From the Tuesday, October 30, 2007, Toronto Star, News section, page A3, the forest industry pledging to become carbon neutral:
CANADA'S FOREST INDUSTRY TO TURN OVER A NEW LEAF
Making plans to meet carbon-neutral pledge
Peter Gorrie
Environment Reporter
Canada's forest industry says it will be carbon neutral by 2015.
In what is likely the first such pledge by any major industry sector in the world, the forest companies say their logging, paper and pulp operations, and the products they produce, will, in effect, no longer be a source of greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
And they'll do it, they say, without resorting to offsets - the controversial practice in which polluters continue to spew emissions, but contribute to projects elsewhere that claim to reduce them.
The effort must extend beyond forests and mills to wood and paper consumers, such as construction sites, homes and offices, Avrim Lazar, president of the Forest Products Association of Canada, said.
The aim is to protect both the environment and the industry's bottom line, said Lazar, who was to announce the pledge this morning at a conference in Ottawa.
Global demand for wood products is soaring, he said, "If people continue to do it the old way... it won't be very good for the planet."
The devastating spread of pine beetles in British Columbia - partly because winters are no longer cold enough to kill the insects - is a wake-up call, he said.
"We got a lesson in the impact of climate change before most of the rest of Canada."
As well, global buyers increasingly demand products from "sustainable" operations. That can be an edge for Canadian firms, which face fierce competition from China, Brazil and other places where trees grow faster, costs are lower, and environment rules can be lax.
The Canadian industry has reduced its greenhouse emissions 44 per cent since 1990, when its output increased by 20 per cent.
That puts it far ahead of Canada's Kyoto Protocol target - a 6 per cent cut.
Most of the industry's reductions have been at pulp and paper mills, which have become more efficient and, in many cases, converted from oil and gas to renewable fuels. But much of the effort will involve keeping wood and paper out of landfills where, as it decomposes, it releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
About half the paper used in Canada is recycled, Lazar said. To improve that figure, the industry will use publicity to target consumers in offices and apartment buildings, where recycling rates are low.
Another focus will be recycling wood waste at construction sites. The aim is to have it recycled into plywood, particleboard or paper; or sent to high-tech plants that burn wood for heat and electricity.
"We hope other industries will rise to the challenge" of doing the same, or better, said Lorne Johnson of World Wildlife Fund Canada, which is working with the association. Other green groups are on an advisory panel.
Johnson added the odds are good the industry will meet the target. "They're already doing a good job."
Shifting Into Neutral
How the Canadian forestry industry plans to meet its 2015 target:
* Become energy self-sufficient - switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
* Adopt energy-efficient technologies.
* Increase diversion of used forest products from landfills.
* Cap more landfills to prevent methane leaks.
* Increase cogeneration - using waste heat to generate electricity.
* Increase potential of forests and wood products to store carbon.
* Maximize recycling of paper and wood products.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
British Business Group & Climate Change Commitment
From the Business section of the Toronto Star, Tuesday, November 27, 2007, page B4:
U.K. EMPLOYER GROUP VOWS TO FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE
London - Britain's top employer's organization pledged yesterday to help combat climate change, saying the issue is an urgent priority for business, government and consumers alike.
The Confederation of British Industry has placed global warming at the heart ofits agenda at the start of its annual two-day conference in London.
Reporting the findings of its climate change task force, the federation called for fundamental change in British business and issued a series of pledges to help companies adopt greener practices.
Firms must "change their business models to meet consumers' and society's needs in an era of climate change," it said.
One key pledge was to "develop new products and services that will empoyer households to halve their emissions by 2020."
Another vow was to save an extra 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
Federation director-general Richard Lambert added: "This report makes clear that in the future, businesses will have to be green to grow."
The task force comprises top executives from 18 well-known companies, such as BP, Royal Dutch Shell and steel maker Corus, which employ some two million people.
"Today the ... task force has demonstrated its commitment to tackling climate change," said chair Ben Verwaayen, who is also head of telecommunications group BT.
Meanwhile, the federation has questioned the British government's ambitious targets to slash carbon emissions by 26 per cent to 32 per cent by 2020 and 60 per cent by 2050.
"The U.K.'s carbon reduction targets for 2020 are likely to be missed , but that 2050 goal, whilst stretching, can be achieved at a manageable cost - provided a greater sense of urgency is now adopted, " it said, citing analysis by McKinsey consultants.
Agence France-Presse
U.K. EMPLOYER GROUP VOWS TO FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE
London - Britain's top employer's organization pledged yesterday to help combat climate change, saying the issue is an urgent priority for business, government and consumers alike.
The Confederation of British Industry has placed global warming at the heart ofits agenda at the start of its annual two-day conference in London.
Reporting the findings of its climate change task force, the federation called for fundamental change in British business and issued a series of pledges to help companies adopt greener practices.
Firms must "change their business models to meet consumers' and society's needs in an era of climate change," it said.
One key pledge was to "develop new products and services that will empoyer households to halve their emissions by 2020."
Another vow was to save an extra 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
Federation director-general Richard Lambert added: "This report makes clear that in the future, businesses will have to be green to grow."
The task force comprises top executives from 18 well-known companies, such as BP, Royal Dutch Shell and steel maker Corus, which employ some two million people.
"Today the ... task force has demonstrated its commitment to tackling climate change," said chair Ben Verwaayen, who is also head of telecommunications group BT.
Meanwhile, the federation has questioned the British government's ambitious targets to slash carbon emissions by 26 per cent to 32 per cent by 2020 and 60 per cent by 2050.
"The U.K.'s carbon reduction targets for 2020 are likely to be missed , but that 2050 goal, whilst stretching, can be achieved at a manageable cost - provided a greater sense of urgency is now adopted, " it said, citing analysis by McKinsey consultants.
Agence France-Presse
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Climate Change Affects Poor the Most
From 24 hours, Wednesday, November 28, 2007, page 3, an article about the impacts of climate change that will unduly affect the poor:
CLIMATE CHANGE
Poor will suffer: UN
Rich countries must provide some $86 billion by 2015 to help the world's poor adapt to global warming, an expert United Nations panel warned yesterday.
The nearly 400-page Human Development Report comes just a week before a major new world conference convenes in Indonesia to negotiate a successor climate treaty to the 1997 Kyoto Accord.
It adds a dire economic perspective to previous UN scientific findings that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions must be stabilized by 2015 and then reduced.
Without the money, a warmer world "could stall and then reverse human development" in the countries where 2.6 billion people live on $2 a day or less, according to the UN Development Program panel.
Scientists have reported that temperatures have risen an average 0.7 degrees Celsius over the last 100 years, bringing the prospect of a century of extreme weather, rising seas, widening drought and disease and harm to fisheries, forests and farmland.
According to development officials, the consequences include women and young girls walking further to collect water in the Horn of Africa, people erecting bamboo flood shelters on stilts in the delta of the Ganges River in India.
"These impacts ... go unnoticed in financial markets and in the measurement of world gross domestic product (GDP)," the panel's report said.
"But increased exposure to drought, to more intense storms, to floods and environmental stress is holding back the efforts of the world's poor to build a better life for themselves and their children."
The Associated Press
CLIMATE CHANGE
Poor will suffer: UN
Rich countries must provide some $86 billion by 2015 to help the world's poor adapt to global warming, an expert United Nations panel warned yesterday.
The nearly 400-page Human Development Report comes just a week before a major new world conference convenes in Indonesia to negotiate a successor climate treaty to the 1997 Kyoto Accord.
It adds a dire economic perspective to previous UN scientific findings that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions must be stabilized by 2015 and then reduced.
Without the money, a warmer world "could stall and then reverse human development" in the countries where 2.6 billion people live on $2 a day or less, according to the UN Development Program panel.
Scientists have reported that temperatures have risen an average 0.7 degrees Celsius over the last 100 years, bringing the prospect of a century of extreme weather, rising seas, widening drought and disease and harm to fisheries, forests and farmland.
According to development officials, the consequences include women and young girls walking further to collect water in the Horn of Africa, people erecting bamboo flood shelters on stilts in the delta of the Ganges River in India.
"These impacts ... go unnoticed in financial markets and in the measurement of world gross domestic product (GDP)," the panel's report said.
"But increased exposure to drought, to more intense storms, to floods and environmental stress is holding back the efforts of the world's poor to build a better life for themselves and their children."
The Associated Press
Friday, December 14, 2007
Heat Waves: Say Goodbye to Real Winters
I have never seen as many articles on global warming as I have this year. The media has finally realized the skeptics have been leading them down the garden path for years and they were too lazy to look into the issues to know what the consensus of real scientists had to say about it.
An Inconvenient Truth was an eye opener not just to people but also to journalists and others in the media. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report and/or the Nobel Prize won in connection with Al Gore on climate change helped put the nail in the coffin (except among ultra-right wing conservative think tanks funded by the dirty industries - oil, agribusiness, cars, and so on) that there wasn't enough certainty about the science on climate change.
The over-the-top weather events have worried some and given others first-hand experience of what climate change means. The mayor of Atlanta sure "gets" climate change this year after the long drought and effect on the city's water supply and that of the state's and adjoining states.
