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CHICAGO, IL — The Chicago chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council this week released the first study of post-construction performance of LEED-certified buildings in the region, measuring their performance compared to conventional buildings.

The group's report, Regional Green Building Case Study Project: a Post-Occupancy Study of LEED Projects in Illinois," summarizes the first year of a mulit-year study of 25 LEED-certified projects in the Chicago area, looking specifically at energy intensity, greenhouse gas emissions, water use, operating costs and occupant comfort.

The report found a wide variance in resource use at the buildings, all of which were certified under an older version of the LEED standard. Figure 1 below shows the Energy Usage Intensity (EUI) for 17 of the 25 projects, each of which provided full energy data for the facility. The energy used in BTUs per square foot per year varies from 30,000 to nearly 140,000 in these projects, but on average performed 24 percent better than the national average.

Those same 17 projects generated 25.8 pounds of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gases per square foot per year, according to the report. Water use for all 25 facilities was measured at 5.9 gallons per occupant per day.

The next phase of the project will add an additional 25 LEED-certified projects to the study, and will further the energy use survey, providing results back to the building owners as a way of boosting the efficiency of the facilities.

"With an understanding of operational issues, tenant behavior, and maintenance practices, building owners and managers can implement ongoing changes that lead to increased building performance and sustainability over time," said Doug Widener, Executive Director of the U.S. Green Building Council's Chicago Chapter.

Other findings in the first round of the study include very high levels of occupant comfort: Overall satisfaction with the buildings, as shown in Figure 2 below, were consistently high across almost every category measured.

Also among the findings from the report are that a premium for green buildings practices exists: The average premium reported by the facility owners was 3.8 percent, in line with the national average. Those premiums can be offset by savings in energy and water use, as well as overall quality of workplace environment.

The full report from the USGBC's Chicago chapter is available for download from GreenerBuildings.com.

If only Americans would hang their laundry out to dry – and commit 16 other acts of environmental kindness – they could slash US carbon dioxide emissions by 7.4 per cent by 2019.

Thomas Dietz of Michigan State University in East Lansing and his team calculated the carbon-saving impact of 17 practices, such as eschewing tumble dryers, car pooling and buying fuel-efficient vehicles (see the full list below).

By drawing on previous studies, Dietz estimated what proportion of the population could realistically be persuaded to change their behaviour using financial incentives, mass-media campaigns and so forth. For example, 90 per cent of Americans are likely to take up better home insulation, though only 15 per cent would go in for car pooling.

The team found that by 2019, US households could cut their annual emissions by 20 per cent – representing slightly more CO₂ than France spews out each year.

Canada and Australia should pay attention, too: Dietz reasons that these two countries, "which have carbon profiles roughly comparable to that of the US", may be able to achieve similar savings.

Everyday shift

"This study is the best estimate we have to date of how effectively behavioural change could cut US greenhouse gas emissions," says Ruth Rettie, who leads Project Charm, a group based at Kingston University in London that investigates ways in which people's behaviour could be influenced.

"Everyday household practices – for example tumble drying or using air conditioning – are resistant to change because they are embedded in conceptions of comfort and convenience," says Rettie. "But with the right combination of policy tools and social marketing, interventions can result in major behaviour changes."

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0908738106

Our early twenty-first century civilization is being squeezed between advancing deserts and rising seas. Measured by the biologically productive land area that can support human habitation, the earth is shrinking. Mounting population densities, once generated solely by population growth, are now also fueled by the relentless advance of deserts and may soon be affected by the projected rise in sea level. As overpumping depletes aquifers, millions more are forced to relocate in search of water.

Desert expansion in sub-Saharan Africa, principally in the Sahelian countries, is displacing millions of people—forcing them to either move southward or migrate to North Africa. A 2006 U.N. conference on desertification in Tunisia projected that by 2020 up to 60 million people could migrate from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa and Europe. This flow of migrants has been under way for many years.

