Mystery of the disappearing bees: Solved!
If it were a novel, people would criticize the plot for being too far-fetched – thriving colonies disappear overnight without leaving a trace, the bodies of the victims are never found. Only in this case, it’s not fiction: It’s what’s happening to fully a third of commercial beehives, over a million colonies every year. Seemingly healthy communities fly off never to return. The queen bee and mother of the hive is abandoned to starve and die.
Thousands of scientific sleuths have been on this case for the last 15 years trying to determine why our honey bees are disappearing in such alarming numbers. “This is the biggest general threat to our food supply,” according to Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s bee and pollination program.
Until recently, the evidence was inconclusive on the cause of the mysterious “colony collapse disorder” (CCD) that threatens the future of beekeeping worldwide. But three new studies point an accusing finger at a culprit that many have suspected all along, a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids.
In the U.S. alone, these pesticides, produced primarily by the German chemical giant Bayer and known as “neonics” for short, coat a massive 142 million acres of corn, wheat, soy and cotton seeds. They are also a common ingredient in home gardening products.
Research published last month in the prestigious journal Science shows that neonics are absorbed by the plants’ vascular system and contaminate the pollen and nectar that bees encounter on their rounds. They are a nerve poison that disorient their insect victims and appear to damage the homing ability of bees, which may help to account for their mysterious failure to make it back to the hive.
Another study published in the American Chemical Society’s Environmental Science and Technology journal implicated neonic-containing dust released into the air at planting time with “lethal effects compatible with colony losses phenomena observed by beekeepers.”
Purdue University entomologists observed bees at infected hives exhibiting tremors, uncoordinated movement and convulsions, all signs of acute insecticide poisoning. And yet another study conducted by scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health actually re-created colony collapse disorder in several honeybee hives simply by administering small doses of a popular neonic, imidacloprid.
Painting Bill Clinton’s “white roofs” into reality
By Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza The opnions expressed are his own.
If you’ve been outside recently, you probably realize that this summer is hot. With the latest heat wave now spreading across the country, it’s worth pointing out that many Americans are unknowingly contributing to the soaring temperatures. How? Millions of rooftops in America are made of black tar; and they absorb and trap an enormous amount of heat during the summer months. It’s also worth pointing out that there’s an easy fix to the black roofs problem that people of all political stripes can get behind: paint the black roofs white.
Painting black tar roofs with a white, solar-reflective coating is a low cost, quick and tangible way to reduce the risk of power grid ‘brown-outs’, save millions of dollars in energy costs, and curb climate change. The statistics are as simple as they are staggering: A roof covered with solar-reflective white paint reflects up to 90% of sunlight as opposed to the 20% reflected by a traditional black roof. On a 90°F day, a black roof can be up to 180°F. That heat has a major impact on interior building temperature, potentially heating your room to between 115 – 125°F. A white roof stays a cool 100°F. Plus the inside of the building stays cooler than the air outdoors, around 80°F in this example, reducing cooling costs.
White roofs also reduce the “urban heat island” effect in which temperatures rise in dense urban areas because of the proliferation of heat-radiating, black tar surfaces. For example, the Urban Heat Island effect causes New York City to be about 5 degrees warmer than surrounding suburbs and accounts for 5 to 10 percent of summer electricity use.
In New York City alone, 12% of all surfaces are rooftops. It’s estimated that implementing a white roof program in 11 metropolitan cities could save the United States 7 gigawatts in energy usage. That’s the equivalent of turning off 14 power plants, and a cost savings of $750 million per year.
Recently, former President Bill Clinton wrote in Newsweek, “Every black roof in New York should be white; every roof in Chicago should be white; every roof in Little Rock should be white. Every flat tar-surface roof anywhere! In most of these places you could recover the cost of the paint and the labor in a week.” The former president regularly touts the white roofs as one of those win-win scenarios that could also help create jobs and stimulate the economy.
The folks at White Roof Project agree. Last year, a progressive group of young people got together to found the project and get it going at the grassroots level. When 150 volunteers showed up to coat the historic Bowery Mission in New York City (our first project) it was a watershed moment. Volunteers saw that all it takes is a paint roller, some solar-reflective white coating and a little hard work to start curbing climate change. Since then we’ve been educating and activating our neighbors around the white roof movement that Bill Clinton has called on someone to build.
Well, there are some intelligent responses and some not so intelligent responses. But the most important thing to remember is that these hypotheses can all be very easily tested. (except for this malthusian stuff and the climate control on the trains. stay on topic. we’re talking about whether or not to paint a roof white to save on energy costs.) I am going to have mine painted white next week, so I’ll let you know if it helps.
Helping Haiti: Stop the handouts
By Danielle Grace Warren The opinions expressed are her own.
The people of Haiti have a name for the earthquake that rocked their country: Goudougoudou, an onomatopoetic creole nickname invented for the earthquake meant to emulate the sound of the earth rumbling, the buildings falling. There are numbers for it, too: 230,000 deaths, 59 aftershocks and 1.5 million people who remain displaced nearly a year later.