The increased media coverage of the the sea ice or ice shelves or glacier melts in Arctic or Antarctic or Greenland also underline the climate change probably dramatically.
From the Ideas section of the Toronto Star, Sunday, September 9, 2007, page ID2, here is an article under a picture of people moving a small boat from open water over ice.
A PICTURE AND A THOUSAND WORDS
Tempted to whinge about summer's latest (and maybe last) heat wave? Just remember this
Bill Taylor
Feature Writer
Lest we forget, now that our driest summer in 50 years has given us a valedictory blast of heat, this is what February was like. February in Quebec, but not a whole lot removed from what February was like on Queens' Quay, staring out across the lake to Centre Island.
It's painful just to look at this picture. It was even more painful to shoot it from the breezy deck of a ferry butting through the ice-choked St. Lawrence between Quebec City and Levis. The temperature? Minus way-too-much.
Nothing the five-person crew - so out of place on a river that, even in the depths of winter, is a perilously busy seaway - was wearing could possibly keep them properly warm or dry. The current was fast enough to make scrambling out of the boat and on to the harsh, unforgiving ice doubly perilous. An ice floe is really just a small iceberg with 90 per cent of its mass below the surface. Bigger and more dangerous than you might think, especially when it's careening along like a bus with no brakes.
In the distance, a small, blue-hulled tanker moved slowly upriver in the direction of Montreal. It's bridge was emblazoned with a huge "No Smoking" sign. A few minutes earlier, a big grey freighter had passed going the other way, heading for the ocean.
There was a tug bustling about its business, too, and two ferries criss-crossing. This was surely no place for cockleshell heroes to play, but the little green boat darted about like a demented water beetle, everyone having an uproarious time.
Local lore has it that in pre-ferry days, the mail-delivery contract went to the crew who could get across the river fastest, rowing between ice floes and dragging the boat over them. A highly competitive business. Now it's a highly competitive sport, a mainstay of Quebec's annual Winter Carnival; possibly the sport I most don't ever want to try. Alligator wrestling? Sure, bring it on.
Winter carnivals could become an endangered species. As could Canadian winters. Shovelling the walk. Weekend ski trips. Backyard shinny. Ontario icewine. Frostbite and snowboarding compound fractures. Ah, memories.
The UN World Meteorological Organization says this past winter was the warmest since record-keeping began in 1880. (Who, one wonders, first had the brainwave: "Hey let's write down the temperature today. And tomorrow and ..." And someone else must have said, "Wow, yeah, awesome!" Or words to that effect.)
According to New Scientist magazine, Britain's records go back to 1659, and last year was its warmest since then. That was the year, incidentally, that Richard Cromwell dissolved the English parliament and later resigned as the country's Lord Protector. And there was a drought in India.
Climatologists say this year could be even hotter, with a "very active" hurricane season. The ferry between St. Barbe, Nfld., and Blanc Sablon, Labrador, resumed service last spring earlier than ever before.
Last year, hardly any place in the world escaped without some weather aberration, New Scientist reports. Heat waves in Europe, the United States, Latin America and Australia (I was in Sydney on New Year's Day, 2006; the temperature hit 45 and the bush north of the city went up in flames); a crippling drought in China and its worst cyclones in years; floods in Europe, the United States and Africa, including the Sahara Desert.
In November, Vancouver had almost twice its normal average rainfall. Meanwhile, Arctic ice continues to melt at an ever-increasing rate. The U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research predicted last year that by 2040 - only 33 years from now - the Arctic Ocean could be devoid of ice.
Tourism's doing better and better, though. The European Union's recent embrace of an "open skies" policy will lower transatlantic fares, add planes and give travellers far more credit-card-friendly choices. U.S. and European airlines will be able to fly between any EU city and any American city.
As U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters put it: "Tearing down regulatory barriers allows us to foster more affordable and convenient air travel and gives our airline industry more opportunities to compete, innovate and thrive."
And pollute the hell out of the upper atmosphere.
It's expected to put tickets in to the hands of more than 26 additional people over the next five years. Airlines are scrambling to grab chunks of the new action.
This includes Virgin, whose founder, Sir Richard Branson, last year pledged the next 10 years' profits from his planes and trains - an estimated $3.5 billion - to fight global warming. More passengers, more planes, more profit, more pollution . . . That noise you hear is the jangle of irony.
We seem to be going to hell, not so much in a hand basket as in a cut-price seat on a jetliner leaving a destructive vapour trail across the more-crowded, less-friendly skies. Brown becomes the new blue and the seagulls turn tubercular and fall coughing from the air.
The diesel fashion label was quick to mount a footwear ad campaign showing such things as the Great Wall of China crossing a desert and parrots rather than pigeons in a city square, with the slogan, "Global warming ready." Cute.
One day, perhaps in our children's lifetime if not our own, winter might just be a word instead of a season. Songs about warm, woollen mittens and snowflakes that stay on your nose and eyelashes will be an incomprehensible as "Sumer is icomen in, Lhude sing cucco" to anyone who hasn't studied Chaucerian English. The cuckoo will be sweating too much to sing, anyway, loudly or not.
When Vermont has lost its maple-sugar industry to Quebec. When New York is under water, an archipelago of skyscraper tips and the Statue of Liberty's bedraggled arm, not waving but drowning. When the grapevines flourish along the St. Lawrence and we're sitting on the upturned hulls of obsolete ice-boats sipping our Chateau Frontenac or Cotes du Heights of Abraham, all we'll have left will be fading pictures like this.
An Inconvenient Truth was an eye opener not just to people but also to journalists and others in the media. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report and/or the Nobel Prize won in connection with Al Gore on climate change helped put the nail in the coffin (except among ultra-right wing conservative think tanks funded by the dirty industries - oil, agribusiness, cars, and so on) that there wasn't enough certainty about the science on climate change.
The over-the-top weather events have worried some and given others first-hand experience of what climate change means. The mayor of Atlanta sure "gets" climate change this year after the long drought and effect on the city's water supply and that of the state's and adjoining states.
The increased media coverage of the the sea ice or ice shelves or glacier melts in Arctic or Antarctic or Greenland also underline the climate change probably dramatically.
From the Ideas section of the Toronto Star, Sunday, September 9, 2007, page ID2, here is an article under a picture of people moving a small boat from open water over ice.
A PICTURE AND A THOUSAND WORDS
Tempted to whinge about summer's latest (and maybe last) heat wave? Just remember this
Bill Taylor
Feature Writer
Lest we forget, now that our driest summer in 50 years has given us a valedictory blast of heat, this is what February was like. February in Quebec, but not a whole lot removed from what February was like on Queens' Quay, staring out across the lake to Centre Island.
It's painful just to look at this picture. It was even more painful to shoot it from the breezy deck of a ferry butting through the ice-choked St. Lawrence between Quebec City and Levis. The temperature? Minus way-too-much.
Nothing the five-person crew - so out of place on a river that, even in the depths of winter, is a perilously busy seaway - was wearing could possibly keep them properly warm or dry. The current was fast enough to make scrambling out of the boat and on to the harsh, unforgiving ice doubly perilous. An ice floe is really just a small iceberg with 90 per cent of its mass below the surface. Bigger and more dangerous than you might think, especially when it's careening along like a bus with no brakes.
In the distance, a small, blue-hulled tanker moved slowly upriver in the direction of Montreal. It's bridge was emblazoned with a huge "No Smoking" sign. A few minutes earlier, a big grey freighter had passed going the other way, heading for the ocean.
There was a tug bustling about its business, too, and two ferries criss-crossing. This was surely no place for cockleshell heroes to play, but the little green boat darted about like a demented water beetle, everyone having an uproarious time.
Local lore has it that in pre-ferry days, the mail-delivery contract went to the crew who could get across the river fastest, rowing between ice floes and dragging the boat over them. A highly competitive business. Now it's a highly competitive sport, a mainstay of Quebec's annual Winter Carnival; possibly the sport I most don't ever want to try. Alligator wrestling? Sure, bring it on.
Winter carnivals could become an endangered species. As could Canadian winters. Shovelling the walk. Weekend ski trips. Backyard shinny. Ontario icewine. Frostbite and snowboarding compound fractures. Ah, memories.
The UN World Meteorological Organization says this past winter was the warmest since record-keeping began in 1880. (Who, one wonders, first had the brainwave: "Hey let's write down the temperature today. And tomorrow and ..." And someone else must have said, "Wow, yeah, awesome!" Or words to that effect.)
According to New Scientist magazine, Britain's records go back to 1659, and last year was its warmest since then. That was the year, incidentally, that Richard Cromwell dissolved the English parliament and later resigned as the country's Lord Protector. And there was a drought in India.
Climatologists say this year could be even hotter, with a "very active" hurricane season. The ferry between St. Barbe, Nfld., and Blanc Sablon, Labrador, resumed service last spring earlier than ever before.
Last year, hardly any place in the world escaped without some weather aberration, New Scientist reports. Heat waves in Europe, the United States, Latin America and Australia (I was in Sydney on New Year's Day, 2006; the temperature hit 45 and the bush north of the city went up in flames); a crippling drought in China and its worst cyclones in years; floods in Europe, the United States and Africa, including the Sahara Desert.