In mid-October 2003, Italian authorities discovered a boat bound for Italy carrying refugees from Africa. After being adrift for more than two weeks and having run out of fuel, food, and water, many of the passengers had died. At first the dead were tossed overboard. But after a point, the remaining survivors lacked the strength to hoist the bodies over the side. The dead and the living shared the boat, resembling what a rescuer described as “a scene from Dante’s Inferno.”

The refugees were believed to be Somalis who had embarked from Libya, but the survivors would not reveal their country of origin, lest they be sent home. We do not know whether they were political, economic, or environmental refugees. Failed states like Somalia produce all three. We do know that Somalia is an ecological disaster, with overpopulation, overgrazing, and the resulting desertification destroying its pastoral economy.

Perhaps the largest flow of Somali migrants is into Yemen, another failing state. In 2008 an estimated 50,000 migrants and asylum seekers reached Yemen, 70 percent more than in 2007. And during the first three months of 2009 the migrant flow was up 30 percent over the same period in 2008. These numbers simply add to the already unsustainable pressures on Yemen’s land and water resources, hastening its decline.

On April 30, 2006, a man fishing off the coast of Barbados discovered a 20-foot boat adrift with the bodies of 11 young men on board, bodies that were “virtually mummified” by the sun and salty ocean spray. As the end drew near, one passenger left a note tucked between two bodies: “I would like to send my family in Basada [Senegal] a sum of money. Please excuse me and goodbye.”

The author of the note was apparently one of a group of 52 who had left Senegal on Christmas Eve aboard a boat destined for the Canary Islands, a jumping off point for Europe. They must have drifted for some 2,000 miles, ending their trip in the Caribbean. This boat was not unique. During the first weekend of September 2006, police intercepted boats from Mauritania with a record total of nearly 1,200 people on board.

For those living in Central American countries, including Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, Mexico is often the gateway to the United States. In 2008, Mexican immigration authorities reported some 39,000 detentions and 89,000 deportations.

In the city of Tapachula on the Guatemala-Mexico border, young men in search of jobs wait along the tracks for a slow-moving freight train passing through the city en route to the north. Some make it onto the train. Others do not.

The Jesús el Buen Pastor refuge is home to 25 amputees who lost their grip and fell under a train while trying to board. For these young men, says Olga Sánchez Martínez, the director of the refuge, this is the “end of their American dream.” A local priest, Flor María Rigoni, calls the migrants attempting to board the trains “the kamikazes of poverty.”

Today, bodies washing ashore in Italy, Spain, and Turkey are a daily occurrence, the result of desperate acts by desperate people. And each day Mexicans risk their lives in the Arizona desert trying to reach jobs in the United States. On average, some 100,000 or more Mexicans leave rural areas every year, abandoning plots of land too small or too eroded to make a living.

They either head for Mexican cities or try to cross illegally into the United States. Many of those who try to cross the Arizona desert perish in its punishing heat. Since 2001, some 200 bodies have been found along the Arizona border each year.

With the vast majority of the 2.4 billion people to be added to the world by 2050 coming in countries where water tables are already falling, water refugees are likely to become commonplace. They will be most common in arid and semiarid regions where populations are outgrowing the water supply and sinking into hydrological poverty.

Villages in northwestern India are being abandoned as aquifers are depleted and people can no longer find water. Millions of villagers in northern and western China and in parts of Mexico may have to move because of a lack of water.

Advancing deserts are squeezing expanding populations into an ever smaller geographic area. Whereas the U.S. Dust Bowl displaced 3 million people, the advancing desert in China’s Dust Bowl provinces could displace tens of millions.

Africa, too, is facing this problem. The Sahara Desert is pushing the populations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria northward toward the Mediterranean. In a desperate effort to deal with drought and desertification, Morocco is geographically restructuring its agriculture, replacing grain with less thirsty orchards and vineyards.

