Avoiding Collapse in Modern Civilization

THE NATURE OF THE NEW WORLD
October 2, 2007 -- By Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

Plan B 2.0 Book Byte:

We recently entered a new century, but we are also entering a new world, one where the collisions between our demands and the earth’s capacity to satisfy them are becoming daily events. It may be another crop-withering heat wave, another village abandoned because of invading sand dunes, or another aquifer pumped dry. If we do not act quickly to reverse the trends, these seemingly isolated events will occur more and more frequently, accumulating and combining to determine our future.

Resources that accumulated over eons of geological time are being consumed in a single human lifespan. We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize. These deadlines, determined by nature, are not politically negotiable.

Nature has many thresholds that we discover only when it is too late. In our fast-forward world, we learn that we have crossed them only after the fact, leaving little time to adjust. For example, when we exceed the sustainable catch of a fishery, the stocks begin to shrink. Once this threshold is crossed, we have a limited time in which to back off and lighten the catch. If we fail to meet this deadline, breeding populations shrink to where the fishery is no longer viable, and it collapses.

We know from earlier civilizations that the lead indicators of economic decline were environmental, not economic. The trees went first, then the soil, and finally the civilization itself. To archeologists, the sequence is all too familiar.

Our situation today is far more challenging because in addition to shrinking forests and eroding soils, we must deal with falling water tables, more frequent crop-withering heat waves, collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts, deteriorating rangelands, dying coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising seas, more-powerful storms, disappearing species, and, soon, shrinking oil supplies. Although these ecologically destructive trends have been evident for some time, and some have been reversed at the national level, not one has been reversed at the global level.

The bottom line is that the world is in what ecologists call an “overshoot-and-collapse” mode. Demand has exceeded the sustainable yield of natural systems at the local level countless times in the past. Now, for the first time, it is doing so at the global level. Forests are shrinking for the world as a whole. Fishery collapses are widespread. Grasslands are deteriorating on every continent. Water tables are falling in many countries. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions exceed CO2 sequestration.

In 2002, a team of scientists led by Mathis Wackernagel, who now heads the Global Footprint Network, concluded that humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980. Their study, published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, estimated that global demands in 1999 exceeded that capacity by 20 percent. The gap, growing by 1 percent or so a year, is now much wider. We are meeting current demands by consuming the earth’s natural assets, setting the stage for decline and collapse.

In a rather ingenious approach to calculating the human physical presence on the planet, Paul MacCready, the founder and Chairman of AeroVironment and designer of the first solar-powered aircraft, has calculated the weight of all vertebrates on the land and in the air. He notes that when agriculture began, humans, their livestock, and pets together accounted for less than 0.1 percent of the total. Today, he estimates, this group accounts for 98 percent of the earth’s total vertebrate biomass, leaving only 2 percent for the wild portion, the latter including all the deer, wildebeests, elephants, great cats, birds, small mammals, and so forth.

Ecologists are intimately familiar with the overshoot-and-collapse phenomenon. One of their favorite examples began in 1944, when the Coast Guard introduced 29 reindeer on remote St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea to serve as the backup food source for the 19 men operating a station there. After World War II ended a year later, the base was closed and the men left the island. When U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist David Kline visited St. Matthew in 1957, he discovered a thriving population of 1,350 reindeer feeding on the thick mat of lichen that covered the 332-square-kilometer (128-square-mile) island. In the absence of any predators, the population was exploding. By 1963, it had reached 6,000. He returned to St. Matthew in 1966 and discovered an island strewn with reindeer skeletons and not much lichen. Only 42 of the reindeer survived: 41 females and 1 not entirely healthy male. There were no fawns. By 1980 or so, the remaining reindeer had died off.

Like the deer on St. Matthew Island, we too are overconsuming our natural resources. Overshoot leads sometimes to decline and sometimes to a complete collapse. It is not always clear which it will be. In the former, a remnant of the population or economic activity survives in a resource-depleted environment. For example, as the environmental resource base of Easter Island in the South Pacific deteriorated, its population declined from a peak of 20,000 several centuries ago to today’s population of fewer than 4,000. In contrast, the 500-year-old Norse settlement in Greenland collapsed during the 1400s, disappearing entirely in the face of environmental adversity.

Even as the global population is climbing and the economy’s environmental support systems are deteriorating, the world is pumping oil with reckless abandon. Leading geologists now think oil production may soon peak and turn downward. Although no one knows exactly when oil production will peak, supply is already lagging behind demand, driving prices upward.

Faced with a seemingly insatiable demand for automotive fuel, farmers will want to clear more and more of the remaining tropical forests to produce sugarcane, oil palms, and other high-yielding biofuel crops. Already, billions of dollars of private capital are moving into this effort. In effect, the rising price of oil is generating a massive new threat to the earth’s biological diversity.

As the demand for farm commodities climbs, it is shifting the focus of international trade concerns from the traditional goal of assured access to markets to one of assured access to supplies. Countries heavily dependent on imported grain for food are beginning to worry that buyers for fuel distilleries may outbid them for supplies. As oil security deteriorates, so, too, will food security.

As the role of oil recedes, the process of globalization will be reversed in fundamental ways. As the world turned to oil during the last century, the energy economy became increasingly globalized, with the world depending heavily on a handful of countries in the Middle East for energy supplies. Now as the world turns to wind, solar cells, and geothermal energy in this century, we are witnessing the localization of the world energy economy.

The world is facing the emergence of a geopolitics of scarcity, which is already highly visible in the efforts by China, India, and other developing countries to ensure their access to oil supplies. In the future, the issue will be who gets access to not only Middle Eastern oil but also Brazilian ethanol and North American grain. Pressures on land and water resources, already excessive in most of the world, will intensify further as the demand for biofuels climbs. This geopolitics of scarcity is an early manifestation of civilization in an overshoot-and-collapse mode, much like the one that emerged among the Mayan cities competing for food in that civilization’s waning years.

You do not need to be an ecologist to see that if recent environmental trends continue, the global economy eventually will come crashing down. It is not knowledge that we lack. At issue is whether national governments can stabilize population and restructure the economy before time runs out.

In addition, here is a synopsis of Jared Diamond's book entitled Collapse:

Diamond lists eight factors which have historically contributed to the collapse of past societies:

1. Deforestation and habitat destruction
2. Soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses)
3. Water management problems
4. Overhunting
5. Overfishing
6. Effects of introduced species on native species
7. Human population growth
8. Increased per-capita impact of people

Further he says four new factors may contribute to the weakening and collapse of present and future societies:

1. Human-caused climate change
2. Buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment
3. Energy shortages
4. Full human utilization of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity

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.

Global Fresh Water Supplies in Peril

Water Tables Falling and Rivers Running Dry
July 24, 2007 -- By Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

PLAN B 2.0 BOOK BYTE:
As the world’s demand for water has tripled over the last half-century and as the demand for hydroelectric power has grown even faster, dams and diversions of river water have drained many rivers dry. As water tables fall, the springs that feed rivers go dry, reducing river flows.