In November, Vancouver had almost twice its normal average rainfall. Meanwhile, Arctic ice continues to melt at an ever-increasing rate. The U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research predicted last year that by 2040 - only 33 years from now - the Arctic Ocean could be devoid of ice.
Tourism's doing better and better, though. The European Union's recent embrace of an "open skies" policy will lower transatlantic fares, add planes and give travellers far more credit-card-friendly choices. U.S. and European airlines will be able to fly between any EU city and any American city.
As U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters put it: "Tearing down regulatory barriers allows us to foster more affordable and convenient air travel and gives our airline industry more opportunities to compete, innovate and thrive."
And pollute the hell out of the upper atmosphere.
It's expected to put tickets in to the hands of more than 26 additional people over the next five years. Airlines are scrambling to grab chunks of the new action.
This includes Virgin, whose founder, Sir Richard Branson, last year pledged the next 10 years' profits from his planes and trains - an estimated $3.5 billion - to fight global warming. More passengers, more planes, more profit, more pollution . . . That noise you hear is the jangle of irony.
We seem to be going to hell, not so much in a hand basket as in a cut-price seat on a jetliner leaving a destructive vapour trail across the more-crowded, less-friendly skies. Brown becomes the new blue and the seagulls turn tubercular and fall coughing from the air.
The diesel fashion label was quick to mount a footwear ad campaign showing such things as the Great Wall of China crossing a desert and parrots rather than pigeons in a city square, with the slogan, "Global warming ready." Cute.
One day, perhaps in our children's lifetime if not our own, winter might just be a word instead of a season. Songs about warm, woollen mittens and snowflakes that stay on your nose and eyelashes will be an incomprehensible as "Sumer is icomen in, Lhude sing cucco" to anyone who hasn't studied Chaucerian English. The cuckoo will be sweating too much to sing, anyway, loudly or not.
When Vermont has lost its maple-sugar industry to Quebec. When New York is under water, an archipelago of skyscraper tips and the Statue of Liberty's bedraggled arm, not waving but drowning. When the grapevines flourish along the St. Lawrence and we're sitting on the upturned hulls of obsolete ice-boats sipping our Chateau Frontenac or Cotes du Heights of Abraham, all we'll have left will be fading pictures like this.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Canada's Environmentally Dreadful Oil Sands
From the October 8, 2007, National section of Maclean's, an article about the toxic outcome for Alberta of the oil sands. I have always thought that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's reticence to cap emissions stems from his protectionism over the development of the oil sands in the province he is from. Apart from that, getting oil from the oil sands is a dirty business and will further ruin additional areas of that province.
Doomsday
Alberta Stands Accused
A huge fight between East and West - over the oil sands - is just starting
By Nicholas Kohler
Left unfettered, Alberta's energy sector will, by the end of this century, transform the southern part of the province into a desert and its north into a treeless, toxic swamp. Driven both by global warming and oil and gas developments, temperatures in Alberta will soar by as much as eight degrees. The Athabasca River will slow to a trickle, parching the remainder of the province's forests and encouraging them to burst into flame, generating vast quantities of CO2. "They're going to be the architects of their own destruction," says journalist William Marsden, whose new book outlines the environmental threats posed by Alberta's energy industry.
Even now, fish pulled from the Athabasca downstream of the oil sands taste of gasoline and smell of burning galoshes in the fry pan. The landscape is perforated by more than 300,000 oil and gas wells. Water in some areas to the south can be set alight with a match, likely due to coal-bed methane developments. Doctors administering to Aboriginal communities not far from the oil sands report high rates of thyroid conditions and rare diseases such as cancer of the bile duct. Some from those communities have been employed at the oil sands raking in the carcasses of ducks floating on vast pools of rotten water, the by-product of the sands' oil-extraction methods.
Such are the claims contained in Marsden's upcoming Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn't Seem to Care), which presents a scenario almost too frightening to contemplate and suggests Alberta may already be too far gone for redemption - indeed, that it is environmentally doomed. "When you start digging up an area equivalent to the state of Florida, when you start carpet-bombing your province with oil and gas wells, and at the same time, you've got global warming drying up the glaciers and your rivers - you're kind of looking at a doomsday scenario," he says. "It sounds bizarre, but it's an absolute possibility that they could be literally destroying themselves."
Marsden argues Alberta's political leadership has consistently neglected - in an almost willful, pathological way - to curb the destruction wrought by industry. Former premier Ralph Klein for years rejected placing controls on Alberta's energy sector and, according to Marsden, ordered the dismantling of oversight bodies that might have monitored the degradation, the extent of which remains somewhat unclear today as a result. Marsden charges the province with marginalizing scientists who sound warnings on the environment, quoting Rod Love, Klein's long-time chief of staff, dismissing them as "flakes."
The book is bound to enrage Alberta and its energy sector. "Why are Albertans so stupid?" Marsden asks an Alberta scientist at one point in the book. Designed to be provocative, Stupid to the Last Drop will come under intense fire as an exercise in fearmongering and West-bashing by a Montreal journalist. Yet it will be applauded by others who fear that the environment gets short shrift in Alberta. "I think it's useful to have books like that - it scares people, I guess," says David Keith, an expert on carbon capture at the University of Calgary.
Still, the fight Marsden is picking with Alberta may be a harbinger of a more titanic one to come. Alberta has become the country's economic engine - churning out money at the same time it spews huge emissions - and the rest of Canada, whether out of jealousy or genuine concern, may soon demand environmental controls be placed on the province, the country's worst industrial greenhouse gas emitter. Experts, from constitutional scholars to former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed, are predicting a battle, and at the centre of that coming feud is the issue of how far the federal government can go in controlling a resource Alberta owns. It's a fight some fear may tear Canada apart.
Known mainly for his reporting on organized crime in Canada, Marsden has written a polemic on the Alberta environment that looks at first blush to be a departure. Marsden disagrees."Frankly, I think what's going on in Alberta is a crime," he says. "You get these kinds of political factions and gangsters, almost who have literally taken over a province - and are reducing it to catastrophic shape."
The riches generated by Alberta's energy sector are astounding, the stuff of breathless business stories and promises by the likes of Prime Minister Stephen Harper that the province is on the cusp of becoming an 'energy superpower." Earlier this year, Calgary-based EnCanada earned profits of $6.4 billion, a record-breaking sum. The provincial government's last budget showed a surplus of $8.5 billion. So dynamic is Alberta's energy boom that it's become, what with Ontario's struggling manufacturing sector, the real power in the economy. Remove Alberta from the Canadian economy, some say, and the country would now be in recession.
There is no denying, however, that the wealth comes at a huge environmental cost. In a rollicking, wry style Stupid to the last Drop outlines that environmental degradation, as well as the energy industry's appetite for wild schemes. Marsden dredges up, for example, a little-known plot hatched by an American geologist in the 1950s to free oil from the tar sands by detonating a nuclear device beneath an Alberta creek, a plan that came surprisingly close to execution. And yet, Marsden argues, what is going on right now is almost as outrageous.
Consider the millions in cubic metres of water that three oil sands projects - 20 more are in the works or pending approval - extract from the Athabasca river each year. The water, which in heated form is used to melt the bitumen free of the sands, is crucial; between two and six barrels of water are required to produce a single barrel of oil. Oil sands outfits are sucking 215.2 million cubic metres of water a year, twice what's required for the city of Calgary. Extractions form the Athabasca could triple in the next decade.
As a result of both global warming, which is melting the mountain glaciers that nourish Alberta's waterways, and oil sands extractions, flow in the Athabasca has been reduced by 30 per cent since 9170. By 2020, the oil sands could use as much as half the river's flow in winter, a time when it is at its lowest ebb and fish populations are most stressed. At such levels, says the Pembina Institute's Chris Severson-Baker, "You run the risk of killing the ecosystem." More, Marsden cites scientific research that suggests the 20th century was unusually kind to Alberta in water terms - a desert in its south is a real possibility, he says and warns that industry may be taking advantage of a natural anomaly.
Alberta's oil sands operations also struggle with the problem of what to do with the water once it's been used. Only eight per cent can be made sufficiently clean to go back to the Athabasca. The rest stagnates in huge ponds. "Birds that land on them never take off," David Schindler, an ecologist at the University of Alberta, told Maclean's. Oil sands operators now float buoys in the ponds equipped with hard-hat-wearing scarecrows and propane cannons, whose booming sounds are designed to prevent the water fowl from landing.
Consumption of natural gas, another critical oil sands ingredient, also boggles the mind. By the end of 2005, the industry's daily consumption could heat 3.2 million homes for a day. Marsden notes that present consumption could triple in the oil sands by 2015. Environmentalists have long decried the absurdity of wasting such huge quantities of reasonably clean energy to extract dirtier oil.
Then there's the question of greenhouse gas emissions. The Sierra Club of Canada says oil sands operations spewed 23.3 megatonnes of them in 2000 - about three per cent of Canada's total emissions. Those emissions are predicted to rise between 57 and 97 megatonnes by 2015, making the oil sands Canada's largest single contributor to global warming. The University of Calgary's Keith says the province is responsible for roughly 36 per cent of Canada's CO2 emissions, though most originate in the electrical power industry (the most significant emitters of any industry countrywide). Alberta, Keith points out is "only 11 per cent of the population - it's pretty asymmetric."
