Gordon Brown Hails New Carbon Partnership

Tuesday, 30 October 2007, 9:59 am
Press Release: UK Government

British PM hails new carbon partnership

The British Prime Minister has welcomed the launch of a new international partnership aimed at promoting and improving carbon trading.
In a recorded message, Mr Brown called the launch of the group in Portgual today a "significant step forward" in the fight against climate change. Building a global mechanism for trading carbon emissions is "fundamental" to reducing greenhouse gases while enabling economic development, he said.

The International Carbon Action Partnership (ICAP) will provide a forum for countries currently engaged in cap and trade initiatives with the aim of establishing a wider and more coordinated global market. The UK has signed up to ICAP along with Germany, France, Portugal and the state of California amongst others.

The PM said:
"The launch of the International Carbon Action Partnership is a truly significant step forward in the global effort to combat climate change.
"Building a global carbon market is, I believe, fundamental to reducing greenhouse gas emissions while allowing economies to grow and prosper. Trading emissions between nations allows us all to reach our greenhouse gas targets more cost-effectively. And it therefore allows us to reduce emissions by more than we could by acting alone."

The Prime Minister's words came as the Government published its Climate Change Bill detailing a list of measures aimed at reducing emissions and creating a low carbon economy. Releasing the report, Envirionment Secretary Hilary Benn said it was time to "step up the fight" on climate change.

The UK has set its cap for the second phase of the European trading scheme, from 2008 to 2012, at 13 percent below its 2005 emissions. Last week the PM said that the UK also remained committed to targets on the development of renewable enrgy sources.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0710/S00727.htm

Internet Uses 9.4% of U.S. Electricity, According to Uclue Research

Equipment powering the internet accounts for 9.4% of electricity demand in the U.S., and 5.3% of global demand, according to new research from Uclue.com

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(PRWEB) September 25, 2007 -- Equipment powering the internet accounts for 9.4% of electricity demand in the U.S., and 5.3% of global demand, according to new research from Uclue.com.
The annual energy demand of computers, monitors, networking, and transmission equipment for the internet amount to 350 billion kWh in the US -- 9.4% of the 3.7 trillion kWh used in total. Similarly, world demand for the internet is 868 billion kWh, or 5.3% of total global electricity consumption of 16.33 trillion kWh.
The largest demand for internet-related energy use comes from desktop computers and monitors, which account for two-thirds of total use. Networking equipment such as modems and routers are another sizable draw, as are the substantial power demands for data processing and equipment cooling at data centers. Actual data transmission, on the other hand, chiefly over telephone lines, is a small component -- approximately 0.1% -- of overall energy demand.
"As far as we know, this is the first estimate of total internet electricity use," said David Sarokin, the Uclue researcher who compiled the data. "The raw numbers were all out there, but they hadn't been assembled in this way before."
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/9/prweb555778.htm

Precious prairie dying for ethanol

5:00AM Tuesday October 30, 2007

America's Great Plains are being engulfed by corn fields.