Scores of countries are overpumping aquifers as they struggle to satisfy their growing water needs, including each of the big three grain producers—China, India, and the United States. More than half the world’s people live in countries where water tables are falling.

There are two types of aquifers: replenishable and nonreplenishable (or fossil) aquifers. Most of the aquifers in India and the shallow aquifer under the North China Plain are replenishable. When these are depleted, the maximum rate of pumping is automatically reduced to the rate of recharge.

For fossil aquifers, such as the vast U.S. Ogallala aquifer, the deep aquifer under the North China Plain, or the Saudi aquifer, depletion brings pumping to an end. Farmers who lose their irrigation water have the option of returning to lower-yield dryland farming if rainfall permits. In more arid regions, however, such as in the southwestern United States or the Middle East, the loss of irrigation water means the end of agriculture.

The U.S. embassy in Beijing reports that Chinese wheat farmers in some areas are now pumping from a depth of 300 meters, or nearly 1,000 feet. Pumping water from this far down raises pumping costs so high that farmers are often forced to abandon irrigation and return to less productive dryland farming. A World Bank study indicates that China is overpumping three river basins in the north—the Hai, which flows through Beijing and Tianjin; the Yellow; and the Huai, the next river south of the Yellow. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce one ton of grain, the shortfall in the Hai basin of nearly 40 billion tons of water per year (1 ton equals 1 cubic meter) means that when the aquifer is depleted, the grain harvest will drop by 40 million tons—enough to feed 120 million Chinese.

In India, water shortages are particularly serious simply because the margin between actual food consumption and survival is so precarious. In a survey of India’s water situation, Fred Pearce reported in New Scientist that the 21 million wells drilled are lowering water tables in most of the country. In North Gujarat, the water table is falling by 6 meters (20 feet) per year. In Tamil Nadu, a state with more than 62 million people in southern India, wells are going dry almost everywhere and falling water tables have dried up 95 percent of the wells owned by small farmers, reducing the irrigated area in the state by half over the last decade.

As water tables fall, well drillers are using modified oil-drilling technology to reach water, going as deep as 1,000 meters in some locations. In communities where underground water sources have dried up entirely, all agriculture is rain-fed and drinking water is trucked in. Tushaar Shah, who heads the International Water Management Institute’s groundwater station in Gujarat, says of India’s water situation, “When the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural India.”

In the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that in parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas—three leading grain-producing states—the underground water table has dropped by more than 30 meters (100 feet). As a result, wells have gone dry on thousands of farms in the southern Great Plains. Although this mining of underground water is taking a toll on U.S. grain production, irrigated land accounts for only one fifth of the U.S. grain harvest, compared with close to three fifths of the harvest in India and four fifths in China.

Pakistan, a country with 158 million people that is growing by 3 million per year, is also mining its underground water. In the Pakistani part of the fertile Punjab plain, the drop in water tables appears to be similar to that in India. Observation wells near the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi show a fall in the water table between 1982 and 2000 that ranges from 1 to nearly 2 meters a year.

In the province of Baluchistan, water tables around the capital, Quetta, are falling by 3.5 meters per year. Richard Garstang, a water expert with the World Wildlife Fund and a participant in a study of Pakistan’s water situation, said in 2001 that “within 15 years Quetta will run out of water if the current consumption rate continues.”

Iran, a country of 70 million people, is overpumping its aquifers by an average of 5 billion tons of water per year, the water equivalent of one third of its annual grain harvest. Under the small but agriculturally rich Chenaran Plain in northeastern Iran, the water table was falling by 2.8 meters a year in the late 1990s. New wells being drilled both for irrigation and to supply the nearby city of Mashad are responsible. Villages in eastern Iran are being abandoned as wells go dry, generating a flow of “water refugees.”

Saudi Arabia, a country of 25 million people, is as water-poor as it is oil-rich. Relying heavily on subsidies, it developed an extensive irrigated agriculture based largely on its deep fossil aquifer. After several years of using oil money to support wheat prices at five times the world market level, the government was forced to face fiscal reality and cut the subsidies. Its wheat harvest dropped from a high of 4 million tons in 1992 to some 2 million tons in 2005. Some Saudi farmers are now pumping water from wells that are 1,200 meters deep (nearly four fifths of a mile).

In neighboring Yemen, a nation of 21 million, the water table under most of the country is falling by roughly 2 meters a year as water use outstrips the sustainable yield of aquifers. In western Yemen’s Sana’a Basin, the estimated annual water extraction of 224 million tons exceeds the annual recharge of 42 million tons by a factor of five, dropping the water table 6 meters per year. World Bank projections indicate the Sana’a Basin—site of the national capital, Sana’a, and home to 2 million people—will be pumped dry by 2010.

In the search for water, the Yemeni government has drilled test wells in the basin that are 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) deep—depths normally associated with the oil industry—but they have failed to find water. Yemen must soon decide whether to bring water to Sana’a, possibly by pipeline from coastal desalting plants, if it can afford it, or to relocate the capital. Either alternative will be costly and potentially traumatic.

Israel, even though it is a pioneer in raising irrigation water productivity, is depleting both of its principal aquifers—the coastal aquifer and the mountain aquifer that it shares with Palestinians. Israel’s population, whose growth is fueled by both natural increase and immigration, is outgrowing its water supply. Conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians over the allocation of water in the latter area are ongoing. Because of severe water shortages, Israel has banned the irrigation of wheat.

In Mexico—home to a population of 107 million that is projected to reach 140 million by 2050—the demand for water is outstripping supply. Mexico City’s water problems are well known. Rural areas are also suffering. For example, in the agricultural state of Guanajuato, the water table is falling by 2 meters or more a year. At the national level, 51 percent of all the water extracted from underground is from aquifers that are being overpumped.

Since the overpumping of aquifers is occurring in many countries more or less simultaneously, the depletion of aquifers and the resulting harvest cutbacks could come at roughly the same time. And the accelerating depletion of aquifers means this day may come soon, creating potentially unmanageable food scarcity.

While falling water tables are largely hidden, rivers that are drained dry before they reach the sea are highly visible. Two rivers where this phenomenon can be seen are the Colorado, the major river in the southwestern United States, and the Yellow, the largest river in northern China. Other large rivers that either run dry or are reduced to a mere trickle during the dry season are the Nile, the lifeline of Egypt; the Indus, which supplies most of Pakistan’s irrigation water; and the Ganges in India’s densely populated Gangetic basin. Many smaller rivers have disappeared entirely.

Since 1950, the number of large dams, those over 15 meters high, has increased from 5,000 to 45,000. Each dam deprives a river of some of its flow. Engineers like to say that dams built to generate electricity do not take water from the river, only its energy, but this is not entirely true since reservoirs increase evaporation. The annual loss of water from a reservoir in arid or semiarid regions, where evaporation rates are high, is typically equal to 10 percent of its storage capacity.

The Colorado River now rarely makes it to the sea. With the states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and, most important, California depending heavily on the Colorado’s water, the river is simply drained dry before it reaches the Gulf of California. This excessive demand for water is destroying the river’s ecosystem, including its fisheries.

