3)So last week I commented on an article that dealt with 'algae as a new energy source', and I mentioned that I was just waiting for someone to find a huge downside to this seemingly perfect biofuel. AND HERE IT IS: sea critters eat algae. Oh yeah, algae is food...
Algae needs iron in order to grow, so scientists have been proposing an experiment in which we simply throw a bunch of iron into sea water to see what happens. Hopefully it would lead to an explosion of algae growth, which would then suck up the CO2 in the air and take care of some of our environmental troubles. When scientists did precisely this in Argentina's coastal waters, the first part of the plan seemed to work perfectly-- the algae did indeed bloom. But it was the wrong kind of algae (not big enough, apparently). And then a bunch of shrimps ate it all. Hahaha.
Though this experiment has obviously failed quite miserably, it seems as though some iron-fertilization (of algae) supporters refuse to give up. "These results neither argue for nor against iron fertilization as a carbon-sequestration strategy," said Kenneth Coale, one of these supporters. Are you kidding? Sea critters EAT THIS STUFF. Unless we create huge bathtubs all over the world to grow this algae, we aren't going to be able to keep it from becoming food (unless of course, we manage to kill all the 'predators'... but that wouldn't be very smart).
At least the iron those scientists dumped in the ocean didn't kill anything (yet). But who knows? Perhaps in a few days I will stumble across an article reporting all the sea creatures by the coast of Argentina having died of iron-poisoning.
So one of the ways to grow algae seems a bit faulty. The firm in the article I posted last week actually grew its algae in huge bathtub-like dishes. Does that mean that, in the future, instead of meadows and forests we'll have huge artificial pools of algae everywhere? That's actually a frightening thought. Perhaps we'll be able to use deserts and wastelands for this project. Let's hope we find room for biofuels soon. (At least we know that there are experiments going on).
------------------------------------------------ Huge Man-Made Algae Swarm Devoured--Bad for Climate? Kelly Hearn for National Geographic News March 27, 2009
A giant experiment went awry at sea this month.
Shrimplike animals devoured 159 square miles (300 square kilometers) of artificially stimulated algae meant to fight global warming—casting serious doubt on ocean fertilization as a climate-control tool.
For years, scientists have proposed supercharging algae growth by dumping tons of iron into the ocean.
Iron is a necessary element for algae photosynthesis—the process by which the plants convert sunlight into energy—but it is relatively rare in the ocean.
(Related: "Plan to Dump Iron in Ocean as Climate Fix Attracts Debate".)
Algae suck carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, out of the atmosphere. The algae then generally fall to the seafloor—sequestering the CO2 indefinitely.
About a dozen such "iron fertilization" experiments have already been done—with mixed success.
But experts have warned of unintended consequences, such as unpredictable reactions in the ecosystem.
And that's just what happened during a recent, large-scale iron dump in the South Atlantic, the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany announced this week.
Surprising Blooms
With the greenish, crystalline look of a pulverized windshield, ferrous sulfate is commonly given to iron-deficient humans.
It's also the iron of choice for boosting algae growth.
Working aboard the German research vessel Polarstern, German and Indian scientists in recent weeks mixed ten tons of ferrous sulfate with seawater. The team then pumped the artificially enhanced water back into the Atlantic outside Argentina's coastal waters.
As expected, the experiment created a massive, CO2-eating algae bloom.
But it was the wrong algae.
The blooms were mostly tiny haptophytes, not the larger diatom algae the team had expected.
The smaller algae variety is typically found only in coastal waters, and it's a favorite food of tiny shrimplike crustaceans called copepods.
The copepods wolfed down the algae shortly after the new South Atlantic bloom appeared—and a potential weapon against global warming quickly disappeared.
"The fact that they are rapidly eaten by marine animals is not good for carbon sequestration," said Ulrich Bathmann, head of bioscience at the Alfred Wegener Polar and Oceanography Institute (AWI) in Bremerhaven, Germany, who was involved in the experiment.
Good News? Bad News?
Experts not part of the new experiment are divided on what the results mean.
"The new finding here is that the standard calculations of 'the number of tons of iron in equals the number of tons of carbon out' probably don't actually work," said Gabriel M. Filippelli, an earth sciences professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
"This calls into question the efficacy of iron fertilization as a solution to global warming."
"These results neither argue for nor against iron fertilization as a carbon-sequestration strategy," said Kenneth Coale, director of California-based Moss Landing Marine Laboratories.
Moss Landing scientists created a similar, though smaller, algae bloom in Antarctic waters in 2002.
On the bright side, Coale said, the experiment adds to evidence that iron can stimulate large-scale algae growth. It's not clear that in every instance animals would gobble up the carbon-sucking plants, he says.
Other experiments have also had better success at sequestering carbon, Coale added.
And regardless of its carbon-sequestration success or failure, Coale said, at least the South Atlantic experiment did not damage the local ocean environment—which would have been a more serious black mark on iron fertilization.
The consensus, though, seems to fall somewhere on the fence, said environmental scientist Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia, U.K.
The recent experiment, Watson said via email, "shows that we still haven't learned by any means all there is to know about the effects of iron on marine ecosystems and the carbon balance in the oceans."
Since this blog was made to enhance dialog between course members I'd like to comment on the article above...
I also read about that "failed" experiment. Anyhow, dumping iron to create a farmable amount of algae in open water is something I never heard of. And so I assume that the connection drawn by Mikah is not correct. Dumping iron has the aim of binding CO2, not using the algue bloom for farming.
In my oppinion, industrial production of algue has to be in tubes, gigantic pools or whatever since making open farms in sea water are, how this article shows, not practical, distance might be too far and a closed environment is better for chemical tuning etc. It also won't take long until more productive "gene algue" are going to be talked about...
3. Since the web is full of car companies saying they will bring electric cars on the streets within some years, the question how to store the energy is getting more media attention as well. Car makers biggest hope are lithium ion batteries with a bigger storage capability than other battery types. With an estimated grow for electric vehicles lithium is already said to be scarce within a decade or two. Its extracting is mainly concentrated in South America and the biggest amount of known lithium is located in Bolivia. However, Bolivian's head of state, Morales, won't give ressources away as cheap as other countries did and thereby investors were not able or willing to spend money in Bolivian's lithium extraction. Although other countries maybe able to increase their production an age of fully electric cars without half of earth's lithium seems doubtful. These problems surrounding lithium batteries also shows the strong interconnections between S/B/P. Social factors seem to slow down extraction. Which can only become a problem because of the unequal physical distribution of lithium. I can't see any biological side yet. Maybe that one will turn up with large scale production and possible health concerns. -------- Bolivia pins hopes on lithium, electric vehicles President ready to sink $200 million in mining world's largest reserves Piles of salt lay on the salt flats of Uyuni, Bolivia, where the population has harvested salt for years. Underneath the salt lies the world's largest lithium reserves. Lithium is the key component for electronics batteries and electric car batteries.
Bolivia has about half the world's proven lithium reserves, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and Morales says he's ready to sink some $200 million into mining it. He just needs the right partner. In addition to Bollore, suitors include Japan's Sumitomo Corp. and Mitsubishi Corp. But Morales is insisting on requirements that could turn them all away, leaving the remote Salar de Uyuni flats as they have been for millenia — a vast crystalline dry sea, shimmering quietly in the fierce Andean sun. Nationalizing industry For Bolivians, economic development and job creation are a must — the partner can't be like foreign companies who they say shortchanged the nation's hardscrabble Indians while extracting copper, silver and tin from vegetation-starved highlands. Morales wants lithium batteries manufactured domestically, and even hopes to assemble battery-powered cars. "We don't even manufacture a pin here," Mining Minister Freddy Beltran complained to The Associated Press. "It's a story that must change." But Bolivia lacks the expertise to even begin to compete with Chile and Argentina, which together account for more than half the world's 27,400 metric tons of annual lithium production. China and Australia also are major producers. Since his 2005 election, Morales has secured for Bolivians the bulk of profits from their natural gas — South America's second-largest known deposits after Venezuela's. Now he sees lithium as a way to create an industrial economy. "The state doesn't see ever losing sovereignty over the lithium," Morales told reporters. "Whoever wants to invest in it should be assured that the state must have control of 60 percent of the earnings." 'Scientific committee' A $6 million pilot project managed by Comibol, the state-owned mining company, plans to begin some production next year. To accelerate the process, Bolivia has asked Sumitomo, Mitsubishi and Bollore to join a "scientific committee" to determine how best to mine the flats' estimated 5.4 million tons of lithium. "Right now, most of the lithium that is used (industrially) is drawn from South America because it is the easiest to extract," said Haresh Kamath of the Electric Power Research Institute in California. Bolivia's economy is already dependent on mining and natural gas extraction, heavy industries whose contamination is accepted because the profits and jobs are so sorely needed in South America's poorest country. A battery plant or car factory would increase pollution, but most likely be located in an urban area with at least some infrastructure and available workers. One possibility: El Alto, the slum around the capital that is a huge base of the socialist leader's political support. Extracting the lithium, meanwhile, would plant a substantial human footprint in one of the world's most remote places, a 12,000 foot high desert visited only by flocks of pink flamingos and occasional tourists. The metal, found in salty water typically just a few yards below the crusty surface, would be pumped into evaporation pools and then trucked away. Kamath said scrubbers at modern plants can contain sulfur dioxide and other byproducts of processing the lithium, which is shipped as non-hazardous lithium carbonate for use in heat-resistant glass, ceramics and anti-psychotic drugs, as well as batteries. 'It's not impossible' Marco Octavio Rivera of Bolivia's Environmental Defense League says he can't yet estimate the environmental impact, since no details of Morales' visions have emerged. But he says extracting and processing lithium in the same way that Argentina and Chile do it won't cause as much contamination as Bolivia's other mining industries. Sumitomo supplies Toyota, which now uses nickel-metal hydride batteries in the popular Prius hybrid but plans a future lithium-battery by the end of this year and an all-electric car in 2012. Mitsubishi plans to begin producing electric cars later this year. In the U.S., Chevrolet's Volt is to go on sale next year, powered by lithium-ion batteries supplied by LG Chem Ltd. of South Korea. Mass production of Bollore's electric car, meanwhile, is planned in Turin, Italy, later this year. The car is designed by Pininfarina; Bollore promises 150 miles on a single charge and a top speed of 80 mph. The Bollore Group's financial director, Thierry Marraud, told the AP in Paris after meeting Morales that his company is preparing a detailed plan to develop Bolivia's lithium industry. "We told him, 'For you, it's better to transform the lithium than just to export it straight,'" he said. "If President Morales wants a car plant, we can help him, Why not? It's not impossible." Battery technologies Spokesman Koji Furui said Sumitomo is in preliminary talks with Bolivia, and feels its chances are good because it just purchased a silver mine concession nearby. Mitsubishi described its talks as more serious than preliminary, but offered no details. Neither Japanese company has committed publicly to making the batteries in Bolivia, and industry analysts are skeptical. "Some of the most carefully guarded technologies in the world today are lithium-ion and nickel-metal hydride battery technologies," said Detroit-based metals consultant Jack Lifton. "The Japanese and Koreans do not export these technologies, not even to the United States." Battery-making is capital intensive, highly automated, produces few jobs and requires nearly the same precision as the semiconductor industry. Also, auto manufacturers generally want batteries made near their assembly plants. How soon Bolivia's lithium deposits are developed depends on many factors — the U.S. government's auto industry bailout, whether Chevrolet's Volt sells well at up to $40,000 a car, and whether U.S. gas prices return to $3 a gallon or more in an economic recovery, said Bill Moore, editor of the online electric-vehicle journal EVWorld. Other analysts believe gas prices will need to go even higher if President Barack Obama's goal of 1 million plug-in hybrids vehicles on U.S. roads by 2015 is to be met. Some demand could be spurred by part of the U.S. stimulus package — $2.3 billion to develop U.S. battery technologies. In his speech to Congress Tuesday night, Obama complained that many such batteries are now made in South Korea. 'Won't be any shortage' For now, predictions of a lithium shortage and a spike in prices appear unfounded. Currently, there is a slight oversupply, and plenty of capacity to meet needs during the economic downturn. "Everything I've been hearing from the producers and industry consultants indicates there won't be any shortage for the next 10-15 years," said Brian Jaskula, a U.S. Geological Survey commodity analyst. Chile's top producer, SQM S.A., says it supplies a third of the global market and says it recently expanded capacity to 40,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate a year, enough to power about 5 million vehicles using current technologies. It is relatively easy to move and refine Chile's lithium from Andean salt flats to cargo ships for transport to Asia or the United States. Improving the roads and developing other infrastructure in a remote corner of landlocked Bolivia, however, could take years. Marraud said it would take at least two years to identify the deposits and build a processing plant. Given these difficulties, Bolivians shouldn't ask too much of foreign partners, said Juan Carlos Zuleta, a Bolivia-based metals analyst. "The people could exaggerate their demands and that could, in the end, lead to the business going elsewhere," he said. -------------------- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29445248// and some other links about Bolivian's lithium ressources: http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/02/03/peak-lithium-will-supply-fears-drive-alternative-batteries/ http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1872561-1,00.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/world/americas/03lithium.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&hp
Quick response to Martin's comment (and edit of my original summary):
Wow, I just got that. I had to stare at the screen for a while to understand what I did wrong. So this article is actually about growing algae not as a biofuel, but as a CO2 eater (I subconsciously combined those two into one function: "to improve the environment", which is why I made that mistake).
There's no edit function here, so I'll just leave it as it is.
My opinion doesn't change anyway- whether it was meant to be a CO2 eater or a biofuel, having all the experimental algae eaten by a bunch of shrimps is pretty sad (funny, but sad). Sure, they got a different type of algae than they had expected, but does that mean that the 'bigger' algae they counted on WOULDN'T have been eaten by sea critters? Did they expect marine life to simply leave that stuff alone?
And as I said, it's obvious that algae farming can't be done in the ocean- so will the planet be covered with algae pools in the future?
3. This article pointed out the impact on human and environmental health from power pollution, and discussed the need to invest in finding more efficient technology that will reduce carbon emission without increasing the market price of electricity. The article mentioned a linkage between increasing respiratory and cardiovascular diseases to power pollution as well, and showed that the burden of health budgets that result from carbon emission should be accounted for in future energy policies. This article revealed estimated rise in prices in a range of different energy sources. It is clear that the uncertainties of extra costs of these technologies that are aimed to reduce carbon emission needs to be reexamined in order to find the most efficient technology in terms of cost and fulfilling the goal of reducing carbon emission. While this may result in a huge investment, the risks and consequences that excessive carbon emission can bring shows that this project will be a necessity for the future well-being of human beings and the environment.
Too often it seems that most debates or projects that are linked to the environment bring up the issue of financial gain or cost problem. It will be important, as this project continues, that they find a solution to unfold the uncertainties that exist behind these extra costs and aim to work toward saving our health and our environment in the long-run.
