The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono

The Man Who Planted Trees (L'homme qui plantait des arbres)
The Story of Elzéard Bouffier
1953 -- By Jean Giono
Animated adaptation by Frédéric Back in 1987

Methane Hydrates (Clathrates) Could Power The World

The great submarine burp
August 27, 2007 -- The Economist

Methane from the oceans could power the world

Much effort is quietly going into the pursuit of what is probably the world’s greatest store of fossil fuel—caches of methane, the primary component of natural gas, stored in structures called methane hydrates, or clathrates (a general term for gas molecules trapped by water molecules). Looking just like ice, they are methane molecules trapped within tiny cages of water molecules. They form where temperatures are low and pressures are high, which is to say, on the sea-floor at the continental shelves, and within the permafrost at the Earth’s poles.

As with all fossil-fuel resources, it is hard to estimate just how much methane is trapped in clathrates worldwide. But there is a lot. One litre of clathrates can hold more than 150 litres of methane. Numerous deposits have been identified off the coasts of all of the continents. Even a few of the lakes in Central Asia are just frosty enough to support clathrate formation. Some guess that clathrate methane reserves could equal twice the rest of the world’s fossil fuel supplies combined.

America's National Energy Technology Laboratory put together a consortium of other government agencies and petroleum companies to drill for clathrates with some success in the Gulf of Mexico; they were promptly hired by India to perform the trick there. A Japanese government collaboration has drilled about 30 wells, with a timeline to start production and distribution of methane from hydrates by 2016. In June China reported having pulled up some first methane-bearing samples from the South China Sea.

All of this might sound like the beginnings of the solution to the world’s energy problems. And it may yet be. But, as always, there are some daunting details to sort out first. Many deposits will yield just a fraction of the hoped-for methane, and harvesting even that will be difficult. The little cages of water around the methane are dangerously delicate, so that collection has to take place on the sea-floor. Much work is now under way on adapting conventional drilling equipment for large-scale deep-sea methane recovery.

Clathrates are suspects in a number of geo-crimes great and small. Mixed with sea-floor sediment, they can constitute vast unstable deposits prone to underwater landslides. Such a landslide 8000 years ago in the North Sea created a tsunami that flooded much of coastal Scotland and Norway.

And, given their delicate nature, clathrates tend to release their methane bounty during these landslides. Methane is the cleanest of the fossil fuels when burned; but released directly into the atmosphere, it is a “greenhouse gas” significantly more potent than carbon dioxide. Vast releases of methane from clathrates are widely thought to have played a part in two global temperature spikes that led to mass extinctions about 250m and 55m years ago.

Because the icy slush left over after methane removal is less structurally stable than the clathrates, stripping the seafloor of some of its methane might result in frequent landslides that release much more methane. Many clathrate deposits sit atop grand reservoirs of free gas, so that drilling might unleash a methane burp of enormous size, with environmental impacts to match.

One brilliant-sounding idea, now being studied, calls for pumping carbon dioxide into the clathrates. The carbon dioxide would make the clathrates more stable; and, its presence would case them to give up their methane, sequester the carbon dioxide, and let off a little heat that kept the reaction going.

The technological challenge is vast, but no more so than the potential economic rewards. The trick is to get the gas, without the pains.

Rabbit-Proof Fence Has Unintended Consequences

At Australia’s Bunny Fence, Variable Cloudiness Prompts Climate Study
August 14, 2007 -- By Sonal Noticewala, The New York Times

A fence built to prevent rabbits from entering the Australian outback has unintentionally allowed scientists to study the effects of land use on regional climates.

The rabbit-proof fence — or bunny fence — in Western Australia was completed in 1907 and stretches about 2,000 miles. It acts as a boundary separating native vegetation from farmland. Within the fence area, scientists have observed a strange phenomenon: above the native vegetation, the sky is rich in rain-producing clouds. But the sky on the farmland side is clear.


Researchers led by Tom Lyons of Murdoch University in Australia and Udaysankar S. Nair of the University of Alabama in Huntsville have come up with three possible explanations for this difference in cloudiness.

One theory is that the dark native vegetation absorbs and releases more heat into the atmosphere than the light-colored crops. These native plants release heat that combines with water vapor from the lower atmosphere, resulting in cloud formation.