The projects are at the same time decimating Albert'a northern boreal forest, which forms an umbrella above a vast, metres-thick deposit of peat, a carbon sink that begins bleeding CO2 into the atmosphere upon excavation. "The boreal forest per unit area actually contains more carbon than the Amazon does," Schindler says. Adds Severson-Baker: "The public has been really focused on the critical role of the tropical rainforest, but the boreal forest plays a similar role" in regulating the earth's climate. The remainder of the boreal forest will soon become a tinderbox of forest fire activity due to a global warming-related pine beetle infestation and an increasingly dry Alberta, Marsden says. The Canadian Forest Service says global-warming models show the area burned by forest fires will double over the next century. High forest fire years already spew emissions equal to 90 per cent of industrial emissions, says Schindler.
It's a startling litany of environmental abuse. but some in Alberta point out that the province has already begun meeting these challenges by bringing in green legislation earlier this year more stringent than federal law. Others believe Marsden's Armageddon won't happen because industry will become cleaner through innovation. "We have a history of meeting those challenges," says Calgary-based Annette Hester, of the Centre for International Governance Innovation. "If it wasn't for meeting those challenges, we would never have an oil sands development in the first place." Oil sands outfits are required by the province to plan for land restoration. And cleaner and more efficient practices - carbon sequestration that buries CO2 or nuclear power as a replacement for natural gas - are in the offing.
Nor does Keith believe doomsday scenarios like those presented by Marsden. Though effects like an eight-degree rise in temperature - one potential outcome included in the book - are possible, "that prediction is contingent on people's choices," says Keith. "My actual prediction is, we won't get close to that." He adds: "Do we have serious environmental problems? Of course. is it true that eventually we will have to close down the entire industry here - the entire industry of producing oil for putting in cars - because of environmental concerns? At some level yeah. Is there going to be a desert? No."
But Marsden believes the future he describes should persuade Alberta to halt further oil sands developments. "I think that you have to put a moratorium on any further growth in the oil sands until that province really figures out where it wants to go," he says. "Then the people of the province - and the people of Canada, too because these are vital resources for all of Canada - can decide how they want to proceed on this." Although such a suggestion may be blasphemous to some - particularly in Alberta - no less a figure than former premier Peter Lougheed has called for a slowdown, in part to study how the oil sands developments are effecting the environment.
Marsden has another point to make. Driving the breakneck pace of Alberta's oil boom, he says, is Canada's commitments to the U.S. under the North America Free Trade Agreement, which he says promises the U.S. an inordinate amount of our oil. Marsden, in effect, argues Canada has sold its soul. "We have ourselves in a corner over NAFTA," says Marsden, "because we've surrendered soverignty over our energy." Stupid to the Last Drop has Lougheed, who helped negotiate NAFTA, predicting that the U.S. will manhandle Canada fiercely should China or India, say, make grabs for a share of the sands. Paraphrasing Lougheed, he writes: Alberta under Ralph Klein...essentially surrendered its control over its resources to the free market, and the Americans have walked in and taken control."
Now Alberta's resource-development surge has put it on a collision course with central Canada's devotion to Kyoto. Lougheed, who predicted this clash of interests in a speech last month in Calgary, warned that Canada's very national fabric could be threatened when Alberta's desire to exploit its resources conflicts with any renewed federal government push to regulate them.
Doomsday
Alberta Stands Accused
A huge fight between East and West - over the oil sands - is just starting
By Nicholas Kohler
Left unfettered, Alberta's energy sector will, by the end of this century, transform the southern part of the province into a desert and its north into a treeless, toxic swamp. Driven both by global warming and oil and gas developments, temperatures in Alberta will soar by as much as eight degrees. The Athabasca River will slow to a trickle, parching the remainder of the province's forests and encouraging them to burst into flame, generating vast quantities of CO2. "They're going to be the architects of their own destruction," says journalist William Marsden, whose new book outlines the environmental threats posed by Alberta's energy industry.
Even now, fish pulled from the Athabasca downstream of the oil sands taste of gasoline and smell of burning galoshes in the fry pan. The landscape is perforated by more than 300,000 oil and gas wells. Water in some areas to the south can be set alight with a match, likely due to coal-bed methane developments. Doctors administering to Aboriginal communities not far from the oil sands report high rates of thyroid conditions and rare diseases such as cancer of the bile duct. Some from those communities have been employed at the oil sands raking in the carcasses of ducks floating on vast pools of rotten water, the by-product of the sands' oil-extraction methods.
Such are the claims contained in Marsden's upcoming Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn't Seem to Care), which presents a scenario almost too frightening to contemplate and suggests Alberta may already be too far gone for redemption - indeed, that it is environmentally doomed. "When you start digging up an area equivalent to the state of Florida, when you start carpet-bombing your province with oil and gas wells, and at the same time, you've got global warming drying up the glaciers and your rivers - you're kind of looking at a doomsday scenario," he says. "It sounds bizarre, but it's an absolute possibility that they could be literally destroying themselves."
Marsden argues Alberta's political leadership has consistently neglected - in an almost willful, pathological way - to curb the destruction wrought by industry. Former premier Ralph Klein for years rejected placing controls on Alberta's energy sector and, according to Marsden, ordered the dismantling of oversight bodies that might have monitored the degradation, the extent of which remains somewhat unclear today as a result. Marsden charges the province with marginalizing scientists who sound warnings on the environment, quoting Rod Love, Klein's long-time chief of staff, dismissing them as "flakes."
The book is bound to enrage Alberta and its energy sector. "Why are Albertans so stupid?" Marsden asks an Alberta scientist at one point in the book. Designed to be provocative, Stupid to the Last Drop will come under intense fire as an exercise in fearmongering and West-bashing by a Montreal journalist. Yet it will be applauded by others who fear that the environment gets short shrift in Alberta. "I think it's useful to have books like that - it scares people, I guess," says David Keith, an expert on carbon capture at the University of Calgary.
Still, the fight Marsden is picking with Alberta may be a harbinger of a more titanic one to come. Alberta has become the country's economic engine - churning out money at the same time it spews huge emissions - and the rest of Canada, whether out of jealousy or genuine concern, may soon demand environmental controls be placed on the province, the country's worst industrial greenhouse gas emitter. Experts, from constitutional scholars to former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed, are predicting a battle, and at the centre of that coming feud is the issue of how far the federal government can go in controlling a resource Alberta owns. It's a fight some fear may tear Canada apart.
Known mainly for his reporting on organized crime in Canada, Marsden has written a polemic on the Alberta environment that looks at first blush to be a departure. Marsden disagrees."Frankly, I think what's going on in Alberta is a crime," he says. "You get these kinds of political factions and gangsters, almost who have literally taken over a province - and are reducing it to catastrophic shape."
The riches generated by Alberta's energy sector are astounding, the stuff of breathless business stories and promises by the likes of Prime Minister Stephen Harper that the province is on the cusp of becoming an 'energy superpower." Earlier this year, Calgary-based EnCanada earned profits of $6.4 billion, a record-breaking sum. The provincial government's last budget showed a surplus of $8.5 billion. So dynamic is Alberta's energy boom that it's become, what with Ontario's struggling manufacturing sector, the real power in the economy. Remove Alberta from the Canadian economy, some say, and the country would now be in recession.
There is no denying, however, that the wealth comes at a huge environmental cost. In a rollicking, wry style Stupid to the last Drop outlines that environmental degradation, as well as the energy industry's appetite for wild schemes. Marsden dredges up, for example, a little-known plot hatched by an American geologist in the 1950s to free oil from the tar sands by detonating a nuclear device beneath an Alberta creek, a plan that came surprisingly close to execution. And yet, Marsden argues, what is going on right now is almost as outrageous.
Consider the millions in cubic metres of water that three oil sands projects - 20 more are in the works or pending approval - extract from the Athabasca river each year. The water, which in heated form is used to melt the bitumen free of the sands, is crucial; between two and six barrels of water are required to produce a single barrel of oil. Oil sands outfits are sucking 215.2 million cubic metres of water a year, twice what's required for the city of Calgary. Extractions form the Athabasca could triple in the next decade.
As a result of both global warming, which is melting the mountain glaciers that nourish Alberta's waterways, and oil sands extractions, flow in the Athabasca has been reduced by 30 per cent since 9170. By 2020, the oil sands could use as much as half the river's flow in winter, a time when it is at its lowest ebb and fish populations are most stressed. At such levels, says the Pembina Institute's Chris Severson-Baker, "You run the risk of killing the ecosystem." More, Marsden cites scientific research that suggests the 20th century was unusually kind to Alberta in water terms - a desert in its south is a real possibility, he says and warns that industry may be taking advantage of a natural anomaly.
Alberta's oil sands operations also struggle with the problem of what to do with the water once it's been used. Only eight per cent can be made sufficiently clean to go back to the Athabasca. The rest stagnates in huge ponds. "Birds that land on them never take off," David Schindler, an ecologist at the University of Alberta, told Maclean's. Oil sands operators now float buoys in the ponds equipped with hard-hat-wearing scarecrows and propane cannons, whose booming sounds are designed to prevent the water fowl from landing.