------------------------------------
THE hidden costs of power station emissions to public health and to the environment can no longer be ignored, according to the nation's peak engineers' body.
The impact on human and environmental health from pollution, or what the industry calls "externalities", should be "quantified in monetary terms", as it is in Europe, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering says.
In a report to be released today, ATSE calls on the Federal Government to encourage investment-grade data on costs to be collected and analysed, to "inform policy and optimise the future portfolio of generating technologies".
The burden on the health budget from increased respiratory and cardiovascular disease linked to proximity to power generators should be accounted for in future energy policies, ATSE believes.
It said environmental and social costs are not accounted for in the market price of electricity.
Pricing in these factors would add a notional $52 a megawatt hour to the cost of power from brown coal-fired generators, the report estimated.
For black coal it would be $42 extra, and $19 for natural gas.
In a scenario where carbon could be captured and stored, the external cost for black coal power would be just over $10 more.
Nuclear power's price over and above capital and production costs would be an extra $7.
Solar technologies and wind power would each attract less than an extra $5.
With billion-dollar investments at stake, more work was needed to reduce the uncertainties of these extra costs of prospective technologies for reducing carbon emissions, ATSE said. ------
1. Shim Kyuhee 2. Clean coal, too good to be true 3. When I first read this article I was excited to think that there could be a possibility that coal could be developed as a clean and cheap energy source in the future. I have never heard of ‘clean coal’, but if coal could indeed be burned without emitting CO2 into the atmosphere, it would solve many of our energy problems today. Coal is much cheaper than oil, which means that developing parts of the world are still largely reliant on coal for industry. I believe that recent trends of development in countries such as China and India will foster more industrial activity and result in more pollution due to the use of coal. This article introduced a new technology, albeit still at a development stage, that could possibly transform coal into a sustainable energy source, by ridding it of its poisonous gases when burned. However I was sadly disappointed. Not only is the technology extremely expensive, it has only been able to reduce the amount of CO2 released into the air by 1 percent. Compared to the effort that went into cleaning coal, there was only a small benefit for the environment. The article mentions a few companies that have adopted the process however I doubt the expensive technology will be welcomed by any companies based in the developing parts of the world, and even if it were it would make little difference. I guess ‘clean coal’ was too good to be true. If it had been more successful it would have been a huge breakthrough for the global community. It would have meant that poor developing nations, such as China, would not have to sacrifice their environment to sustain economic growth. It is unfair that nations beginning to develop belatedly must do it at the cost of their environment and the health of their people. That is why even though the prospects for clean coal are low, I hope that more funds go into research in developing alternative energy sources. ----------------------------------------------- 4. Coal Hard Facts: Cleaning It Won't Be Dirt Cheap The Technology to Scrub Out Carbon Dioxide Is Within Reach, but It Costs Too Much Money and Consumes Too Much Energy By JEFFREY BALL Pleasant Prairie, Wis. Big industry calls it the future. Al Gore suggests it's a fantasy. Whatever the truth about "clean coal," consumers will be paying for it one way or another. Coal, more than any other fuel, powers the planet. It is the primary source of electricity in dominant economies from the U.S. to China to Germany. In all those places, coal is cheap and, unlike oil, domestically plentiful. Its use is rising, particularly in developing countries that soon will consume more energy than the industrialized world.
Coal's problem is that it is dirty. When burned, it spews out more carbon dioxide than any other fossil fuel. Globally, burning coal to make electricity is the biggest single source of man-made CO2 -- bigger than gasoline-powered cars and trucks. Governments world-wide are advocating massive cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. It is hard to see how those cuts could materialize without clean coal. Clean coal refers to the idea of harnessing the black rock's energy while safely disposing of the resulting CO2 rather than sending it skyward. In dueling television commercials, the power industry portrays it as a silver bullet nearly ready to be deployed, while environmental groups allied with Mr. Gore imply it's a smokescreen from a fossil-fuel industry under fire. Right now, clean coal seems both possible and improbable. The basic elements of clean coal are already in use in small corners of industry. But whether it is broadly and quickly adopted around the world will depend less on science than on economics. Cleaning coal is very expensive. Home to one of the world's most advanced clean-coal tests, the Pleasant Prairie power plant exposes the hyperbole on both sides of the debate. Fired up three decades ago, the plant has run full-bore ever since, adapting time and again to new environmental rules and still churning out some of the cheapest energy in the nation. It burns some 13,000 tons of coal daily to produce 13% of the electricity consumed by all of Wisconsin. New rooms of machinery have been added to scrub a swirl of pollutants from the plant's exhaust before it is released into the air. Today, half as much space at the plant is devoted to preventing pollution as to producing power. That has slashed the plant's output of chemicals that cause respiratory disease and acid rain. But it has done nothing to trim the plant's emissions of CO2. This coal-fired power plant is cleaner than it once was, but it still isn't "clean." This plant pours out some 8.6 million tons of CO2 annually -- about as much as 1.7 million U.S. cars.
Is clean coal a real solution to Americas energy problems? WSJ's Jeff Ball goes to Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin to examine a clean coal plant. The first step in making coal more climate-friendly is for a power plant to capture most of its CO2. A handful of plants today capture small amounts of the gas for reasons unrelated to climate change. One in Maryland, for example, sells it for making soft drinks and beer, and for freezing food. One byproduct of power generation is steam, and the federal government offers incentives to plants that make more-efficient use of it. Steam is also used to capture CO2. A year ago, the Pleasant Prairie plant entered this first phase with an experiment to capture its CO2. The machinery for extracting the gas here is three stories tall. But at the 425-acre plant, it seems tiny. Its pipes pull a bit of exhaust from the power plant and then remove the CO2 in a process that involves mixing the gas with ammonia. So far, the test is grabbing only about 1% of the greenhouse gas the plant coughs out. The method still consumes too much energy, says Sean Black, a manager at Alstom SA, the French company managing the test. "We're just in the beginning of this process," he says. The second step -- one not yet attempted here at the Wisconsin plant -- is to take the captured CO2 and dispose of it safely, perhaps by burying it. CO2 has been shot underground for decades in places like Texas, where it is injected into aging oil and gas fields to force the remaining fossil fuel up through wells. Some 30 million tons of CO2 are injected into oil and gas wells annually in the U.S., according to federal statistics. That is tiny -- less than 1% of the roughly six billion tons of CO2 the country annually exhales. Howard Herzog, a leading clean-coal specialist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a technological optimist and a political realist. He believes scientists can find ways to slash power plants' CO2 output just like they figured out how to slash those plants' output of pollutants that foul air and streams. But it will take a lot of money: MIT recommended in a recent study that the U.S. nearly quadruple its clean-coal spending, to $1 billion a year. And that is just for research.
Click to enlarge graphic It also will take patience. An anticoal backlash is gathering steam in the U.S., and Mr. Herzog worries it will block all new coal-fired power plants in the country, which could boost electricity prices. A rational compromise, he believes, would be to allow new coal-fired plants to keep their CO2 emissions at the same level as natural-gas-fired plants through the use of cleaning technology. That would amount to an emissions cut of about 50% below the level of a conventional coal-fired plant, while raising the cost of generation by 50%, Mr. Herzog figures. Consumers probably wouldn't see rate boosts that high, he says, because generating costs are only one factor in determining retail electricity rates. Still, clean coal has proven too expensive before. Earlier this decade, the federal government launched a multibillion-dollar research program intended to build a carbon-free, coal-fired power plant. Last year, when the cost of that program nearly doubled to $1.8 billion, the government effectively shut it down. The Pleasant Prairie power plant is a monument to the fickleness of the nation's energy priorities -- and to the stubborness of coal. Designed in the wake of sweeping 1970s federal environmental laws, the power plant was the first built by Wisconsin Energy Corp. to burn coal from Wyoming's Powder River Basin rather than from nearby Illinois or Appalachia. One reason is that Western coal is lower than the Eastern variety in sulfur, which forms a pollutant the laws capped. At the time, Wisconsin Energy intended to build new nuclear plants, too. But Wisconsin effectively banned new nuclear-plant construction in the state. Without an alternative, Wisconsin Energy has run the Pleasant Prairie plant to crank out more power than originally planned. As the federal government has further toughened clean-air standards, the company kept adding pollution-scrubbing equipment to keep the plant alive. The crackdown on CO2 is just the latest -- and biggest -- regulatory shift prodding more changes to the plant. On a recent frigid morning, in a scene that brought to mind an old whiskey still, one of the shiny pipes for capturing CO2 was shaking and clanging, and steam was pouring out the top. Alstom's Mr. Black said the contraption looked so jury-rigged because engineers had to modify it to resolve problems that cropped up. That burst of steam could be the industry's last gasp. It also could be a fresh breath from an industry with plenty of life left. --------------------------------------------------------- 5. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123751110892790871.html
2. Earth Hour: Turning out the lights plays into the hands of our critics
3. This Saturday was Earth Hour Day and I saw many advertisements online. So I found this article today about Earth Hour. Earth Hour is when people around the world turn off their lights and other electrical appliances for one hour to raise awareness of taking action on climate change. This might mean a small thing that can be ignored to many people, however, this article talks about the symbolic meaning of Earth Hour. It says that many organizations and companies are participating in this event and it may not have a direct impact on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but it gives a message to our world leaders that people are concerned with climate change. One critic questions whether darkness is a right symbol, but I think that this event has become significant since it has become hope for people who are participating and it raises awareness for others who are unconcerned of our environmental issues.
-----------------------------
At 8:30pm today the luminous face of Big Ben will go dark. Next door, the houses of parliament will switch off all its lights too, along with thousands of landmarks, buildings and people around the world in a global gesture of solidarity in the fight against climate change. From the international dateline, Earth Hour starts in New Zealand's Chatham Islands and will conclude in Honolulu. Passed like a baton around the planet, cities including Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore, Moscow, Istanbul, Dubai, Cape Town and Las Vegas will be darkened for an hour at 8:30pm local time to mark Earth Hour, the single biggest mass event to mark public concern over global warming. More than 3,200 cities across 88 countries have signed up and the event has received support from international leaders including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. Environment campaign group WWF, which is co-ordinating the global event, expects hundreds of millions of people around the world to take part in turning out their lights for an hour, in the hope of sending a direct message to world leaders that their voters want urgent action to save the planet from rising temperatures. "Earth Hour is shaping up to be an impressive symbolic response to our planet in peril," said the climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, who is supporting the event. "Popular pressure like this will leave little doubt around the negotiating table in Copenhagen this December that a meaningful global carbon deal must be delivered. Making us all more aware of the energy we use is a critical first step in making lasting changes to our lifestyles." The Eiffel Tower, Shanghai's Hong Kong New World Tower, the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Sydney's Opera House and Table Mountain in Cape Town will all take part. In London, Nelson's Column, City Hall, the National Gallery and the National Theatre will switch off their lights. The Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, the Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol, the Belfast Wheel and Scotland's Forth rail bridge and Edinburgh castle will all go dark. Over 1,200 schools in the UK have also been active in the run-up to Earth Hour, with pupils receiving lessons on the challenges faced by climate change. WWF's head of campaigns, Colin Butfield, said the idea was that children would then go home and pester their parents to turn out lights . Members of the Women's Institute have also been encouraged to support the event at home. Almost 400 British businesses are also taking part. Furniture retailer Ikea will turn off the lights outside its stores while Coca-Cola will switch off its advertising screen at Piccadilly Circus, only the third time it has been extinguished since the second world war. "We hope it communicates the importance of everybody being involved in this and hopefully this will increase awareness that everybody needs to do their part, that includes governments, NGOs and individuals," said Coca-Cola's Euan Wilmshurst. Green electricity company, Good Energy, has written to its 25,000 customers, encouraging them to turn out their lamps and light candles for an hour instead. Founder and chief executive Juliet Davenport encouraged people at home to play candle-lit board games and said that mass events such as Earth Hour allowed people to see how small actions, of the kind needed to tackle climate change at an individual level, could add up to something influential on a global scale. The idea for Earth Hour grew out of a similar campaign held by WWF's Australian campaigners in 2007. For the global version, the campaign group chose 2009 because of the negotiations in Copenhagen to set climate targets after the Kyoto protocol runs out in 2012. Campaigners have not calculated the amount of energy that might be saved by the combined action around the world, arguing that Earth Hour is more symbolic than a direct attempt to save carbon emissions. "When global leaders meet at the UN conference in Copenhagen later this year, they are going to determine how the world will work together to tackle climate change in future. We need them to know that the eyes of the world will be upon them," said Butfield. "Earth Hour is a simple way for people all over the world to make sure our leaders really understand that people are looking to them to do what is right and that the time for action is now." Not everyone is so positive, however. Organisers had hoped for the participation from the Forbidden City in Beijing but Chinese government officials have told their citizens to hold back because Earth hour clashes with Serf Liberation Day in Tibet, a new holiday to commemorate the ousting of the Dalai Lama from the province. George Marshall, of the charity Climate Outreach and Information Network, questioned whether darkness was the right symbol. "This action offers darkness, regression and the threat of less. Light has always been a symbol of progress, civilisation, intelligence, truth. Turning off lights has always been a symbol of collapse the Dark Ages." But Andy Ridley, of WWF in Australia, said: "For the people who take part, we hope there is a sense of empowerment, the knowledge that however small or big the actions you can effect in your life, whether you are a CEO or doing your GCSEs you can make a difference when these actions are brought together."
3. One or two weeks ago, in class professor said that all the plastics human has ever made is still where we live. This fact was really a kind of shock to me. Actually we think little bit more, we can guess this. Sure, however, nobody do that! So it was a big surprise, although I could understand. After I heard that I tried more to reduce the amount of plastic I use. (actually not that hard^^;;;) There are few thing one person can do to reduce plastics. So this problem must be solved at government level or organization level. (But I don't mean that each person shouldn't do anyhing at all.) Nowadays, I think, the korean government is doing quite well. Even 4 or 5years ago,I guess, we never had to pay for the plastic bags. But now in big supermarkets, they give 50won, when we bring our own bags. But still the plastic bad is too cheap that people don't feel it is a burden. In my oponion, the plastic bags should be more expensive to be more close to plastic bags free. Not only that, but also government or organization should try to change the common thought. ------------------------------------
A nationwide campaign to push for a levy on plastic supermarket bags was launched today.
The 'Get Real' campaign wants Progressive Enterprises and Foodstuffs, owners of New Zealand's largest supermarkets, to charge for plastic bags at their supermarket counters.
Both companies signed the Packaging Accord in 2004 which set a goal of reducing the number of bags used by a fifth (144 million bags) this year.
Sustainable Wanaka general manager Sophie Ward, whose organisation was involved in the campaign, said supermarkets needed to make a real commitment to reducing the number of plastic bags given away each year.
Nearly a billion plastic bags were buried in landfills each year, with others polluting outdoor spaces and being ingested by wildlife, she said.