While over a billion dollars in US aid was promised was for rebuilding Haiti is tied up in the umbilicus of Washington, Port au Prince residents are settling between piles of debris — 98% of which still has not been removed. Haitians pick through the rubble for building scraps to reinforce torn tarpaulin.
Many who were displaced by the disaster and came to the Haitian capital for aid have tried to re-settle in the small towns and villages of their birth. But they have been forced to return to the capital yet again since it is still where most of the food and aid in the country can be found.
Before the earthquake happened there were already 3.5 million people living in Port au Prince — nearly 50% of the total country population. This number has doubled in recent years as people have flooded in from severely deforested and degraded agrarian areas in the hope of finding a job. Yet the vast majority of Port au Prince residents are unemployed or underemployed. Eighty percent of city dwellers live below the poverty line in slum and squatter settlements with unstable housing and poor sanitation.
If living in poverty in Port au Prince is the best thing going for Haitians because it means hope for the possibility of work then the international community’s focus on the area is sure to keep the majority of the people there in a perpetual state of waiting.
As are, of course, the Haitian mico-lending programs of Fonkoze, Finca and ACME. To whom I would encourage a significant amount of aid funds to be channeled.
Bottom-up biodiversity
By Karol Boudreaux The opinions expressed are her own.
At the recent UN biodiversity conference in Japan, participants were tasked with finding a new approach to preserve threatened ecosystems.
In the end, government and UN officials, NGO representatives and others reached an agreement that some are calling historic. The executive director of the UN’s Environment Programme, Achim Steiner, said: “This is a day to celebrate in terms of a new and innovative response to the alarming loss of biodiversity and ecosystems.” But how different is it?
The new “Aichi Target” (named after the prefecture in Japan where the meetings took place) creates a 10-year strategic plan to meet 20 goals for stemming species loss. It is set to take effect in 2020 but will need to be ratified by nearly 200 signatory nations, then implemented at the national and local levels by government officials, and then funded in order to work. This is yet another highly complex and inefficient process to address a very important problem. A more effective model would be to keep things simple.
Rather than trusting government officials to halt species loss, the goal should be to empower the citizens of these countries where such species are declining. There are programs that have been successful in protecting biodiversity while also aiding economic development. For instance, delegates should be pursuing the community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) model — a traditional approach to managing resources that exists across the globe. But, unfortunately, such approaches were not the focus of discussion at the conference.
CBNRM is a bottom-up approach that gives local communities, who are the ones to bear the costs of preserving and conserving resources, legal rights to manage those resources and benefit from their use. In economic terms, CBNRM gives local people incentives to preserve rather than poach or overuse the forests, wildlife or fisheries they control. Countries across Africa have implemented CBNRM programs but one in particular, has been a dramatic success.
Having been directly involved since 1985 with setting up community-based NRM systems in three developing countries, I can only heartily agree with Karol’s article ….. local power politics and corruption are the greatest obstacle to successfully implementing such systems, but the results ALWAYS speak for themselves …. even in so-called developed countries!
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.
Why the coast is key to the survival of New Orleans
The following is a guest post by Mark Davis, a senior research fellow and director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy at Tulane Law School. The opinions expressed are his own.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill the importance of the ecosystems surrounding New Orleans, and their vulnerability to mankind’s manipulations and mistakes, has never been clearer. Equally clear is the fact that for New Orleans to transform itself and create a better future, the metropolitan area must enter into a new, wiser relationship with the land and water surrounding it.
The fate and fortune of New Orleans have always been, and will always be, tied to the coast. In the past, New Orleans has had a troubled relationship with its watery environs. The proximity to the Mississippi River and the Gulf made the city’s founding and its rise to prominence possible. But the risk of flooding from the river, torrential rains, and the Gulf made it a hard bargain with nature from the beginning.
The vulnerability of New Orleans to storms and rising seas has been growing for more than 100 years as the buffering coast began to erode. Because the causes of that coastal collapse are mostly traceable to economic activity such as oil and gas canals, dredging navigation canals, draining and filling wetlands for development, it was easy — indeed, it was policy — to discount the growing risks and to blindly hope somehow things wouldn’t get bad and, if they did, someone else would fix them.
Water also shaped the distinctive culture of the region. The port of New Orleans made the city one of the great points of entry for immigrants, adding a cosmopolitan flavor to the city known in only a handful of other American places. In stark contrast to the metropolis of New Orleans, the meandering bayous, bays, lakes, swamps, and marshes of the surrounding delta gave isolating refuge to Native Americans, expatriate Acadians (today’s Cajuns), runaway slaves, Vietnamese, and others, forging a network of landscape-oriented cultures that remains, at least for now.
Today, New Orleans’ recovery and prosperity are tied to reestablishing sustainability to its surrounding landscape.
from The Great Debate UK:
Why Pakistan monsoons support evidence of global warming
-Lord Julian Hunt is visiting Professor at Delft University, and former Director-General of the UK Met Office. The opinions expressed are his own.-
The unusually large rainfall from this year’s monsoon has caused the most catastrophic flooding in Pakistan for 80 years, with the U.N. estimating that around one fifth of the country is underwater. This is thus truly a crisis of the very first order.