Consumption of natural gas, another critical oil sands ingredient, also boggles the mind. By the end of 2005, the industry's daily consumption could heat 3.2 million homes for a day. Marsden notes that present consumption could triple in the oil sands by 2015. Environmentalists have long decried the absurdity of wasting such huge quantities of reasonably clean energy to extract dirtier oil.
Then there's the question of greenhouse gas emissions. The Sierra Club of Canada says oil sands operations spewed 23.3 megatonnes of them in 2000 - about three per cent of Canada's total emissions. Those emissions are predicted to rise between 57 and 97 megatonnes by 2015, making the oil sands Canada's largest single contributor to global warming. The University of Calgary's Keith says the province is responsible for roughly 36 per cent of Canada's CO2 emissions, though most originate in the electrical power industry (the most significant emitters of any industry countrywide). Alberta, Keith points out is "only 11 per cent of the population - it's pretty asymmetric."
The projects are at the same time decimating Albert'a northern boreal forest, which forms an umbrella above a vast, metres-thick deposit of peat, a carbon sink that begins bleeding CO2 into the atmosphere upon excavation. "The boreal forest per unit area actually contains more carbon than the Amazon does," Schindler says. Adds Severson-Baker: "The public has been really focused on the critical role of the tropical rainforest, but the boreal forest plays a similar role" in regulating the earth's climate. The remainder of the boreal forest will soon become a tinderbox of forest fire activity due to a global warming-related pine beetle infestation and an increasingly dry Alberta, Marsden says. The Canadian Forest Service says global-warming models show the area burned by forest fires will double over the next century. High forest fire years already spew emissions equal to 90 per cent of industrial emissions, says Schindler.
It's a startling litany of environmental abuse. but some in Alberta point out that the province has already begun meeting these challenges by bringing in green legislation earlier this year more stringent than federal law. Others believe Marsden's Armageddon won't happen because industry will become cleaner through innovation. "We have a history of meeting those challenges," says Calgary-based Annette Hester, of the Centre for International Governance Innovation. "If it wasn't for meeting those challenges, we would never have an oil sands development in the first place." Oil sands outfits are required by the province to plan for land restoration. And cleaner and more efficient practices - carbon sequestration that buries CO2 or nuclear power as a replacement for natural gas - are in the offing.
Nor does Keith believe doomsday scenarios like those presented by Marsden. Though effects like an eight-degree rise in temperature - one potential outcome included in the book - are possible, "that prediction is contingent on people's choices," says Keith. "My actual prediction is, we won't get close to that." He adds: "Do we have serious environmental problems? Of course. is it true that eventually we will have to close down the entire industry here - the entire industry of producing oil for putting in cars - because of environmental concerns? At some level yeah. Is there going to be a desert? No."
But Marsden believes the future he describes should persuade Alberta to halt further oil sands developments. "I think that you have to put a moratorium on any further growth in the oil sands until that province really figures out where it wants to go," he says. "Then the people of the province - and the people of Canada, too because these are vital resources for all of Canada - can decide how they want to proceed on this." Although such a suggestion may be blasphemous to some - particularly in Alberta - no less a figure than former premier Peter Lougheed has called for a slowdown, in part to study how the oil sands developments are effecting the environment.
Marsden has another point to make. Driving the breakneck pace of Alberta's oil boom, he says, is Canada's commitments to the U.S. under the North America Free Trade Agreement, which he says promises the U.S. an inordinate amount of our oil. Marsden, in effect, argues Canada has sold its soul. "We have ourselves in a corner over NAFTA," says Marsden, "because we've surrendered soverignty over our energy." Stupid to the Last Drop has Lougheed, who helped negotiate NAFTA, predicting that the U.S. will manhandle Canada fiercely should China or India, say, make grabs for a share of the sands. Paraphrasing Lougheed, he writes: Alberta under Ralph Klein...essentially surrendered its control over its resources to the free market, and the Americans have walked in and taken control."
Now Alberta's resource-development surge has put it on a collision course with central Canada's devotion to Kyoto. Lougheed, who predicted this clash of interests in a speech last month in Calgary, warned that Canada's very national fabric could be threatened when Alberta's desire to exploit its resources conflicts with any renewed federal government push to regulate them.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Emissions Cap and Trade in the U.S. North-East States
There are ten north-eastern American states that are now part of a greenhouse gas emission cap and trade system. From the November 17th-23rd United States section of The Economist, www.economist.com, page 36:
Cap-and-trade in the north-east
EMBRACING REGGIE
A scheme that tries to avoid Europe's mistakes
Could America's first experiment with a cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gases go awry? That is the fear of some observers of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), an agreement among ten north-eastern states to cut emissions from power plants by 10% between 2009 and 2018.
The states in question formed RGGI (pronounced "Reggie") out of despair at the federal government's failure to tackle emissions growth. Some states in the West and midwest are working on similar schemes. But RGGI will be the first to start up: emissions will be capped from January 1st 2009.
RGGI's designers hope to avoid some of the flaws that have dogged the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), the European Union's ongoing experiment with cap-and-trade, European governments handed out emissions permits to existing power plants and factories free of charge; that turned out to be a windfall for big polluters, who were able to sell on unneeded permits for huge profits.
Moreover, it gradually become clear that governments had handed out too many permits, causing their price to fall to almost nothing in the first phase of the scheme, which ends this year. If permits are so cheap, why cut emissions?
Under RGGI, by contrast, state governments will auction almost all permits. But Veronique Bugnion of Point Carbon, an energy consultancy, suspects that - at the start of the scheme, at least - there may be more permits on offer than utilities need, thanks to a recent contraction in the RGGI states' emissions. During the early years of the decade, when RGGI's emissions cap was being set, the price of oil was relatively low. It has since risen sharply, not only in absolute terms but also relative to natural gas. That has led utilities to use more gas and less oil for power generation in the RGGI states; and since gas-fired generation produces fewer emissions than the oil-fired sort, overall emissions form the RGGI states have fallen too.
RGGI's permits, unlike those of the ETS, are valid for the lifetime of the scheme. So firms will have an incentive to buy up any excess during the early years for use later on, when the cap begins to fall. That might help to prevent an embarrassing price crash like Europe's. RGGI states are also considering setting a reserve when they auction permits.
But even if these measures succeed, it remains true that RGGI covers a relatively small area in which unusual weather, the refurbishment of a few big power stations or the opening of a new transmission line for imported power could move the whole market. The correct response to any teething pains RGGI may suffer, its defenders say, is not to curb the scheme but to expand it.
Cap-and-trade in the north-east
EMBRACING REGGIE
A scheme that tries to avoid Europe's mistakes
Could America's first experiment with a cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gases go awry? That is the fear of some observers of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), an agreement among ten north-eastern states to cut emissions from power plants by 10% between 2009 and 2018.
The states in question formed RGGI (pronounced "Reggie") out of despair at the federal government's failure to tackle emissions growth. Some states in the West and midwest are working on similar schemes. But RGGI will be the first to start up: emissions will be capped from January 1st 2009.
RGGI's designers hope to avoid some of the flaws that have dogged the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), the European Union's ongoing experiment with cap-and-trade, European governments handed out emissions permits to existing power plants and factories free of charge; that turned out to be a windfall for big polluters, who were able to sell on unneeded permits for huge profits.
Moreover, it gradually become clear that governments had handed out too many permits, causing their price to fall to almost nothing in the first phase of the scheme, which ends this year. If permits are so cheap, why cut emissions?
Under RGGI, by contrast, state governments will auction almost all permits. But Veronique Bugnion of Point Carbon, an energy consultancy, suspects that - at the start of the scheme, at least - there may be more permits on offer than utilities need, thanks to a recent contraction in the RGGI states' emissions. During the early years of the decade, when RGGI's emissions cap was being set, the price of oil was relatively low. It has since risen sharply, not only in absolute terms but also relative to natural gas. That has led utilities to use more gas and less oil for power generation in the RGGI states; and since gas-fired generation produces fewer emissions than the oil-fired sort, overall emissions form the RGGI states have fallen too.
RGGI's permits, unlike those of the ETS, are valid for the lifetime of the scheme. So firms will have an incentive to buy up any excess during the early years for use later on, when the cap begins to fall. That might help to prevent an embarrassing price crash like Europe's. RGGI states are also considering setting a reserve when they auction permits.
But even if these measures succeed, it remains true that RGGI covers a relatively small area in which unusual weather, the refurbishment of a few big power stations or the opening of a new transmission line for imported power could move the whole market. The correct response to any teething pains RGGI may suffer, its defenders say, is not to curb the scheme but to expand it.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Amazon Deforestation
From the October 15, 2007, Environment section of Maclean's magazine, pages 86-88:
Environment
FIRE IN THE AMAZON
Brazil says less rainforest is disappearing, but deforestation is continuing at an alarming rate
by Isabel Vincent
When Brazil's President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva addressed the United Nations General Assembly last month, he certainly wanted to come across as one of the world's "green" leaders. He pushed biofuels, and pledged Rio de Janeiro as a venue for a global environmental conference in 2012. Near the top of his agenda was trying to end deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. To this end, he said, his government was working hard, and in the last three years the rate of deforestation in the Amazon region has been cut in half.