A similar situation exists in Central Asia. The Amu Darya—which, along with the Syr Darya, feeds the Aral Sea—is diverted to irrigate the cotton fields of Central Asia. In the late 1980s, water levels dropped so low that the sea split in two. While recent efforts to revitalize the North Aral Sea have raised the water level somewhat, the South Aral Sea will likely never recover.

China’s Yellow River, which flows some 4,000 kilometers through five provinces before it reaches the Yellow Sea, has been under mounting pressure for several decades. It first ran dry in 1972. Since 1985 it has often failed to reach the sea, although better management and greater reservoir capacity have facilitated year-round flow in recent years.

The Nile, site of another ancient civilization, now barely makes it to the sea. Water analyst Sandra Postel, in Pillar of Sand, notes that before the Aswan Dam was built, some 32 billion cubic meters of water reached the Mediterranean each year. After the dam was completed, however, increasing irrigation, evaporation, and other demands reduced its discharge to less than 2 billion cubic meters.

Pakistan, like Egypt, is essentially a river-based civilization, heavily dependent on the Indus. This river, originating in the Himalayas and flowing westward to the Indian Ocean, not only provides surface water, it also recharges aquifers that supply the irrigation wells dotting the Pakistani countryside. In the face of growing water demand, it too is starting to run dry in its lower reaches. Pakistan, with a population projected to reach 305 million by 2050, is in trouble.

In Southeast Asia, the flow of the Mekong is being reduced by the dams being built on its upper reaches by the Chinese. The downstream countries, including Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Viet Nam—countries with 168 million people—complain about the reduced flow of the Mekong, but this has done little to curb China’s efforts to exploit the power and the water in the river.

The same problem exists with the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which originate in Turkey and flow through Syria and Iraq en route to the Persian Gulf. This river system, the site of Sumer and other early civilizations, is being overused. Large dams erected in Turkey and Iraq have reduced water flow to the once “fertile crescent,” helping to destroy more than 90 percent of the formerly vast wetlands that enriched the delta region.

In the river systems just mentioned, virtually all the water in the basin is being used. Inevitably, if people upstream use more water, those downstream will get less. As demands continue to grow, balancing water demand and supply is imperative. Failure to do so means that water tables will continue to fall, more rivers will run dry, and more lakes and wetlands will disappear.

Alberta's Oil Sands Face Water Shortages

Excerpt from:
Choke point for oil sands may be water shortage
May 11, 2007 -- By Martin Mittelstaedt, The Globe and Mail via Peak Energy

The amount of water available in Northern Alberta isn't sufficient to accommodate both the needs of burgeoning oil sands development and preserve the Athabasca River, contends a study issued jointly yesterday by the University of Toronto and the University of Alberta.

The study, written in part by Dr. David Schindler, a University of Alberta biologist considered Canada's top water expert, suggests that the choke point for the province's oil sands expansion may not be the huge carbon dioxide emissions arising from mining and processing the sticky, bitumen containing tar sands, as is widely assumed, but a lack of water.

Oil sands plants typically use two to four barrels of water to extract a barrel of oil from the tar sands, a resource that has given the Northern Alberta region the world's largest petroleum reserves but made it a global centre of environmental controversy.

The problem of water availability is expected to become acute in the decades ahead because climate change is likely to cause much more arid conditions, reducing stream flows on the Athabasca River, the source of the industry's water, to critically low levels during parts of each year.

US biofuels: A field in ferment

US biofuels: A field in ferment (Subscription)
December 7, 2006 -- By Katharine Sanderson, Nature

To move US biofuels beyond subsidized corn will be a challenge, reports Katharine Sanderson.

Critics of the US ethanol industry have long derided it as an environmentally questionable subsidy to Mid-western farmers that simply serves a transparently political purpose. Voters in Iowa, the buckle in the US corn belt, get first say in the process of choosing presidential candidates. All such candidates are in favour of turning corn (maize), which the state produces in abundance, into ethanol. This pre-presidential support is good for the Iowan economy, but not necessarily that great for the environment.

Studies that compare the energy that goes into making ethanol — expended during the harvesting, fertilizing and transporting of the corn to refineries, and then refining it — with the energy that is released when it is burned routinely show that the net gain is at best small. The American Coalition for Ethanol says that ethanol contains twice the amount of energy that is used to make it; critics see no net gain whatsoever.

This criticism has had little effect, and since 1980, US ethanol production has risen from an average of 6,500 barrels (1 million litres) a day to 260,000 barrels a day. Federal mandates call for a further doubling by 2012. But it is increasingly clear to many in the industry that the criticisms of corn-based ethanol have merit, and in 2006, the need for an alternative was given the highest profile it could get when President George W. Bush brought it up in his state of the union address. In order to improve US energy security, he said, his government intended to make cellulosic ethanol (ethanol made from the rougher and woodier parts of plants) a competitive biofuel within six years.

Corn stores
The advantage of an ear of corn as a source of ethanol (or for that matter as a bit of food) is that it is mainly starch, which is made up of sugars linked in a regular way with bonds that can be broken easily. Breaking the bonds between sugars and using yeast in the fermentation to produce ethanol is a straightforward task for the biorefineries. The disadvantage is that corn is a crop that needs a lot of inputs — fertilizers, water and pesticides — and that doesn't put as much of the sugar it creates through photosynthesis into its ears as one might wish. A lot of the sugar is instead turned into stalks and 'stover' — structural material rich in cellulose and considerably more difficult to break down.

Plants that store up a significant amount of energy in easily usable forms such as starch or sugar are exceptions, encouraged in their oddities by millennia of selective breeding — and of them all, only sugar cane grown in the tropics puts enough energy into its easily purified products to make bioethanol obviously attractive. Most plants put the bulk of the energy they store up from the sun into cellulose and a related polymer, hemicellulose, and woody plants add another substance, lignin, to the mix. Cellulose makes up the plant's cell walls and, like starch, it is a polymer of sugars containing six carbon atoms linked one to the next. Hemicellulose, on the other hand, is based on a five-carbon sugar, xylose, although it contains many other sugars as well; its various components are thrown together in messy looking chains with many branches. Lignins are huge crosslinked jumbles of organic molecules which reinforce cellulose and hemicellulose to turn them into wood.

The energy that the plants put in to making the bonds in these various substances could, in principle, be extracted by fuel makers. And these molecules — particularly cellulose, which is both the most abundant and the easiest to dismantle — are much more plentiful than starches and sugars. But they are also much harder for microbes to break down; if they weren't, there'd be no trees, just pools of green goo. As yet, there are no cellulosic ethanol refineries operating at full commercial capacity, and assessments of the technology's readiness for market vary a great deal, as do opinions on how to get there from here. Government incentives and tax breaks might be one solution, but big energy companies also have a role to play, as do the smaller companies that have already worked on developing the technology, but have not yet found the best ways of spreading and licensing it.