Photo / Reuters
Beaumont, (pop 286, 70 per cent Republican, 30 per cent Democrat,) is a town so tucked away in the Flint hills of Kansas that it boasts its own fly-in hotel.
It is way off the beaten track, far from the bustle of the interstates, and it was here that I met Pete Ferrell, a rebel rancher burning with anger at the way he says American agriculture is being subverted to the detriment of the planet.
Almost unnoticed by urban America, the last 35 million acres of prairie - deliberately left alone to preserve a precious ecology - is being ploughed up to produce ethanol from corn.
Pete the rancher came striding into the tiny Beaumont Hotel wearing jeans and cowboy shirt, and sat down in the small cafe overhung by aircraft memorabilia to tell his and Beaumont's story.
For more than 100 years his family has been fattening cattle on rich Kansas Bluestem prairie grass, among the last remaining stands of original prairie.
Most of the tallgrass that once covered millions of acres of the Great Plains has been ploughed under. Only isolated pockets remain, some preserved by conservation grants.
Now, even in the Flint Hills, what is left of the prairie is under threat as farmers race to cash in on a bonanza created by planting corn for ethanol production, to ease America's worries about future fuel supplies.
The corn economy is nothing short of a disaster for the environment, for the farm economy and potentially for the Flint Hills, in Ferrell's view.
The prairie is some of the most fertile and productive land on the planet.
A typical section of prairie grass shelters nearly 800 types of birds, mammals and reptiles. It also thrives on being heavily grazed and then left fallow. Prairie grasses hide nearly two-thirds of their buds and mass beneath the ground, and when Native Americans set fire to it to burn off brush, the fresh growth lured back the buffalo they depended on. The Flint Hills were once home to the Kansas Indians who lived off the migrating buffalo. The buffalo were wiped out and the Indians starved off the land to the benefit of the cattle trade.
The cattle came to be fattened up and the cattle barons and ranchers from Texas and Oklahoma stayed in Beaumont's little hotel, while the cowboys camped outside.
In the 1950s, for the convenience of cattlemen, a grass airstrip was put in, allowing planes to taxi up the main street and park at the hotel. These days, the hotel attracts flyers from around the world who delight in taxi-ing their planes down Main Street.
What is annoying Pete Ferrell is not the occasional aircraft crossing the road, but what is happening in his own back yard: the rapid ploughing under of the ancient prairie lands he loves.
Ninety-five per cent of the tallgrass prairie which once blanketed 240 millions of acres of the MidWest is already gone. It was broken up a decade ago by the "sodbusters" of old. Now King Corn, as farmers call their subsidised bonanza crop, is destroying the last surviving prairie lands.
Some conservation minded ranchers like Pete Ferrell still fatten cattle the old-fashioned way with pasture, and then ship them off to Chicago. But most American cows are raised indoors in enormous feedlots, fattened with corn and grains, which they are only able to digest with the help of antibiotics.
America wants to become less dependent on foreign oil, but instead of cutting back on consumption and reducing emissions, it is planning to substitute ethanol for petrol.
Ethanol or grain alcohol is the high-octane corn poteen that hard-pressed Mid-Western farmers and top-tier Washington politicians hope will soon replace petrol.
Across the country there is a madcap dash for biofuels, home-brewed ethanol, and vegetable oil diesel substitutes made from such crops as soybeans, sugar cane and corn.
Because the carbon in biofuels comes from the atmosphere, the theory is that burning it could be carbon neutral. But producing ethanol from corn actually consumes as much fossil fuel as the ethanol itself replaces.
Worse, as the remaining 35 million acres of American soil set aside for soil and wildlife conservation are targeted by farmers, it will release even more carbon into the atmosphere from fields of prairie left deliberately fallow.
Long known as America's breadbasket, the Great Plains have been the country's primary source of wheat for over 100 years. Insecurity over future oil supplies - worsened by the disastrous situation in Iraq - has created a situation in which ethanol production is expected to reach 60 billion gallons by 2030.
It was energy anxiety, and fears about cancer from additives added to petrol to raise its octane, rather than climate change that caused Congress to decree two years ago that 7.5 billion gallons of the country's fuel must come from crops.

This triggered a boom in grain alcohol distilleries in the Mid-West, followed by a surge in railroads to carry the grain and the ethanol, which happens to be too corrosive to use in the country's network of fuel pipelines. So great has been the rush to cash in, that a glut of ethanol hit the market causing prices to plunge 30 per cent since spring.

This has forced the Government to fork out more subsidies to the loss-making ethanol producers and blenders of ethanol and petrol. Another problem is that the Government provides crop insurance and rewards rather than penalises farmers whose crops keep failing, so there is no incentive to stop farming marginal land.

Driving across the plains of Kansas to its geographical centre, I watched its farmers bring in their biggest corn harvest since World War II. Corn now completely dominates the landscape.
Bruce Babbitt, like Al Gore, is a nearly man of US presidential politics. Like Al Gore he is an environmentalist who ran for the White House and failed. Babbitt fell at the first hurdle, in Iowa, in the heart of America's Corn Belt, although he later became US Secretary of the Interior in charge of its national parks and is now chairman of the WWF(US).

"Riding across the Iowa landscape at dawn is a beautiful experience," Babbitt said. "You can almost hear the corn growing."

It is only when you stop to think that the beauty starts to fade - there is just one crop, no wildlife, the skies are empty and the creeks run muddy. It is an industrial landscape stripped of its diversity, an American tragedy.

Environmentalists are now seeing corn being grown for ethanol in places it was never seen before, from southern Texas to the marshy "pothole prairie" of rural Iowa. The total private grassland area declined by almost 25 million acres from 1982 to 2003 - and the pace is quickening along with energy insecurity.