Taken on its own, the figure may seem to be a tremendous accomplishment for Lula's centre-left Workers Party government, which had made ecology one of its cornerstones during this first term in office, beginning in October 2002. But when you consider that, under the Lula government, deforestation in the Amazon reached its highest level ever, the Workers Party ecological records starts to look incredibly grim. "What Lula is saying now that after deforestation reached a peak in his first three years of government, it is slowing down," says Roberto Smeraldi, director of Friends of the Earth's Sao Paulo chapter, which focuses its efforts on the Amazon. "You have to read this in context, because during his time in office it went up higher than it ever had, and on average it is still higher than at any other time in the past."
Already, fully 20 per cent of the Amazon rainforest has been lost to deforestation, experts say. Between July 2005 and July 2006, 14,000 square km of forest disappeared as ranchers and others slashed and burned vegetation in order to make way for agribusiness ventures, such as cattle raising and soy bean production (in the Amazon, the cattle population is increasing by more than two million head per year - a huge threat). The year before, 21,000 square km of rainforest were lost. In 2005, parts of the Amazon also experienced the worst drought the forest has seen in a century. Scientists say that if the trend continues, the Amazon rainforest will start to die.
As it is, the burning of the Amazon in Brazil has made the country the third-largest source for carbon emissions in the world, after China and the United States. Moreover, scientists say that information on the reduction of deforestation is still very partial and unclear, and they are waiting for satellite images scheduled to be released at the end of the year, in order to make up their minds on whether deforestation has indeed dipped by 50 per cent. But what remains clear, Smeraldi says, is that "a huge area of forest is being converted every year in the Amazon, beyond any social and economic rationale."
Globally, that is a huge concern. Recently, diplomat Hans Blix, the former head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and inspection Commission, called global warming "a greater long-term threat to mankind than weapons of mass destruction.' He said that "a vital part of tackling the problem is to halt the destruction of tropical rainforests as a matter of urgency." Scientists and environmentalists around the world agree, and consider the preservation of the Amazon of vital importance. Recently, a group of them began the Forests Now Declaration from Brazil to Bali, an initiative that calls on governments to take urgent action on deforestation in the tropics, which contributes up to 25 per cent of global carbon emissions, second only to the use of fossil fuels. The declaration, which is being signed by leaders and environmentalists around the world, will be presented to the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bali in December.
But the destruction of the Amazon also has a very direct regional environmental impact. "We're all obsessed with carbon emissions, but if I were Lula, i would be concerned about rainfall l and the disruption in trade winds that are resulting from Amazon deforestation," says Hilton Philipson, a trustee of the Global Canopy Program and a force behind the Forests Now Declaration in London. "If you take away the moderating influence of the forest, you get stronger upswellings of hotter air, rains are more powerful, and there will be more violent weather patterns originating in the Amazon basin." Already, scientists have blamed an upsurge in hurricanes in the Caribbean on deforestation in the Amazon. The strong force of hurricanes such as Katrina are also blamed on problems originating in the Amazon rainforest, they say.
But what to do about an area that environmentalists are lobbying to keep untouched - and which many Brazilian administrations have seemed eager to develop and exploit? As lula himself noted during his first year in office, "This region cannot be treated like it was something from another world, untouchable, in which the people don't have the right to the benefits." Ever the pragmatist, Lula set about pledging to complete work on such projects as the BR-163, a highway connecting the central farming state of Mato Grosso with the Amazon region, so that soy beans can be easily transported for export to the iver port of Santarem. Also under development is the Transoceanic Highway, a continuation of the TransAmazon Highway, which will link the town of Rio Branco in the deep Amazon to Perus' Pacific ports. Environmentalists fear that in two years, when the road is scheduled to be completed, there will be an asphalted connection linking the Amazon region to the Pacific and China, which is keen to improve its access to the forest.
"I'm not in the game of blame, but it seems to be that the structure of the world economy is not giving Brazil a chance," says Philipson. Favourable world-market grain and beef prices actually increase deforestation in the Amazon as ranchers seek to expand their productivity and burn more forest to accommodate more cattle. Last week, Lula also announced plans to plant sugar cane in devastated forest areas in order to increase Brazil's production of ethanol (the country's vehicles have been running on ethanol for more than 30 years and Brazil is a world leader in the production of biofuels). It was a move that brought further criticism. "Lula is presenting himself to the world as a mascot for biofuels rather than as a statesmen for ecology," said Marcelo Leite, a political columnist writing in the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper.
Environmental critics fear that farming and infrastructure projects will only bring more development to the Amazon, as speculators occupy land when it is still cheap, before highways are paved or other projects such as dams are built. But Philipson notes that Lula has done some good in the Amazon, especially by demarcating the 17,000-square-km Raposa Serra do Sol native reservation in the Amazon state of Roraima in 2005. And he says the answer to the preservation of rainforests around the world is simple: money. If you want to save the rainforest, pay the Brazilian government for "environmental services," and treat the forest as "a giant utility." Insurance companies, for example, ubiquitous around the world, could be taxed and the money sent to governments to administer tropical forests. "There is a whole new industry there in the export of environmental services to the world," says Philipson. "The only way we are going to save the forest is money, and the recognition that the forest delivers environmental services to mankind."
Brazilian scientists Antonio Bonato Nobre agrees. A federal researcher with the National Institute for Amazon Research, he says every hectare that is currently being used for agri-business in the Amazon yields US$22 per year. "If we could find a way of ascribing more than $22, we don't have to worry about anything, the forest will be protected," he said, adding that at least one Amazon governor is behind the plan and has already started telling other politicians they could earn more money under a scheme to leave the forest alone. "What is happening to the Amazon is not the fault of the Brazilian government, but of the international economic system," says Nobre. "Money talks because people are selfish. Everything else is hypocrisy,and it won't protect the standing forests."
Environment
FIRE IN THE AMAZON
Brazil says less rainforest is disappearing, but deforestation is continuing at an alarming rate
by Isabel Vincent
When Brazil's President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva addressed the United Nations General Assembly last month, he certainly wanted to come across as one of the world's "green" leaders. He pushed biofuels, and pledged Rio de Janeiro as a venue for a global environmental conference in 2012. Near the top of his agenda was trying to end deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. To this end, he said, his government was working hard, and in the last three years the rate of deforestation in the Amazon region has been cut in half.
Taken on its own, the figure may seem to be a tremendous accomplishment for Lula's centre-left Workers Party government, which had made ecology one of its cornerstones during this first term in office, beginning in October 2002. But when you consider that, under the Lula government, deforestation in the Amazon reached its highest level ever, the Workers Party ecological records starts to look incredibly grim. "What Lula is saying now that after deforestation reached a peak in his first three years of government, it is slowing down," says Roberto Smeraldi, director of Friends of the Earth's Sao Paulo chapter, which focuses its efforts on the Amazon. "You have to read this in context, because during his time in office it went up higher than it ever had, and on average it is still higher than at any other time in the past."
Already, fully 20 per cent of the Amazon rainforest has been lost to deforestation, experts say. Between July 2005 and July 2006, 14,000 square km of forest disappeared as ranchers and others slashed and burned vegetation in order to make way for agribusiness ventures, such as cattle raising and soy bean production (in the Amazon, the cattle population is increasing by more than two million head per year - a huge threat). The year before, 21,000 square km of rainforest were lost. In 2005, parts of the Amazon also experienced the worst drought the forest has seen in a century. Scientists say that if the trend continues, the Amazon rainforest will start to die.
As it is, the burning of the Amazon in Brazil has made the country the third-largest source for carbon emissions in the world, after China and the United States. Moreover, scientists say that information on the reduction of deforestation is still very partial and unclear, and they are waiting for satellite images scheduled to be released at the end of the year, in order to make up their minds on whether deforestation has indeed dipped by 50 per cent. But what remains clear, Smeraldi says, is that "a huge area of forest is being converted every year in the Amazon, beyond any social and economic rationale."
Globally, that is a huge concern. Recently, diplomat Hans Blix, the former head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and inspection Commission, called global warming "a greater long-term threat to mankind than weapons of mass destruction.' He said that "a vital part of tackling the problem is to halt the destruction of tropical rainforests as a matter of urgency." Scientists and environmentalists around the world agree, and consider the preservation of the Amazon of vital importance. Recently, a group of them began the Forests Now Declaration from Brazil to Bali, an initiative that calls on governments to take urgent action on deforestation in the tropics, which contributes up to 25 per cent of global carbon emissions, second only to the use of fossil fuels. The declaration, which is being signed by leaders and environmentalists around the world, will be presented to the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bali in December.
But the destruction of the Amazon also has a very direct regional environmental impact. "We're all obsessed with carbon emissions, but if I were Lula, i would be concerned about rainfall l and the disruption in trade winds that are resulting from Amazon deforestation," says Hilton Philipson, a trustee of the Global Canopy Program and a force behind the Forests Now Declaration in London. "If you take away the moderating influence of the forest, you get stronger upswellings of hotter air, rains are more powerful, and there will be more violent weather patterns originating in the Amazon basin." Already, scientists have blamed an upsurge in hurricanes in the Caribbean on deforestation in the Amazon. The strong force of hurricanes such as Katrina are also blamed on problems originating in the Amazon rainforest, they say.