In Iran, villages abandoned because of spreading deserts or a lack of water already number in the thousands. In the vicinity of Damavand, a small town within an hour’s drive of Tehran, 88 villages have been abandoned. And as the desert takes over in Nigeria, farmers and herders are forced to move, squeezed into a shrinking area of productive land. Desertification refugees typically end up in cities, many in squatter settlements. Others migrate abroad.

In Latin America, deserts are expanding and forcing people to move in both Brazil and Mexico. In Brazil, some 66 million hectares of land are affected, much of it concentrated in the country’s northeast. In Mexico, with a much larger share of arid and semiarid land, the degradation of cropland now extends over 59 million hectares.

While desert expansion and water shortages are now displacing millions of people, rising seas promise to displace far greater numbers in the future, given the concentration of the world’s population in low-lying coastal cities and rice-growing river deltas. The numbers could eventually reach the hundreds of millions, offering yet another powerful reason for stabilizing both climate and population.

In the end, the issue with rising seas is whether governments are strong enough to withstand the political and economic stress of relocating large numbers of people while suffering heavy coastal losses of housing and industrial facilities.

During this century we must deal with the effects of trends—rapid population growth, advancing deserts, and rising seas—that we set in motion during the last century. Our choice is a simple one: reverse these trends or risk being overwhelmed by them.

A MOVIE called Vanishing of the Bees opened in cinemas across the UK earlier this month. It's a feature-length documentary about the "mysterious collapse" of the honeybee population across the planet - a phenomenon that has recently attracted a great deal of attention and hand-wringing.

The idea that bees are disappearing for reasons unknown has embedded itself in the public consciousness. It is also a great story that taps into the anxieties of our age. But is it true? We think not, at least not yet.

First, the basics. Pollination by bees and other animals - flies, butterflies, birds and bats - is necessary for the production of fruits and seeds in many wild and cultivated plants. More than 80 per cent of the planet's 250,000 species of flowering plants are pollinated by animals.

Agriculture is a large-scale beneficiary of these pollination services, so claims that pollinators are in decline have triggered alarm that our food supply could be in jeopardy, that we may be on the verge of a global "pollination crisis".

Claims of such a crisis rest on three main tenets: that bees are responsible for the production of a large fraction of our food; that pollinators are declining worldwide; and that pollinator decline threatens agricultural yield. Numerous scientific papers, many media stories and even a European Parliament resolution in 2008 present each of these as an uncontested truth. But are they?

Our analysis of data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reveals a different perspective on the pollination crisis - one that is less catastrophic than that depicted in the movies (Current Biology, vol 18, p 1572, and vol 19, p 915).

The first tenet - that bees are responsible for the production of a large fraction of our food - is simply untrue. Pollinators are important for many crops, but it is a myth that humanity would starve without bees.

About 70 per cent of the 115 most productive crops, including most fruits and oilseeds, are animal-pollinated. These account for nearly 2.5 billion tonnes of food a year, about a third of global agricultural production. However, few of these crops depend on animal pollination completely, owing largely to their capacity for self-pollination.

On top of that, production of many staple foods does not depend on pollinators at all: carbohydrate crops such as wheat, rice and corn are wind-pollinated or self-pollinated. If bees disappeared altogether, global agricultural production would decrease by only 4 to 6 per cent.

What of pollinator decline? Claims of global bee disappearance are based on collections of (often extreme) regional examples, which are not necessarily representative of global trends. These examples tend to come from parts of Europe and North America where little natural or semi-natural habitat remains.

Stocks of domesticated honeybees, the most important crop pollinator of all, have also decreased considerably in the US and some European countries in recent decades. However, these declines have been more than offset by strong increases in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Indeed, the number of managed honeybee hives worldwide has increased by about 45 per cent in the past five decades.

There have also been scare stories about "colony collapse disorder" and the spread of Varroa mites in the US and Europe. Again, these are real phenomena, but they are short-term blips rather than the driving forces of long-term trends. Instead, the long-term declines seem to be consistent with the economic dynamics of the honey industry, which seems to be shifting to developing countries in search of cheaper production.