The most expensive part of making ethanol from cellulose is pretreating the biomass to make it accessible to the enzymes that will then cut the sugars from the polymers so that they can be fermented. Typical pretreatments reduce the feedstock's volume chemically using acids, peroxides and ammonia, often along with some form of mechanical pressing or shredding. Unfortunately, this is not a step that can be skipped to cut costs, says Charles Wyman of the University of California, Riverside, because high sugar yields are essential, and untreated biomass gives very low yields. "The only step more expensive than pretreatment is no pretreatment," he says. Instead, the hunt is on for pre-treatment technologies that involve fewer chemicals, require less energy and don't degrade the sugars that are set free in the process.

After the pre-treatment stage comes the snipping out of the sugars, which is the point at which biotechnologists think they can greatly improve on the current process. Abengoa Bioenergy of St Louis, Missouri, a subsidiary of the Spanish engineering group Abengoa, recently invested $10 million in Dyadic International, a biotechnology company that is concentrating on enzymes for degrading cellulose.

Based in Jupiter, Florida, Dyadic didn't start out as an energy company — in the 1970s it was a leading supplier of pumice for stonewashing jeans. But the enzymatic expertise it developed for distressing denim was then turned to a number of other ends. One of those was breaking down wood, a job that in nature largely falls to fungi. The company's research has centred on a filamentous mess of a fungus discovered by accident in a Russian forest that now, after ten years of processing and genetic engineering, makes up Dyadic's patented C1 fungal cell system. The fungus has been fully sequenced and encouraged to overexpress the genes that then make cellulases and xylanases — the proteins that break up cellulose and hemicellulose to produce fermentable sugars. "We have the world's most prolific filamentous fungus," boasts Dyadic's chief executive Mark Emalfarb.

Cellulose solutions
Emalfarb believes that the cellulosic ethanol market could eventually be worth $20 billion a year in the United States, and suggests that there is enough raw material available in the United States to produce 2.4 billion barrels of cellulosic ethanol a year. This is a bit more than half of what some estimates claim is needed to completely replace petrol as a fuel — the United States gets through some 3.3 billion barrels a year, but the energy content of ethanol is lower than that of petroleum.

The current leader in the cellulosic ethanol market, Iogen, also uses fungal enzymes. The company makes small commercial quantities of ethanol from straw at its pioneering cellulosic ethanol facility in Ottawa, Canada. As the first of its kind, this is an undoubted achievement. But even when it reaches its full capacity, which it is taking quite some time to do, it will be capable of producing only 2.5 million litres (16,000 barrels) a year, which is not a great deal.

Iogen chief executive Brian Foody is not worried. The critical steps for getting the right enzymes, the right pretreatment systems and the right yeast systems, have all been done, he says. "We just need to go through the nuts and bolts of the process." This means making sure that the demonstration plant works well enough to be replicated elsewhere — the company is looking to build new facilities in Idaho, Saskatchewan and Germany.

Iogen recently secured a $30-million investment from the bankers Goldman Sachs, bringing the total invested in it since the 1970s up to $130 million. But not all potential investors are convinced. "I don't really understand what Iogen is doing," says Matt Drinkwater, market analyst at New Energy Finance in London, UK. And his concerns are not unique to Iogen — many of the companies in the sector, he says, hold details of their processes so close to their chests that they are hard to evaluate, whether they be relatively small outfits such as Iogen or giants such as DuPont, which is also developing cellulosic ethanol technologies. Robert Wilder, who manages the Wilderhill clean energy index — the first such index to be accepted on Wall Street — agrees, but acknowledges the constraints that the chief executives of small cellulosic ethanol companies work under in terms of not tipping their hands to larger competitors.

Smells like green spirit
Perhaps because of these uncertainties over the technology's readiness, most of the money that has been invested recently in ethanol production both within the United States and beyond has been in the more traditional technologies. The sizable investments being made by agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland — the biggest ethanol producer in the United States and, perhaps tellingly, a company run by a chief executive who was recruited from the oil industry — seem mostly to be in traditional corn ethanol. The same applies to high-flying UK entrepreneur Richard Branson's recent investments in Ethanol Grain Processors of Tennessee and a new grain-based Californian ethanol venture, Cilion.

But there is some evidence that enthusiasm for investing in corn ethanol may be waning. Various ethanol companies that were riding high earlier in the year saw their stock slump after the summer when oil prices came down from their $78 a barrel peak.

This might mean the market is aware that, although subsidies may be able to keep it profitable for the time being, there is no way that corn ethanol can make a marked difference to long-term energy use in the United States. To make enough ethanol to start seriously displacing oil imports requires a process that can use cellulosic materials such as switchgrass, a tall prairie grass, or miscanthus, a grass imported from Asia, which provide far more tonnes of biomass per hectare than corn kernels ever can, and can be grown on land not suitable for conventional agriculture. Other sources could be farm waste or trees or newly engineered plants of some sort.. This leads to something of an investing impasse: the companies in the business at the moment make money; the ones that might take it to the next stage do not, in large part because no one has made the heavy capital investments needed for plants that make use of the technologies that have already been piloted.

One way round this is to invest across the board. This is the strategy pursued by Vinod Khosla, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who is one of the founders of Cilion. Khosla is also involved in cellulosic technologies through two companies based in Cambridge, Massachusetts: Celunol, which has just started to operate its own pilot plant, and Mascoma, which concentrates on process engineering and which last month raised $30 million in second-round venture funding. Farther afield in the biofuels world, Khosla is also a major investor in Kergy, a company that turns biomass into fuel in a completely different 'thermochemical' way, using just heat and catalysts. For some observers, such as Dan Schrag, a geochemist at Harvard University, these approaches are more attractive than fermentation, not least because they need no witches' brews made from fiddly feedstock-specific enzyme. "When the dust clears, cellulosic ethanol is unlikely to be where we end up," he predicts.

To Drinkwater, investors such as Khosla, with their broad-based approach to the problem, are exactly what the industry needs to drive the market forwards and get it over the final bump it needs to clear before commercial success. Unfortunately, there are few such people. In their absence, many in the industry, not without self-interest, see the responsibility resting with governments to provide attractive tax incentives. "All forms of energy should face market prices that reflect the cost to society that they impose," says Foody. And to set those market prices, the right tax incentives and government mandates need to be in place.

But government incentives won't make the scientists any smarter, and observers outside the pioneering companies believe there is still basic work to be done before those companies, or their eventual competitors, make the process economically viable. Thus they welcome increasing levels of basic research from the government, such as the US Department of Energy's pledge of $250 million to set up two bioenergy research centres that are largely focused on cellulosic ethanol. The European Union has set aside E100 million (US$132 million) for cellulosic ethanol in its seventh Framework Programme on research.

Ethanol alternative
Companies large enough to afford it are also following the basic research route rather than placing early bets on particular technologies. BP has announced it will invest $500 million over ten years to fund an Energy Biosciences Institute, which will be a dedicated facility based at a university. The University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have all been mentioned as possible hosts — the final decision is expected in December.

