of the border. Mexico later established the Cañon de Santa Elena and Maderas del Carmen protected areas in Chihuahua and Coahuila.

 “Building upon our shared history of ecosystem and species conservation, the plan will develop a model of bi-national cooperation for the conservation and enjoyment of shared ecosystems for current and future generations,” Salazar said in a news release posted on the U.S. Department of the Interior web site. Salazar announced the plan in conjunction with the North American Leaders Summit in  Guadalajara , Mexico, where U.S. President Barack Obama, Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, met on Sunday and Monday to discuss issues including trade, climate change and drug trafficking.

Do green jobs cannibalize other jobs?

President Obama has promised to help create millions of new green jobs, saying that doing so will spur the U.S. economy toward recovery — and has held out Spain as having “surged ahead” of the rest of the world by investing in renewable energy.

But a new study of Spain’s renewable energy initiatives has found that creating green jobs actually destroys jobs in other sectors — and  most of the time doesn’t lead to permanent employment.

The study, which was directed by an economics professor at Juan Carlos University of Madrid, found that every green job created by the Spanish government destroyed an average of 2.2 other jobs, and that only 1 in 10 were permanent.

“Spain’s experience cited by President Obama as a model reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about 9 jobs lost for every 4 created,”  the professor, Gabriel Calzada, wrote in an introduction to the study.

“The study’s results demonstrate how such ‘green jobs’ policy clearly hinders Spain’s way out of the current economic crisis, even while U.S. politicians insist that rushing into such a scheme will ease their own emergence from the turmoil,” Calzada wrote.

Conservative bloggers have seized on the study to show that Obama’s green energy push will cost the U.S. some 6 million jobs — although others have injected a note of skepticism.