Finally, does a low abundance of pollinators significantly affect agricultural productivity? It is true that a lack of pollinators, especially bees, can limit the yield of many crops and wild plants. It is also true that the yields of many pollinator-dependent crops have grown more slowly than that of most non-dependent crops. However, contrary to what we would expect if pollinators were in decline, the average yield of pollinator-dependent crops has increased steadily during recent decades, as have those of non-dependent crops, with no sign of slowing.

Overall, we must conclude that claims of a global crisis in agricultural pollination are untrue.

Pollination problems may be looming, though. Total global agricultural production has kept pace with the doubling of the human population during the past five decades, but the small proportion of this that depends on pollinators has quadrupled during the same period. This includes luxury foods such as raspberries, cherries, mangoes and cashew nuts. The increased production of these crops has been achieved, in part, by a 25 per cent increase in cultivated area in response to increased demand for them.

This expansion may be straining global pollination capacity, for two reasons. Demand for pollination services has grown faster than the stock of domestic honeybees, and the associated land clearance has destroyed much of the natural habitat of wild pollinators.

The accelerating increase of pollinator-dependent crops therefore has the potential to trigger future problems both for these crops and wild plants. These problems may grow as decreasing yields of raspberries, cherries and the rest prompt higher prices, stimulating yet more expansion of cultivation. So although the current pollination crisis is largely mythical, we may soon have a real one on our hands.

WASHINGTON -- A new report from the National Research Council examines and, when possible, estimates "hidden" costs of energy production and use -- such as the damage air pollution imposes on human health -- that are not reflected in market prices of coal, oil, other energy sources, or the electricity and gasoline produced from them.  The report estimates dollar values for several major components of these costs.  The damages the committee was able to quantify were an estimated $120 billion in the U.S. in 2005, a number that reflects primarily health damages from air pollution associated with electricity generation and motor vehicle transportation.  The figure does not include damages from climate change, harm to ecosystems, effects of some air pollutants such as mercury, and risks to national security, which the report examines but does not monetize.   

 

Requested by Congress, the report assesses what economists call external effects caused by various energy sources over their entire life cycle -- for example, not only the pollution generated when gasoline is used to run a car but also the pollution created by extracting and refining oil and transporting fuel to gas stations.  Because these effects are not reflected in energy prices, government, businesses and consumers may not realize the full impact of their choices.  When such market failures occur, a case can be made for government interventions -- such as regulations, taxes or tradable permits -- to address these external costs, the report says. 

 

The committee that wrote the report focused on monetizing the damage of major air pollutants -- sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, ozone, and particulate matter – on human health, grain crops and timber yields, buildings, and recreation.  When possible, it estimated both what the damages were in 2005 (the latest year for which data were available) and what they are likely to be in 2030, assuming current policies continue and new policies already slated for implementation are put in place.    

 

The committee also separately derived a range of values for damages from climate change; the wide range of possibilities for these damages made it impossible to develop precise estimates of cost.  However, all model results available to the committee indicate that climate-related damages caused by each ton of CO2 emissions will be far worse in 2030 than now; even if the total amount of annual emissions remains steady, the damages caused by each ton would increase 50 percent to 80 percent. 

 

Damages From Electricity Generation 

 

Coal accounts for about half the electricity produced in the U.S.  In 2005 the total annual external damages from sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter created by burning coal at 406 coal-fired power plants, which produce 95 percent of the nation's coal-generated electricity, were about $62 billion; these nonclimate damages average about 3.2 cents for every kilowatt-hour (kwh) of energy produced.  A relatively small number of plants -- 10 percent of the total number -- accounted for 43 percent of the damages.  By 2030, nonclimate damages are estimated to fall to 1.7 cents per kwh.

