Glaciers in Nepal Shrinking & Producing Mass of Melt Water

Ngozumpa Glacier in Nepal snakes away from the sixth highest mountain in the world, Cho Oyo. It is generating a lot of scientific interest as the Nepalese Himalayas have been warming significantly more than the global mean temperature in recent decades. The concern is that this great mass of water could eventually breach the debris dam and hurtle down the valley, sweeping away the Sherpa villages in its path.

Taking the pulse of Ngozumpa

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News (26 December 2011):

The volume of water at the terminus of Ngozumpa is about a third of a cubic km and growing

Ngozumpa Glacier in Nepal snakes away from the sixth highest mountain in the world, Cho Oyo.

It’s not the greatest glacier to look at – far from it. It’s smothered in a layer of rocky debris that’s fallen from the surrounding cliffs, giving it a very grey, dirty appearance.

But Ngozumpa is generating a lot of scientific interest at the moment.

The Nepalese Himalayas have been warming significantly more than the global mean temperature in recent decades.

Glaciers in much of the region are showing signs of shrinking, thinning, and retreating; and this is producing a lot of melt water.

On Ngozumpa, some of this water is seen to pool on the surface and then drain away via a series of streams and caverns to the snout of the glacier.

There, some 25km from the mountain, an enormous lake is growing behind a mound of dumped rock fragments.

This lake, called Spillway, has the potential to be about 6km long, 1km wide and 100m deep.

The concern is that this great mass of water could eventually breach the debris dam and hurtle down the valley, sweeping away the Sherpa villages in its path. The threat is not immediate, but it’s a situation that needs monitoring, say scientists.

One of the researchers at work on Ngozumpa is Ulyana Horodyskyj, from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado in Boulder, US.

She is setting up remote cameras to monitor the surface, or supraglacial, pools of water that dot the length of Ngozumpa. Some are small; some are big – the size of several football fields.

Already, she has been able to establish just how dynamic these water features can be as they drain and fill in rapid time.

The volumes involved can be prodigious. In one event, her cameras spied a supraglacial lake losing more than 100,000 cubic metres of water in just two days. Within five days, the lake had recovered half the volume, fed by waters from higher up the glacier.

“Say I came the week before and the week after a lake drained – it would seem like nothing had happened because the lake level would appear to be the same,” Ms Horodyskyj told BBC News.

“But my timelapse photography tells me that something has happened – 40 Olympic-size swimming pools just got sent down the glacier.”

The CIRES researcher wants to understand the part these supraglacial lakes play in the erosion of Ngozumpa.

Horodyskyj is placing cameras on the cliffs to monitor the water features on the glacier below

Debris-covered glaciers don’t melt in the same way as clean glaciers. The rock covering, depending on its depth, will insulate the ice from solar radiation. But remove it – as happens in these fluctuating lakes – and the rate of melting will increase.

“The enhanced melting comes from the bare ice walls in the lakes,” she explains.

“The melt rate below the debris covering is about 2cm per day, but on these walls it’s 4cm per day. As the lake drains, it exposes the walls which can then calve.”

Ms Horodyskyj’s assumption is that many of the lakes on Ngozumpa’s surface are directly connected; and as one of them drains, it’s likely that another lake at lower elevation is filling. However, the routes taken by the plumbing system are not always obvious.

This is being investigated by Doug Benn from the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), Norway.

He’s been climbing through the vast channels cut by flowing water inside Ngozumpa. Some of these “ice pipes” open up into spectacular caverns.

“It’s widely recognised that the glaciers in this region are melting down as a result of global warming, but what hasn’t been realised is that they’re also being eaten away from the inside as well,” he says.

“These glaciers are becoming like Swiss cheeses, so everything is happening more rapidly than is apparent by just looking at the surface.”

Dr Benn visits the conduits after the melt season, after the water has stopped flowing. It would be too dangerous to get inside them at the height of summer.

It would seem the channels control where some surface pools and lakes form. It is as if the conduits are the templates.

“They’re lines of weakness. As the glacier melts down, the roofs of the tunnels fall in and bare ice is exposed,” explained Dr Benn. “The rock debris on the surface would normally slow down melting, but the existence of these weaknesses inside Ngozumpa opens it up and makes it melt far faster than would otherwise be the case.”

One of his students, Sarah Thompson, is concentrating her study on the end story – the snout of the glacier. This is where the water sent down Ngozumpa is gathering, in the rapidly growing Spillway Lake.

It is bounded by the moraine – an enormous pile of granite fragments dropped by the glacier over millennia.

At this point the glacier is stagnant; it is not moving. Again, the exposed ice walls that line Spillway Lake calve into the water, raising its level.

“We’ve got quite a short time period – the past 10 years – but it’s an exponential growth in area,” Ms Thompson says of Spillway’s size. “And when we look at other similar lakes in the region, Spillway is on the same sort of trajectory to their development.”

The Swansea University researcher added: “The expansion is way beyond what you would expect from the rates of ice melting, ablation and even calving.

“We need to understand at an early stage the processing rates so that we can predict ahead of time what is likely to happen and, if needs be, go in and mitigate all of this before it becomes such a significant hazard.

“In my work, we’ve been trying to identify where there might be weak points in the moraine dam, and we believe we’ve identified a few areas where in future you might want to take action.”

Spillway is not expected to burst out anytime soon. It could be two decades or more before a 6km-long body of water is built
up. But the difficulty of working in the region and bringing heavy equipment into the area means a long-term strategy for managing the lake’s evolution is essential.