Another hypothesis is that the warmer air on the native scrubland rises, creating a vacuum in the lower atmosphere that is then filled by cooler air from cropland across the fence. As a result, clouds form on the scrubland side.

A third idea is that a high concentration of aerosols — particles suspended in the atmosphere — on the agricultural side results in small water droplets and a decrease in the probability of rainfall. On the native landscape, the concentration of aerosols is lower, translating into larger droplets and more rainfall.

Within the last few decades, about 32 million acres of native vegetation have been converted to croplands west of the bunny fence. On the agricultural side of the fence, rainfall has been reduced by 20 percent since the 1970s.

Dr. Nair speculates that increases in the world’s population will prompt the clearing of more land to increase food production. But he wonders whether, in the long run, “we will reach a point of land clearing that will diminish food production,” because rainfall has decreased.

Dr. Lyons said he hoped the research would help scientists “understand the relationships between the land surface and atmosphere and to provide ideas for sustainable agricultural practices.”

The bunny fence, as it turns out, failed to prevent rabbits from entering the farmland, but it has successfully blocked kangaroos and emus.

2007 Farm Bill

After searching for information on the 2007 Farm Bill, I realized that I was still uncertain of all the proposals and debates. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for good articles on this topic.

In addition to the article below, I would recommend these links:
Purdue University (including overviews of Energy and Conservation proposals within the bill)
Reflections on the 2007 Farm Bill Debate (3rd article down) by Brent Sohngen of Ohio State
Panel Discussion on 2007 Farm Bill at UC Berkeley

The Year of the Farm Bill
Summer 2007 -- By Amy Kiser, Terrain (a free publication of ecology center)

The nation's Farm Bill has likely never before made it to the Top Ten—or Top Two Hundred—of your focus factors. An enormous and complex piece of legislation, the bill grinds through Congress every half-decade or so. Allocating a staggering amount of money, its effects are profound—driving land-use decisions, dietary choices, and even immigration. This year the Farm Bill may vault into your consciousness as more people than ever try to shape it to align with pressing national interests.

The Farm Bill's many elements are organized into ten "Titles." One of the most contentious is Title I, which primarily subsidizes corn, soy, wheat, rice, and cotton. The federal government pays farmers to produce as much of these crops as possible. The effects of this free-market-tweaking policy could fill a book, but the most obvious is that farmers are rewarded for growing subsidized crops as monocrops for export, animal feed, and biofuels, rather than growing non-subsidized diverse market crops that could provide food for their surrounding communities and urban centers. According to the Congressional Research Service, the top 10 percent of farm-subsidy recipients (mostly corporations and absentee landowners) take in more than two-thirds of those payments.

This represents a considerable government giveaway to already-profitable farms. Last time the Farm Bill was passed, a coalition of Senators argued to lower the cap on subsidies from a half million to a quarter of a million dollars, claiming that "millionaire farmers" were reaping all the benefits of the legislation, and that it favored the consolidation of farms by pushing the smallest farms out of business and undermining the economic development of small farming communities...

Conservation and the protection of water, air, wildlife habitat, and farmland is the concern of Title II, a category whose funding is chopped away every year by Bush's budget. One of II's provisions is the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), which rewards livestock and crop producers for making conservation and environmental improvements. Some of these improvements, however, you wouldn't wish on your best friend—and certainly not your next door neighbor's land.

Last year, the Union of Concerned Scientists submitted an excellent brief to the House Committee on Agriculture, analyzing perverse incentives in Title II and recommending remedies. The organization is particularly critical of the EQIP provisions that actually underwrite and promote the expansion of large concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which are bona-fide disasters from the standpoint of waste treatment, profligate use of antibiotics, and E. coli contamination.

Title III of the Farm Bill contains programs designed to develop and expand commercial outlets for US commodities. Unfortunately, the cheapness of the commodities subsidized by Title I gives our producers an unfair advantage over our so-called "free trade" agreement partners. Mexican corn growers, for example, cannot compete with the subsidized US corn that is dumped into their country, driving Mexican farmers out of business and indirectly creating economic refugees who may immigrate to urban centers in the US and elsewhere.