 

Coal-fired power plants are the single largest source of greenhouse gases in the U.S., emitting on average about a ton of CO2 per megawatt-hour of electricity produced, the report says. Climate-related monetary damages range from 0.1 cents to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, based on previous modeling studies. 

 

Burning natural gas generated far less damage than coal, both overall and per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated.  A sample of 498 natural gas fueled plants, which accounted for 71 percent of gas-generated electricity, produced $740 million in total nonclimate damages in 2005, an average of 0.16 cents per kwh.  As with coal, there was a vast difference among plants; half the plants account for only 4 percent of the total nonclimate damages from air pollution, while 10 percent produce 65 percent of the damages.  By 2030, nonclimate damages are estimated to fall to 0.11 cents per kwh.  Estimated climate damages from natural gas were half that of coal, ranging from 0.05 cents to 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. 

 

The life-cycle damages of wind power, which produces just over 1 percent of U.S. electricity but has large growth potential, are small compared with those from coal and natural gas.  So are the damages associated with normal operation of the nation's 104 nuclear reactors, which provide almost 20 percent of the country’s electricity.  But the life cycle of nuclear power does pose some risks; if uranium mining activities contaminate ground or surface water, for example, people could potentially be exposed to radon or other radionuclides; this risk is borne mostly by other nations, the report says, because the U.S. mines only 5 percent of the world’s uranium.  The potential risks from a proposed long-term facility for storing high-level radioactive waste need further evaluation before they can be quantified.  Life-cycle CO2 emissions from nuclear, wind, biomass, and solar power appear to be negligible when compared with fossil fuels. 

 

Damages From Heating

 

The production of heat for buildings or industrial processes accounts for about 30 percent of American energy demand.  Most of this heat energy comes from natural gas or, to a lesser extent, the use of electricity; the total damages from burning natural gas for heat were about $1.4 billion in 2005.  The median damages in residential and commercial buildings were about 11 cents per thousand cubic feet, and the proportional harm did not vary much across regions.  Damages from heat in 2030 are likely to be about the same, assuming the effects of additional sources to meet demand are offset by lower-emitting sources.

 

Damages From Motor Vehicles and Fuels

 

Transportation, which today relies almost exclusively on oil, accounts for nearly 30 percent of U.S. energy demand.  In 2005 motor vehicles produced $56 billion in health and other nonclimate-related damages, says the report.  The committee evaluated damages for a variety of types of vehicles and fuels over their full life cycles, from extracting and transporting the fuel to manufacturing and operating the vehicle.  In most cases, operating the vehicle accounted for less than one-third of the quantifiable nonclimate damages, the report found. 

 

Damages per vehicle mile traveled were remarkably similar among various combinations of fuels and technologies -- the range was 1.2 cents to about 1.7 cents per mile traveled -- and it is important to be cautious in interpreting small differences, the report says.  Nonclimate-related damages for corn grain ethanol were similar to or slightly worse than gasoline, because of the energy needed to produce the corn and convert it to fuel.  In contrast, ethanol made from herbaceous plants or corn stover -- which are not yet commercially available -- had lower damages than most other options. 

 

Electric vehicles and grid-dependent (plug-in) hybrid vehicles showed somewhat higher nonclimate damages than many other technologies for both 2005 and 2030.  Operating these vehicles produces few or no emissions, but producing the electricity to power them currently relies heavily on fossil fuels; also, energy used in creating the battery and electric motor adds up to 20 percent to the manufacturing part of life-cycle damages. 

 

Most vehicle and fuel combinations had similar levels of greenhouse gas emissions in 2005. There are not substantial changes estimated for those emissions in 2030; while population and income growth are expected to drive up the damages caused by each ton of emissions, implementation of new fuel efficiency standards of 35.5 miles per gallon will lower emissions and damages for every vehicle mile traveled.  Achieving significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 will likely also require breakthrough technologies, such as cost-effective carbon capture and storage or conversion of advanced biofuels, the report says. 