"For now the prairie is in crisis," Babbitt says. "My great fear is that the push for ethanol will cause a great wave of 'sodbusting' and break up what remains of the prairie ecosystem."

The greatest loss of habitat has been in the Corn Belt, which takes in a vast stretch from Iowa to Kentucky. There, some five million acres - about 25 per cent of grassland - has already been lost to ethanol paid for by subsidies that cost the US taxpayer about US$2.7 billion ($3.5 billion) in 2006.

But the worst damage may be taking place in Montana and the Dakotas, where farmers who have been hurting economically are embracing King Corn with abandon.
The fuel E-85 (85 per cent ethanol, 15 per cent petrol) which arrives at the pumps is sold as a "completely renewable, domestic, environmentally friendly fuel".

And it is America's 300 million consumers who enable the corn bonanza to take place.
American taxpayers hand over US$82.1 billion in subsidies a year to farmers and the political system is rigged to keep it that way.

Small, poorly populated Mid-Western farm states have extra political clout because every state, however small or under-populated, has two senators and along with it disproportionate influence in Congress.
But many of the "farmers" collecting the subsidy cheques of $1 million-$2 million are absentee landlords in far away cities like LA, New York and even London.
Jarid Manos is head of the Great Plains Restoration Council, a multicultural organisation of mostly black and Native American members.
"This corn-based ethanol orgy is not only helping destroy what tiny fragments of virgin prairie we have left," he said.
"It also releases thousands of years of soil-stored carbon into the atmosphere as the native prairie is destroyed, not to mention all the carbon pollution from the energy used in its production."

But his is a voice in the wilderness, drowned out by the roar of the 18-wheeler trucks as they head across the interstate laden with corn or ethanol. Back in Beaumont, Kansas, Pete Ferrell remains adamantly opposed to the corn mania gripping the country. He takes me on a tour of his ranch, where cattle graze as hundreds of wind turbines turn gently overhead.

He too was harshly criticised by environmentalists when he installed them two years ago for ruining, as they said, one of the most pristine environments in the American Mid-West.
"Now we have tourists coming out to see us and business in the hotel is booming as a result," he said.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=39&objectid=10472794&pnum=0

BP to Pay Largest Criminal Fine Ever for Air Violations

Release date: 10/25/2007
(Washington, D.C. - Oct. 25, 2007)

Today, BP Products North America, Inc. agreed to pay a total criminal fine of more than $60 million for violations

of federal environmental regulations in Texas and Alaska. In addition to the penalty, the company will spend approximately $400 million on safety upgrades and improvements to prevent future chemical releases and spills.

"BP committed serious environmental crimes in our two largest states, with terrible consequences for people and the environment," said Granta Nakayama, assistant administrator for EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. "Today's agreement sends a message that these types of crimes will be prosecuted."

This is the largest criminal fine ever assessed against a corporation for Clean Air Act violations and the first criminal prosecution of the requirement that refineries and chemical plants take steps to prevent accidental releases. The requirement was passed in 1990 as part of the Clean Air Act following the explosion at the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India where thousands were killed and injured.

BP will pay $50 million for a catastrophic explosion in 2005 that killed 15 people and injured more than 170 others at its Texas City refinery. BP will also pay a $12 million fine for spilling 200,000 gallons of crude oil onto the Alaskan tundra and onto a frozen lake in March 2006, resulting in the largest spill that ever occurred on the North Slope.

In addition to the $50 million fine, the company pleaded guilty to a felony violation of the Clean Air Act and will serve three years of probation for the Texas City incident. BP is also required to complete a facility-wide study of its safety valves and renovate its flare system to prevent excess emissions at an estimated cost of $265 million.

For the Alaska spill, BP pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor of the Clean Water Act and will serve three years probation, pay $4 million to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to support research and activities on the North Slope, and pay $4 million in restitution to the State of Alaska. BP is required to replace 16 miles of pipeline at an estimated cost of $150 million.

On March 23, 2005, an explosion occurred at the Texas City refinery when hydrocarbon vapor and liquid released from a stack and ignited during the process of increasing octane levels in unleaded gasoline. Investigators learned that operators regularly failed to follow written standard operating procedures for ensuring mechanical integrity of safety equipment. The stack where the release occurred had been in poor operating condition since at least April 2003. Alarms failed to function or were ignored.

The Texas City refinery is BP's largest U.S. refinery, which covers more than 1,200 acres and can process as much as 460,000 barrels of crude oil per day. The refinery was previously owned by Amoco, which merged with BP in December 1998.