Source:  www.bbc.co.uk

Climate Change Challenge for Cocoa and Chocolate

Enjoy your festive treats while you can, chocolate could once again become an expensive luxury item due to climate change, according to a new study commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It found prices could go up even further due to global warming. It looked at the cocoa plantations in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, where more than half of the world’s cocoa is grown, and found that the amount of land suitable for production could halve due to temperature rise of just 2.3C by 2050.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent for The Telegraph (26 December 2011):

Chocolate will become an expensive luxury item due to climate change

Enjoy your festive treats while you can, chocolate could once again become an expensive luxury item due to climate change, according to a new study.

Britain has a greater variety of chocolate bars and treats on sale than any other country in the world and is one of the biggest consumers of chocolate per capita.

But prices are rising due to growing demand in the emerging nations like China and conflict in the countries where the crop is grown.

Now a new study commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has found prices could go up even further due to global warming.

The study of cocoa plantations in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, where more than half of the world’s cocoa is grown, found that the amount of land suitable for production could halve due to temperature rise of just 2.3C by 2050.

Dr Peter Laderach of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture was unable to put a figure on the price rise in almost 40 years’ time.

But he said chocolate will certainly become more expensive if demand continues to rise and climate change causes shortages of cocoa, making it a luxury item.

“If the demand of cocoa keeps growing and the land suitable to grow cocoa decreases the prices will go up,” he said.

Recent political upheavals in West Africa have already pushed up the price by 10 per cent on the trading floor top almost £2,000 per tonne. Higher demand and shortages due to climate change will push up the price further, eventually forcing retailers to put up the price of chocolate bars.

Cadbury and Nestlé have recently pushed up the recommended retail price of top-selling confectionery in the UK such as Dairy Milk, Wispa, Kit Kat and Yorkie by up to 7 per cent – more than double the rate of inflation.

Cocoa trees need a cool climate to thrive and could be moved further up into higher land but since West Africa is fairly flat the potential for this is limited.

The study proposes finding new heat and drought resistant crops and growing more cocoa in the shade.

Ultimately, however farmers will have to branch out from cocoa and diversify with crops that can sustain hotter temperatures in order to survive.

Fair trade chocolate suppliers have long argued that cocoa production should be more focused on high quality production rather than mass plantations. This would allow a better price for farmers, discourage child labour and encourage more diverse farming practices.

The study is not the first time it has been claimed a favourite food is threatened by global warming. Other products reportedly affected by climate change include French wine, and Italian pasta.

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

When Will it Ever End? Coal Mining Challenge for Obama

When it comes to coal mining in the United States, environmentalists have a simple goal: End it. For the Obama administration, it’s a little more complicated. It has restricted coal-mining waste from being dumped into streams and imposed new pollution controls on coal-fired power plants. It admits the twin goals of increased fossil fuel production and reducing US greenhouse gas emissions are necessarily in conflict, at least without a national cap on emissions.  Sierra Club and Wild-Earth Guardians have seven cases challenging federal coal leases in the Powder River Basin, the single largest source of coal mined in the US.

Administration reluctant to close federal lands.

By Juliet Eilperin in Washington Post (26 December 2011):

When it comes to coal mining in the United States, environmentalists have a simple goal: End it. For the Obama administration, it’s a little more complicated.

Since taking office nearly three years ago, the administration has restricted coal-mining waste from being dumped into streams and imposed new pollution controls on coal-fired power plants.

But on the fundamental question of whether the government should halt federal leasing, the answer has been: Not yet.

Instead, the federal government is analyzing the environmental impact of extracting coal from public land, drawing fire from both sides. Environmentalists say such action doesn’t go far enough, while industry officials question why it would pursue this analysis in the absence of a federal law on greenhouse gas emissions.

“On some level, the twin goals of increased fossil fuel production and reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are necessarily in conflict, at least without a national cap on emissions,” said Paul Bledsoe, who was a special assistant at the Interior Department during the Clinton administration. “This fundamental contradiction in current U.S. energy policy is playing out on the Keystone oil pipeline, in our public lands policy and throughout the energy economy.”

Interior Deputy Secretary David Hayes said the agency is “committed to evaluating greenhouse gas emissions among the many important factors we analyze when considering whether or not a coal extraction lease sale makes sense for the environment, the economy and America’s energy security.”

Even as Interior has given added scrutiny to
leasing and pushed for the development of renewable energy alternatives, Hayes added, it hasn’t sought to shut down coal production.

“Coal is providing close to half the electricity in the United States, and 40 percent of the coal used in that mix comes from the public land — our land,” he said. “It’s an important part of our energy mix.”

Coal production totaled 1.17 billion short tons in 2008, according to the Energy Information Agency. It declined to 1.074 billion tons in 2009 and last year reached 1.084 billion. It is expected to be roughly 1.08 billion tons in 2011.

Increasingly, both the mining industry and environmentalists have focused on the Powder River Basin, where coal extraction has more than doubled during the past two decades. In 1990, the federal government made the decision to “decertify” the area as a coal production region, which allows coal companies to identify which tracts of land they’d like to lease rather than having the Bureau of Land Management select them.

Sierra Club and Wild-Earth Guardians have seven cases challenging federal coal leases there.

Source: www.mysanantonio.com

Hawaii Leads in Energy Savings & Renewable Energy Innovations

Given its isolated location, Hawaii is in a particularly precarious position, importing 90% of its energy and with the highest energy prices in the country. But it is also ranked No. 1 in the US for investment in energy savings for public buildings per capita and thanks to its renewed commitment, it is also becoming something of a test bed for renewable energy technologies, including geothermal and algae-based biofuel technologies to smart grid experiments.