Progressive Enterprises public affairs manager Bill Moore told NZPA the company had agreed to trim its use of plastic bags by 20 percent by June this year, and was doing its ''utmost to get everyone behind us to reduce plastic bag usage even further''.
''We all want to reduce the number of plastic bags in the environment, and we continue to make good progress towards this goal.''
He said Progressive Enterprises, which owns Foodtown, Woolworths and Countdown, trains staff to pack at least seven items into bags where possible, and to ask customers if they want a bag if they are purchasing less than four items.
''Our customers want to reduce their use of bags, but they also like to be able to use them as and when needed,'' he said.
"If the Government were to mandate a charge on plastic bags, we would of course support this move, but we believe voluntary efforts make the most sense.''
Campaigner Angus Ho said experience here and overseas showed having to pay for plastic bags changed people's behaviour.
Plastic bags never completely broke down, Mr Ho said.
"They disintegrate into smaller and smaller pieces, taking over 500 years and ending up as plastic dust in the air and soil.''
In a letter to Mr Ho, Environment Minister Nick Smith said the ministry was investigating the effectiveness and feasibility of a levy on plastic bags.
The 'Get Real' organisers praised The Warehouse, which would introduce a 10 cent levy on plastic bags from April 20.
A survey of 600 Warehouse customers showed 78 percent supported the change, with 85 percent of those affected by trials at stores saying they would choose not to use a plastic bag once the charge applied.
The cash collected from the levy would go to community groups and the bags could be returned to Warehouse stores for recycling.
The Warehouse, along with Mitre 10 and Caltex, also signed the Packaging Accord.
By January this year, 100 million bags had been taken out of circulation as the campaign gained traction.
Bunnings and Borders had their own bag reduction schemes, with Borders reducing usage by 80 percent in one year with a 10 cent levy.
The New Zealand Retailers Association opposed a ban or mandatory tax on plastic bags and rejected calls for New Zealand to follow the South Australian government, which introduced a Plastic Shopping Bags (Waste Avoidance) Act on January 1.
The association previously said the industry was on track to reach targets voluntarily, so a ban or tax was not required.
Ireland and Taiwan both reduced plastic bag usage by more than 90 percent through a small levy, 'Get Real' organisers said.
India introduced a fine of 100,000 rupee ($3800) and possible jail time for selling or even carrying a non-biodegradable plastic bag.
An open letter to the supermarkets can be signed at www.getreal.org.nz.
1. Hye Sung, Yoon 2. U.S. aid nets kill wildlife off Africa - Effort to help poor Kenyan fishermen destroying ecosystem they depend on The Associated Press updated 4:06 a.m. ET March 26, 2009 3. So far, I've read some articles to do my assignments. And I found out that some environmental problems are sometimes because of the needs to help people. In this article, the plan of U.S is destroying ecosystem in Africa. At first, I wondered why 'U.S aid nets kill wildlife off Africa.' However, as I read this, I got to know what the title means. Obviously, It is nice to help the growing groups of poor fishermen. But It hurts the environment. I feel that political policies are connected with the environment. So, we should consider lots of possible problems when deciding something. It is too hard to determine in this problem. If we think more about the poor fishermen, we can not care about the environment. I really wonder which choice the U.S government will choose. I hope them to make a decision wisely.
----------------- DIANI, Kenya - Plastic fishing nets — some bought for poor fishermen with American aid money — are tangling up whales and turtles off one of Africa's most popular beaches.
One recent victim was a huge dappled whaleshark that bled to death after its tail was cut off by fishermen unwilling to slash their nets to save it. In another case, divers risked their lives to free a pregnant, thrashing humpback whale entangled in a net last summer.
Both incidents occurred off Diani beach, which is popular with American and European tourists.
The fishermen have traditionally used hooks and hand lines to haul in their catch, which they then sold to hotels full of tourists. But the use of plastic nets has become increasingly common as growing populations have competed to catch shrinking supplies of fish, marine biologist David Obura said.
In 2003, USAID began a four-year project worth $575,000 to improve the lives of coastal communities. It worked on a project with a Kenyan government agency that included providing freezers for the fishermen to store their catch, along with boats and nets.
But the plastic nets are destroying the very ecosystems that the fishermen depend on and the tourists come to see, said Daniel Floren, who runs a local diving school.
Officials, experts and even the fishermen themselves acknowledge the nets are killing wildlife and coral.
"Without the reefs, there will be no diving. If we have nothing to show, I'll have to shut up shop," Floren said.
Project aimed at alleviating poverty The aim of the U.S. project was to help lift local people out of poverty, said Robert Buzzard, a USAID official involved in the initiative. But there were no studies to show how the kind of equipment supplied might affect the marine life.
"There weren't environmental assessments year on year," Buzzard acknowledged, saying USAID was "partly" responsible but also was dependent on local organizations to provide information.
The project did not provide the type of nets or long fishing lines — which catch fish without entangling other marine life — that fishermen requested, said Isaak Mwachala, head of one of the local fishermen's associations.
"When they were going to the shop where these nets are sold, they didn't bring us with them ... but when (the nets) are already here we can't refuse them," he said.
Buzzard said he did not have records of Mwachala's request, but said it was possible it had been made.
When Mwachala and his friends head out to sea, they often throw miles (kilometers) of plastic net onto the reef. The money they earn pays school fees for one man's child, hospital bills for another's. But along with the haul of colorful fish, the nets threaten turtles, whales, whalesharks and dugongs — large marine mammals related to manatees.
The fishermen, who say their old hook-and-line method never caught turtles or whales, practice conservation where they can.
Pregnant, entangled humpback whale freed After Floren offered small payments last year, they brought him more than 70 turtles snarled in fishing nets over a two-month period. It was not possible to say how many of them were trapped in nets funded by USAID. He managed to cut free and release all but a dozen. But the pregnant, entangled humpback whale last September was much harder.
It took Floren and two other divers three tense hours to cut her free, all the while risking panicking the whale and becoming entangled in the mesh themselves if she suddenly fled to the deep sea. A rare dugong and another humpback mother whale were freed a month later in the northern town of Malindi.
The huge dappled whalesharks that migrate down the coast are also at risk. Volker Bassen, founder of the East African Whaleshark Trust, said about half a dozen have become entangled in the type of nets funded by USAID since he founded the trust four years ago.
He said most marine animals are trapped by nets left on the reefs overnight to catch lobsters for the tourists.
"The nets that USAID bought are made of nylon, which doesn't rot. Even if it washes away, it remains in the sea and continues to kill marine life for decades," he explained. "It turns into a ghost net."
Coral killers The nets are still destructive even if just used during the day and hauled in at night. The stones they use to weigh down the nets scrape over the delicate corals in time with the current, snagging the nets along the bottom and leaving scraps of blue nylon entangled in their wake. Onboard the boat bought with USAID funds, the men casually tossed chunks of the coral they'd pulled up over the side of the boat.
The fishermen interviewed by The Associated Press agreed that their livelihoods depended on preserving the seas and were interested in trying long lines if they were provided.
But Buzzard said USAID's involvement with the fishermen's group had been finished for a year and a half, and there were no plans to replace the nets. Buzzard said a colleague had been sent to speak to local conservationists who had complained about the nets.
"Those concerns are valid," he said. But "this project is finished ... Every project we do, we learn from."
Still, providing only one group of fishermen with new equipment would not be enough to save the marine life, said Obura, who specializes in studying coral reefs.
Huge trawlers overfishing deeper waters In addition to the growing groups of poor fishermen crowding onto the reefs, huge European and Asian trawlers much further offshore are overfishing the deeper coastal waters, he said.
"The fishermen have the strong sense that there are other, richer fishermen out there raping and pillaging the seas and so why shouldn't they?" he said.
Fisherman Mohammed Khamis said the nets provided with USAID funds have increased the fishermen's average daily earnings from $4.50 to $7 — still less than a tourist pays for a fish fillet at an expensive hotel.
Khamis knew the nets could be destructive, but had three sets of school fees to pay totaling $460 a year and no other options for work in a country riddled with corruption and poverty. He says he could not afford to sacrifice his children's future for a turtle's.
"If someone has a family, they have to look for school fees, sickness, everything," he said. "We don't eat these turtles and we don't want to catch them but the extra fish is paying my children's school for their future." -------
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29890406/
1. Selina Li Qiaowei 2. Lights out in 84 countries for Earth Hour 2009
3. This news is the headline for many main media corporations around the world on 29th of March. It is very touch to watch on YouTube when you see the world’s famous buildings to turn off their unnecessary lights at the same time to show their willingness to care for the Earth including the UN. I believe this is a very good activity hold around the global with more and more countries to join since 2007. It is easy, simple and effective for everyone to participate. On YouTube, their promotion video starts with one slogan, it is ‘I am just one person, what can I do to the Earth.’ For a lot of times, we do not take action to many green actions because we think that even we did it, our effect is not going to give impact to anything as our power is too small to change the world. The message of Earth Hour is very positive and clear, to solve global environmental problem is within our ability, and the choice to make the Earth a better place to live is within our hand. We are people who hold the ability to control what we need to do to change environmental problem such as global warming. There are also some people go against the project, as they said that global warming is based on faulty science. I want to tell these people that no matter what are main causes of global warming, it is a fact that global warming is a result of human action. There is no need to fight over the benefit or negative effect of science at this moment. And it is also not a right time for people to go against science when all people around the world is trying to put in their small effort to reduce the use of energy and be aware of global warming. We shall all participate to show our concern over the Earth problems, one hour per year is not long, but look at how much amount of CO2 we can hold back during Earth Hour, it is a great achievement of our ordinary citizen that according to figure showed, within this one our, we could reduce about 840,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. After this event, it must take us to consider on this figure, because all lights that we switch off during Earth Hour is unnecessary light. So why not we let this campaign continues and spread out, I am not so sure why all these unnecessary lights is keep to shine on every night. I also do not understand the purpose for cities to turn on so many unnecessary lights at the night? Is this a way for cities to show off their prosperity with no consideration about how much they may pay back in the future due to their unawareness. This project must continue as people are very forgetful, only when you keep remain them very year, then they could build up this idea of save energy as much as they can. You as one person could help to solve the problem of global warming; it is no doubt to this mission that everyone has to take on their responsibility as a global citizen. ----------------------------------------------- 5. Lights out in 84 countries for Earth Hour 2009 Lights are going down from the Great Pyramids to the Acropolis, the Eiffel Tower to Sears Tower, as more than 2,800 municipalities in 84 countries plan Saturday to mark the second worldwide Earth Hour. McDonald's will even soften the yellow glow from some Golden Arches as part of the time zone-by-time zone plan to dim nonessential lights between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. to highlight global climate change. "Earth Hour makes a powerful statement that the world is going to solve this problem," said Carter Roberts, chief executive of the World Wildlife Fund, which sponsors Earth Hour. "Everyone is realizing the enormous effect that climate change will have on them." Seven times more municipalities have signed on since last year's Earth Hour, which drew participation from 400 cities after Sydney, Australia held a solo event in 2007. Interest has spiked ahead of planned negotiations on a new global warming treaty in Copenhagen, Denmark this December. The last global accord, the Kyoto Protocol, is set to expire in 2012. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon encouraged the convention to reach a fair and effective climate change agreement and promoted Earth Hour participation in a video posted this month on the event's YouTube channel. "Earth Hour is a way for the citizens of the world to send a clear message," Ban said. "They want action on climate change." Other videos have been posted by celebrities such as rocker Pete Wentz and actor Kevin Bacon and WWF has offered Earth Hour iPhone applications. Search engine Yahoo! says there's been a 344 percent increase in "Earth Hour" searches this February and March compared with last year. New studies increasingly highlight the ongoing effects of climate change, said Richard Moss, a member of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and WWF's climate change vice president. "We have satellites and we have ships out at sea and we have monitoring stations set up on buoys in the ocean," Moss said. "We monitor all kinds of things people wouldn't even think about. The scientific research is showing in all kinds of ways that the climate crisis is worsening." But not everyone agrees and at least one counter-protest is planned for Saturday. Suburban Philadelphia ice cream shop owner Bob Gerenser, 56, believes global warming is based on faulty science and calls Earth Hour "nonsense." The resident of New Hope, Pa., and owner of Gerenser's Exotic Ice Cream planned to illuminate his store with extra theatrical lighting. "I'm going to get everyone I know in my neighborhood to turn on every light they possibly can to waste as much electricity as possible to underline the absurdity of this action ... by being absurd," he said. Earth Hour 2009 has garnered support from global corporations, nonprofit groups, schools, scientists and celebrities — including Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett and the Archbishop Desmond Tutu. McDonald's Corp. plans to dim its arches at 500 locations around the Midwest. The Marriott, Ritz-Carlton and Fairmont hotel chains and Coca-Cola Co. also plan to participate. Nearly 200 U.S. cities, towns and villages have signed on, from New York City — which will darken the iconic Empire State Building and Broadway marquees — to Igiugig, population 53 on Iliamna Lake in southwestern Alaska. Among the efforts in Chicago, 50,000 light bulbs at tourist hotspot Navy Pier will dim and 24 spotlights that shine on Sears Tower's twin spires will go dark. "We're the most visible building in the city," said Angela Burnett, a Sears Tower property manager. "Turning off the lights for one hour on a Saturday night shows our commitment to sustainability." The Commonwealth Edison utility said electricity demand fell by 5 percent in Chicago and northern Illinois during last year's Earth Hour, reducing about 840,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. "It goes way beyond turning off the lights," said Roberts of the WWF. "The message we want people to take away is that it is within our power to solve this problem. People can take positive constructive actions." ___ On the Net: Earth Hour: http://www.earthhour.org U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's Earth Hour video: http://sn.im/enqwn
3. I'm not sure whether my assignment will be checked safely, cuz it's already over midnight but better trying than giving up...
Anyway! the article I want to introduce today is of the world-famous journalist's opinion. Thomas L. Friedman is one of my favorite writers and journalists because he always startles the world with his insightful prediction and elucidating humor and allegory he uses in his writing. In this article, he also makes a funny metaphor saying Mother Nature's Dow.
Yes, even though we human cannot see the conspicuous figures being updated everyday on a digital slate that shows how much the numbers have risen or fallen like Dow, it is obviously true that the world climate is in ciritical condition and we need a bold, swift action to cope with the potentially disastrous outcome.
I totally agree with Freidman's idea that the governments of each nations should impose carbon taxes and oil taxes with higher fuel-efficiency regulation. If consumers do not feel the necessity to change there lifestyles and automobiles, clean energy industry will barely boost. The demand for clean energy calls on the supply of those products- without economic incentive, nobody would be willing to invest massive amount of money into uncertain journey to green energy products.
So, we must keep in mind what Friendman says as well as other scientists' warnings based on convincing stastistics that we will finally imperil ourselves if we maintain this anti-environment lifestyles.