One intriguing possibility for such research to pursue is replacing ethanol with another form of alcohol. The fact that ethanol is easy to ferment can blind people to the fact that it has almost as many inherent problems as a fuel as corn has as a feedstock. Its tendency to pick up water wherever it goes makes it hard to transport, particularly in pipelines. It's corrosive. It's more volatile than one might wish. And its energy density is low compared with regular petrol.

For these reasons, BP and DuPont are working with British Sugar to adapt their ethanol fermentation facility in East Anglia to produce butanol — an alcohol with four carbons in it, as opposed to ethanol's two. This requires training microbes in new tricks, but it is not as hard a problem as breaking down woody plant material. The East Anglia plant will use locally grown sugar beet as the feedstock, but in the long term the aim would be to use a cellulosic feedstock. "We accept that taking stuff out of the food chain is not the right way to go," says Robert Wine, a BP spokesman.

Drinkwater thinks that an industry demand for butanol as an end product could actually increase interest in cellulosic approaches. "Most refiners would be much happier to use butanol than ethanol," he says. If oil companies become confident in biofuel technologies, investors would in turn be more confident of the biofuels industry as a whole, giving the industry that elusive final shove that it seems to need.

Water Prices Rising Worldwide

Water Prices Rising Worldwide
March 7, 2007 -- By Edwin H. Clark, II, Earth Policy Institute

ECO-ECONOMY UPDATE:
Water Prices Rising Worldwide

The price of water is increasing—sometimes dramatically—throughout the world. Over the past five years, municipal water rates have increased by an average of 27 percent in the United States, 32 percent in the United Kingdom, 45 percent in Australia, 50 percent in South Africa, and 58 percent in Canada. In Tunisia, the price of irrigation water increased fourfold over a decade.

A recent survey of 14 countries indicates that average municipal water prices range from 66¢ per cubic meter in the United States up to $2.25 in Denmark and Germany. Yet consumers rarely pay the actual cost of water. In fact, many governments practically (and sometimes literally) give water away for nothing.

The average American household consumes about 480 cubic meters (127,400 gallons) of water during a year. Homeowners in Washington, DC, pay about $350 (72¢ per cubic meter) for that amount. Buying that same amount of water from a vendor in the slums of Guatemala City would cost more than $1,700.

The price people pay for water is largely determined by three factors: the cost of transport from its source to the user, total demand for the water, and price subsidies. Treatment to remove contaminants also can add to the cost.

The cost of transporting water is determined largely by how far it has to be carried and how high it has to be lifted. Growing cities and towns may have to go hundreds of kilometers to find the water needed to satisfy their increasing thirst. California cities have long imported water from hundreds of kilometers away. And China is constructing three canals that are 1,156 kilometers, 1,267 kilometers, and 260 kilometers long to transfer water from the Yangtze River to Beijing and other rapidly growing areas in the northern provinces.

Pumping water out of the ground or over land to higher elevations is energy-intensive. Pumping 480 cubic meters of water a height of 100 meters requires some 200 kilowatt-hours of electricity. At a price of 10¢ per kilowatt-hour, the cost is $20—not including the cost of the pump, the well, and the piping. One hundred meters is not an unusual lift for wells tapping falling supplies of groundwater. In Beijing and other areas in northern China, for instance, lifts of 1,000 meters are sometimes required.

Mexico City, at an elevation of 2,239 meters, has to pump some of its water supply over 1,000 meters up a mountain. The operating costs alone amount to $128.5 million annually. Pumping this water requires more energy than is consumed overall in the nearby city of Puebla, home to 8.3 million people. Amman, Jordan, faces a similar problem related to delivering water to higher elevations.

In most places water is not purchased or exchanged in a market. But formal water markets are developing in the western United States, Australia, and Chile. Where these water markets do exist, they provide examples of how high the scarcity value of the water—that is, the amount that other potential users would be willing to pay for it—can be. Water prices in Australia’s markets peaked at near 75¢ per cubic meter in December 2006, climbing 20-fold in a year in part due to prolonged drought. In the U.S. West, water prices typically range between 3¢ and 10¢ per cubic meter. This is just the cost of the water itself and does not include the expense of treating or transporting it. In some western U.S. cities, water is so scarce that cities are selling sewage effluent for as much as $1 a cubic meter to be used for irrigating gardens.

In India, water scarcity has prompted some farmers to profit by selling their water instead of farming. The water they formerly used to irrigate their crops is instead pumped from their wells and trucked to nearby cities. The farmers are harvesting water rather than food and at the same time promoting a rapid drop in underground water tables.

The final factor affecting how much people pay for water is the amount it is subsidized. Water subsidies can be very large. For instance, water revenues in the city of Delhi are less than 20 percent of what it spends each year to provide water. On average worldwide, nearly 40 percent of municipal suppliers do not charge enough for water to meet their basic operation and maintenance costs.

Subsidies often benefit only higher-income families. Frequently, urban slum residents in developing countries have no access to municipal water supplies and instead purchase water from private purveyors who bring it in by truck. In part because unscrupulous vendors often control this distribution, the prices are very high, typically exceeding $1 per cubic meter. In several Asian cities, for instance, households forced to purchase water from a private vendor pay more than 10 times as much as middle-income families who are connected to the municipality’s distribution system. The poorest households in Uganda spend 22 percent of their income on water, while those in El Salvador and Jamaica use more than 10 percent of their income to satisfy water needs.

Water subsidies are not limited to the developing world. Farmers in California’s Central Valley, for example, use roughly one fifth of the state’s water and pay on average slightly over 1¢ per cubic meter, just 2 percent of what Los Angeles pays for its drinking water and only 10 percent of its replacement value. One analysis of a new U.S. project in central Utah found that the water it will provide will cost close to 40 times more than irrigators pay for it.

Water is currently managed as if it were worthless instead of the life-sustaining, valuable, and increasingly scarce resource that it is. A key step in moving toward more rational water management is to place a price on water that reflects its value and scarcity. This can, of course, result in substantial price increases that particularly hurt low-income families. The best way to avoid this problem is to use a block rate pricing system where a low level of consumption—that required to satisfy basic needs—is very cheap, while prices increase at higher levels of consumption. In Osaka, Japan, for instance, users pay a set monthly fee that includes 10 cubic meters of water; beyond that prices increase in steps from 82¢ per cubic meter up to $3 or more for high-volume users. In addition, ensuring that the poorest households are connected to a secure water supply can protect them from price gouging by private vendors.

Although pricing water at a reasonable cost can generate political problems in the short run, it can lead to substantial efficiencies in the longer run and eliminate a perverse drain on government budgets. Higher prices will lead farmers and industries to use water more efficiently and encourage households to buy more water-efficient appliances and reduce the amount of water they waste. Many efficiency improvements are relatively inexpensive, and most pay for themselves. Any improvement that reduces hot water use, for instance, can pay for itself over time because it saves energy as well as water.

Indeed, there are many links between energy and water. Not only are substantial amounts of energy required to extract, transport, and treat water, but just as the oil price shocks of the 1970s stimulated energy conservation, so too could pricing water to better reflect its real cost stimulate similar conservation efforts by industries, farmers, and households.