By Sonia Isotov for Maui Now (28 December 2011):

Hawaii is ranked No. 1 in the United States for investment in energy savings performance contracting (ESPC) for public buildings per capita, according to a ranking published by the Energy Services Coalition.

Hawaii’s overall conservation investment exceeds $150 million. “We are growing a sustainable economy and transforming government through performance contracting and by mobilizing and leveraging investment in high-impact energy efficiency projects for public and private buildings,” said Mark Glick, administrator, DBEDT’s State Energy Office.

“This is exactly the type of investment that will propel the State of Hawai‘i toward our goal of 70% clean energy by 2030,” said Governor Neil Abercrombie, in a written statement today.

“Energy savings performance contracting projects combined with other ambitious clean energy programs – such as the aggressive expansion of photovoltaic use at public school facilities – will further our state’s energy independence and provide a strong catalyst for job growth.”

The Energy Services Coalition is a national nonprofit network working at the state and local level to increase energy efficiency through building upgrades.

ESPC uses guaranteed future energy and water utility bill savings to pay for the up-front capital costs of facility improvements. In Hawai‘i, the State Energy Office has been providing technical assistance on performance contracting to state agencies and the counties, upon request, since 1996.

From 1996 to 2008, ESPC projects by the State of Hawai‘i Executive Branch, University of Hawai‘i at Hilo, state Judiciary, local hospitals, City and County of Honolulu, and the counties of Hawai‘i and Kaua‘i totaled $68,218,183.

In 2009, an additional investment exceeding $33,900,000 for Phase I of a state Department of Accounting and General Services (DAGS) ESPC project brought the total for Hawai‘i to over $100 million.

This year, the state Department of Public Safety (PSD), with DAGS as overall manager, and the University of Hawai‘i Community Colleges (UHCC) initiated projects of $25,511,264 and $32,802,833, respectively, bringing the total investment to more than $159 million (or $117 per capita).

The PSD project covers more than 569,000 square feet at the high and medium security sections at the Halawa Correctional Facility (HCF) and the Laumaka Work Furlough Center at the O‘ahu Community Correctional Center (OCCC). Work includes energy and water efficiency retrofits and improvements to operations and maintenance with annual savings of $2.3 million over the 20-year term of the project.

The UHCC project covers four campuses on O‘ahu with upgrades in lighting and heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment and is expected to generate savings of $4.5 million annually over the 20-year term of the project.

The state is moving forward on other Energy Savings Performance Contracting projects to further increase energy efficiency and reduce costs at state government buildings and facilities. DAGS issued an invitation for proposal (IFP) for a Phase II ESPC for 28 buildings; the Hawai‘i Public Housing Authority is finalizing agreements for a 789-building project; and the state Department of Transportation, with the Airports Division taking the lead, issued an IFP for ESPC for 15 airports, five harbors, and highways facilities throughout the state.

Source: www.mauinow.com

Amy Westervelt for  Forbes GREEN TECH (29 December 2011):

Hawaii: Our Very Own Island Nation, Battling Climate Change Via Innovation

Amid the abstract arguments that often dominate discussions of climate change (let’s face it, for the average person climate models and debates over half a degree here or there don’t hold much relevance), the pleas of island nations have helped to put a human face on things. Representatives from the small island nation of Tuvalu, concerned that their country might disappear in the coming decades, became the poster children of the Copenhagen climate summit last year. Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed has captured hearts and minds all over the world with his commitment to keeping his people and country above water.

Of course, Americans don’t actually have to go all the way to the Indian Ocean to see the effects of climate change. The people of Kivalina, Alaska are losing the ice their village is built on at an alarming rate, requiring urgent and expensive relocation. Many have attributed the storms and floods that have battered Louisiana over the past several years to climate change. But nowhere in the United States is the immediate need to tackle resource efficiency more evident than in the island state of Hawaii.

While people continue to argue over whether human activity is affecting global temperatures, no one disputes the fact that many of our most fundamental resources–water, energy, clean air–are increasingly constrained as the planet’s population grows. Given its isolated location, Hawaii is in a particularly precarious position. Currently the state imports 90 percent of its energy and has the highest energy prices in the country.

We are at great risk of a severe crisis in the future if we don’t become self-sufficient,” says Mark Glick, administrator of the State Energy Office of the Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism (DBEDT). “Our longeterm vitality is totally dependent on our ability to become more self-sufficient and, in turn, to retain businesses.”

Glick notes that the state’s current high energy prices are a deal-breaker for many businesses, making it difficult to grow the economy beyond the state’s traditional economic engine–tourism. In an effort to reduce its dependence on imported energy, Hawaii has set an aggressive goal of meeting 40 percent of its energy needs through renewable sources and employing conservation measures to reduce energy demand by 30 percent by 2030. Unfortunately, according to a recent study conducted by the Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Lab it’s doubtful that the state will be able to meet this goal without connecting its disparate island energy sources into a single, statewide grid.

To that end, the state is moving forward with an innovative and ambitious plan to connect the islands via undersea cable, starting with Oahu, Maui, Molokai and Lanai. “Oahu has about 85 percent of the population in the Islands,” explains William Kucharski, director of renewable energy (Pacific) at AECOM Technical Services, Inc, which is producing the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the state’s new renewable energy project. “It also has the least amount of developable land. So when you’re looking at renewables, it appears they’ll have to get power from some other source. If renewable energy can be produced on the other islands, then it can be transmitted through undersea cable,  and hook the Islands together to have a statewide grid rather than a separate grid for each island.”