But what to do about an area that environmentalists are lobbying to keep untouched - and which many Brazilian administrations have seemed eager to develop and exploit? As lula himself noted during his first year in office, "This region cannot be treated like it was something from another world, untouchable, in which the people don't have the right to the benefits." Ever the pragmatist, Lula set about pledging to complete work on such projects as the BR-163, a highway connecting the central farming state of Mato Grosso with the Amazon region, so that soy beans can be easily transported for export to the iver port of Santarem. Also under development is the Transoceanic Highway, a continuation of the TransAmazon Highway, which will link the town of Rio Branco in the deep Amazon to Perus' Pacific ports. Environmentalists fear that in two years, when the road is scheduled to be completed, there will be an asphalted connection linking the Amazon region to the Pacific and China, which is keen to improve its access to the forest.
"I'm not in the game of blame, but it seems to be that the structure of the world economy is not giving Brazil a chance," says Philipson. Favourable world-market grain and beef prices actually increase deforestation in the Amazon as ranchers seek to expand their productivity and burn more forest to accommodate more cattle. Last week, Lula also announced plans to plant sugar cane in devastated forest areas in order to increase Brazil's production of ethanol (the country's vehicles have been running on ethanol for more than 30 years and Brazil is a world leader in the production of biofuels). It was a move that brought further criticism. "Lula is presenting himself to the world as a mascot for biofuels rather than as a statesmen for ecology," said Marcelo Leite, a political columnist writing in the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper.
Environmental critics fear that farming and infrastructure projects will only bring more development to the Amazon, as speculators occupy land when it is still cheap, before highways are paved or other projects such as dams are built. But Philipson notes that Lula has done some good in the Amazon, especially by demarcating the 17,000-square-km Raposa Serra do Sol native reservation in the Amazon state of Roraima in 2005. And he says the answer to the preservation of rainforests around the world is simple: money. If you want to save the rainforest, pay the Brazilian government for "environmental services," and treat the forest as "a giant utility." Insurance companies, for example, ubiquitous around the world, could be taxed and the money sent to governments to administer tropical forests. "There is a whole new industry there in the export of environmental services to the world," says Philipson. "The only way we are going to save the forest is money, and the recognition that the forest delivers environmental services to mankind."
Brazilian scientists Antonio Bonato Nobre agrees. A federal researcher with the National Institute for Amazon Research, he says every hectare that is currently being used for agri-business in the Amazon yields US$22 per year. "If we could find a way of ascribing more than $22, we don't have to worry about anything, the forest will be protected," he said, adding that at least one Amazon governor is behind the plan and has already started telling other politicians they could earn more money under a scheme to leave the forest alone. "What is happening to the Amazon is not the fault of the Brazilian government, but of the international economic system," says Nobre. "Money talks because people are selfish. Everything else is hypocrisy,and it won't protect the standing forests."
Friday, December 7, 2007
Climate Change Affects Children More
This article about the adverse affects global warming will have on children is from the Stop Global Warming website, http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/sgw_read.asp?id=12391410292007:
Global warming may hit kids harder, pediatrics group says
by: Marilyn Elias 29 October 2007
Global warming is likely to disproportionately harm the health of children, and politicians should launch "aggressive policies" to curb climate change, the American Academy of Pediatrics said today.
In the first major report about the unique effects of global warming on kids, U.S. pediatricians also were advised to "educate" elected officials about the coming dangers.
There's evidence that children are likely to suffer more than adults from climate change, says the report's lead author, Katherine Shea, a pediatrician and adjunct public health professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
"We already have change, and certain bad things are going to happen no matter what we do," Shea says. "But we can prevent things from getting even worse. We don't have the luxury of waiting."
More greenhouse gases and a warming Earth will leave children particularly vulnerable in several ways, the report says:
•Air pollution does more damage to children's lungs, causing asthma and respiratory ailments, because their lungs are still developing, they breathe at a higher rate than adults and are outdoors more.
•Waterborne infections, such as diarrhea and other gastrointestinal problems, hit children especially hard. These infections rise sharply with more rain, which is expected as the climate warms.
•As mosquitoes are able to move to higher ground, the malaria zone is expanding. Kids are especially vulnerable; 75% of malaria deaths occur in children younger than 5.
The report briefly mentions that mass migrations are expected as regions become uninhabitable. "Children fare very poorly in these major population shifts," says Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and president of the Children's Health Fund. "They're more fragile medically and nutritionally," says Redlener, who wasn't involved with the report. "They're less resilient, less likely to survive."
No matter what the risks, the pediatrics academy shouldn't be sending its members out to lobby, argues Janice Crouse, director of a think tank affiliated with Concerned Women for America, a conservative public policy group. "Let them issue a scientific report, and people can judge whether it has validity. For a scientific group to use children as a means of advancing a political agenda is beyond the pale," she says.
Julie Gerberding, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, briefed a Senate committee on the health risks of global warming last week. She mentioned increasing asthma, malaria and waterborne diseases but not children's vulnerability.
The Associated Press reported that Gerberding's speech was "eviscerated" by the White House, but CDC spokesman Tom Skinner denied it, adding that Gerberding said everything she wanted to say without constraint.
"This is not a political issue, it's a public health issue," Shea says. "If we know the health of children and future children is threatened, we have an obligation to act."
Global warming may hit kids harder, pediatrics group says
by: Marilyn Elias 29 October 2007
Global warming is likely to disproportionately harm the health of children, and politicians should launch "aggressive policies" to curb climate change, the American Academy of Pediatrics said today.
In the first major report about the unique effects of global warming on kids, U.S. pediatricians also were advised to "educate" elected officials about the coming dangers.
There's evidence that children are likely to suffer more than adults from climate change, says the report's lead author, Katherine Shea, a pediatrician and adjunct public health professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
"We already have change, and certain bad things are going to happen no matter what we do," Shea says. "But we can prevent things from getting even worse. We don't have the luxury of waiting."
More greenhouse gases and a warming Earth will leave children particularly vulnerable in several ways, the report says:
•Air pollution does more damage to children's lungs, causing asthma and respiratory ailments, because their lungs are still developing, they breathe at a higher rate than adults and are outdoors more.
•Waterborne infections, such as diarrhea and other gastrointestinal problems, hit children especially hard. These infections rise sharply with more rain, which is expected as the climate warms.
•As mosquitoes are able to move to higher ground, the malaria zone is expanding. Kids are especially vulnerable; 75% of malaria deaths occur in children younger than 5.
The report briefly mentions that mass migrations are expected as regions become uninhabitable. "Children fare very poorly in these major population shifts," says Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and president of the Children's Health Fund. "They're more fragile medically and nutritionally," says Redlener, who wasn't involved with the report. "They're less resilient, less likely to survive."
No matter what the risks, the pediatrics academy shouldn't be sending its members out to lobby, argues Janice Crouse, director of a think tank affiliated with Concerned Women for America, a conservative public policy group. "Let them issue a scientific report, and people can judge whether it has validity. For a scientific group to use children as a means of advancing a political agenda is beyond the pale," she says.
Julie Gerberding, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, briefed a Senate committee on the health risks of global warming last week. She mentioned increasing asthma, malaria and waterborne diseases but not children's vulnerability.
The Associated Press reported that Gerberding's speech was "eviscerated" by the White House, but CDC spokesman Tom Skinner denied it, adding that Gerberding said everything she wanted to say without constraint.
"This is not a political issue, it's a public health issue," Shea says. "If we know the health of children and future children is threatened, we have an obligation to act."
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Permafrost Scientists
Global warming means lots of things happening for the permafrost scientists. Here is an article from the Saturday, November 24, 2007, Ideas section, Toronto Star, page ID5:
COLD COMFORT: THIS SCIENCE IS A NOT-SO-HOT CAREER CHOICE
Permafrost scientists are a rare breed in Canada. The modest pay has something to do with that. So does the nature of the work. When not drilling holes in intense cold, permafrost scientists are drilling holes in stifling heat that excites blackflies and mosquitoes.
Permafrost scientists are such brutes for punishment that Peter Kershaw of the University of Alberta recently was named to Popular Science magazine's "Ten Worst Jobs in Science" list.
He finished just ahead of the orangutan pee collector in Borneo and two places behind the human semen washer in Los Angeles.
The honours aren't all dubious. Kershaw was also named Earthwatch's Principal Investigator of the Year in 2005 for his research on permafrost in the Mackenzie Mountains and on the Hudson Bay coast of northern Manitoba. He was up against 130 scientists from around the world.
Steve Blasco, a marine geophysicist with the Geological Survey, has also won accolades from his work. He was named chief scientist on a joint Canada, U.S. and Russian scientific/commercial expedition to film the Titanic.
Blasco says it helps to be a little crazy to do what he and his colleagues do.