Title VII funds agricultural research and extension programs, including grants for food biosecurity and developing biotechnology crops for poor countries. In the last Farm Bill, a tiny wedge of funds was earmarked to support research and extension activities for organic agriculture. Needless to say, in Title VII and others, the federal government gives large-scale industrial agriculture and its methods a heavily weighted economic advantage over organic and small-scale family farms.

The behemoth Farm Bill of 2002 was launched with little fanfare. In the immediate wake of 9/11, Congress had little appetite for heated or prolonged debate about domestic issues, and we were about to invade Afghanistan. In the years since, skyrocketing obesity and Type II diabetes rates, E. coli scares, and books and films like Fast Food Nation, SuperSize Me, and the Omnivore's Dilemma have alerted the public that all is not right with our food and farming systems. Finally, scrutiny is turning to the role the federal government plays in this mess.

The Farm Bill can be a powerful vehicle, capable of driving entrepreneurship and research, protecting species and restoring habitat, supporting public health, and strengthening rural communities and regional food systems. With enough public input, this year's bill might just fulfill its promise.

Yangtze River Dolphin: Likely Extinct

Rare Yangtze River dolphin probably extinct: study
August 7, 2007 -- By Michael Kahn, Reuters

The long-threatened Yangtze River dolphin in China is probably extinct, according to an international team of researchers who said this would mark the first whale or dolphin to be wiped out due to human activity.

The freshwater dolphin, or baiji, was last spotted several years ago and an intensive six-week search in late 2006 failed to find any evidence that one of the rarest species on earth survives, said Samuel Turvey, a conservation biologist, at the Zoological Society of London, who took part in the search.

He said the dolphin's demise -- which resulted from overfishing, pollution and lack of intervention -- might serve as a cautionary tale and should spur governments and scientists to act to save other species verging on extinction.

"Ours is the first scientific study which didn't find any," he said in a telephone interview. "Even if there are a few left we can't find them and we can't do anything to stop their extinction."

The team, which published its findings in the Journal of the Royal Society Biology Letters on Wednesday, included researchers from the United States, Britain, Japan and China. The survey was also authorized by the Chinese government, Turvey said.

The last confirmed baiji sighting was 2002, although there have been a handful of unconfirmed sightings since then. The last baiji in captivity died in 2002, Turvey said.

During the six-week search, the team carried out both visual and acoustic surveys and used two boats to twice cover the dolphin's 1,669 kilometer range stretching from the city of Yichang just downstream from the Three Gorges dam to Shanghai.

The last such survey conducted from 1997 to 1999 turned up 13 of the mammals, but Turvey said fishing, pollution and boat traffic in the busy river, home to about 10 percent of the world's population, has likely meant the baiji's end.

"We covered the whole range of the dolphin twice," Turvey said. "It is difficult to see how we could miss any animals."

The dolphins will now be classified as critically endangered and possibly extinct but Turvey said there is little chance any remaining baiji are alive.

Researchers have known for years about the dolphin's precarious situation but indecision about how best to save the species meant little was actually done, he added.

This underscores the need to act quickly to prevent the extinction of other similar shallow-water aquatic mammals like the vaquita found in the Sea of Cortez and the Yangtze finless porpoise, Turvey said.

"One really needs to learn from this to make sure future conservation efforts are more dynamic," he said. "There has always been so much focus on 'save the whale' and 'prevent whaling' that it has led to these range-restricted shallow cetaceans slipping through the crack."

AC, DC and Wind Power

Where The Wind Blows
July 26, 2007 -- The Economist

Plug in your toaster—or your television or your vacuum cleaner—and the electricity that surges through it is an alternating current. The question of whether the world would be powered by direct current (DC), in which electrons flow in one direction around a circuit, or by alternating current (AC), in which they jiggle back and forth, was decided in the 1880s. Thomas Edison backed DC. George Westinghouse backed AC. Westinghouse won.

The reason was that over the short distances spanned by early power grids, AC transmission suffers lower losses than DC. It thus became the industry standard. Some people, however, question that standard because over long distances high-voltage DC lines suffer lower losses than AC. Not only does that make them better in their own right, but employing them would allow electricity grids to be restructured in ways that would make wind power more attractive. That would reduce the need for new conventional (and polluting) power stations.