It sounds simple enough, but given the fact that much of Hawaii is surrounded by marine sanctuaries–some of which are under federal jurisdiction while others are overseen by the state–and that a few of the renewable energy projects proposed to meet the state’s goals, particularly wind farms proposed for Lanai and Molokai, have come under fire, it’s not likely to be easy for the state to move forward. It’s also not a hugely common technology. Underwater cables have been installed in Long Island, in a few test projects in Canada, and in a handful of European locations, but the Hawaii project will be one of the largest and most complicated.

As a first step, rather than tying the development of the undersea cable to any particular renewable energy project (or type of renewable energy), the EIS is taking a programmatic approach, which would enable the cable to move forward irrespective of any particular energy project receiving approval. The EIS is scheduled for completion within 18 months, and the local utility–Hawaiian Electric Company, Inc.–has a request for proposals out for cable developers, one of which is likely to be selected in 2012.

In the meantime, the state is working to study and better understand other aspects of the project as well. “The World Bank has done considerable studies on the Caribbean nations in terms of different ways their grids could be connected to transform the economies of island nations,” Glick says. “We find that work directly applicable to our situation, and we’re looking into those cases much more deeply. We’ve had to do considerable study on our particular context as well, in terms of distances traveled and the depths of the ocean, as well as how the energy could be introduced to various markets in Hawaii.”

The state’s renewable energy strategy is now fairly dependent on the cabling project moving forward.

We really are focused on making this successful,” Glick says. “If it doesn’t work out it makes it extremely difficult to meet our self-sufficiency goals and our renewable energy goals. So we are totally consumed with making this work, under the premise that now is the time to act and if we do act now we can achieve our renewable energy portfolio goals in an economically viable way.”

At stake is not only the state’s ability to wean itself off of imported oil, but also residents’ ability to pay increasingly pricey electrical bills. “Molokai has the highest rates in the country,” Kucharski says.  ”Hooking it into a statewide grid would allow the utility to normalize rates, which might increase Oahu’s rates slightly, but would bring Molokai’s rates down, possibly by a lot.”

Thanks to its commitment to renewable energy, Hawaii is now also becoming something of a test bed for renewable energy technologies, from the study of various geothermal and algae-based biofuel technologies happening at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority on the Big Island to smart grid experiments the state is conducting along with representatives from Japan and China.

We have more in common with Japan and Okinawa, for example, than we do with any other part of the U.S.,” Glick explains. “They look to us as a place to test technology – we’re isolated and so the tests can be very true.  We provide an excellent statistical case to test new technology.”

Those relationships also keep the state’s energy industry up-to-date on the latest technologies, which Glick hopes could push Hawaii’s renewable energy goals past the current 40 percent.

There’s a real opportunity for us to have and even higher degree of self-sufficiency and retain all of this wealth that we currently send outside the state,” Glick says. “Increasing our energy production could really help to improve our balance of trade payments.

Source: www.forbes.com

Study Shows Past Climate Change Shifted Species Off  the Planet

Climate change — even drastic climate change — isn’t new for the planet. But something else is: us. The earth has never seen a species as numerous or as demanding as the modern Homo sapiens, spread to every corner of the world, using up resources and transforming the planet through agriculture, mining and deforestation. Bryan Walsh in Time Magazine.

By Bryan Walsh in Time Magazine (27 December 2011):

A new study shows how climate change drove species diversity in the past.

We are the products of our environment — and that goes for egrets and elephants as much as human beings. The history of all life on this planet has been one of change and adaptation. The environment changes, and life adapts. That’s evolution in a nutshell.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that as the planet’s climate has changed through the geologic past — and it’s changed severely, from the hot and humid earth of the Triassic period to the ice ages that ended just 20,000 years ago — life has changed along with it.

In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a group of researchers plot out just how the changing climate has impacted mammalian evolution in North America over the past 65 million years. They find that there have been six distinct waves of species diversity, and that the driving force of those waves has likely been climate change.

Here’s Brown University evolutionary biologist Christine Janis — a co-author on the paper with a group of Spanish researchers — on how changes in the climate beat out other factors like migration:

Although we’ve always known in a general way that mammals respond to climatic change over time, there has been controversy as to whether this can be demonstrated in a quantitative fashion. We show that the rise and fall of these faunas is indeed correlated with climatic change — the rise or fall of global paleotemperatures — and also influenced by other more local perturbations such as immigration events.

Of those six “waves” that Janis and her colleagues identify, four show statistically significant correlations with major changes in temperature, while the other two show a weaker correlation, most likely because those patterns corresponded to times when mammals from other continents invaded North America. Even today, invasive species are a leading cause of species extinction and ecosystem change — keeping in mind the fact that humans are, in a sense, an invasive species. But the PNAS study shows how relatively rapid changes in the planet’s temperature led to changes in ecosystems — woodland vegetation shifting to grasslands, for example — which in turn led to evolutionary changes in species themselves. Life adapts.

Of course, as the climate changes today — much more quickly than it has in the past — the question again is how life will adapt to a warmer world. Though the PNAS study doesn’t make any projections, other research has — and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. It’s difficult to get a firm idea of how wildlife might adapt — or not — to rapid climate change, which makes it hard to project actual numbers of extinctions in a warmer world. The PNAS study shows that temperature change in the past has led to changes in species diversity; when it comes to man-made global warming though, we’re embarking on an unplanned experiment without a control group.