-----------------------------------------
While I’m convinced that our current financial crisis is the product of both The Market and Mother Nature hitting the wall at once — telling us we need to grow in more sustainable ways — some might ask this: We know when the market hits a wall. It shows up in red numbers on the Dow. But Mother Nature doesn’t have a Dow. What makes you think she’s hitting a wall, too? And even if she is: Who cares? When my 401(k) is collapsing, it’s hard to worry about my sea level rising.
It’s true, Mother Nature doesn’t tell us with one simple number how she’s feeling. But if you follow climate science, what has been striking is how insistently some of the world’s best scientists have been warning — in just the past few months — that climate change is happening faster and will bring bigger changes quicker than we anticipated just a few years ago. Indeed, if Mother Nature had a Dow, you could say that it, too, has been breaking into new (scientific) lows.
Consider just two recent articles:
The Washington Post reported on Feb. 1, that “the pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said. ‘We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,’ Christopher Field, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said.”
The physicist and climate expert Joe Romm recently noted on his blog, climateprogress.org, that in January, M.I.T.’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change quietly updated its Integrated Global System Model that tracks and predicts climate change from 1861 to 2100. Its revised projection indicates that if we stick with business as usual, in terms of carbon-dioxide emissions, average surface temperatures on Earth by 2100 will hit levels far beyond anything humans have ever experienced.
“In our more recent global model simulations,” explained M.I.T., “the ocean heat-uptake is slower than previously estimated, the ocean uptake of carbon is weaker, feedbacks from the land system as temperature rises are stronger, cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases over the century are higher, and offsetting cooling from aerosol emissions is lower. Not one of these effects is very strong on its own, and even adding each separately together would not fully explain the higher temperatures. [But,] rather than interacting additively, these different effects appear to interact multiplicatively, with feedbacks among the contributing factors, leading to the surprisingly large increase in the chance of much higher temperatures.”
What to do? It would be nice to say, “Hey, Mother Nature, we’re having a credit crisis, could you take a couple years off?” But as the environmental consultant Rob Watson likes to say, “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics,” and she is going to do whatever they dictate. You can’t sweet talk Mother Nature or the market. You have to change the economics to affect the Dow and the chemistry, biology and physics to affect Mother Nature.
That’s why we need a climate bailout along with our economic bailout. Hal Harvey is the C.E.O. of a new $1 billion foundation, ClimateWorks, set up to accelerate the policy changes that can avoid climate catastrophe by taking climate policies from where they are working the best to the places where they are needed the most.
“There are five policies that can help us win the energy-climate battle, and each has been proven somewhere,” Harvey explained. First, building codes: California’s energy-efficient building and appliance codes now save Californians $6 billion per year,” he said. Second, better vehicle fuel-efficiency standards: “The European Union’s fuel-efficiency fleet average for new cars now stands at 41 miles per gallon, and is rising steadily,” he added.
Third, we need a national renewable portfolio standard, mandating that power utilities produce 15 or 20 percent of their energy from renewables by 2020. Right now, only about half our states have these. “Whenever utilities are required to purchase electricity from renewable sources,” said Harvey, “clean energy booms.” (See Germany’s solar business or Texas’s wind power.)
The fourth is decoupling — the program begun in California that turns the utility business on its head. Under decoupling, power utilities make money by helping homeowners save energy rather than by encouraging them to consume it. “Finally,” said Harvey, “we need a price on carbon.” Polluting the atmosphere can’t be free.
These are the pillars of a climate bailout. Yes, some have upfront costs. But all of them would pay long-term dividends, because they would foster massive U.S. innovation in new clean technologies that would stimulate the real Dow and much lower emissions that would stimulate the Climate Dow.
2. Mass Transit and a Soaring Car Culture Clash in China
3. One aspect that intrigues me in class is the social, biological, and physical pyramid of viewing issues in the world and in history. This article focuses on the growing city of Guangzhou, a metropolis northwest of Hong Kong, and its necessity for expansion. The proposed mean is to expand the subway system into one of the world's most advanced and largest. The article touches on the s/b/p aspects, and its interrelationships.
China is undergoing a massive influx of a rising middle class, many of which are creating the world's largest demand for automobiles. My favorite line from the article states, "Western mass transit experts applaud China for investing billions in systems that will put less stress on the environment and on cities." This is great news for China, especially because the country's construction works three times as fast as the United States'. Workers work 24 hours a day, and the regulations aren't as excessive as the States. However, what I learned is that it is not as fast as I thought, because of this small passage:
Here, Mr. Chan said, a property surveyor appraises a building and “whatever he says, that’s it.” But, Mr. Chan added, “because China is now more democratic, if they don’t want to move, then you have to take more time.”
It is still awful that the Chinese government can decide on a whim to destroy your building, and provide futile relocation aliments. Yet to the Chinese government, it is a small price to pay for the country's expansion into a global powerhouse.
The 'Big Dig' is a construction project in my hometown of Boston that has recently finished completion on December 31st, 2007. The project was mainly to reroute some heavily congested highways into underground tunnels, and to create a greenspace in its place. Traffic is significantly more efficient now traveling through Boston, but the project cost an astounding 22 billion dollars, making it the most expensive highway project in the US. The project began when I was 4 years old in 1991. It took 16 years to finish this project, which has little to show for itself in the end.
There are so many things wrong with the way the Chinese government works in terms of the treatment of its workers and its residents. But in 20 years, the cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen (the car production capital of China) will be filled with luxury cars and the subway system will be refined to 'keep up with the joneses.' Simply because China is struggling with the creation of a properly planned infrastructure for growth. Yet ironically, the article states that what contradicts all of it is the "other Chinese policies, like allowing real estate developers to build sprawling new suburbs, undermine the benefits of the mass transit boom."
Come on China, what are you doing?!
-----------------------------
4. GUANGZHOU, China — Chan Shao Zhang is in the race of his life.
After four decades of false starts, Mr. Chan, a 67-year-old engineer, is supervising an army of workers operating 60 gargantuan tunneling machines beneath this metropolis in southeastern China. They are building one of the world’s largest and most advanced subway systems.
The question is whether the burrowing machines can outrace China’s growing love affair with the automobile — car sales have soared ninefold since 2000. Or are a hundred Los Angeleses destined to bloom?
And even as Mr. Chan labors to bind Guangzhou together with an underground web of steel, the city is spreading out rapidly above ground, like a drop of ink on a paper towel.
The Guangzhou Metro is just part of a much broader surge in mass transit construction across China.
At least 15 cities are building subway lines and a dozen more are planning them. The pace of construction will only accelerate now that Beijing is pushing local and provincial governments to step up their infrastructure spending to offset lost revenue from slumping exports.
“Nobody is building like they are,” said Shomik Mehndiratta, a World Bank specialist in urban transport. “The center of construction is really China.”
Western mass transit experts applaud China for investing billions in systems that will put less stress on the environment and on cities. But they warn that other Chinese policies, like allowing real estate developers to build sprawling new suburbs, undermine the benefits of the mass transit boom.
“They wind up better than if they did nothing, but it costs them a fortune,” said Lee Schipper, a specialist at Stanford in urban transport.
Mr. Chan defended Guangzhou’s combination of cars and subways, saying that the city built a subway line to a new Toyota assembly plant to help employees and suppliers reach it.
Subways have been most competitive in cities like New York that have high prices for parking, and tolls for bridges and tunnels, discouraging car use. Few Chinese cities have been willing to follow suit, other than Shanghai, which charges a fee of several thousand dollars for each license plate.
The cost and physical limitations of subways have discouraged most cities from building new ones. For instance, only Tokyo has a subway system that carries more people than its buses. The buses are cheaper and able to serve far more streets but move more slowly, pollute more and contribute to traffic congestion.
China has reason to worry. It surpassed the United States in total vehicle sales for the first time in January, although the United States remained slightly ahead in car sales. But in February, China overtook the United States in both, in part because the global downturn has hurt auto sales much more in the United States than in China.
Guangzhou, a city of 12 million people that is also the fastest-growing center of auto manufacturing in China, shows both the promise and obstacles of China’s subway extravaganza.
Mr. Chan helped set up Guangzhou’s subway planning office in 1965, when he was straight out of college. Digging started the next year. But the miners gave up after less than 10 feet when they hit granite.
After that, Mao personally sent China’s finest mining and underground construction experts to oversee the digging. But further excavation efforts failed in 1970, 1971, 1974 and 1979. During and immediately after the Cultural Revolution, Communist dogma, poverty and nationalism forced a reliance on inadequate Chinese equipment.
In 1989, when preparations began for successful excavations, city leaders thought it would be enough to have two subway lines, totaling 20 miles, in an X shape bisecting a tightly packed downtown.
“At that point, it was still mostly bicycles and people walking,” Mr. Chan said. Then, “in the 21st century, the Guangzhou economy really took off.”
Today, Guangzhou has 71 miles of subway lines, most of them opened in the last three years, and yet large areas of the ever-expanding city are still distant from the nearest subway stop.
The city plans to open an additional 83 miles by the end of next year — and an underground tram system and a high-speed commuter rail system. A long-term plan calls for at least 500 miles of subway and light rail routes, and there are discussions on expanding beyond that.
China now produces much of the equipment to build modern subways, but the country’s infrastructure stimulus spending is drawing in imports as well. Most of the tunneling machines here were made by Herrenknecht of Germany. I.B.M. announced on Wednesday that it had signed a consulting contract for computer tracking of Guangzhou Metro’s nearly $3 billion in assets, including convenience stores in subway stations and lighting systems.
The digging in Guangzhou proceeds around the clock, every day. Men like Wang Jiangka, a profusely perspiring engineer in charge of one of the steamy tunnels, endure sweltering temperatures at the tunneling site, where workers put in five 12-hour shifts a week.
“If they don’t want to do overtime, we get other workers,” Mr. Wang said, standing in a red hard hat next to a Herrenknecht tunneling machine that chewed through the rock more than a one-mile walk from the nearest daylight.
Inexpensive labor — less than $400 a month — and the economies of scale created by completing 20 miles of subway lines a year have driven costs down.
Mr. Chan said that it cost about $100 million a mile to build a subway line in Guangzhou, including land acquisition costs for ventilation shafts and station entrances.
By contrast, New York City officials hope to build 1.7 miles of the long-delayed Second Avenue line in eight years at a cost of $3.9 billion, or $2.4 billion a mile. The city expects to use a single tunneling machine.
Owners of land needed for subway construction in Guangzhou have few rights compared with those in New York.
Here, Mr. Chan said, a property surveyor appraises a building and “whatever he says, that’s it.” But, Mr. Chan added, “because China is now more democratic, if they don’t want to move, then you have to take more time.”
And time is of the essence. Guangzhou is growing rapidly outward.
Primly dressed in a white silk shirt and light brown slacks, Kerry Li stood under the 30-foot-tall crystal chandelier in the clubhouse lobby at the Hua Nan Country Garden complex and watched as her 10-year-old son played nearby.
A bus leaves her gated community in the suburbs and heads for the city, across the broad, muddy waters of the Pearl River, every 15 minutes. But a recently completed subway line under the river goes nowhere near the compound. Ms. Li’s husband, a businessman, drives his own car to work every morning, while his wife stays home.
The lure of cars is hard to resist.
Chen Hao Tian, a 43-year-old economic planner for the Guangzhou municipal government who worries about the need for mass transit, used to spend a half-hour riding a free bus for government employees to and from work.
Then he acquired a silver-gray Honda Accord from the local Honda assembly plant and found he could make the trip in 10 minutes — and run errands along the way for his wife and 13-year-old daughter, and listen to his favorite music.
“On my salary, the maintenance costs are a pressure,” he said. “But it gives me great pleasure and the feeling of a higher standard of living.”
And few subway rides do that, even for those who build them.
3. Sony was able to make a battery running on sugar. Its power output is still low with 50mW (2007), which surprisingly is said to be already 70mW in 2009. I think this technology is interesting since it includes the use of enzymes and thereby is using chemical energy differently than combustion and maybe even more efficient. Not to mention the possibility to get the energy for your MP3 from a softdrink.
---- Sony Develops "Bio Battery" Generating Electricity from Sugar - Achieves world's highest power output for passive-type bio batteries -
TOKYO, August 23, 2007- Sony today announced the development of a bio battery1 that generates electricity from carbohydrates (sugar) utilizing enzymes as its catalyst, through the application of power generation principles found in living organisms.
Test cells of this bio battery have achieved power output of 50 mW, currently the world's highest level2 for passive-type3 bio batteries. The output of these test cells is sufficient to power music play back on a memory-type Walkman.
In order to realize the world's highest power output, Sony developed a system of breaking down sugar to generate electricity that involves efficiently immobilizing enzymes and the mediator (electronic conduction materials) while retaining the activity of the enzymes at the anode. Sony also developed a new cathode structure which efficiently supplies oxygen to the electrode while ensuring that the appropriate water content is maintained. Optimizing the electrolyte for these two technologies has enabled these power output levels to be reached.
Sugar is a naturally occurring energy source produced by plants through photosynthesis. It is therefore regenerative, and can be found in most areas of the earth, underlining the potential for sugar-based bio batteries as an ecologically-friendly energy device of the future.
Sony will continue its development of immobilization systems, electrode composition and other technologies in order to further enhance power output and durability, with the aim of realizing practical applications for these bio batteries in the future.
The research results presented here have been accepted as an academic paper at the 234th American Chemical Society National Meeting & Exposition in Boston, MA USA, and were announced at 11 am local time on August 22, 2007.
Masayo Endo, an employee for Japanese electronics giant Sony, displays a new bio battery, including three cubic cells that generate enough electricity to drive a Walkman digital music player, at the International Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Expo in Tokyo on February 25, 2009 while an electric fan (bottom), powered by a bio battery cell whose energy source is a soft drink, winds. Sony has developed a passive type bio battery system of breaking down sugar to generate the world's highest level electric power of 70mW from a cell as an eco-friendly energy. Sony exhibited various eco-friendly power sources, including fuel cell batteries and bio batteries at the exhibition. --------------------- http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/200708/07-074E/index.html
A very down to earth* kind of guy. I'm an environmental sociologist interested in establishing material and organizational sustainability worldwide. I'm always looking for interesting materials/technologies, inspiring ideas, or institutional examples of sustainability to inspire others to recognize their choices now. To be fatalistic about an unsustainable world is a sign of a captive mind, given all our options.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.
1)Mikah(MEE-kah) Lee
ReplyDelete2)Biofuels, ready? NOT!
3)So last week I commented on an article that dealt with 'algae as a new energy source', and I mentioned that I was just waiting for someone to find a huge downside to this seemingly perfect biofuel. AND HERE IT IS: sea critters eat algae. Oh yeah, algae is food...
Algae needs iron in order to grow, so scientists have been proposing an experiment in which we simply throw a bunch of iron into sea water to see what happens. Hopefully it would lead to an explosion of algae growth, which would then suck up the CO2 in the air and take care of some of our environmental troubles. When scientists did precisely this in Argentina's coastal waters, the first part of the plan seemed to work perfectly-- the algae did indeed bloom. But it was the wrong kind of algae (not big enough, apparently). And then a bunch of shrimps ate it all. Hahaha.