AC/DC/PC

Wind power has two problems. You don't always get it where you want it and you don't always get it when you want it. According to Jürgen Schmid, the head of ISET, an alternative-energy institute at the University of Kassel, in Germany, continent-wide power distribution systems in a place like Europe would deal with both of these points.

The question of where the wind is blowing would no longer matter because it is almost always blowing somewhere. If it were windy in Spain but not in Ireland, current would flow in one direction. On a blustery day in the Emerald Isle it would flow in the other.

Dealing with when the wind blows is a subtler issue. In this context, an important part of Dr Schmid's continental grid is the branch to Norway. It is not that Norway is a huge consumer. Rather, the country is well supplied with hydroelectric plants. These are one of the few ways (but not the only way, see article) that energy from transient sources like the wind can be stored in grid-filling quantities. The power is used to pump water up into the reservoirs that feed the hydroelectric turbines. That way it is on tap when needed. The capacity of Norway's reservoirs is so large, according to Dr Schmid, that should the wind drop all over Europe—which does happen on rare occasions—the hydro plants could spring into action and fill in the gap for up to four weeks.

Put like this, a Europe-wide grid seems an obvious idea. That it has not yet been built is because AC power lines would lose too much power over such large distances. Hence the renewed interest in DC.

Westinghouse won the battle of the currents in the 1880s because it is easier to transform the voltage of an AC current than of a DC current. High voltage is the best way to transmit power (the higher the voltage, the smaller the loss), but high voltage is not usually what the user wants. Power is therefore transmitted along high-tension AC lines and then “stepped down” to usable voltages in local sub-stations.

Edison was right, however, to argue that DC is the best way to transmit electricity of any given voltage. That is because the shifting current of AC runs to earth more easily than DC does. To avoid this earthing, AC lines have to be built a long way from the ground—and the higher the voltage, the farther away they need to be. At 400 kilovolts, a standard value for long-distance transmission, an alternating current 30 metres (100 feet) from the ground has a fortieth of the loss of a similar cable at ground level. But even at this height an overhead DC line will beat an AC line at distances more than 1,000km (600 miles), while ground-level DC will beat AC at distances as short as 30km.

Dr Schmid calculates that a DC grid of the sort he envisages would allow wind to supply at least 30% of the power needed in Europe. Moreover, it could do so reliably—and that means wind power could be used for what is known in the jargon as base-load power supply.

Base-load power is the minimum required to keep things ticking over—the demands of three o'clock in the morning, or thereabouts. At the moment, this is supplied by traditional power stations. These either burn fossil fuel and thus contribute to global warming, or use uranium, which brings problems such as how to get rid of the waste, as well as political opposition.

Though wind power has its opponents, too, its environmental virtues might be enough to swing things in its favour if it were also reliable. Indeed, a group of Norwegian companies have already started building high-voltage DC lines between Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Germany, though these are intended as much to sell the country's power as to accumulate other people's. And Airtricity—an Irish wind-power company—plans even more of them. It proposes what it calls a Supergrid. This would link offshore wind farms in the Atlantic ocean and the Irish, North and Baltic seas with customers throughout northern Europe.

Airtricity reckons that the first stage of this project, a 2,000 turbine-strong farm in the North Sea, would cost about €2 billion ($2.7 billion). That farm would generate 10 gigawatts. An equivalent amount of coal-fired capacity would cost around $2.3 billion so, adding in the environmental benefits, the project seems worth examining. Such offshore farms certainly work. Airtricity already operates one in the Atlantic, and though it currently has a capacity of only 25 megawatts, increasing that merely means adding more turbines.

Nor is this the limit of some people's vision. The Global Energy Network Institute, based in San Diego, California, reckons high-voltage DC lines could be used to bring solar energy to market from places such as the Sahara. Wind and geothermal power could be gathered from as far afield as South America and Siberia. Such a globalised market has its attractions. Whether the world is ready for the Organisation of Electricity Exporting Countries to take over from OPEC, though, remains to be seen.

Compressed Air and Wind Power

Trapped Wind
July 26, 2007 -- The Economist

Compressed air might help to make wind power more reliable

Pumping water into the reservoir of a hydroelectric power plant may be a good way of storing energy captured by wind farms—but what if there are no such plants to hand and no high-tension lines to reach them? One answer is to use the energy to compress air, which can be squirrelled away in hermetically sealed underground caverns. Then, when electricity is needed, the air can be released and used to turn a generator.