The good news — of sorts — is that the earth has experienced massive climate change and massive species die-off through its 4.5 billion-year history, and every time, life eventually bounces back. Climate change — even drastic climate change — isn’t new for the planet. But something else is: us. The earth has never seen a species as numerous or as demanding as the modern Homo sapiens, spread to every corner of the world, using up resources and transforming the planet through agriculture, mining and deforestation. Science looks to the past to try to understand the future, but nothing like us has ever happened to the earth before.

Bryan Walsh is a senior writer at TIME

Source: www.time.com

Island Airport Goes Solar & King Tide Beach Snaps Sea Level Rise

A Queensland government project, initiated by Green Cross Australia, is asking beach goers to take summer holiday beach snaps as a way of recording the impact of king tides, which can predict sea level rise. And the Micronesia island state of Palau has covered its airport car park with 1000 solar panels to generate 250 megawatt-hours of electricity annually and avoid about 80 tonnes of carbon emissions each year.

King tides predict climate change sea level rises

By Neroli Roocke ABC Rural News (27 December 2011):

A Queensland government project, initiated by Green Cross Australia, is interested in summer holiday beach photos taken around the time of king tides.

King tides are the highest tides of the year and one of the biggest is forecast for January – although already over Christmas an ex-tropical cyclone sitting almost 1,000 km off the east coast of Australia has pushed up swells as big as four metres.

Beaches from Fraser Island in Queensland to the south of New South Wales have had to be closed and there’s been erosion and some minor flooding as the water pushed inland.

David Robinson from the Queensland Centre for Climate Change Excellence wants to collect images of how high the seawater reaches in as many locations as possible.

“We know that the sea level is rising but it’s a little difficult to visualise and understand what that means,” he said.

“But if we take photographs of the big tides of the year, then this will give us an indication of what’s going to come in the future.”

“The king tides of today will become the everyday tides of the future.”

Similar photographic studies have been undertaken in New South Wales, California in the US and Canada.

Photos can be uploaded to www.witnesskingtides.org and they will go towards an interactive map.

Source: www.abc.net.au

Palau enters race against climate change

ABC Asia Pacific News (28 December 2011):

The roof of Palau airport’s carpark is covered in more than 1,000 solar panels.

Palau has entered the global campaign to tackle climate change by covering its airport carpark in solar roof panels to reduce the facility’s carbon footprint.

More than 1,000 solar panels have been installed, producing an estimated 250 megawatt-hours of electricity annually.

The project is expected to avoid about 80 tonnes of carbon emissions each year.

The minister for Public Infrastructure, Industries, and Commerce, Jackson R. Ngiraingas said the panels would help reduce the country’s reliance on expensive, imported fossil fuels by 2030.

“Our country is very environmentally conscious,” Mr Ngiraingas told Pacific Beat.

“The window of change has begun in which most countries are becoming aware of climate change.”

Palau says the project was funded by a Japanese aid grant.

Solar panels have also been rigged in the country’s main hospital parking lot along with three government buildings.

Mr Ngiraingas said the solar panels are multi-purposed as they also provide shelter for parked cars.

“It’s a blessing in disguise,” he said.

“People park their cars in the area, and at the same time in the sunshine it provides shade for the cars and even when it rains it acts as an umbrella.”

Palau, officially the Republic of Palau, is an island nation in the Pacific Ocean, 800 km east of the Philippines and 3,200 km south of Tokyo.

In 1978, after three decades as being part of the United Nations trusteeship, Palau chose independence instead of becoming part of the Federated States of Micronesia, a Compact of Free Association was approved in 1986 but not ratified until 1993. It was put into force the following year, making it one of the world’s youngest and smallest sovereign states.

Source: www.abcasiapacificnews.com

It’s Getting a Lot Easier to be Green: Good Product News for 2012

Business and product announcements to cheer about: the world’s most fuel-efficient hybrid car is ready to go; there’s a new way to store energy that outperforms most batteries and is much cheaper to produce; and technology exists to generate electricity by turning shredded paper into sugar which in turn is used as fuel. Meanwhile, in the US incandescent light bulbs are finally on their way out. They will be phased out in 2012 and all light bulbs will be required to meet new energy efficiency standards.

From Reuters (26 December 2011):

Toyota Motor Corp launched the world’s most fuel-efficient hybrid car, as the company looks to fight off competition from pure electric vehicles.

The compact car, dubbed ‘Aqua’ in Japan and the ‘Prius C’ overseas, has a listed fuel efficiency of 35.4 km/litre (83.3 mpg), beating the current top Prius, which gets 32 km/litre.

Rivals Nissan Motor Co and General Motors Co are seeking to share the green limelight with their Leaf and Chevrolet Volt electric cars, though sales volumes are expected to stay relatively low until the high price of batteries comes down significantly.

Toyota is aiming for monthly Aqua sales in Japan of 12,000 units, with a starting price of 1.69 million yen (US$21,600).

The Japanese automaker, which dominates the hybrid field, is aiming to launch about 10 new gasoline-electric models by 2015 and offer a fuel-sipping option across its entire line-up around 2020.

The firm last week forecast a 20 percent surge in 2012 sales as it recovers from the March earthquake in Japan and flooding in Thailand that hit production around the world.

Source: www.reuters.com

Energy-store membrane better than batteries

Straits Times report (24 December 2011):

A team from the National University of Singapore’s Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Initiative has come up with a new way to store energy that outperforms most batteries.

That has important uses, especially for storing the energy produced by alternative technologies like solar and wind power.

The polystyrene-based polymer membrane (right) can store up to 0.2 farads (a unit of charge) per square centimetre when sandwiched between two metal plates, compared with a millionth of a farad for a standard capacitor.