Corn-based ethanol's a flawed concept

Corn-based ethanol's a flawed concept
February 16, 2007 -- By Myra P. Saefong, MarketWatch

Ethanol as an alternative energy source is a flawed concept -- at least when corn is used to produce it.

And the consequences of using corn to create ethanol are far-ranging - they even impact consumers and the price they pay for meat.

So is it worth it? It depends who you ask.

"There have been numerous studies completed regarding the energy efficiency of ethanol vs. its production," said John Eichberger, vice president of government relations for the National Association of Convenience Stores.

"These range from a positive net energy return in excess of 30% to a negative net energy return of more than 30%," he said. "Researchers on both sides of the issue argue that the other research is significantly flawed."

Even so, policymakers insist that ethanol is a "positive replacement product for crude-oil based fuels and have proceeded down a path to subsidize and mandate its use," said Eichberger, whose trade organization represents the convenience and petroleum-retailing industry.

There's no doubt that renewable fuels are a good idea, said Darin Newsom, a senior analyst at Omaha, Nebraska-based DTN. "That means putting more research into more efficient ways" of making them.

That said, "corn is a short-term end to the means."

Invest energy to get energy

"Some of the warts associated with ethanol production are [real] -- it does use a lot of water, electricity and natural gas," said Newsom.

So "the problem with corn-based ethanol is that, at best, you don't get more energy out of it than it costs to grow and make it," said Sean Brodrick, a contributing editor at MoneyandMarkets.com.

"At worst, you lose energy."

A math and science lesson is in order.

An easy-to-read measure of whether ethanol's economically viable can be derived from taking a look at its "energy return on energy invested," or EROI, according to Brodrick.

"It is at the crux of why corn-based ethanol is a boondoggle," he said.

EROI can be expressed as "net energy," he explains. The EROI for corn-based ethanol is 1.2:1, so the net energy is 0.2, he said.

That means you put in 1 British thermal unit to get 1.2 BTUs from it, he said.

"At EROI of 1.2 to 1, the 3.9 billion gallons that the U.S. produced in 2005 required 3.29 billion gallons of BTU energy input, resulting in a 'net energy' of 610 million gallons," he said.

And that's being generous, he said. "There are some computations that show corn-based ethanol has a net energy of zero. Others show it as a net energy loser."

So it all depends on how you look at it.

A "break even" with the cost of production would be largely based on the cost of crude oil and the cost of corn, said Rick Kment, an analyst at DTN.

For example, if crude-oil prices are at $70 to $100 per barrel, very high corn prices can be paid and ethanol can still economically work in the system, he said.

But with $30 crude and $4 corn, "it becomes unprofitable," he said.

At current price levels, DTN estimates a net profit -- after depreciation and all other factors -- to be near 5 cents per gallon of ethanol produced, he said.

That's down from a 50-cent per gallon net profit at the first of the year, and down from $2.50 a gallon in June 2006, Kment said.

March crude-oil futures closed Thursday at $57.99 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, while March corn futures were trading around a 10-year high above $4 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade. And March ethanol stood at $2.08 a gallon on the CBOT.

'Dead argument'

Still, there are many more experts who say there's really no question as to whether corn-based ethanol puts out more than it uses up.

"The argument over the energy balance of ethanol is really a dead argument," said Matt Hartwig, a spokesman for the Renewable Fuels Association, the national trade group for the ethanol industry. "Study after study has proven them [the critics] to be flat out wrong," he said.

Hartwig called attention to the Web site for the biomass conversion research laboratory at Michigan State University.

A Feb. 5 note on the site prepared by Bruce Dale, professor of chemical engineering at the university, said the net energy analysis is "simple and has great intuitive appeal," with net energy defined as ethanol's heating value minus the fossil energy inputs required to produce the ethanol.

But "it is also dead wrong and dangerously misleading."

Tadeusz Patzek, professor of civil & environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, said in a report last year that the "energy cost of producing and refining carbon fuels in real time, e.g., corn and ethanol, is high relative to that of fossil fuels deposited and concentrated over geological time."

"We do not value energy per se, but rather the services or 'qualities' that the energy provides," argued Dale.

"We need to carefully choose our metric of comparison," he said.

One gallon of ethanol contains 84,000 BTUs, which is about 2/3 that of gasoline, according to Neil Koehler, chief executive of Pacific Ethanol Inc.

"Since ethanol burns more completely (and cleanly) than gasoline, this lower energy density can be completely offset by increased efficiency," he said.

It's eating at corn

But ethanol's impact on the corn market has been "dramatic," said DTN's Newsom.

"If ethanol demand increases to projected levels, corn supplies will be incredibly low at the end of the 2006-2007 marketing year in August 2007," he said.

The U.S. produced an estimated 4.9 billion gallons of ethanol last year and used more than 5.5 billion, according to the Renewable Fuel Association's Hartwig. Ethanol is blended in more than 46% of the nation's gasoline, he said.

"It would seem that the corn market is poised for a long-term rally in price," said Newsom. He predicts that the high of $5.54 a bushel from 1996 seems like a "reasonable price target."

Meanwhile, limitation in the corn market itself should be considered.

"Corn-based ethanol will be of limited supply," said Charles Perry, chairman of energy-consulting firm Perry Management. The U.S has a limited amount of productive land so we "can spare only a limited amount of our corn crop for ethanol."

At the same time, this corn use for ethanol has been "hampering feeding, with some talk in the livestock industry of herd reduction due to higher feed costs," said Newsom.

"Our food prices will go through the roof -- $4-$5 corn makes for very expensive beef, pork and chicken," said Bernie Feshbach, president of investment firm Feshbach & Sons.

Also, "the use of corn makes ethanol a regional (Midwest) issue as the U.S. lacks the infrastructure to move the product around to meet demand," said Newsom.

But the logistics involved with ethanol production could be irrelevant.

"More attention needs to be paid to the personal economics of ethanol since many consumers are more concerned with cost, than with how a fuel is derived," said Geoff Sundstrom, a spokesman for motorist group AAA.

The industry will get a chance to discuss all of these things soon. The Renewable Fuels Association's 12th annual National Ethanol Conference is next week from Feb. 19-21 in Tucson, Ariz.

The group's Web site says registration for the conference is closed because it's reached its capacity. Interested parties are being placed on a waiting list.

Queensland, Australia: Recycled Sewage Made Drinkable

Australian State Leader Says Drinking Water Must Be Recycled
January 29, 2007 -- By Rod McGuirk, Associated Press, via ENN

CANBERRA, Australia -- An Australian state plans to introduce recycled sewage to its drinking water as a record drought threatens water supplies around the nation, a state leader said Monday.

Queensland state Premier Peter Beattie said falling dam levels have left his government with no choice but to introduce recycled water next year in the state's southeast -- one of Australia's fastest growing urban areas.

"We're not getting rain; we've got no choice," Beattie, who said his government had scrapped a referendum planned for March on the issue, told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

Australian farms and most cities are in the grip of the nation's worst drought in a century, with some areas receiving below average rainfall for a decade.