At the moment, however, there are only two compressed-air energy-storage plants in the world (one in America and one in Germany), and neither was built to make use of wind power. Instead, they are designed to take advantage of variations in the price of electricity. When power is cheap, it is used to run their compressors. When it is expensive, the valves are opened and the generators turn.

Compressed-air plants are inefficient, and so they are commercially viable only in places where the price of power varies dramatically. But the intermittent nature of wind power can cause just that sort of variability. At any rate, a group of municipal power companies in the American Midwest reckon that building a wind-powered compressed-air plant to take advantage of the blustery Great Plains will be worthwhile. They have just selected a site in Iowa, and hope to be operational by 2011. BP, a British energy firm, is also looking into the concept.

Meanwhile, General Compression, a small firm based in Attleboro, Massachusetts, is taking another approach. Its windmill compresses air directly. This has the advantage of eliminating two wasteful steps: the conversion of the mechanical power of a windmill into electricity and its subsequent reconversion into mechanical power in a compressor. But an air-compressing windmill, while fine for storing energy, cannot transmit electricity directly to the grid. The firm will not produce its first prototype until 2009, but sceptics already worry that what it gains on the swings, it will lose on the roundabouts—or, in this case, on the turbines.

"He not busy being born is busy dying"

Via CEOs for Cities
Excerpts from:
The Living City
August 2007 -- By Jonah Lehrer, Seed Magazine

Cities act just like creatures. They obey the same metabolic laws that govern every organism. Which means that cities, just like elephants, get more economical with size.

It turns out that every city is simply a scaled version of the same city. A city can double its population without doubling its resource consumption.

President of Santa Fe Institute Geoffrey West told (the terrific science and culture magazine) Seed, "One of the basic principles of cities is that it's more efficient to bring people together. You need a little bit less of everything per person. It's the exact same way in biology."

While most of us imagine idyllic rural America as the epitome of sustainable living, conventional wisdom is exactly backward. "Cities are bastions of environmentalism," according to West and his collaborator Luis Bettencourt. "People who live in densely populated places lead environmentally friendly lives. They consume fewer resources per person and take up less space. And because efficiency scales with the size of the population, big cities are always more efficient than small cities."

Bottom line: The secret to creating a more environmentally sustainable society is making our big cities bigger. We need more metropolises.

The researchers also found that as cities got bigger, each individual got more productive. "A doubling of population led to a more than doubling of creative and economic output. A bigger population means more economic activity for each person, which encourages more people to move to the city, which results in more economic activity, and so on."

Every city runs out of resources. But that's where innovation comes into play. West told Seed, "The only way to avoid stagnation from a shortage of resources is to change something.... There's the invention of the steam engine, the car, the digital revolution... A city that isn't innovating is on the verge of collapse."

Turns out that innovation returns smaller dividends per person as the population expands. That's why the bigger the city, the faster it must innovate in order to continue its patterns of growth.

Although cities are the driving force behind accelerating innovation cycles, cities cannot take innovation for granted. West warns cities and corporations not to cut money for research and development, especially in tough times. It only reduces your ability to innovate when you need it most.

Innovation in cities is rooted in human interaction and lots of it. "Cities concentrate our social interactions and that's what leads to this explosion of knowledge creation and innovation." So West's team plans to study urban form to figure out how the social interactions of urban streets translate into new kinds of knowledge. And I can't wait to see the results.

Death Valley, Galaxies and Sailing Stones

I recently found this image of Death Valley on the NASA: Astronomy Picture of the Day website. I liked it so much that it is now part of this site. Futility Closet points out that rocks, like the one in this image, 'sail' extraordinarily well at Racetrack Playa in Death Valley. Nobody has seen them move because it may only occur once every two or three years, but many assume that wind is the culprit.

Production and Consumption

The revolution of production and consumption
May 29, 2006 -- By Timo Mäkelä, Sitra

Growing numbers of decision-makers, scientists and economists believe that the world economy is heading towards a crisis because of diminishing natural resources and their consequently high prices. What is more, the race after energy and natural resources will lead to ever wider and more acute environmental problems. The climate will change while storms and draughts will become commoner and the environment impoverished and polluted. The Earth simply cannot long support the accelerating rate of production and consumption.