And it is four to eight times as cheap as lithium-ion batteries. Most rechargeable batteries are based on liquid electrolytes, making them more expensive to produce and make larger.

The research, led by Dr Xie Xian Ning, was published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science and highlighted in Nature.

Source: www.lexisnexis.com

BBC News Technology (21 December 2011):

Sony has unveiled a paper-powered battery prototype in Japan.

The technology generates electricity by turning shredded paper into sugar which in turn is used as fuel.

If brought to market, the innovation could allow the public to top up the power of their mobile devices using waste material.

The team behind the project said such bio-batteries are environmentally friendly as they did not use harmful chemicals or metals.

The Japanese electronics giant showed off its invention at the Eco-Products exhibition in Tokyo last week.

Employees invited children to drop piece of paper and cardboard into a liquid made up of water and enzymes, and then to shake it. The equipment was connected to a small fan which began spinning a few minutes later.

The process works by using the enzyme cellulase to decompose the materials into glucose sugar. These were then combined with oxygen and further enzymes which turned the material into electrons and hydrogen ions.

The electrons were used by the battery to generate electricity. Water and the acid gluconolactone, which is commonly used in cosmetics, were created as by-products.

Researchers involved in the project likened the mechanism to the one used by white ants and termites to digest wood and turn it into energy.

Their work builds on a previous project in which they used fruit juice to power a Walkman music player.

“Using a ‘fuel’ as simple as old greetings cards – the sort of cards that millions of us will be receiving this Christmas – the bio battery can deliver enough energy to power a small fan,” said Yuichi Tokita, senior researcher at Sony’s Advanced Material Research Lab.

“Of course, this is still at the very early stages of its development, but when you imagine the possibilities that this technology could deliver, it becomes very exciting indeed.”

Source: www.bbc.co.uk

David Biello in Scientific American (1 January 2012):

Happy New Year! And welcome to the year of light…bulbs. Why you ask? Well, it’s not just because LEDs lit up the iconic New Year’s ball drop here in New York City again. No, it’s because this is the year that lighting will finally become more efficient.

The old, incandescent lightbulb turns 90 percent of the electricity it uses into heat rather than light. And in 2012, it will be phased out in the U.S.—or at least radically upgraded. Lightbulbs will be required to meet new energy efficiency standards. So the old 100-watt lightbulb will have to produce the same light using just 72 watts.

Lighting is the original killer app of modern energy—and one that the world continues to embrace. By adopting lighting technologies that use less energy the nations of the world will cut down on the fossil fuels, often coal, burned to produce that light.

So whether it’s new, long-lasting but expensive light-emitting diodes, the swirls of a compact fluorescent or just more efficient incandescents, 2012 will be the year that lighting’s environmental impact gets lighter.

Source: www.scientificamerican.com

Singapore: Is Energy Efficiency Enough to Achieve Emissions Cuts?

Singapore is in danger of having a split personality when it comes to climate change mitigation and adaptation. It is torn between its twin interests as a small vulnerable island state and an economy that relies on energy-intensive industries such as petroleum refining. But serving as a role model means Singapore must shoulder some responsibilities, and tackling climate change is one of those responsibilities it must bear. Grace Chua reflecting in the Straits Times after attending the climate talks in Durban.

By Grace Chua in The Straits Times (22 December 2011):

The United Nations climate talks in Durban, South Africa, earlier this month resulted in what some have called ‘a plan to make a plan’: an agreement for all countries to negotiate a new regime of greenhouse gas emissions cuts by 2015 and have it take effect by 2020.

The current Kyoto Protocol was extended for another five-year commitment period, but it covers only developed nations.

What’s a developing country to do in this interim grey area? They could get some pointers from Singapore, perhaps.

Though the island state aligns itself with the Alliance of Small Island States and the developing world Group of 77 (G-77), which want the developed world to bear responsibility for the emissions it put into the atmosphere, it bears characteristics of both developed and developing countries.

Hence, the Republic serves as a model of how a relatively advanced economy could navigate the tricky shoals of climate change.

Singapore has close relationships with both Eastern and Western nations, and Asian countries in particular look to it on many counts. For example, it has collaborated with China on projects like the Suzhou industrial park and a planned eco-city in Tianjin.

But the implication is that serving as a role model means Singapore must shoulder some responsibilities, and tackling climate change is one of those responsibilities it must bear.

Singapore’s stance is: It is keen on a binding agreement that all countries adhere to, according to their respective responsibilities and capabilities.

Singapore Environment Council executive director Jose Raymond commented: ‘As a small island state, Singapore certainly has a vested interest in a legally binding deal being reached as soon as possible.

‘The longer it takes, the greater our vulnerability to climate change, and the greater our investment in mitigation and adaptation measures will be,’ he said.

But torn between its twin interests as a small vulnerable island state and an economy that relies on energy-intensive industries such as petroleum refining, it can be a little split personality.

Arguably, it is not absolutely necessary for Singapore to go any greener.

Compare cutting emissions with the case of electricity. Electricity is not subsidised here, to encourage people to use less. But for many residents middle-class and up, electricity is a small proportion of overall costs, compared with the overall benefit they derive from running the air-conditioner and the computer 24/7.

Likewise, Singapore now has such a high gross domestic product – US$43,867 (S$56,800) per capita – that adapting to the impact of climate change would be a small proportion of overall costs, compared with the potential short-term benefit of continuing to produce carbon emissions by encouraging consumption and industrial growth.