Though this experiment has obviously failed quite miserably, it seems as though some iron-fertilization (of algae) supporters refuse to give up. "These results neither argue for nor against iron fertilization as a carbon-sequestration strategy," said Kenneth Coale, one of these supporters. Are you kidding? Sea critters EAT THIS STUFF. Unless we create huge bathtubs all over the world to grow this algae, we aren't going to be able to keep it from becoming food (unless of course, we manage to kill all the 'predators'... but that wouldn't be very smart).
At least the iron those scientists dumped in the ocean didn't kill anything (yet). But who knows? Perhaps in a few days I will stumble across an article reporting all the sea creatures by the coast of Argentina having died of iron-poisoning.
So one of the ways to grow algae seems a bit faulty. The firm in the article I posted last week actually grew its algae in huge bathtub-like dishes. Does that mean that, in the future, instead of meadows and forests we'll have huge artificial pools of algae everywhere? That's actually a frightening thought. Perhaps we'll be able to use deserts and wastelands for this project. Let's hope we find room for biofuels soon. (At least we know that there are experiments going on).
------------------------------------------------
Huge Man-Made Algae Swarm Devoured--Bad for Climate?
Kelly Hearn
for National Geographic News
March 27, 2009
A giant experiment went awry at sea this month.
Shrimplike animals devoured 159 square miles (300 square kilometers) of artificially stimulated algae meant to fight global warming—casting serious doubt on ocean fertilization as a climate-control tool.
For years, scientists have proposed supercharging algae growth by dumping tons of iron into the ocean.
Iron is a necessary element for algae photosynthesis—the process by which the plants convert sunlight into energy—but it is relatively rare in the ocean.
(Related: "Plan to Dump Iron in Ocean as Climate Fix Attracts Debate".)
Algae suck carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, out of the atmosphere. The algae then generally fall to the seafloor—sequestering the CO2 indefinitely.
About a dozen such "iron fertilization" experiments have already been done—with mixed success.
But experts have warned of unintended consequences, such as unpredictable reactions in the ecosystem.
And that's just what happened during a recent, large-scale iron dump in the South Atlantic, the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany announced this week.
Surprising Blooms
With the greenish, crystalline look of a pulverized windshield, ferrous sulfate is commonly given to iron-deficient humans.
It's also the iron of choice for boosting algae growth.
Working aboard the German research vessel Polarstern, German and Indian scientists in recent weeks mixed ten tons of ferrous sulfate with seawater. The team then pumped the artificially enhanced water back into the Atlantic outside Argentina's coastal waters.
As expected, the experiment created a massive, CO2-eating algae bloom.
But it was the wrong algae.
The blooms were mostly tiny haptophytes, not the larger diatom algae the team had expected.
The smaller algae variety is typically found only in coastal waters, and it's a favorite food of tiny shrimplike crustaceans called copepods.
The copepods wolfed down the algae shortly after the new South Atlantic bloom appeared—and a potential weapon against global warming quickly disappeared.
"The fact that they are rapidly eaten by marine animals is not good for carbon sequestration," said Ulrich Bathmann, head of bioscience at the Alfred Wegener Polar and Oceanography Institute (AWI) in Bremerhaven, Germany, who was involved in the experiment.
Good News? Bad News?
Experts not part of the new experiment are divided on what the results mean.
"The new finding here is that the standard calculations of 'the number of tons of iron in equals the number of tons of carbon out' probably don't actually work," said Gabriel M. Filippelli, an earth sciences professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
"This calls into question the efficacy of iron fertilization as a solution to global warming."
(Read about other global warming solutions.)
Iron-fertilization supporters, though, remain hopeful.
"These results neither argue for nor against iron fertilization as a carbon-sequestration strategy," said Kenneth Coale, director of California-based Moss Landing Marine Laboratories.
Moss Landing scientists created a similar, though smaller, algae bloom in Antarctic waters in 2002.
On the bright side, Coale said, the experiment adds to evidence that iron can stimulate large-scale algae growth. It's not clear that in every instance animals would gobble up the carbon-sucking plants, he says.
Other experiments have also had better success at sequestering carbon, Coale added.
And regardless of its carbon-sequestration success or failure, Coale said, at least the South Atlantic experiment did not damage the local ocean environment—which would have been a more serious black mark on iron fertilization.
The consensus, though, seems to fall somewhere on the fence, said environmental scientist Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia, U.K.
The recent experiment, Watson said via email, "shows that we still haven't learned by any means all there is to know about the effects of iron on marine ecosystems and the carbon balance in the oceans."
------------
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/23853563.html
Martin Weiser
ReplyDeleteSince this blog was made to enhance dialog between course members I'd like to comment on the article above...
I also read about that "failed" experiment. Anyhow, dumping iron to create a farmable amount of algae in open water is something I never heard of. And so I assume that the connection drawn by Mikah is not correct. Dumping iron has the aim of binding CO2, not using the algue bloom for farming.
In my oppinion, industrial production of algue has to be in tubes, gigantic pools or whatever since making open farms in sea water are, how this article shows, not practical, distance might be too far and a closed environment is better for chemical tuning etc. It also won't take long until more productive "gene algue" are going to be talked about...
1. Martin Weiser
ReplyDelete2. Lithium Batteries and S/B/P
3. Since the web is full of car companies saying they will bring electric cars on the streets within some years, the question how to store the energy is getting more media attention as well. Car makers biggest hope are lithium ion batteries with a bigger storage capability than other battery types. With an estimated grow for electric vehicles lithium is already said to be scarce within a decade or two. Its extracting is mainly concentrated in South America and the biggest amount of known lithium is located in Bolivia.
However, Bolivian's head of state, Morales, won't give ressources away as cheap as other countries did and thereby investors were not able or willing to spend money in Bolivian's lithium extraction. Although other countries maybe able to increase their production an age of fully electric cars without half of earth's lithium seems doubtful.
These problems surrounding lithium batteries also shows the strong interconnections between S/B/P. Social factors seem to slow down extraction. Which can only become a problem because of the unequal physical distribution of lithium. I can't see any biological side yet. Maybe that one will turn up with large scale production and possible health concerns.
--------
Bolivia pins hopes on lithium, electric vehicles
President ready to sink $200 million in mining world's largest reserves
Piles of salt lay on the salt flats of Uyuni, Bolivia, where the population has harvested salt for years. Underneath the salt lies the world's largest lithium reserves. Lithium is the key component for electronics batteries and electric car batteries.
Bolivia has about half the world's proven lithium reserves, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and Morales says he's ready to sink some $200 million into mining it.
He just needs the right partner.
In addition to Bollore, suitors include Japan's Sumitomo Corp. and Mitsubishi Corp.
But Morales is insisting on requirements that could turn them all away, leaving the remote Salar de Uyuni flats as they have been for millenia — a vast crystalline dry sea, shimmering quietly in the fierce Andean sun.
Nationalizing industry
For Bolivians, economic development and job creation are a must — the partner can't be like foreign companies who they say shortchanged the nation's hardscrabble Indians while extracting copper, silver and tin from vegetation-starved highlands. Morales wants lithium batteries manufactured domestically, and even hopes to assemble battery-powered cars.
"We don't even manufacture a pin here," Mining Minister Freddy Beltran complained to The Associated Press. "It's a story that must change."
But Bolivia lacks the expertise to even begin to compete with Chile and Argentina, which together account for more than half the world's 27,400 metric tons of annual lithium production. China and Australia also are major producers.
Since his 2005 election, Morales has secured for Bolivians the bulk of profits from their natural gas — South America's second-largest known deposits after Venezuela's. Now he sees lithium as a way to create an industrial economy.
"The state doesn't see ever losing sovereignty over the lithium," Morales told reporters. "Whoever wants to invest in it should be assured that the state must have control of 60 percent of the earnings."
'Scientific committee'
A $6 million pilot project managed by Comibol, the state-owned mining company, plans to begin some production next year. To accelerate the process, Bolivia has asked Sumitomo, Mitsubishi and Bollore to join a "scientific committee" to determine how best to mine the flats' estimated 5.4 million tons of lithium.
"Right now, most of the lithium that is used (industrially) is drawn from South America because it is the easiest to extract," said Haresh Kamath of the Electric Power Research Institute in California.
Bolivia's economy is already dependent on mining and natural gas extraction, heavy industries whose contamination is accepted because the profits and jobs are so sorely needed in South America's poorest country. A battery plant or car factory would increase pollution, but most likely be located in an urban area with at least some infrastructure and available workers.
One possibility: El Alto, the slum around the capital that is a huge base of the socialist leader's political support.
Extracting the lithium, meanwhile, would plant a substantial human footprint in one of the world's most remote places, a 12,000 foot high desert visited only by flocks of pink flamingos and occasional tourists. The metal, found in salty water typically just a few yards below the crusty surface, would be pumped into evaporation pools and then trucked away.
Kamath said scrubbers at modern plants can contain sulfur dioxide and other byproducts of processing the lithium, which is shipped as non-hazardous lithium carbonate for use in heat-resistant glass, ceramics and anti-psychotic drugs, as well as batteries.
'It's not impossible'
Marco Octavio Rivera of Bolivia's Environmental Defense League says he can't yet estimate the environmental impact, since no details of Morales' visions have emerged. But he says extracting and processing lithium in the same way that Argentina and Chile do it won't cause as much contamination as Bolivia's other mining industries.
Sumitomo supplies Toyota, which now uses nickel-metal hydride batteries in the popular Prius hybrid but plans a future lithium-battery by the end of this year and an all-electric car in 2012. Mitsubishi plans to begin producing electric cars later this year.
In the U.S., Chevrolet's Volt is to go on sale next year, powered by lithium-ion batteries supplied by LG Chem Ltd. of South Korea.
Mass production of Bollore's electric car, meanwhile, is planned in Turin, Italy, later this year. The car is designed by Pininfarina; Bollore promises 150 miles on a single charge and a top speed of 80 mph.
The Bollore Group's financial director, Thierry Marraud, told the AP in Paris after meeting Morales that his company is preparing a detailed plan to develop Bolivia's lithium industry.
"We told him, 'For you, it's better to transform the lithium than just to export it straight,'" he said. "If President Morales wants a car plant, we can help him, Why not? It's not impossible."
Battery technologies
Spokesman Koji Furui said Sumitomo is in preliminary talks with Bolivia, and feels its chances are good because it just purchased a silver mine concession nearby. Mitsubishi described its talks as more serious than preliminary, but offered no details.
Neither Japanese company has committed publicly to making the batteries in Bolivia, and industry analysts are skeptical.
"Some of the most carefully guarded technologies in the world today are lithium-ion and nickel-metal hydride battery technologies," said Detroit-based metals consultant Jack Lifton. "The Japanese and Koreans do not export these technologies, not even to the United States."
Battery-making is capital intensive, highly automated, produces few jobs and requires nearly the same precision as the semiconductor industry. Also, auto manufacturers generally want batteries made near their assembly plants.
How soon Bolivia's lithium deposits are developed depends on many factors — the U.S. government's auto industry bailout, whether Chevrolet's Volt sells well at up to $40,000 a car, and whether U.S. gas prices return to $3 a gallon or more in an economic recovery, said Bill Moore, editor of the online electric-vehicle journal EVWorld.
Other analysts believe gas prices will need to go even higher if President Barack Obama's goal of 1 million plug-in hybrids vehicles on U.S. roads by 2015 is to be met.
Some demand could be spurred by part of the U.S. stimulus package — $2.3 billion to develop U.S. battery technologies. In his speech to Congress Tuesday night, Obama complained that many such batteries are now made in South Korea.
'Won't be any shortage'
For now, predictions of a lithium shortage and a spike in prices appear unfounded. Currently, there is a slight oversupply, and plenty of capacity to meet needs during the economic downturn.
"Everything I've been hearing from the producers and industry consultants indicates there won't be any shortage for the next 10-15 years," said Brian Jaskula, a U.S. Geological Survey commodity analyst.
Chile's top producer, SQM S.A., says it supplies a third of the global market and says it recently expanded capacity to 40,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate a year, enough to power about 5 million vehicles using current technologies.
It is relatively easy to move and refine Chile's lithium from Andean salt flats to cargo ships for transport to Asia or the United States. Improving the roads and developing other infrastructure in a remote corner of landlocked Bolivia, however, could take years. Marraud said it would take at least two years to identify the deposits and build a processing plant.
Given these difficulties, Bolivians shouldn't ask too much of foreign partners, said Juan Carlos Zuleta, a Bolivia-based metals analyst.
"The people could exaggerate their demands and that could, in the end, lead to the business going elsewhere," he said.
--------------------
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29445248//
and some other links about Bolivian's lithium ressources:
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/02/03/peak-lithium-will-supply-fears-drive-alternative-batteries/
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1872561-1,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/world/americas/03lithium.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&hp
Mikah Lee
ReplyDeleteQuick response to Martin's comment (and edit of my original summary):
Wow, I just got that. I had to stare at the screen for a while to understand what I did wrong.
So this article is actually about growing algae not as a biofuel, but as a CO2 eater (I subconsciously combined those two into one function: "to improve the environment", which is why I made that mistake).
There's no edit function here, so I'll just leave it as it is.
My opinion doesn't change anyway- whether it was meant to be a CO2 eater or a biofuel, having all the experimental algae eaten by a bunch of shrimps is pretty sad (funny, but sad). Sure, they got a different type of algae than they had expected, but does that mean that the 'bigger' algae they counted on WOULDN'T have been eaten by sea critters? Did they expect marine life to simply leave that stuff alone?
And as I said, it's obvious that algae farming can't be done in the ocean- so will the planet be covered with algae pools in the future?
Anyway, sorry for the mistake.
1. Dakyung Lee
ReplyDelete2. Hidden Costs of Power Pollution
3. This article pointed out the impact on human and environmental health from power pollution, and discussed the need to invest in finding more efficient technology that will reduce carbon emission without increasing the market price of electricity. The article mentioned a linkage between increasing respiratory and cardiovascular diseases to power pollution as well, and showed that the burden of health budgets that result from carbon emission should be accounted for in future energy policies.
This article revealed estimated rise in prices in a range of different energy sources. It is clear that the uncertainties of extra costs of these technologies that are aimed to reduce carbon emission needs to be reexamined in order to find the most efficient technology in terms of cost and fulfilling the goal of reducing carbon emission. While this may result in a huge investment, the risks and consequences that excessive carbon emission can bring shows that this project will be a necessity for the future well-being of human beings and the environment.
Too often it seems that most debates or projects that are linked to the environment bring up the issue of financial gain or cost problem. It will be important, as this project continues, that they find a solution to unfold the uncertainties that exist behind these extra costs and aim to work toward saving our health and our environment in the long-run.