Heavy monsoon precipitation has increased in frequency in Pakistan and Western India in recent years. For instance, in July 2005, Mumbai was deluged by almost 950 mm (37 inches) of rain in just one day, and more than 1,000 people were killed in floods in the state of Maharashtra. Last year, deadly flash floods hit Northwestern Pakistan, and Karachi was also flooded.
It is my clear view that this trend is being fueled both by global warming (which also means extremes of rainfall are also a growing world-wide trend), and indeed potentially by any intensification of the El-Nino/La-Nino cycle.
To understand the reasons why global warming is playing a role here, one needs to look at the main climatic trends in South Asia. In addition to more extreme rainfall events, there is also a decreasing thickness of ice over the Tibetan plateau and changing patterns of precipitation, with less snow at higher levels, plus more rapid run off from mountains.
How does climate change help explain this?
from The Great Debate UK:
Heather Rogers on fixing “Green Gone Wrong”
How can human production be transformed and harnessed to save the planet? Can the market economy really help solve the environmental crisis?
Author Heather Rogers argues in a new book that current efforts to green the planet need to be reconsidered.
The growth-based economy can't help but add to the problems the planet faces, Rogers writes in "Green Gone Wrong" published by Verso.
"I think we can have an economy that supports environmental health, but we have to differentiate between growth and development."
"It's not about feeling guilty, it's not about sacrifice and suffering, it's about understanding how we can have a healthy economy, good standards of living and wellbeing -- within that is protecting the environment."
Rogers, who will speak the Institute of Contemporary Arts on Wednesday, set out her argument for Reuters after a talk in London at the New Economics Foundation.
Smart grid skepticism derails Baltimore plan
Maryland Public Service Commission highlighted the political resistance smart-metering advocates must overcome when it shot down proposals for compulsory smart metering submitted by Baltimore Gas and Electric Company (BGE).
Smart grids are essential for the Obama administration’s and power industry’s plan to meet rising electricity demand while integrating more renewable generation into the grid.
Creating flexibility on the demand side to match increased intermittency in supply is the only way to maintain reliability without having to build enormous amounts of expensive back-up gas-fired generating capacity and disfigure the landscape by installing thousands of miles of transmission lines.
BGE’s initiative has already been approved by the U.S. Department of Energy to receive $200 million of federal funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the centrepiece of the Obama administration’s stimulus package. It is one of the largest grants for electricity infrastructure made under the act. Of the total, $136 million would be spent on rolling out “advanced metering infrastructure” (AMI). SEMI-SMART GRID But BGE still needs approval from the state public service commission (PSC) for key elements of the system. The company’s proposals, as submitted to the commission, consist of three major components:
(1) Universal deployment of smart meters throughout BGE’s service territory, replacing or upgrading all existing customer electric and gas meters.
(2) Installing a related two-way communication network between the power utility, the smart meter and the premise.
(3) Implementing a mandatory “Smart Energy Pricing” (SEP) schedule for all residential electric customers. The SEP schedule would vary electricity rates during the peak months from June to September based on the time of day and time of week.
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from The Great Debate UK:
How much damage will the BP oil spill cause?
-Kees Willemse is professor of offshore engineering at Delft University. The opinions expressed are his own.-
Last month’s explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig continues to result in the leakage of an estimated 200,000 gallons (910,000 litres) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico each day.
According to U.S. President Barack Obama, “we are dealing with a massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster”.
While the leak is extremely serious, and Obama’s words may ultimately ring true, the leak is (as yet) not one of the top 50 biggest oil spillages from either oil rigs or tankers in historical perspective:
• Some 7-10,000 tonnes of oil are so far estimated to have leaked into the Gulf of Mexico from Deepwater Horizon. • The Exxon Valdez leaked some 36,000 tonnes of crude oil on the shores of Alaska. • The largest ever off-shore leakage of oil occurred in 1979 in the Ixtoc-1 spillage when an estimated 476,000 tonnes of oil polluted the Gulf of Mexico (Bay of Campeche). • The biggest ever on-shore spillage occurred in the aftermath of the 1991 Iraq War when an estimated 1.4 to 1.5 million tonnes was released in Kuwait by Iraqi military forces.
Most at risk from the Deepwater Horizon spill are the coastlines of Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, including the wetlands near New Orleans where millions of migratory birds are currently nesting, and fish spawning.
The oil spill could also be catastrophic for the Gulf Coast’s substantial seafood industry, including oysters and shrimp.
Iam a beekeeper and have been for a short while (about 5 yesrs). Each year I have lost from 50% to 100% of my hives to CCD. Each hive lost is about $100 US to replenish the bees, and like others have said, the high demand of replacement bees is deteriorating the quality of the bees. Most of the Obama admistration’s argicultural appointees are former high level exectives of Monsanto, and they are obviously going to appose labeling or discontinuing GMO crops and protect big business pestisides that have been proven to cause bee deaths. They have even allowed Monsanto to patent heirloom seed varities that have been around for centuries, and Monsanto had nothing to do with their creation. The bees are TELLING US SOMETHING here, we better start listening.