In March 2006, BP spilled more than 200,000 gallons of crude oil on the North Slope in Alaska. A second spill occurred in August 2006, but was quickly contained after leaking approximately 1,000 gallons of oil. Investigators determined the leak was caused by a build up of sediment in the pipe, and that BP failed to properly inspect or clean the pipeline, which is required by law to prevent pipeline corrosion. The investigation revealed that in 2004, the company became aware of increased corrosion in the pipeline.

http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/eebfaebc1afd883d85257355005afd19/ca0637fa729266968525737f0060bc4b!OpenDocument

Pygmies stand tall over logging

Forty million people in the Congo, including 600,000 pygmies, depend on the rainforests for survival
. Photo / Reuters

The rumble of giant machinery heralds the arrival of loggers deep in the heart of the Congo rainforest. For the pygmy tribes who have inhabited this thick jungle for millennia, the sound of the advancing column is the sound of encroaching hunger and the loss of a way of life stretching back hundreds of generations.

"They bring with them huge machines which go deep into the forest and make noise which frightens all the game animals away," says Adrian Sinafasi, the man seeking to alert the outside world to the plight of central Africa's pygmies. "When the loggers arrive, they bring many workers who are needed to fell the trees. They also need to eat and start hunting but, rather than use traditional weapons in the right season, they hunt with firearms and don't care about seasons or how much food they take."

Sinafasi, who was displaced from his ancestral home in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, is leading a delegation of pygmies to meet the new head of the World Bank in Washington this week. He hopes the talks could lead to a deal to safeguard the world's second-largest rainforest. There is mounting optimism that when the representatives of some of Africa's most remote tribes arrive in the US capital, they can capitalise on outrage over the bank's plan to turn 60,000sq km of pristine forest over to European logging companies.

Forty million people in the Congo depend on the rainforests for survival. Among them are up to 600,000 pygmies who are engaged in a battle over plans to allow millions of hardwood trees to be felled, many to make garden furniture and flooring for European homes. As well as retaining nearly 8 per cent of the world's carbon dioxide, the rainforest is home to a vast biodiversity, including the bonobo apes unique to the Congo river basin.

The indigenous tribes scored a victory last month when their complaints about logging were upheld by the bank's independent experts. Observers believe the bank's board of directors is poised to accept the principle that forest peoples should have a final say in any future development.
The panel, which visited Congo to investigate the pygmies' claims, accepted evidence that the value of the trees had been wildly overstated and officials had failed to consider other sustainable uses for the wood.

It is claimed that far from bringing development and riches, logging is causing widespread malnutrition, especially among children. Felling is also blamed for re-igniting violence in the region, which is still recovering from years of civil war.
Sinafasi, who leads a coalition of 12 pygmy groups, said he would call on the new bank president, Robert Zoellick, to deliver on promises made by his predecessor Paul Wolfowitz. He claimed that his people only learned their homelands were to become logging areas when bulldozers rumbled into their villages.
He said: "When the logging companies arrive, they restrict our right to use the forest and forbid us access to vast areas. They cut pell-mell, with no consideration for the trees we depend on for caterpillars to eat, or the places where we can find mushrooms or get honey. We have no say about whether a tree should stand or fall."

Plans to allow industrial logging in the Congo were drawn up after the World Bank moved back into the country in 2002, aiming to turn it into Africa's main timber producer. While the civil war cost millions of lives, peace has brought with it a new threat as Western companies return to exploit the nation's new-found stability. Roads are being driven through the eastern forest and, to the west, railways and ports are being upgraded around Kinshasa, the capital.

Campaigners fear that over-development, coupled with widespread corruption signals the beginning of the end for the rainforest.

Simon Counsell of the Rainforest Foundation - a British charity which is backing the pygmies - said: "The board of the bank has the chance to avert a major environmental and humanitarian disaster. It should insist on an end to industrial logging of Congo's forests and work with the Congolese Government to find non-destructive ways of managing them for the benefit of Congo's people."

As well as the World Bank, pressure for change is also mounting on its third-largest donor - the British Government, which has a permanent seat on the bank's board. In August, more than 200 MPs signed a motion calling for an end to destruction of the forest.