------------------------------------
THE hidden costs of power station emissions to public health and to the environment can no longer be ignored, according to the nation's peak engineers' body.
The impact on human and environmental health from pollution, or what the industry calls "externalities", should be "quantified in monetary terms", as it is in Europe, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering says.
In a report to be released today, ATSE calls on the Federal Government to encourage investment-grade data on costs to be collected and analysed, to "inform policy and optimise the future portfolio of generating technologies".
The burden on the health budget from increased respiratory and cardiovascular disease linked to proximity to power generators should be accounted for in future energy policies, ATSE believes.
It said environmental and social costs are not accounted for in the market price of electricity.
Pricing in these factors would add a notional $52 a megawatt hour to the cost of power from brown coal-fired generators, the report estimated.
For black coal it would be $42 extra, and $19 for natural gas.
In a scenario where carbon could be captured and stored, the external cost for black coal power would be just over $10 more.
Nuclear power's price over and above capital and production costs would be an extra $7.
Solar technologies and wind power would each attract less than an extra $5.
With billion-dollar investments at stake, more work was needed to reduce the uncertainties of these extra costs of prospective technologies for reducing carbon emissions, ATSE said.
------
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25247763-664,00.html
1. Shim Kyuhee
ReplyDelete2. Clean coal, too good to be true
3.
When I first read this article I was excited to think that there could be a possibility that coal could be developed as a clean and cheap energy source in the future. I have never heard of ‘clean coal’, but if coal could indeed be burned without emitting CO2 into the atmosphere, it would solve many of our energy problems today. Coal is much cheaper than oil, which means that developing parts of the world are still largely reliant on coal for industry.
I believe that recent trends of development in countries such as China and India will foster more industrial activity and result in more pollution due to the use of coal. This article introduced a new technology, albeit still at a development stage, that could possibly transform coal into a sustainable energy source, by ridding it of its poisonous gases when burned.
However I was sadly disappointed. Not only is the technology extremely expensive, it has only been able to reduce the amount of CO2 released into the air by 1 percent. Compared to the effort that went into cleaning coal, there was only a small benefit for the environment. The article mentions a few companies that have adopted the process however I doubt the expensive technology will be welcomed by any companies based in the developing parts of the world, and even if it were it would make little difference. I guess ‘clean coal’ was too good to be true.
If it had been more successful it would have been a huge breakthrough for the global community. It would have meant that poor developing nations, such as China, would not have to sacrifice their environment to sustain economic growth. It is unfair that nations beginning to develop belatedly must do it at the cost of their environment and the health of their people. That is why even though the prospects for clean coal are low, I hope that more funds go into research in developing alternative energy sources.
-----------------------------------------------
4. Coal Hard Facts: Cleaning It Won't Be Dirt Cheap
The Technology to Scrub Out Carbon Dioxide Is Within Reach, but It Costs Too Much Money and Consumes Too Much Energy
By JEFFREY BALL
Pleasant Prairie, Wis.
Big industry calls it the future. Al Gore suggests it's a fantasy. Whatever the truth about "clean coal," consumers will be paying for it one way or another.
Coal, more than any other fuel, powers the planet. It is the primary source of electricity in dominant economies from the U.S. to China to Germany. In all those places, coal is cheap and, unlike oil, domestically plentiful. Its use is rising, particularly in developing countries that soon will consume more energy than the industrialized world.
Coal's problem is that it is dirty. When burned, it spews out more carbon dioxide than any other fossil fuel. Globally, burning coal to make electricity is the biggest single source of man-made CO2 -- bigger than gasoline-powered cars and trucks. Governments world-wide are advocating massive cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. It is hard to see how those cuts could materialize without clean coal.
Clean coal refers to the idea of harnessing the black rock's energy while safely disposing of the resulting CO2 rather than sending it skyward. In dueling television commercials, the power industry portrays it as a silver bullet nearly ready to be deployed, while environmental groups allied with Mr. Gore imply it's a smokescreen from a fossil-fuel industry under fire.
Right now, clean coal seems both possible and improbable. The basic elements of clean coal are already in use in small corners of industry. But whether it is broadly and quickly adopted around the world will depend less on science than on economics. Cleaning coal is very expensive.
Home to one of the world's most advanced clean-coal tests, the Pleasant Prairie power plant exposes the hyperbole on both sides of the debate. Fired up three decades ago, the plant has run full-bore ever since, adapting time and again to new environmental rules and still churning out some of the cheapest energy in the nation. It burns some 13,000 tons of coal daily to produce 13% of the electricity consumed by all of Wisconsin.
New rooms of machinery have been added to scrub a swirl of pollutants from the plant's exhaust before it is released into the air. Today, half as much space at the plant is devoted to preventing pollution as to producing power. That has slashed the plant's output of chemicals that cause respiratory disease and acid rain. But it has done nothing to trim the plant's emissions of CO2. This coal-fired power plant is cleaner than it once was, but it still isn't "clean." This plant pours out some 8.6 million tons of CO2 annually -- about as much as 1.7 million U.S. cars.
Is clean coal a real solution to Americas energy problems? WSJ's Jeff Ball goes to Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin to examine a clean coal plant.
The first step in making coal more climate-friendly is for a power plant to capture most of its CO2. A handful of plants today capture small amounts of the gas for reasons unrelated to climate change. One in Maryland, for example, sells it for making soft drinks and beer, and for freezing food. One byproduct of power generation is steam, and the federal government offers incentives to plants that make more-efficient use of it. Steam is also used to capture CO2.
A year ago, the Pleasant Prairie plant entered this first phase with an experiment to capture its CO2. The machinery for extracting the gas here is three stories tall. But at the 425-acre plant, it seems tiny. Its pipes pull a bit of exhaust from the power plant and then remove the CO2 in a process that involves mixing the gas with ammonia.
So far, the test is grabbing only about 1% of the greenhouse gas the plant coughs out. The method still consumes too much energy, says Sean Black, a manager at Alstom SA, the French company managing the test. "We're just in the beginning of this process," he says.
The second step -- one not yet attempted here at the Wisconsin plant -- is to take the captured CO2 and dispose of it safely, perhaps by burying it. CO2 has been shot underground for decades in places like Texas, where it is injected into aging oil and gas fields to force the remaining fossil fuel up through wells. Some 30 million tons of CO2 are injected into oil and gas wells annually in the U.S., according to federal statistics. That is tiny -- less than 1% of the roughly six billion tons of CO2 the country annually exhales.
Howard Herzog, a leading clean-coal specialist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a technological optimist and a political realist. He believes scientists can find ways to slash power plants' CO2 output just like they figured out how to slash those plants' output of pollutants that foul air and streams. But it will take a lot of money: MIT recommended in a recent study that the U.S. nearly quadruple its clean-coal spending, to $1 billion a year. And that is just for research.
Click to enlarge graphic
It also will take patience. An anticoal backlash is gathering steam in the U.S., and Mr. Herzog worries it will block all new coal-fired power plants in the country, which could boost electricity prices. A rational compromise, he believes, would be to allow new coal-fired plants to keep their CO2 emissions at the same level as natural-gas-fired plants through the use of cleaning technology. That would amount to an emissions cut of about 50% below the level of a conventional coal-fired plant, while raising the cost of generation by 50%, Mr. Herzog figures. Consumers probably wouldn't see rate boosts that high, he says, because generating costs are only one factor in determining retail electricity rates.
Still, clean coal has proven too expensive before. Earlier this decade, the federal government launched a multibillion-dollar research program intended to build a carbon-free, coal-fired power plant. Last year, when the cost of that program nearly doubled to $1.8 billion, the government effectively shut it down.
The Pleasant Prairie power plant is a monument to the fickleness of the nation's energy priorities -- and to the stubborness of coal. Designed in the wake of sweeping 1970s federal environmental laws, the power plant was the first built by Wisconsin Energy Corp. to burn coal from Wyoming's Powder River Basin rather than from nearby Illinois or Appalachia. One reason is that Western coal is lower than the Eastern variety in sulfur, which forms a pollutant the laws capped.
At the time, Wisconsin Energy intended to build new nuclear plants, too. But Wisconsin effectively banned new nuclear-plant construction in the state. Without an alternative, Wisconsin Energy has run the Pleasant Prairie plant to crank out more power than originally planned. As the federal government has further toughened clean-air standards, the company kept adding pollution-scrubbing equipment to keep the plant alive.
The crackdown on CO2 is just the latest -- and biggest -- regulatory shift prodding more changes to the plant. On a recent frigid morning, in a scene that brought to mind an old whiskey still, one of the shiny pipes for capturing CO2 was shaking and clanging, and steam was pouring out the top. Alstom's Mr. Black said the contraption looked so jury-rigged because engineers had to modify it to resolve problems that cropped up.
That burst of steam could be the industry's last gasp. It also could be a fresh breath from an industry with plenty of life left.
---------------------------------------------------------
5. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123751110892790871.html
1. Sohyun Park
ReplyDelete2. Earth Hour: Turning out the lights plays into the hands of our critics
3. This Saturday was Earth Hour Day and I saw many advertisements online. So I found this article today about Earth Hour. Earth Hour is when people around the world turn off their lights and other electrical appliances for one hour to raise awareness of taking action on climate change. This might mean a small thing that can be ignored to many people, however, this article talks about the symbolic meaning of Earth Hour. It says that many organizations and companies are participating in this event and it may not have a direct impact on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but it gives a message to our world leaders that people are concerned with climate change. One critic questions whether darkness is a right symbol, but I think that this event has become significant since it has become hope for people who are participating and it raises awareness for others who are unconcerned of our environmental issues.
-----------------------------
At 8:30pm today the luminous face of Big Ben will go dark. Next door, the houses of parliament will switch off all its lights too, along with thousands of landmarks, buildings and people around the world in a global gesture of solidarity in the fight against climate change.
From the international dateline, Earth Hour starts in New Zealand's Chatham Islands and will conclude in Honolulu. Passed like a baton around the planet, cities including Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore, Moscow, Istanbul, Dubai, Cape Town and Las Vegas will be darkened for an hour at 8:30pm local time to mark Earth Hour, the single biggest mass event to mark public concern over global warming.
More than 3,200 cities across 88 countries have signed up and the event has received support from international leaders including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. Environment campaign group WWF, which is co-ordinating the global event, expects hundreds of millions of people around the world to take part in turning out their lights for an hour, in the hope of sending a direct message to world leaders that their voters want urgent action to save the planet from rising temperatures.
"Earth Hour is shaping up to be an impressive symbolic response to our planet in peril," said the climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, who is supporting the event. "Popular pressure like this will leave little doubt around the negotiating table in Copenhagen this December that a meaningful global carbon deal must be delivered. Making us all more aware of the energy we use is a critical first step in making lasting changes to our lifestyles."
The Eiffel Tower, Shanghai's Hong Kong New World Tower, the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Sydney's Opera House and Table Mountain in Cape Town will all take part.
In London, Nelson's Column, City Hall, the National Gallery and the National Theatre will switch off their lights. The Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, the Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol, the Belfast Wheel and Scotland's Forth rail bridge and Edinburgh castle will all go dark.
Over 1,200 schools in the UK have also been active in the run-up to Earth Hour, with pupils receiving lessons on the challenges faced by climate change. WWF's head of campaigns, Colin Butfield, said the idea was that children would then go home and pester their parents to turn out lights . Members of the Women's Institute have also been encouraged to support the event at home.
Almost 400 British businesses are also taking part. Furniture retailer Ikea will turn off the lights outside its stores while Coca-Cola will switch off its advertising screen at Piccadilly Circus, only the third time it has been extinguished since the second world war.
"We hope it communicates the importance of everybody being involved in this and hopefully this will increase awareness that everybody needs to do their part, that includes governments, NGOs and individuals," said Coca-Cola's Euan Wilmshurst.
Green electricity company, Good Energy, has written to its 25,000 customers, encouraging them to turn out their lamps and light candles for an hour instead. Founder and chief executive Juliet Davenport encouraged people at home to play candle-lit board games and said that mass events such as Earth Hour allowed people to see how small actions, of the kind needed to tackle climate change at an individual level, could add up to something influential on a global scale.
The idea for Earth Hour grew out of a similar campaign held by WWF's Australian campaigners in 2007. For the global version, the campaign group chose 2009 because of the negotiations in Copenhagen to set climate targets after the Kyoto protocol runs out in 2012.
Campaigners have not calculated the amount of energy that might be saved by the combined action around the world, arguing that Earth Hour is more symbolic than a direct attempt to save carbon emissions.
"When global leaders meet at the UN conference in Copenhagen later this year, they are going to determine how the world will work together to tackle climate change in future. We need them to know that the eyes of the world will be upon them," said Butfield. "Earth Hour is a simple way for people all over the world to make sure our leaders really understand that people are looking to them to do what is right and that the time for action is now."
Not everyone is so positive, however. Organisers had hoped for the participation from the Forbidden City in Beijing but Chinese government officials have told their citizens to hold back because Earth hour clashes with Serf Liberation Day in Tibet, a new holiday to commemorate the ousting of the Dalai Lama from the province.
George Marshall, of the charity Climate Outreach and Information Network, questioned whether darkness was the right symbol. "This action offers darkness, regression and the threat of less. Light has always been a symbol of progress, civilisation, intelligence, truth. Turning off lights has always been a symbol of collapse the Dark Ages."
But Andy Ridley, of WWF in Australia, said: "For the people who take part, we hope there is a sense of empowerment, the knowledge that however small or big the actions you can effect in your life, whether you are a CEO or doing your GCSEs you can make a difference when these actions are brought together."
---
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/27/earth-hour-climate-change-wwf
1. Soo-Bin ,Lee
ReplyDelete2. Campaigners push plastic bag fee
3. One or two weeks ago, in class professor said that all the plastics human has ever made
is still where we live. This fact was really a kind of shock to me. Actually we think little bit more, we can guess this. Sure, however, nobody do that! So it was a big surprise, although I could understand. After I heard that I tried more to reduce the amount of plastic I use. (actually not that hard^^;;;)
There are few thing one person can do to reduce plastics. So this problem must be solved
at government level or organization level. (But I don't mean that each person shouldn't do anyhing at all.) Nowadays, I think, the korean government is doing quite well. Even 4 or 5years ago,I guess, we never had to pay for the plastic bags. But now in big supermarkets, they give 50won, when we bring our own bags. But still the plastic bad is too cheap that people don't feel it is a burden. In my oponion, the plastic bags should be more expensive to be more close to plastic bags free. Not only that, but also government or organization should try to change the common thought.
------------------------------------
A nationwide campaign to push for a levy on plastic supermarket bags was launched today.
The 'Get Real' campaign wants Progressive Enterprises and Foodstuffs, owners of New Zealand's largest supermarkets, to charge for plastic bags at their supermarket counters.
Both companies signed the Packaging Accord in 2004 which set a goal of reducing the number of bags used by a fifth (144 million bags) this year.