At the same time, Singapore is not sitting around waiting for a real deal, so to speak, before it starts cleaning house. In 2009, it announced it would cut emissions by 7 per cent to 11 per cent by 2020 if no global, binding deal was reached, and by 16 per cent if one was.

Already, other emerging economies that have grown very fast in the past few decades – such as South Korea and China – are adopting similar voluntary targets.

Singapore’s targets are down from the ‘business as usual’ case – in other words, if it continued on the growth trajectory it was on. If no changes were made, Singapore was predicted to have reached some 72 million tonnes of emissions by 2020.

It is aware it will have to pay for adaptation measures anyway, and has already raised minimum levels for land reclamation and new building platforms.

But the crux of the matter is that Singapore’s current energy demand outstrips its current alternative energy supply.

With constant cloud cover and intermittent wind, Singapore is not able to take full advantage of alternative energy sources like solar and wind power.

So it must rely on energy efficiency to achieve those cuts, and has put a new Energy Conservation Act up for discussion, meant to rein in large energy users. (In fact, this is an important symbolic shift, signifying a willingness to use the law instead of simply offering energy users monetary incentives to improve.)

But energy efficiency goes only so far.

That’s why Singapore is genuinely concerned about meeting more stringent binding targets, if in future, all countries must limit their emissions.

Speaking to The Straits Times after the UN talks, Environment and Water Resources Minister Vivian Balakrishnan acknowledged that Singapore might have to purchase carbon offsets one day, depending on how future negotiations go.

Still, Singapore could do more to go green systematically – for example, taxing cars by emissions instead of fuel type, truly supporting the use of public transport and cycling, or offering tax incentives to cleaner and more energy-efficient firms.

That suggests one way to be a role model. The Republic is an emerging economy, which has grown very fast in a few short decades, and countries like China and Thailand are on a similar trajectory (and so are their carbon emissions). While the island state taking the plunge will not transform the world’s climate, it can, by its own action yet, nudge such emerging economies towards deeper, binding targets.

This is not to single Singapore out.

Many countries at the negotiations were also loath to commit to internationally binding, absolute targets, even though they had passed domestic legislation to trim emissions.

With its energy performance requirements and green building legislation, Singapore is already on something approaching the right track.

But now it needs to take the lead and make the difficult decision on how much further to go.

Source: www.eco-business.com

Top 10 Clean Energy Stories of 2011

The clean energy stunner of 2011, according to Stephen Lacey in Grist.com  was undoubtedly that renewable power tops fossil fuels for the first time: “Even with a severe financial crisis in Europe and the continued malaise in the US, renewable energy surpassed fossil fuels for the first time in new power-plant investments in 2011”. This is number one in the top ten clean energy stories of the past year.

By Stephen Lacey in Grist.com (28 December 2011):

What an odd year. While businesses around the world were making record-level investments in renewables and efficiency, a growing number of conservative politicians and members of the American media punditry — lead by the outrageously ignorant “reporting” by Fox News — have been foolishly projecting (even cheering on) the demise of the sector.

Aside from the mind-boggling disparity between the science and politics of climate change, I’ve never seen such a large gap between perception and what’s actually happening on the ground.

Of course, we can’t ignore the enormous challenges — from cheap natural gas to relentless competition in manufacturing — that will lead to the death of many of the companies we know today. That is part of the natural (and sometimes violent) shakeout we can expect to see in years to come.

However, in order to cut through some of the recent political attacks, here are stories on the positive trends in clean energy. These are some of our favourites from the last year (with some of our best clean energy charts of the year):

1. Clean energy stunner: Renewable power tops fossil fuels for the first time.

Even with a severe financial crisis in Europe and the continued malaise in the U.S., renewable energy surpassed fossil fuels for the first time in new power-plant investments in 2011.

2. Solar is ready now: “Ferocious cost reductions” make solar PV competitive.

This great series of charts shows just how cost-competitive solar photovoltaics have become with new coal and nuclear plants in the U.S.

3. Regional greenhouse gas initiative (RGGI) adds 16,000 jobs and $1.6 billion in value to Northeast economies.

While RGGI was being implemented, conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity claimed the regional cap-and-trade program would drive rates up 90 percent. An independent analysis shows that after three years, the program has set a course for $1.2 billion in ratepayer savings.

4. Pension funds and big companies to invest over $1.6 billion in energy efficiency projects.

This year saw a couple record-setting, private-sector investments in efficiency, proving once again that the biggest companies in the world see enormous value in reducing energy.

5. Google map reveals massive geothermal potential nationwide, “effectively an unlimited supply,” says Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

The geothermal industry has had its share of troubles financing and building projects in the last couple of years. But a new Google-funded map shows that technically exploitable geothermal resources in the U.S. are equivalent to 10 times our current coal capacity.

6. Green jobs reach 2.7 million: The “clean economy” starts delivering on its promise of high-wage jobs.

Despite what we hear from politicians who call green jobs “progaganda,” a Brookings Institute report released this summer showed “torrid” growth in high-paying, export-heavy green jobs around the U.S.

7. Google phases out clean energy R&D in favor of deployment, citing the “compelling” cost reductions in solar PV.

With over $915 million in clean energy investments to date, Google is emerging as one of the leading players in renewables and efficiency. In order to make a more immediate impact on the market, the tech giant has switched its focus from R&D to deployment.

8. Solar stunner: America is a $1.9 billion exporter of solar products.

With a high-profile trade war against the Chinese brewing in the solar market, it’s often forgotten that the U.S. is actually a net exporter of solar products to China and the rest of the world. With 73 cents out of every dollar spent on a solar installation staying within the U.S., this sector is providing immense domestic value.