"I think in the end, because of the drought, all of Australia are going to end up drinking recycled, purified water," he added.

However, Morris Iemma, Premier of New South Wales, the most populous of Australia's six states, said drinking recycled water was not inevitable for Australia's major cities including his state capital, Sydney.

South Australia state Premier Mike Rann said his state -- Australia's driest -- already used recycled water to irrigate crops but would not introduce it to the drinking water supply.

Victoria, the second most populous state, did not need to recycle drinking water, the state's acting Water Minister Justin Madden. He said using recycled water for industry was a better option since that would free up more drinking water.

Prime Minister John Howard, a Sydney resident, congratulated Beattie and predicted recycled water would be introduced to Sydney in the near future.

"I am very strongly in favor of recycling, and Mr. Beattie is right and I agree with him completely," Howard told Southern Cross Broadcasting radio in Sydney.

Davos Day 3: Sustainable Development in Asia -- The Answer's in the Water

Sustainable Development in Asia
January 26, 2007 -- By Lester R. Brown, The Huffington Post

Last night I was privileged to attend a dinner at the World Economic Forum that was sponsored by the Japan Water Forum. The dinner had an important focus: Sustainable Growth in Asia.

While sustainable growth in our world's most populous continent carries many environmental implications there is one area that emerges as the most critical, namely water shortages.

In recent decades, water has become a dominant issue in many countries around the world. In Plan B 2.0, which can be downloaded free of charge from the Earth Policy Institute's web site, I spend a great deal of time focused on this issue, especially as it relates to Asia.

In the last half century water demand has tripled, exceeding the sustainable yield of aquifers in scores of countries, and ultimately leading to falling water tables. In fact, water tables are now falling in countries that contain more than half the world's people

In Asia, this problem is particularly acute. The Amu Darya river, formerly a major source of water for the Aral Sea, is now drained dry by Uzbek and Turkmen cotton farmers upstream. In China, the Yellow River, which flows some 4,000 kilometers through five provinces before it reaches the Yellow Sea, has been under mounting pressure for several decades. It first ran dry in 1972, and since 1985 it has often failed to reach the sea.

A similar situation is taking place in Southeast Asia where the flow of the Mekong - which provides water to Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Viet Nam - is being reduced by the dams being built on its upper reaches by the Chinese.

What does this mean for Asia? It means not only water scarcity, but eventually a dramatic drop in crop yields.

Countries that are pressing against the limits of their water supply typically satisfy the growing need of cities and industry by diverting irrigation water from agriculture, and then importing grain to offset the loss of productive capacity. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain, importing grain is the most efficient way to import water.

The link between water and food is strong. We each drink on average nearly 4 liters of water per day in one form or another, while the water required to produce our daily food totals at least 2,000 liters--500 times as much. This helps explain why 70 percent of all water use is for one purpose--irrigation. Another 20 percent is used by industry, and 10 percent goes for residential purposes. With the demand for water growing in all three categories, competition among sectors is intensifying, with farmers almost always losing.

In China, a combination of aquifer depletion, and the diversion of irrigation water to cities are making it difficult to expand the grain harvest. After peaking at 392 million tons in 1998, the harvest dropped to 346 million tons in 2002 before gradually recovering during the four harvests since then. China's food bubble may be about to burst, as more and more irrigation wells go dry. In recent years, China has covered its grain shortfall by drawing down its stocks, but it will soon have to turn to the world market to fill this deficit. When it does, it could destabilize world grain markets.

Asia can lead the charge to solve the world's ballooning water problems. I see two important steps to this end. First, Asia - as well as developing countries around the world where water scarcity is already a real problem - can reduce demand by stabilizing population and raising water productivity. This is an extraordinary challenge considering that nearly all of the 3 billion people to be added by 2050 will be born in developing countries

The second step in stabilizing the water situation is to raise water productivity, not unlike the way we have raised land productivity. After World War II, with population projected to double by 2000 and with little new land to bring under the plow, the world launched a major effort to raise cropland productivity. As a result, land productivity has nearly tripled since1950. We now need to make a similar effort when it comes to water.

For more Davos coverage -- including news, videos, and blog posts -- visit the Davos Conversation site.

Bolton vs. Gore

The issue of finite resource allocation to the cause with the highest priority is extremely important in trying to make the world a better place. But what the highest priority is depends on who you ask. Here is the article from this weeks The Economist:

A question of priorities: hunger and disease or climate change?

Two years ago, a Danish environmentalist called Bjorn Lomborg had an idea. We all want to make the world a better place but, given finite resources, we should look for the most cost-effective ways of doing so. He persuaded a bunch of economists, including three Nobel laureates, to draw up a list of priorities. They found that efforts to fight malnutrition and disease would save many lives at modest expense, whereas fighting global warming would cost a colossal amount and yield distant and uncertain rewards.

That conclusion upset a lot of environmentalists. This week, another man who upsets a lot of people embraced it. John Bolton, America's ambassador to the United Nations, said that Mr Lomborg's “Copenhagen Consensus” (see articles) provided a useful way for the world body to get its priorities straight. Too often at the UN, said Mr Bolton, “everything is a priority”. The secretary-general is charged with carrying out 9,000 mandates, he said, and when you have 9,000 priorities you have none.

So, over the weekend, Mr Bolton sat down with UN diplomats from seven other countries, including China and India but no Europeans, to rank 40 ways of tackling ten global crises. The problems addressed were climate change, communicable diseases, war, education, financial instability, governance, malnutrition, migration, clean water and trade barriers.

Given a notional $50 billion, how would the ambassadors spend it to make the world a better place? Their conclusions were strikingly similar to the Copenhagen Consensus. After hearing presentations from experts on each problem, they drew up a list of priorities. The top four were basic health care, better water and sanitation, more schools and better nutrition for children. Averting climate change came last.

The ambassadors thought it wiser to spend money on things they knew would work. Promoting breast-feeding, for example, costs very little and is proven to save lives. It also helps infants grow up stronger and more intelligent, which means they will earn more as adults. Vitamin A supplements cost as little as $1, save lives and stop people from going blind. And so on.

For climate change, the trouble is that though few dispute that it is occurring, no one knows how severe it will be or what damage it will cause. And the proposed solutions are staggeringly expensive. Mr Lomborg reckons that the benefits of implementing the Kyoto protocol would probably outweigh the costs, but not until 2100. This calculation will not please Al Gore. Nipped at the post by George Bush in 2000, Mr Gore calls global warming an “onrushing catastrophe” and argues vigorously that curbing it is the most urgent moral challenge facing mankind.

Mr Lomborg demurs. “We need to realise that there are many inconvenient truths,” he says. But whether he and Mr Bolton can persuade the UN of this remains to be seen. Mark Malloch Brown, the UN's deputy secretary-general, said on June 6th that: “there is currently a perception among many otherwise quite moderate countries that anything the US supports must have a secret agenda...and therefore, put crudely, should be opposed without any real discussion of whether [it makes] sense or not.”