Sustainable Wanaka general manager Sophie Ward, whose organisation was involved in the campaign, said supermarkets needed to make a real commitment to reducing the number of plastic bags given away each year.
Nearly a billion plastic bags were buried in landfills each year, with others polluting outdoor spaces and being ingested by wildlife, she said.
Progressive Enterprises public affairs manager Bill Moore told NZPA the company had agreed to trim its use of plastic bags by 20 percent by June this year, and was doing its ''utmost to get everyone behind us to reduce plastic bag usage even further''.
''We all want to reduce the number of plastic bags in the environment, and we continue to make good progress towards this goal.''
He said Progressive Enterprises, which owns Foodtown, Woolworths and Countdown, trains staff to pack at least seven items into bags where possible, and to ask customers if they want a bag if they are purchasing less than four items.
''Our customers want to reduce their use of bags, but they also like to be able to use them as and when needed,'' he said.
"If the Government were to mandate a charge on plastic bags, we would of course support this move, but we believe voluntary efforts make the most sense.''
Campaigner Angus Ho said experience here and overseas showed having to pay for plastic bags changed people's behaviour.
Plastic bags never completely broke down, Mr Ho said.
"They disintegrate into smaller and smaller pieces, taking over 500 years and ending up as plastic dust in the air and soil.''
In a letter to Mr Ho, Environment Minister Nick Smith said the ministry was investigating the effectiveness and feasibility of a levy on plastic bags.
The 'Get Real' organisers praised The Warehouse, which would introduce a 10 cent levy on plastic bags from April 20.
A survey of 600 Warehouse customers showed 78 percent supported the change, with 85 percent of those affected by trials at stores saying they would choose not to use a plastic bag once the charge applied.
The cash collected from the levy would go to community groups and the bags could be returned to Warehouse stores for recycling.
The Warehouse, along with Mitre 10 and Caltex, also signed the Packaging Accord.
By January this year, 100 million bags had been taken out of circulation as the campaign gained traction.
Bunnings and Borders had their own bag reduction schemes, with Borders reducing usage by 80 percent in one year with a 10 cent levy.
The New Zealand Retailers Association opposed a ban or mandatory tax on plastic bags and rejected calls for New Zealand to follow the South Australian government, which introduced a Plastic Shopping Bags (Waste Avoidance) Act on January 1.
The association previously said the industry was on track to reach targets voluntarily, so a ban or tax was not required.
Ireland and Taiwan both reduced plastic bag usage by more than 90 percent through a small levy, 'Get Real' organisers said.
India introduced a fine of 100,000 rupee ($3800) and possible jail time for selling or even carrying a non-biodegradable plastic bag.
An open letter to the supermarkets can be signed at www.getreal.org.nz.
- NZPA
--------------------
http://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/2299827/Campaigners-push-plastic-bag-fee
1. Hye Sung, Yoon
ReplyDelete2. U.S. aid nets kill wildlife off Africa
- Effort to help poor Kenyan fishermen destroying ecosystem they depend on
The Associated Press
updated 4:06 a.m. ET March 26, 2009
3. So far, I've read some articles to do my assignments. And I found out that some environmental problems are sometimes because of the needs to help people. In this article, the plan of U.S is destroying ecosystem in Africa. At first, I wondered why 'U.S aid nets kill wildlife off Africa.' However, as I read this, I got to know what the title means.
Obviously, It is nice to help the growing groups of poor fishermen. But It hurts the environment. I feel that political policies are connected with the environment. So, we should consider lots of possible problems when deciding something.
It is too hard to determine in this problem. If we think more about the poor fishermen, we can not care about the environment. I really wonder which choice the U.S government will choose. I hope them to make a decision wisely.
-----------------
DIANI, Kenya - Plastic fishing nets — some bought for poor fishermen with American aid money — are tangling up whales and turtles off one of Africa's most popular beaches.
One recent victim was a huge dappled whaleshark that bled to death after its tail was cut off by fishermen unwilling to slash their nets to save it. In another case, divers risked their lives to free a pregnant, thrashing humpback whale entangled in a net last summer.
Both incidents occurred off Diani beach, which is popular with American and European tourists.
The fishermen have traditionally used hooks and hand lines to haul in their catch, which they then sold to hotels full of tourists. But the use of plastic nets has become increasingly common as growing populations have competed to catch shrinking supplies of fish, marine biologist David Obura said.
In 2003, USAID began a four-year project worth $575,000 to improve the lives of coastal communities. It worked on a project with a Kenyan government agency that included providing freezers for the fishermen to store their catch, along with boats and nets.
But the plastic nets are destroying the very ecosystems that the fishermen depend on and the tourists come to see, said Daniel Floren, who runs a local diving school.
Officials, experts and even the fishermen themselves acknowledge the nets are killing wildlife and coral.
"Without the reefs, there will be no diving. If we have nothing to show, I'll have to shut up shop," Floren said.
Project aimed at alleviating poverty
The aim of the U.S. project was to help lift local people out of poverty, said Robert Buzzard, a USAID official involved in the initiative. But there were no studies to show how the kind of equipment supplied might affect the marine life.
"There weren't environmental assessments year on year," Buzzard acknowledged, saying USAID was "partly" responsible but also was dependent on local organizations to provide information.
The project did not provide the type of nets or long fishing lines — which catch fish without entangling other marine life — that fishermen requested, said Isaak Mwachala, head of one of the local fishermen's associations.
"When they were going to the shop where these nets are sold, they didn't bring us with them ... but when (the nets) are already here we can't refuse them," he said.
Buzzard said he did not have records of Mwachala's request, but said it was possible it had been made.
When Mwachala and his friends head out to sea, they often throw miles (kilometers) of plastic net onto the reef. The money they earn pays school fees for one man's child, hospital bills for another's. But along with the haul of colorful fish, the nets threaten turtles, whales, whalesharks and dugongs — large marine mammals related to manatees.
The fishermen, who say their old hook-and-line method never caught turtles or whales, practice conservation where they can.
Pregnant, entangled humpback whale freed
After Floren offered small payments last year, they brought him more than 70 turtles snarled in fishing nets over a two-month period. It was not possible to say how many of them were trapped in nets funded by USAID. He managed to cut free and release all but a dozen. But the pregnant, entangled humpback whale last September was much harder.
It took Floren and two other divers three tense hours to cut her free, all the while risking panicking the whale and becoming entangled in the mesh themselves if she suddenly fled to the deep sea. A rare dugong and another humpback mother whale were freed a month later in the northern town of Malindi.
The huge dappled whalesharks that migrate down the coast are also at risk. Volker Bassen, founder of the East African Whaleshark Trust, said about half a dozen have become entangled in the type of nets funded by USAID since he founded the trust four years ago.
He said most marine animals are trapped by nets left on the reefs overnight to catch lobsters for the tourists.
"The nets that USAID bought are made of nylon, which doesn't rot. Even if it washes away, it remains in the sea and continues to kill marine life for decades," he explained. "It turns into a ghost net."
Coral killers
The nets are still destructive even if just used during the day and hauled in at night. The stones they use to weigh down the nets scrape over the delicate corals in time with the current, snagging the nets along the bottom and leaving scraps of blue nylon entangled in their wake. Onboard the boat bought with USAID funds, the men casually tossed chunks of the coral they'd pulled up over the side of the boat.
The fishermen interviewed by The Associated Press agreed that their livelihoods depended on preserving the seas and were interested in trying long lines if they were provided.
But Buzzard said USAID's involvement with the fishermen's group had been finished for a year and a half, and there were no plans to replace the nets. Buzzard said a colleague had been sent to speak to local conservationists who had complained about the nets.
"Those concerns are valid," he said. But "this project is finished ... Every project we do, we learn from."
Still, providing only one group of fishermen with new equipment would not be enough to save the marine life, said Obura, who specializes in studying coral reefs.
Huge trawlers overfishing deeper waters
In addition to the growing groups of poor fishermen crowding onto the reefs, huge European and Asian trawlers much further offshore are overfishing the deeper coastal waters, he said.
"The fishermen have the strong sense that there are other, richer fishermen out there raping and pillaging the seas and so why shouldn't they?" he said.
Fisherman Mohammed Khamis said the nets provided with USAID funds have increased the fishermen's average daily earnings from $4.50 to $7 — still less than a tourist pays for a fish fillet at an expensive hotel.
Khamis knew the nets could be destructive, but had three sets of school fees to pay totaling $460 a year and no other options for work in a country riddled with corruption and poverty. He says he could not afford to sacrifice his children's future for a turtle's.
"If someone has a family, they have to look for school fees, sickness, everything," he said. "We don't eat these turtles and we don't want to catch them but the extra fish is paying my children's school for their future."
-------
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29890406/
1. Selina Li Qiaowei
ReplyDelete2. Lights out in 84 countries for Earth Hour 2009
3. This news is the headline for many main media corporations around the world on 29th of March. It is very touch to watch on YouTube when you see the world’s famous buildings to turn off their unnecessary lights at the same time to show their willingness to care for the Earth including the UN. I believe this is a very good activity hold around the global with more and more countries to join since 2007. It is easy, simple and effective for everyone to participate. On YouTube, their promotion video starts with one slogan, it is ‘I am just one person, what can I do to the Earth.’ For a lot of times, we do not take action to many green actions because we think that even we did it, our effect is not going to give impact to anything as our power is too small to change the world. The message of Earth Hour is very positive and clear, to solve global environmental problem is within our ability, and the choice to make the Earth a better place to live is within our hand. We are people who hold the ability to control what we need to do to change environmental problem such as global warming.
There are also some people go against the project, as they said that global warming is based on faulty science. I want to tell these people that no matter what are main causes of global warming, it is a fact that global warming is a result of human action. There is no need to fight over the benefit or negative effect of science at this moment. And it is also not a right time for people to go against science when all people around the world is trying to put in their small effort to reduce the use of energy and be aware of global warming. We shall all participate to show our concern over the Earth problems, one hour per year is not long, but look at how much amount of CO2 we can hold back during Earth Hour, it is a great achievement of our ordinary citizen that according to figure showed, within this one our, we could reduce about 840,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.
After this event, it must take us to consider on this figure, because all lights that we switch off during Earth Hour is unnecessary light. So why not we let this campaign continues and spread out, I am not so sure why all these unnecessary lights is keep to shine on every night. I also do not understand the purpose for cities to turn on so many unnecessary lights at the night? Is this a way for cities to show off their prosperity with no consideration about how much they may pay back in the future due to their unawareness. This project must continue as people are very forgetful, only when you keep remain them very year, then they could build up this idea of save energy as much as they can. You as one person could help to solve the problem of global warming; it is no doubt to this mission that everyone has to take on their responsibility as a global citizen.
-----------------------------------------------
5. Lights out in 84 countries for Earth Hour 2009
Lights are going down from the Great Pyramids to the Acropolis, the Eiffel Tower to Sears Tower, as more than 2,800 municipalities in 84 countries plan Saturday to mark the second worldwide Earth Hour.
McDonald's will even soften the yellow glow from some Golden Arches as part of the time zone-by-time zone plan to dim nonessential lights between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. to highlight global climate change.
"Earth Hour makes a powerful statement that the world is going to solve this problem," said Carter Roberts, chief executive of the World Wildlife Fund, which sponsors Earth Hour. "Everyone is realizing the enormous effect that climate change will have on them."
Seven times more municipalities have signed on since last year's Earth Hour, which drew participation from 400 cities after Sydney, Australia held a solo event in 2007. Interest has spiked ahead of planned negotiations on a new global warming treaty in Copenhagen, Denmark this December. The last global accord, the Kyoto Protocol, is set to expire in 2012.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon encouraged the convention to reach a fair and effective climate change agreement and promoted Earth Hour participation in a video posted this month on the event's YouTube channel.
"Earth Hour is a way for the citizens of the world to send a clear message," Ban said. "They want action on climate change."
Other videos have been posted by celebrities such as rocker Pete Wentz and actor Kevin Bacon and WWF has offered Earth Hour iPhone applications. Search engine Yahoo! says there's been a 344 percent increase in "Earth Hour" searches this February and March compared with last year.
New studies increasingly highlight the ongoing effects of climate change, said Richard Moss, a member of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and WWF's climate change vice president.
"We have satellites and we have ships out at sea and we have monitoring stations set up on buoys in the ocean," Moss said. "We monitor all kinds of things people wouldn't even think about. The scientific research is showing in all kinds of ways that the climate crisis is worsening."
But not everyone agrees and at least one counter-protest is planned for Saturday.
Suburban Philadelphia ice cream shop owner Bob Gerenser, 56, believes global warming is based on faulty science and calls Earth Hour "nonsense."
The resident of New Hope, Pa., and owner of Gerenser's Exotic Ice Cream planned to illuminate his store with extra theatrical lighting.
"I'm going to get everyone I know in my neighborhood to turn on every light they possibly can to waste as much electricity as possible to underline the absurdity of this action ... by being absurd," he said.
Earth Hour 2009 has garnered support from global corporations, nonprofit groups, schools, scientists and celebrities — including Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett and the Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
McDonald's Corp. plans to dim its arches at 500 locations around the Midwest. The Marriott, Ritz-Carlton and Fairmont hotel chains and Coca-Cola Co. also plan to participate.
Nearly 200 U.S. cities, towns and villages have signed on, from New York City — which will darken the iconic Empire State Building and Broadway marquees — to Igiugig, population 53 on Iliamna Lake in southwestern Alaska.
Among the efforts in Chicago, 50,000 light bulbs at tourist hotspot Navy Pier will dim and 24 spotlights that shine on Sears Tower's twin spires will go dark.
"We're the most visible building in the city," said Angela Burnett, a Sears Tower property manager. "Turning off the lights for one hour on a Saturday night shows our commitment to sustainability."
The Commonwealth Edison utility said electricity demand fell by 5 percent in Chicago and northern Illinois during last year's Earth Hour, reducing about 840,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.
"It goes way beyond turning off the lights," said Roberts of the WWF. "The message we want people to take away is that it is within our power to solve this problem. People can take positive constructive actions."
___
On the Net:
Earth Hour: http://www.earthhour.org
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's Earth Hour video: http://sn.im/enqwn
-----
from Yahoo UK homepage
1. Yoo GaEun
ReplyDelete2. Mother Nature's Dow
3. I'm not sure whether my assignment will be checked safely, cuz it's already over midnight
but better trying than giving up...
Anyway! the article I want to introduce today is of the world-famous journalist's opinion.
Thomas L. Friedman is one of my favorite writers and journalists because he always startles the world with his insightful prediction and elucidating humor and allegory he uses in his writing. In this article, he also makes a funny
metaphor saying Mother Nature's Dow.
Yes, even though we human cannot see the conspicuous figures being updated everyday on a digital slate that shows how much the numbers have risen or fallen like Dow, it is obviously true that the world climate is in ciritical condition and we need a bold, swift action to cope with the potentially disastrous outcome.