In an effort to maintain their sanity in difficult work conditions some permafrost scientists have invented unusual field games. In Page Watch, for example, the goal is to kill as many mosquitoes and blackflies as possible by slamming shut a book. Although Blasco personally loves the heat, his work sends him to the western Arctic where he identifies and maps mud volcanoes and ice scour lines along possible shipping and pipeline routes. It's not easy trying to figure out what the ocean floor looks like when you're legally blind - as Blasco is.
"But then again," he quips, "no one knew what it looked like when I started in this business, so I was no worse off."
Ed Struzik
Atkinson Fellow
COLD COMFORT: THIS SCIENCE IS A NOT-SO-HOT CAREER CHOICE
Permafrost scientists are a rare breed in Canada. The modest pay has something to do with that. So does the nature of the work. When not drilling holes in intense cold, permafrost scientists are drilling holes in stifling heat that excites blackflies and mosquitoes.
Permafrost scientists are such brutes for punishment that Peter Kershaw of the University of Alberta recently was named to Popular Science magazine's "Ten Worst Jobs in Science" list.
He finished just ahead of the orangutan pee collector in Borneo and two places behind the human semen washer in Los Angeles.
The honours aren't all dubious. Kershaw was also named Earthwatch's Principal Investigator of the Year in 2005 for his research on permafrost in the Mackenzie Mountains and on the Hudson Bay coast of northern Manitoba. He was up against 130 scientists from around the world.
Steve Blasco, a marine geophysicist with the Geological Survey, has also won accolades from his work. He was named chief scientist on a joint Canada, U.S. and Russian scientific/commercial expedition to film the Titanic.
Blasco says it helps to be a little crazy to do what he and his colleagues do.
In an effort to maintain their sanity in difficult work conditions some permafrost scientists have invented unusual field games. In Page Watch, for example, the goal is to kill as many mosquitoes and blackflies as possible by slamming shut a book. Although Blasco personally loves the heat, his work sends him to the western Arctic where he identifies and maps mud volcanoes and ice scour lines along possible shipping and pipeline routes. It's not easy trying to figure out what the ocean floor looks like when you're legally blind - as Blasco is.
"But then again," he quips, "no one knew what it looked like when I started in this business, so I was no worse off."
Ed Struzik
Atkinson Fellow
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Fishing and Organic Standards
From the September/October 2007 issue of E: The Environmental Magazine, www.emagazine.com, an article about the difficulties in getting organic standards for the fishing industry:
FISHING FOR CERTIFICATION
The Struggle to Bring Organic Standards to the Fishing Industry
With the organic meat and produce sector fattening into a $17 billion cash cow and expanding into retail giants like Wal-Mart, it's no wonder the fishing industry feels left out. Aquatic animals were excluded from organics when U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) standards were set in 2002.
The National Organics Standard Board (NOSB) - the panel responsible for creating organic guidelines - decided this past March to defer recommendations on the use of fish meal, fish oil, and open net-cages, delaying aquatic certification until a future meeting. Fish producers eager to take advantage of the higher price tags the label typically fetches have been frustrated by the delay.
"This is a lost opportunity," says Anthony Sims, president of Kona Blue Water Farms - a Hawaii-based company that raises Kona Kampachi fish using self-described sustainable techniques. "This decision means that fish farmers will not yet have the prospect of an organic premium as an incentive to improve their farming methods."
The problem facing organic hopefuls and the NOSB has been how to control and standardize what fish come in contact with in the water and in their food supply. It's especially troubling for wild-caught fish, since fishing companies can't demonstrate the purity of their catch.
Even the diets of farmed fish are difficult to control. While herbivores such as catfish and tilapia respond well to closed ponds and plant-based organic feed, carnivores like salmon aren't so easy to manage.
Conventional salmon farms rely on fish meal and oil made from wild-caught seafood for feed ingredients - an inefficient process that some estimate requires three pounds of wild-caught fish to make one pound of farmed. On average, 70 percent of the salmon's diet comes from seafood sourced from overfished waters. Some in the industry are lobbying to allow future organic fish farmers to use the scraps from sustainably caught wild fish meant for human consumption as a feedstock. Caps would also limit the percentage of scrap-derived meal and oil used in salmon feed at 12 percent for each.
Critics at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium have protested using fish meal or oil from non-certified fish, arguing that to feed non-organic food to certified livestock would cheapen existing organic principles. "It's unclear if the use of open-net pens and the use of fish meal and fish oil are compatible with those principles," says Corey Peet, research analyst for the aquarium. "It's critical that the aquaculture industry adapt to the organic principles and not the other way around."
Open net-cages are also at issue. Opponents argue that the nets, which trap thousands of fish and hold them stationary along coastlines, would also compromise organic principles, since they cannot control effluents in ocean waters. And net-cages have other environmental consequences.
Dom Repta, spokesperson for the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, cites British Columbia studies that show net-cage technology allows untreated waste release, transferring of sea lice to wild salmon and the escape of farmed fish - a potential threat to the genetics and territorial claims of native salmon species. Marine predators such as seals and sea lions also become trapped and die in the nets. "Open net-cages just don't fit under the organic umbrella," says Repta.
Most anti-net lobby groups have pushed for closed-containment units on farms - large tanks that keep fish separate from natural waterways.
"They have to develop a model that is both commercially and environmentally viable," says Richard Martin, chair of the National Fisheries Institute's Organic Seafood Committee.
Some experts wonder if organic certification should be the industry's goal at all. Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) favors performance goals for aquaculture over the prescribed practices of organics.
"What we want producers to do is to actually achieve a result on the ground," says Clay. "And we don't necessarily care how they do it."
CONTACTS: Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, (604) 699-0065, www.farmedanddangerous.org; Kona Blue, (808)331-1188, www.kona-kampachi.com; National Fisheries Institute's Organic Seafood Committee. www.aboutseafood.com.
--Jon Farinelli
FISHING FOR CERTIFICATION
The Struggle to Bring Organic Standards to the Fishing Industry
With the organic meat and produce sector fattening into a $17 billion cash cow and expanding into retail giants like Wal-Mart, it's no wonder the fishing industry feels left out. Aquatic animals were excluded from organics when U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) standards were set in 2002.
The National Organics Standard Board (NOSB) - the panel responsible for creating organic guidelines - decided this past March to defer recommendations on the use of fish meal, fish oil, and open net-cages, delaying aquatic certification until a future meeting. Fish producers eager to take advantage of the higher price tags the label typically fetches have been frustrated by the delay.
"This is a lost opportunity," says Anthony Sims, president of Kona Blue Water Farms - a Hawaii-based company that raises Kona Kampachi fish using self-described sustainable techniques. "This decision means that fish farmers will not yet have the prospect of an organic premium as an incentive to improve their farming methods."
The problem facing organic hopefuls and the NOSB has been how to control and standardize what fish come in contact with in the water and in their food supply. It's especially troubling for wild-caught fish, since fishing companies can't demonstrate the purity of their catch.
Even the diets of farmed fish are difficult to control. While herbivores such as catfish and tilapia respond well to closed ponds and plant-based organic feed, carnivores like salmon aren't so easy to manage.
Conventional salmon farms rely on fish meal and oil made from wild-caught seafood for feed ingredients - an inefficient process that some estimate requires three pounds of wild-caught fish to make one pound of farmed. On average, 70 percent of the salmon's diet comes from seafood sourced from overfished waters. Some in the industry are lobbying to allow future organic fish farmers to use the scraps from sustainably caught wild fish meant for human consumption as a feedstock. Caps would also limit the percentage of scrap-derived meal and oil used in salmon feed at 12 percent for each.
Critics at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium have protested using fish meal or oil from non-certified fish, arguing that to feed non-organic food to certified livestock would cheapen existing organic principles. "It's unclear if the use of open-net pens and the use of fish meal and fish oil are compatible with those principles," says Corey Peet, research analyst for the aquarium. "It's critical that the aquaculture industry adapt to the organic principles and not the other way around."
Open net-cages are also at issue. Opponents argue that the nets, which trap thousands of fish and hold them stationary along coastlines, would also compromise organic principles, since they cannot control effluents in ocean waters. And net-cages have other environmental consequences.
Dom Repta, spokesperson for the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, cites British Columbia studies that show net-cage technology allows untreated waste release, transferring of sea lice to wild salmon and the escape of farmed fish - a potential threat to the genetics and territorial claims of native salmon species. Marine predators such as seals and sea lions also become trapped and die in the nets. "Open net-cages just don't fit under the organic umbrella," says Repta.
Most anti-net lobby groups have pushed for closed-containment units on farms - large tanks that keep fish separate from natural waterways.
"They have to develop a model that is both commercially and environmentally viable," says Richard Martin, chair of the National Fisheries Institute's Organic Seafood Committee.
Some experts wonder if organic certification should be the industry's goal at all. Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) favors performance goals for aquaculture over the prescribed practices of organics.
"What we want producers to do is to actually achieve a result on the ground," says Clay. "And we don't necessarily care how they do it."
CONTACTS: Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, (604) 699-0065, www.farmedanddangerous.org; Kona Blue, (808)331-1188, www.kona-kampachi.com; National Fisheries Institute's Organic Seafood Committee. www.aboutseafood.com.
--Jon Farinelli
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