India's Forgotten Farmers

On June 20th 2006, Karishma Vaswani wrote an article entitled 'India's Forgotten Farmers Await Monsoon' for BBC News. Here are some excerpts:

Across much of India, the rains that should have come with the annual four-month monsoon have been lighter than usual - so suicide rates among India's 700 million farmers, many burdened with drought-related debt, are high. Hundreds of farmers have killed themselves in the Vidharba region in the last year because of drought-related debt.

It's a vicious cycle. Farmers borrow money to buy seeds in the hopes of a good monsoon. But erratic rains, and lack of information about when the rains are coming, make for a poor harvest. They cannot pay back their debts and are forced into more debt for the following year. Suicide seems like the only alternative.

But some farmers have decided to find another route. In Dhorli village, farmers have decided that rather than taking their own lives, they will take matters into their own hands. Dhorli village is one of four villages in India to put itself up for sale. It has put banners up across the village, saying that livestock, homes, property here are all up for sale.

Farmers in this village say they feel neglected by the government. They are so fed up with farming that they want to move to the cities in the hopes of a better life. Village elders told us they had no other choice but to sell their land to repay their debts. When we asked them about braving the life in the cities - where they would surely live in one of Mumbai or Delhi's many slums - they said they would rather put up with a life in the slums where they could earn a living, rather than stay in the village starving.

With few irrigation facilities, Indian farmers have little choice but to depend on rains for their livelihoods. Sixty percent of India's land is not irrigated. A bad monsoon means a bad harvest - and more debt for these farmers. "We have an abundance of land here," says Dharampal Jharundhe, the village elder. "You can see that all 53 of us farmers have land to till. "But we have no water. We are at the mercy of nature. We don't get good harvests - we have nothing to eat here. Tell me, what are we to do? How are we to feed our families - pay back our debts? "We'd rather move to the cities, and set up small tea-shops, or clean footpaths - something to keep our stomachs fed."

But the Indian government is making attempts to help these farmers out. It has set up village resource centres around the country, where young children of farmers are trained to access satellite images showing when the rains are due. This can help farmers plan their harvests better, so that precious seeds are not wasted while waiting for the rains. It's a measure that has not come soon enough.

Farming makes up just a fifth of India's $665bn economy, but it feeds two-thirds of the population. A bad monsoon can spell life or death for millions of India's forgotten farmers.

Africa: Investing in Conservation

On June 20th 2006, CNN wrote this article on sustainable development throughout Africa.

"People who think that development and conservation cannot go hand-in-hand are wrong," President Marc Ravalomanana said Tuesday at the opening of a major international symposium on Africa in the capital of Madagascar, Antananarivo. Organized by Conservation International, a Washington-based environmental group, the five-day conference of more than 400 delegates will examine how to use Africa's unmatched biodiversity to ease poverty and lay a foundation for sustainable development.

"In Africa and elsewhere, let us all put an end to the exploitation of natural resources for one-time payoffs, and instead develop strategies for using them sustainably, in ways that will benefit all people," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a statement before the conference.

Oil-rich Equatorial Guinea announced Tuesday that it was creating a new national forest of more than 1.2 million acres and establishing a $15 million conservation trust fund. Fortunato Ofa Mbo, the former Spanish colony's minister of fisheries and the environment, told the conference the new national forest would increase Equatorial Guinea's total protected territory to 37 percent of the tiny country nestled between Cameroon and Gabon on Africa's western coast. That is one of the highest percentages of any country in the world.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf also appeared in a videotaped statement to announce her government would make forest conservation a key component of development policies after years of ruinous civil war. Johnson-Sirleaf said new regulations would seek a balance between the development benefits from logging, including job creation and foreign exchange, and the benefits from conserving forests that provide clean air and water, food and other vital resources. "My government is committed to protecting these benefits," she said, announcing that legislation is being prepared to create a $30 million conservation trust fund that will finance the creation and maintenance of new protected areas. "We need to invest in the future of our people."

Protecting nature means safeguarding the cheapest and most effective source of clean water, food, natural resources and other benefits of ecosystem services, said Conservation International President Russell Mittermeier. "The challenge is how to maximize these benefits in a sustainable way through biodiversity conservation, so that they exist in perpetuity," Mittermeier said. "That is exactly what the Madagascar symposium will be tackling."

One strategy is branding, in which developing nations such as Madagascar market their unmatched nature as ecotourism destinations. Such policies signal stability and control of natural resources to the international community, attracting increased foreign investment, said Juan Carlos Bonilla, head of Conservation International's Central Africa program. "It's something we've seen happening in places like Costa Rica and Belize," he said. "They have progressive environmental policies and they also have liberal economic frameworks. While unrelated, the two have worked well to attract both investment and eco-tourists." Madagascar has dozens of species of lemurs along with colorful birds and frogs, huge bats known as Madagascar flying foxes, giant plants and flowers found nowhere else on Earth. Many are threatened with extinction. By protecting their habitat, Madagascar invests in its nature as a commodity that cannot be matched by even the most powerful nations.

In Mitsinjo, Madagascar, they are growing seedlings of native tree species to plant as new forests that will ingest fossil fuel emissions in the atmosphere, mostly from industrialized nations. The carbon-consuming role of the forests will be sold as carbon credits on the global market under a system given impetus by the Kyoto Protocol that limits fossil fuel emissions in member countries, said Rainer Dolch of Mitsinjo, a private initiative specializing in conservation and ecotourism.

Impoverished local communities also benefit from re-established forests that provide traditional resources such as fruits, medicines, fibers and housing materials, as well as higher yields in their subsistence farming of native species, Dolch said. Persuading subsistence farmers to take part in the planting expected to begin in January has been challenging, due to the abstract concept of a forest having economic value. "They wondered how they can get money for nothing," Dolch said.

What's In Your Water?

This article edited by Katherine Unger in the May 12th 2006 issue of Science/AAAS provides an informative assessment of the current state of the U.S. water supply.

The vast majority of Americans who rely on groundwater to drink are swigging more than just H2O. A new survey of groundwater stored by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) found that volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are found in 90% of aquifers, although generally at levels considered safe for human consumption.

VOCs come from commmonly used products such as gasoline, cleaning products, plastics, and paint. The 17-year USGS study, released last month, tested water samples from 98 groundwater aquifers and 3500 public and private wells for 55 compounds. Scientists identified 42 such compounds, the most common of which was chloroform. It was found in 7% of aquifers, 5% of domestic wells, and 11% of public wells. But fewer than 2% of the samples had VOC levels above those determined by the Environmental Protection Agency to be harmful to human health.

Senior author John Zogorski says the findings underscore the necessity of 'continuing monitoring efforts to go back and understand the sources' of contamination. And Erik Olson, director of the drinking-water program at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C., cautions that many of the chemicals identified could be harbingers fo worse contamination. For instance, 3% of aquifer samples contained MTBE--a highly mobile gasoline additive that affects water's taste and odor. Its presence could mean that slower moving and more toxic gasoline compounds may not be far behind.