A spokesman for the Department for International Development said Britain had spent £50 million ($131 million) protecting the Congo basin and was urging the bank to continue with a moratorium on the granting of further logging concessions.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=39&objectid=10470039&pnum=0

Tram runs on Lithium battery and recharges in under a minute

The Railway Technical Research Institute in Kokubunji, Tokyo, has developed a streetcar powered by a lithium battery that can recharge in under a minute

The institute will start conducting test runs in Sapporo at the end of November to check the streetcar's capacity. Powered by the onboard battery, the vehicle runs at a maximum speed of 40 kph for 15 kilometers and is capable of converting 70 percent of its deceleration energy into electricity, which it sends back to the battery. The rest of the power is supplied by recharging stations, where the streetcar connects its pantograph to overhead wires.
The streetcar powered by a lithium battery has been designed to be barrier-free and has a low floor. According to the institute, it uses about 10 percent less power than existing streetcars. In 1987, when the Japanese National Railways(JNR) was privatized and divided into seven Japan Railways(JR) companies, the Railway Technical Research Institute and the Railway Labor Science Institute were merged into one railway research center- the Railway Technical Research Institute.
http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/tram_runs_on_lithium_battery_and_recharges_in_under_a_minute.php

Studies Confirm Large Public Health and Economic Impact of Dampness and Mold

EETD scientists estimate that number of asthma cases attributable to exposure in home is 4.6 million, at $3.5 billion annual cost

Scientific studies show that mold in the walls and ceiling of homes substantially raises the risk of a asthma and other respiratory problems and adds $3.5 billion to the annual national health bill.
Photo credit: Mike McNickle.

A pair of studies published in the journal Indoor Air have quantified the considerable public health risks and economic consequences in the United States from building dampness and mold.
One paper by William J. Fisk, Quanhong Lei-Gomez and Mark J. Mendell, all with the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), concludes that building dampness and mold raised the risk of a variety of respiratory and asthma-related health outcomes by 30 to 50 percent.

"Our analysis does not prove that dampness and mold cause these health effects," says Fisk. "However, the consistent and relatively strong associations of dampness with adverse health effects strongly suggest causation by dampness-related [pollutant] exposures."

The second paper, by David Mudarri of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Fisk uses results of the first paper plus additional data on dampness prevalence to estimate that 21 percent of current asthma cases in the U.S. are attributable to dampness and mold exposure.

"Of the 21.8 million people reported to have asthma in the U.S., approximately 4.6 million cases are estimated to be attributable to dampness and mold exposure in the home," says the study. In addition, this paper estimates that "the national annual cost of asthma that is attributable to dampness and mold exposure in the home is $3.5 billion." The paper also summarizes the considerable evidence of adverse health effects from dampness and mold in offices and schools, and suggests that exposure to dampness and mold in those venues appear to have similar health impacts on those exposed.

Mudarri and Fisk suggest that "a significant community response" is warranted given the size of the population affected and the large economic costs. Preventative and corrective actions include:
• better moisture control during the building's design;
• moisture control practices during construction;
• improved preventive maintenance of existing buildings to include a comprehensive moisture control program including control of water intrusions from outside, plumbing leaks, condensation and humidity control, and other causes of moisture accumulation or mold growth.

The Berkeley Lab paper provides quantitative estimates of the increased risks of having current asthma, being diagnosed with asthma, and having related health effects when people live in homes with visible dampness or mold problems. These estimates are based on a statistical analyses of a large number of previously published studies, none of which by themselves are a suitable basis for overall risk quantification.

The EPA paper's results are based on the analyses of studies of this health issue cited in a 2004 report released by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences and more recently published studies. The IOM report, which is considered the current consensus of the U.S. scientific community, concluded that excessive indoor dampness is a public health problem but did not offer any overall quantitative assessment.

Fisk is Acting Division Director of Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division. When writing these papers he was head of the division's Indoor Environment Department. Mudarri was a senior economist and research program manager in the Indoor Environments Division at the U.S. EPA and has recently retired.
These studies are part of the Indoor Air Quality Scientific Findings Resource Bank project, funded by the Indoor Environments Division, Office of Radiation and Indoor Air of the EPA. The project is a cooperative venture between EPA and Berkeley Lab to quantify the health and productivity impacts of indoor air exposures and make those data publicly accessible

http://eetd.lbl.gov/newsletter/nl26/eetd-nl26-2.html

Daily Average Energy Price

30 July 2007 to 30 October 2007

http://new.comitfree.co.nz/comitfree/open/home.jsf 

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