We do not need to look far for an example. At its current growth rate, the amount of grain and paper that China would need in 25 years’ time equals 70% of all grain production in the world and 200% of paper production. More oil would be consumed than the global oil production of today put together.

The UN and the World Bank issued recently an extensive report on the state of the world. It did not make for an amusing read.

Out of the 25 natural resources sustaining life on Earth, nearly 20 are endangered. If every single person in the world consumed like Europeans do, it would take more than two Earths to sustain it. The Americans consume even more, at a rate that according to the same calculation would require four Earths.

Some companies and investors are beginning to worry. A sustainable development classification will be gradually introduced and required of companies as evidence that their ethics are high and the environmental risks under control. In fact, we are moving towards a new industrial revolution, this time directed by the limits of our planet and environmental risks.

Part of this revolution is the rapid growth of global markets for new environmental technologies and services. According to estimates, the markets have already exceeded €500 billion, which is close to those of pharmaceutical and aviation industries. The annual growth rate is 5–10%. As much as 15% of new risk investments in the world are made in the production of renewable energy sources, environmentally friendly technologies and cleaner production. Here, Japanese and American companies are striving for market leadership.

The largest corporation in the world, the American General Electric, has recently revamped its strategy and launched its “Ecomagination” programme. The company will focus in the future on producing more sustainable and environmentally friendlier technologies.

Japan, on the other hand, is ahead of Europe in the efficient use of both energy and natural resources. Japanese products and technologies are taking markets by storm.

Europe is still the leader in environmental technology markets. The German recycling industry produces technologies and innovations for global markets, and Spain is one of the leading utilisers and producers of wind and solar energy. In Denmark, wind energy has surpassed meat products as an export.

But time is running out. That is why Europe is keen to seize this new opportunity. Ecological innovations and the more efficient use of natural resources and energy are an integral part of the EU’s growth and jobs strategy, the Lisbon strategy.

EU’s new environmental technology programme promises research and risk funding for companies investing in environmental technologies. The programme also aims to improve the pull and functionality of the markets. Public procurement, financial steering mechanisms and new product regulations and standards play a key role. Many of the EU Member States, including Finland, have issued their own national environmental technology programmes.

The new and more efficient technologies and methods that save natural resources and energy are a rational choice now and in the future. More efficient production decreases environmental damage but is also financially justified, as it simply saves money.

The industrial revolution geared towards sustainable development will mean efficient recycling of natural resources, extensive use of renewable energy sources, innovative production, materials and technologies, as well as new concepts of how we should move from one place to another. Nothing less will suffice, and as long there is a will, there are plenty of ways. New companies and innovations are in great demand.

The 11th Hour

Here is a trailer for the new documentary entitled The 11th Hour. It's world premiere was at the 2007 60th Annual Cannes Film Festival and will be released on August 17th 2007.

Sustainable Development: A 21st Century American Vision?

As I watched E.O. Wilson speak on BookTV today I was reminded once again of how finite the world's resources are for ourselves and future generations. If every human consumed at equal rates to Americans, it would require four Earths to sustain it. This somber statistic persuaded me to post this snippet I read during a recent BART ride.

Excerpts from:
Learning from History: U.S. Environmental Politics, Policies, and the Common Good
November 2006 -- By Richard N.L. Andrews, Environment

In 2005, the United Nations commissioned Millennium Ecosystem Assessment reported that over the past 50 years, rapid and extensive change in human ecosystems has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth. More land has been converted to cropland since 1945 than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries combined, and water withdrawals from rivers and lakes have doubled since 1960. Since 1750, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, the major contributor to global warming, has increased, with 60 percent of that increase happening between 1959 and the present. Fifty percent of all the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer ever used has been applied since 1985; flows of biologically available nitrogen in terrestrial ecosystems have doubled since 1960 and may increase by two-thirds more by 2050. An estimated 10 to 30 percent of all mammal, bird, and amphibian species are currently threatened with extinction.