9. What free market? Subsidies have always been a big part of energy industry.

Opponents of strategic government investments in clean energy seem to forget the past. A report on historic government investments showed that the federal commitment to oil and gas was five times greater than the commitment to renewables during the first 15 years of a subsidy’s life.

10. Polling reveals that being anti-clean energy is bad politics.

Anyone watching the presidential primaries has seen an astonishing reversal from candidates on climate science and support of clean energy. It turns out that negative rhetoric can actually have negative consequences for candidates.

Stephen Lacey is a reporter with Climate Progress covering clean energy issues. He formerly worked as a producer/editor at RenewableEnergyWorld.com.

Source: www.grist.org

Unsustainable Energy & Food Policies Collide with Global Warming

In a year of big climate news and events, Joe Romm in Climate Progress says the climate story that affects the most people around the world today by far is the one from Oxfam that “extreme weather has helped push tens of millions into hunger and poverty in grim foretaste of warmed world”.  And the energy story with the biggest climate implication was clearly Fukushima.

Climate Progress had been covering those who have been warning the day would come when humanity’s unsustainable energy and agricultural policies would collide with global warming

By Joe Romm in Climate Progress (21 December 2011):

This year has seen a great many important climate stories.  Obviously, the continued self-destructive failure of the nation and the world to reverse greenhouse gas emission trends always deserve to be the top story in some sense:

• Biggest Jump Ever in Global Warming Pollution in 2010, Chinese CO2 Emissions Now Exceed U.S.’s By 50%
• IEA’s Bombshell Warning: We’re Headed Toward 11°F Global Warming and “Delaying Action Is a False Economy”
• The emergence of a genuine grassroots movement following Obama’s fecklessness on the environment is a major U.S. story (see “A Climate Movement Is Born: Ozone Decision Spikes Total Arrests to 1,252 at White House Pipeline Protest“).

And the energy story with the biggest climate implication was clearly Fukushima:

• Japan scraps plan for 14 new nuclear plants

No nukes, No problem. Germany is proving a rapid transition to renewable energy is possible:

“Within four decades, one of the world’s leading economies will be powered almost entirely by wind, solar, biomass, hydro, and geothermal power.”

But the climate story that affects the most people around the world today by far is well described in this post —

Oxfam: Extreme Weather Has Helped Push Tens of Millions into “Hunger and Poverty” in “Grim Foretaste” of Warmed World.

Climate Progress had been covering those who have been warning the day would come when humanity’s unsustainable energy and agricultural policies would collide with global warming, who warned that the agricultural system we need to feed the world was built on a relatively stable climate that we are now destroying.

Lester Brown has been our Paul Revere on food insecurity (see the 2009 post Scientific American asks “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?”).

We covered the emergence of this story last year:

The Coming Food Crisis: Global food security is stretched to the breaking point, and Russia’s fires and Pakistan’s floods are making a bad situation worse; Podesta, Caldwell: “Lasting gains in agricultural productivity will require … action to confront climate change.”

But CP really dug in to this story starting in January, when food prices soared — see Extreme weather events help drive food prices to record highs — and I had lunch with Brown (see Washington Post, Lester Brown explain how extreme weather, climate change drive record food prices).

Brown’s work persuaded me that genuinely destabilizing food insecurity may occur as soon as this decade — assuming 1 billion undernourished people isn’t already a crisis.  So I decided to add a new category, “food insecurity,” and began a series of posts on food insecurity and the threat of Dust-Bowlification, which ultimately led the journal Nature to ask me to make the case that this was the gravest threat to humanity posed by climate change.  As my piece concluded:

“Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.”

Of course, it’s not just climate change that is driving food insecurity.  We have an “unsustainable surge in demand and not just ‘peak oil’, but ‘peak everything’,” as uber-hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, a self-described “die hard contrarian,” put it in a must-read analysis (see  “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever”).

Summary of the Summary:  The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value.  We all need to adjust our behaviour to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.

And we have a grotesquely unsustainable biofuels policy, as CP has long argued:

• The Corn Ultimatum: How long can Americans keep burning one sixth the world’s corn supply in our cars? Bill Clinton warns: Too much ethanol could lead to food riots
• Biofuels May Push 120 Million Into Hunger, Qatar’s Shah Says: “The era of low food prices … is over.”
• The Fuel on the Hill
• More Corn is Used For Ethanol in U.S. Than For Food or Feed — The Top Five Reasons We Should Stop This Madness
• Food-Based Biofuels Are Helping Drive Up Food Prices

But it is climate change that threatens to turn large parts of the habited and arable land of the nation and the world into Dust Bowls, while at the same time driving extreme weather — heat waves and floods — that wreak havoc with crops around the world.

Lester Brown and Oxfam have been doing great work bringing attention to this issue.  And a number of reporters have been doing a good job of covering this story, notably the NY Times climate reporter, Justin Gillis.

And the scientific literature on the connection between global warming and extreme weather exploded this year:

• Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding that harm humans and the environment
• Study Finds 80% Chance Russia’s 2010 July Heat Record Would Not Have Occurred Without Climate Warming
• NOAA Bombshell: Human-Caused Climate Change Already a Major Factor in More Frequent Mediterranean Droughts

My best effort to clearly lay out the problem is the Nature piece.  It had the benefit of multiple reviews by their editors, and I also got comments from five of the world’s leading authorities on climate change and drought and the hydrological cycle:  Kevin Trenberth, Aiguo Dai, Michael Mann, Peter Gleick and Jonathan Overpeck.

Source: www.thinkprogress.org