I totally agree with Freidman's idea that the governments of each nations should impose carbon taxes and oil taxes with higher fuel-efficiency regulation. If consumers do not feel the necessity to change there lifestyles and automobiles, clean energy industry will barely boost. The demand for clean energy calls on the supply of those products- without economic incentive, nobody would be willing to invest massive amount of money into uncertain journey to green energy products.
So, we must keep in mind what Friendman says as well as other scientists' warnings based on convincing stastistics that we will finally imperil ourselves if we maintain this anti-environment lifestyles.
-----------------------------------------
While I’m convinced that our current financial crisis is the product of both The Market and Mother Nature hitting the wall at once — telling us we need to grow in more sustainable ways — some might ask this: We know when the market hits a wall. It shows up in red numbers on the Dow. But Mother Nature doesn’t have a Dow. What makes you think she’s hitting a wall, too? And even if she is: Who cares? When my 401(k) is collapsing, it’s hard to worry about my sea level rising.
It’s true, Mother Nature doesn’t tell us with one simple number how she’s feeling. But if you follow climate science, what has been striking is how insistently some of the world’s best scientists have been warning — in just the past few months — that climate change is happening faster and will bring bigger changes quicker than we anticipated just a few years ago. Indeed, if Mother Nature had a Dow, you could say that it, too, has been breaking into new (scientific) lows.
Consider just two recent articles:
The Washington Post reported on Feb. 1, that “the pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said. ‘We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,’ Christopher Field, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said.”
The physicist and climate expert Joe Romm recently noted on his blog, climateprogress.org, that in January, M.I.T.’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change quietly updated its Integrated Global System Model that tracks and predicts climate change from 1861 to 2100. Its revised projection indicates that if we stick with business as usual, in terms of carbon-dioxide emissions, average surface temperatures on Earth by 2100 will hit levels far beyond anything humans have ever experienced.
“In our more recent global model simulations,” explained M.I.T., “the ocean heat-uptake is slower than previously estimated, the ocean uptake of carbon is weaker, feedbacks from the land system as temperature rises are stronger, cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases over the century are higher, and offsetting cooling from aerosol emissions is lower. Not one of these effects is very strong on its own, and even adding each separately together would not fully explain the higher temperatures. [But,] rather than interacting additively, these different effects appear to interact multiplicatively, with feedbacks among the contributing factors, leading to the surprisingly large increase in the chance of much higher temperatures.”
What to do? It would be nice to say, “Hey, Mother Nature, we’re having a credit crisis, could you take a couple years off?” But as the environmental consultant Rob Watson likes to say, “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics,” and she is going to do whatever they dictate. You can’t sweet talk Mother Nature or the market. You have to change the economics to affect the Dow and the chemistry, biology and physics to affect Mother Nature.
That’s why we need a climate bailout along with our economic bailout. Hal Harvey is the C.E.O. of a new $1 billion foundation, ClimateWorks, set up to accelerate the policy changes that can avoid climate catastrophe by taking climate policies from where they are working the best to the places where they are needed the most.
“There are five policies that can help us win the energy-climate battle, and each has been proven somewhere,” Harvey explained. First, building codes: California’s energy-efficient building and appliance codes now save Californians $6 billion per year,” he said. Second, better vehicle fuel-efficiency standards: “The European Union’s fuel-efficiency fleet average for new cars now stands at 41 miles per gallon, and is rising steadily,” he added.
Third, we need a national renewable portfolio standard, mandating that power utilities produce 15 or 20 percent of their energy from renewables by 2020. Right now, only about half our states have these. “Whenever utilities are required to purchase electricity from renewable sources,” said Harvey, “clean energy booms.” (See Germany’s solar business or Texas’s wind power.)
The fourth is decoupling — the program begun in California that turns the utility business on its head. Under decoupling, power utilities make money by helping homeowners save energy rather than by encouraging them to consume it. “Finally,” said Harvey, “we need a price on carbon.” Polluting the atmosphere can’t be free.
These are the pillars of a climate bailout. Yes, some have upfront costs. But all of them would pay long-term dividends, because they would foster massive U.S. innovation in new clean technologies that would stimulate the real Dow and much lower emissions that would stimulate the Climate Dow.
--------------------------------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/opinion/29friedman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
1. Daniel Cheng
ReplyDelete2. Mass Transit and a Soaring Car Culture Clash in China
3. One aspect that intrigues me in class is the social, biological, and physical pyramid of viewing issues in the world and in history. This article focuses on the growing city of Guangzhou, a metropolis northwest of Hong Kong, and its necessity for expansion. The proposed mean is to expand the subway system into one of the world's most advanced and largest. The article touches on the s/b/p aspects, and its interrelationships.
China is undergoing a massive influx of a rising middle class, many of which are creating the world's largest demand for automobiles. My favorite line from the article states, "Western mass transit experts applaud China for investing billions in systems that will put less stress on the environment and on cities." This is great news for China, especially because the country's construction works three times as fast as the United States'. Workers work 24 hours a day, and the regulations aren't as excessive as the States. However, what I learned is that it is not as fast as I thought, because of this small passage:
Here, Mr. Chan said, a property surveyor appraises a building and “whatever he says, that’s it.” But, Mr. Chan added, “because China is now more democratic, if they don’t want to move, then you have to take more time.”
It is still awful that the Chinese government can decide on a whim to destroy your building, and provide futile relocation aliments. Yet to the Chinese government, it is a small price to pay for the country's expansion into a global powerhouse.
The 'Big Dig' is a construction project in my hometown of Boston that has recently finished completion on December 31st, 2007. The project was mainly to reroute some heavily congested highways into underground tunnels, and to create a greenspace in its place. Traffic is significantly more efficient now traveling through Boston, but the project cost an astounding 22 billion dollars, making it the most expensive highway project in the US. The project began when I was 4 years old in 1991. It took 16 years to finish this project, which has little to show for itself in the end.
There are so many things wrong with the way the Chinese government works in terms of the treatment of its workers and its residents. But in 20 years, the cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen (the car production capital of China) will be filled with luxury cars and the subway system will be refined to 'keep up with the joneses.' Simply because China is struggling with the creation of a properly planned infrastructure for growth. Yet ironically, the article states that what contradicts all of it is the "other Chinese policies, like allowing real estate developers to build sprawling new suburbs, undermine the benefits of the mass transit boom."
Come on China, what are you doing?!
-----------------------------
4. GUANGZHOU, China — Chan Shao Zhang is in the race of his life.
After four decades of false starts, Mr. Chan, a 67-year-old engineer, is supervising an army of workers operating 60 gargantuan tunneling machines beneath this metropolis in southeastern China. They are building one of the world’s largest and most advanced subway systems.
The question is whether the burrowing machines can outrace China’s growing love affair with the automobile — car sales have soared ninefold since 2000. Or are a hundred Los Angeleses destined to bloom?
And even as Mr. Chan labors to bind Guangzhou together with an underground web of steel, the city is spreading out rapidly above ground, like a drop of ink on a paper towel.
The Guangzhou Metro is just part of a much broader surge in mass transit construction across China.
At least 15 cities are building subway lines and a dozen more are planning them. The pace of construction will only accelerate now that Beijing is pushing local and provincial governments to step up their infrastructure spending to offset lost revenue from slumping exports.
“Nobody is building like they are,” said Shomik Mehndiratta, a World Bank specialist in urban transport. “The center of construction is really China.”
Western mass transit experts applaud China for investing billions in systems that will put less stress on the environment and on cities. But they warn that other Chinese policies, like allowing real estate developers to build sprawling new suburbs, undermine the benefits of the mass transit boom.
“They wind up better than if they did nothing, but it costs them a fortune,” said Lee Schipper, a specialist at Stanford in urban transport.
Mr. Chan defended Guangzhou’s combination of cars and subways, saying that the city built a subway line to a new Toyota assembly plant to help employees and suppliers reach it.
Subways have been most competitive in cities like New York that have high prices for parking, and tolls for bridges and tunnels, discouraging car use. Few Chinese cities have been willing to follow suit, other than Shanghai, which charges a fee of several thousand dollars for each license plate.
The cost and physical limitations of subways have discouraged most cities from building new ones. For instance, only Tokyo has a subway system that carries more people than its buses. The buses are cheaper and able to serve far more streets but move more slowly, pollute more and contribute to traffic congestion.
China has reason to worry. It surpassed the United States in total vehicle sales for the first time in January, although the United States remained slightly ahead in car sales. But in February, China overtook the United States in both, in part because the global downturn has hurt auto sales much more in the United States than in China.
Guangzhou, a city of 12 million people that is also the fastest-growing center of auto manufacturing in China, shows both the promise and obstacles of China’s subway extravaganza.
Mr. Chan helped set up Guangzhou’s subway planning office in 1965, when he was straight out of college. Digging started the next year. But the miners gave up after less than 10 feet when they hit granite.
After that, Mao personally sent China’s finest mining and underground construction experts to oversee the digging. But further excavation efforts failed in 1970, 1971, 1974 and 1979. During and immediately after the Cultural Revolution, Communist dogma, poverty and nationalism forced a reliance on inadequate Chinese equipment.
In 1989, when preparations began for successful excavations, city leaders thought it would be enough to have two subway lines, totaling 20 miles, in an X shape bisecting a tightly packed downtown.
“At that point, it was still mostly bicycles and people walking,” Mr. Chan said. Then, “in the 21st century, the Guangzhou economy really took off.”
Today, Guangzhou has 71 miles of subway lines, most of them opened in the last three years, and yet large areas of the ever-expanding city are still distant from the nearest subway stop.
The city plans to open an additional 83 miles by the end of next year — and an underground tram system and a high-speed commuter rail system. A long-term plan calls for at least 500 miles of subway and light rail routes, and there are discussions on expanding beyond that.
China now produces much of the equipment to build modern subways, but the country’s infrastructure stimulus spending is drawing in imports as well. Most of the tunneling machines here were made by Herrenknecht of Germany. I.B.M. announced on Wednesday that it had signed a consulting contract for computer tracking of Guangzhou Metro’s nearly $3 billion in assets, including convenience stores in subway stations and lighting systems.
The digging in Guangzhou proceeds around the clock, every day. Men like Wang Jiangka, a profusely perspiring engineer in charge of one of the steamy tunnels, endure sweltering temperatures at the tunneling site, where workers put in five 12-hour shifts a week.
“If they don’t want to do overtime, we get other workers,” Mr. Wang said, standing in a red hard hat next to a Herrenknecht tunneling machine that chewed through the rock more than a one-mile walk from the nearest daylight.
Inexpensive labor — less than $400 a month — and the economies of scale created by completing 20 miles of subway lines a year have driven costs down.
Mr. Chan said that it cost about $100 million a mile to build a subway line in Guangzhou, including land acquisition costs for ventilation shafts and station entrances.
By contrast, New York City officials hope to build 1.7 miles of the long-delayed Second Avenue line in eight years at a cost of $3.9 billion, or $2.4 billion a mile. The city expects to use a single tunneling machine.
Owners of land needed for subway construction in Guangzhou have few rights compared with those in New York.
Here, Mr. Chan said, a property surveyor appraises a building and “whatever he says, that’s it.” But, Mr. Chan added, “because China is now more democratic, if they don’t want to move, then you have to take more time.”
And time is of the essence. Guangzhou is growing rapidly outward.
Primly dressed in a white silk shirt and light brown slacks, Kerry Li stood under the 30-foot-tall crystal chandelier in the clubhouse lobby at the Hua Nan Country Garden complex and watched as her 10-year-old son played nearby.
A bus leaves her gated community in the suburbs and heads for the city, across the broad, muddy waters of the Pearl River, every 15 minutes. But a recently completed subway line under the river goes nowhere near the compound. Ms. Li’s husband, a businessman, drives his own car to work every morning, while his wife stays home.
The lure of cars is hard to resist.
Chen Hao Tian, a 43-year-old economic planner for the Guangzhou municipal government who worries about the need for mass transit, used to spend a half-hour riding a free bus for government employees to and from work.
Then he acquired a silver-gray Honda Accord from the local Honda assembly plant and found he could make the trip in 10 minutes — and run errands along the way for his wife and 13-year-old daughter, and listen to his favorite music.
“On my salary, the maintenance costs are a pressure,” he said. “But it gives me great pleasure and the feeling of a higher standard of living.”
And few subway rides do that, even for those who build them.
-----------------
5. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/business/worldbusiness/27transit.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=digging%20china&st=cse&scp=1
1. Martin Weiser
ReplyDelete2. Bio Batteries
3. Sony was able to make a battery running on sugar. Its power output is still low with 50mW (2007), which surprisingly is said to be already 70mW in 2009. I think this technology is interesting since it includes the use of enzymes and thereby is using chemical energy differently than combustion and maybe even more efficient. Not to mention the possibility to get the energy for your MP3 from a softdrink.
----
Sony Develops "Bio Battery" Generating Electricity from Sugar
- Achieves world's highest power output for passive-type bio batteries -
TOKYO, August 23, 2007- Sony today announced the development of a bio battery1 that generates electricity from carbohydrates (sugar) utilizing enzymes as its catalyst, through the application of power generation principles found in living organisms.
Test cells of this bio battery have achieved power output of 50 mW, currently the world's highest level2 for passive-type3 bio batteries. The output of these test cells is sufficient to power music play back on a memory-type Walkman.
In order to realize the world's highest power output, Sony developed a system of breaking down sugar to generate electricity that involves efficiently immobilizing enzymes and the mediator (electronic conduction materials) while retaining the activity of the enzymes at the anode. Sony also developed a new cathode structure which efficiently supplies oxygen to the electrode while ensuring that the appropriate water content is maintained. Optimizing the electrolyte for these two technologies has enabled these power output levels to be reached.
Sugar is a naturally occurring energy source produced by plants through photosynthesis. It is therefore regenerative, and can be found in most areas of the earth, underlining the potential for sugar-based bio batteries as an ecologically-friendly energy device of the future.
Sony will continue its development of immobilization systems, electrode composition and other technologies in order to further enhance power output and durability, with the aim of realizing practical applications for these bio batteries in the future.
The research results presented here have been accepted as an academic paper at the 234th American Chemical Society National Meeting & Exposition in Boston, MA USA, and were announced at 11 am local time on August 22, 2007.
Masayo Endo, an employee for Japanese electronics giant Sony, displays a new bio battery, including three cubic cells that generate enough electricity to drive a Walkman digital music player, at the International Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Expo in Tokyo on February 25, 2009 while an electric fan (bottom), powered by a bio battery cell whose energy source is a soft drink, winds. Sony has developed a passive type bio battery system of breaking down sugar to generate the world's highest level electric power of 70mW from a cell as an eco-friendly energy. Sony exhibited various eco-friendly power sources, including fuel cell batteries and bio batteries at the exhibition.
---------------------
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/200708/07-074E/index.html
http://www.daylife.com/photo/02pD3df8u8af6