These changes have contributed to substantial gains in human well-being and economic development at growing costs to the essential services that ecosystems provide to human societies: providing food, water, fuel, wood, and fiber, supporting and regulating natural processes that are necessary for human life and health (nutrient cycling, soil formation, water purification, the climate system, and the control of disease organisms), and providing spiritual and recreational values. These damaging trends are substantially reducing the availability of these services for future use.

U.S. environmental policies have been prominent causes of these damaging trends and must be part of any solution. Throughout American history, the United States' dominant policies have been to promote the economic exploitation of natural resources, first nationally and now globally...

At times throughout this history, U.S. environmental policies also have included initiatives to manage and protect the natural environment...

The net effect of these policies has been to provide unprecedented levels of material comfort to many people and extraordinary affluence to a few and to reduce and even repair some environmental damage.

It would be a mistake to attribute the vast environmental changes in the United States entirely to public policies. Policies tend to lag behind economic and social trends, because government typically acts only in response to a buildup of pressure for collective action...

The enduring challenge for U.S. environmental policy is to build, maintain, and constantly renew public support for effective environmental governance, at home and worldwide. To meet that need, U.S. environmental policy today must recover an essential missing element: a broadly shared vision of the common environmental good. Such visions have emerged at several points in the past. Examples include the sanitation movement of the nineteenth century; the City Beautiful movement of the 1890s; the Progressive civic reform and conservation movements that followed it; the New Deal vision of combining ecological, social, and economic recovery; and the vision of a modern society in harmony with its natural environment that was articulated in NEPA and widely voiced by the American public on Earth Day in 1970...

The closest current approximation to such a vision is perhaps the idea of sustainable development, as articulated by the United Nations' World Commission for Environment and Development in 1987 and in the Agenda 21 document endorsed by the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The commission envisioned sustainable development as a pattern of development that would meet the needs of human communities today without jeopardizing those of the future, and its vision specifically included economic development, ecological sustainability, and social equity as essential and interdependent elements...

Barring some new defining crisis or leadership commitment, the future of U.S. environmental policy will be shaped by the reemergence--or failure to emerge--of a new broad-based national coalition for an ecologically sustainable economy and inclusive and democratic society.

Wind Energy Market Outpacing Manufacturing Capacity

Via Peak Energy
Excerpt from:
Despite Rising Costs, Wind Industry Thriving Worldwide
July 26, 2007 -- By Stephen Lacey, Renewable Energy Access

The wind industry is undergoing temporary growing pains similar to the silicon shortage experienced by the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry: there are simply not enough materials or manufacturing capacity to keep up with the increasing demand for wind turbines. The need for steel, copper, concrete and other materials has driven up project costs, restricted turbine supplies and created a difficult market for smaller wind developers.

But despite a two-and-a-half year stretch of materials shortages and rising costs, the global wind industry is experiencing steady growth worldwide and increased acceptance by utilities, governments and citizens.

"Between 2004 and 2005, the global wind turbine market experienced a rapid period of escalation...Within the span of just that year the global demand for wind turbine components and supply jumped to a new plateau and a new rate of growth," says Joshua Magee, senior analyst for Emerging Energy Research's (EER) North American Wind Advisory Group.

Much of that new demand was caused by the two-year extension of the production tax credit (PTC) in the U.S., which provided certainty for wind developers and encouraged a slew of new projects. In addition, China and India emerged as major players in the wind market, further straining supply of materials.

As the global market expanded rapidly starting at the end of 2004, the manufacturing capacity was not in place to handle demand. Since 2005, manufacturers have been playing catch-up and pumping out turbines as quickly as developers can put them into the ground. However, because it takes about 20 months to ramp up manufacturing capabilities, the cost increase and turbine shortage is not expected to level out until sometime in 2009, says Magee.

"Given that the global wind turbine industry is an inherently capital intensive industry, manufacturers have spent the last two years making the necessary investments to begin to regain parity with this new level of global demand," Magee says.

The point of parity couldn't come soon enough for some developers. Over the last two years, project costs have risen 50% in some cases, according to American Wind Energy Association Executive Director Randall Swisher. But the industry shouldn't be worried, says Swisher. The long-term economics of wind energy are still very attractive to utilities and their customers. While the price of fossil energies continues to rise, the cost of wind will always stay the same—free.