 

Both for 2005 and 2030, vehicles using gasoline made from oil extracted from tar sands and those using diesel derived from the Fischer-Tropsch process -- which converts coal, methane, or biomass to liquid fuel -- had the highest life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions.  Vehicles using ethanol made from corn stover or herbaceous feedstock such as switchgrass had some of the lowest greenhouse gas emissions, as did those powered by compressed natural gas. 

 

Fully implementing federal rules on diesel fuel emissions, which require vehicles beginning in the model year 2007 to use low-sulfur diesel, is expected to substantially decrease nonclimate damages from diesel by 2030 -- an indication of how regulatory actions can significantly affect energy-related damages, the committee said.  Major initiatives to further lower other emissions, improve energy efficiency, or shift to a cleaner mix of energy sources could reduce other damages as well, such as substantially lowering the damages attributable to electric vehicles. 

 

Team California's "Refract House" Stefano Paltera/U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon

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The bright future of green living has been on display for the past two weeks at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., during the Department of Energy's 2009 Solar Decathlon. The biennial contest, which wraps up this weekend, brings hundreds of university students from around the world to a temporary solar village for two weeks, where spectators can walk through student-designed houses and marvel at the latest green tech.

These solar homes have it all, including things that aren't commercially available yet -- like self-activating curled-metal shades; walls made of plants, both living and recycled; and roofs that tilt at the sun, making them efficient sun-catchers from Phoenix to Fargo. Worried about efficiency while you're away? How about an iPhone app that controls your entire house?

Teams include engineering, architecture, graphic arts and marketing students, who typically wouldn't work together until they reach the workforce.

Team Germany's "surprising" design took first place overall, partly because their house performed so well in the net metering contest, which measured how much net energy the house produced and consumed throughout the competition. The house had solar panels on the walls as well as the roof, which improved its performance even with cloudy conditions. Team Germany scored 150 of 150 points in net metering, catapulting them over the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to win the title.

Aside from being an unrivaled educational opportunity, the decathlon is a proving ground for a new generation of energy-efficient products and designs. Some, like floor heating tubes warmed by the sun, seem so obvious it's a wonder every house doesn't already have them; others are most certainly modern.

A few stand-outs:

• Team Arizona's hinged roof, which moves to match the angle of the sun's rays
• Team Missouri's eco-roof and wall materials, harvested from crops grown in the state, including sorghum and oak
• Team California's instantly-hot showers, which work by circulating water through a heat pump activated by a bathroom motion detector
• Team Boston's micro-inverters, which power a few solar panels each and cost a fraction of the price of a regular photovoltaic electricity converter
• Team California's and Virginia Tech's use of iPhone apps to control the homes' solar-electric, entertainment, heating and lighting systems
• Team Boston's windows, developed with Hunter-Douglas, which combine gas, gel and air layers to form a heat-absorbing wall when the sun hangs low in the winter; heat radiates throughout the house when the sun sets.

"You learn skills like communicating, team-building, executing, all these things -- we call it Startup 101," said Preet Anand, a senior at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, Calif., who is the lead water engineer on Team California's Refract House. "What we have learned ... you can't compare that to any other college experience."

Part of the decathlon's mission is to speed up delivery of emerging technology to the marketplace. Several teams worked with companies in their home states to invent new materials or products, some of which are awaiting new patents.

Valence Energy, a company comprised of Santa Clara University alumni who participated in the 2007 contest, helped Team California design a whole-house control system that can be operated via an iPhone app, Anand said. Lighting, entertainment, heating and water systems, even the window shades all connect to a master computer users can access remotely.

"They helped make everything talk to each other. So you can be on the iPhone or the Web site, and you can change the temperature of your house from the car on the way home," he said.

Iowa State University's team worked with a firm called AccuTemp Energy Solutions and with Pella, the window and door manufacturer, to create a better-insulated door for its Interlock House.

Timothy Lentz, a mechanical engineering graduate student at Iowa State, said the door uses vacuum insulation panels to reach an insulation value of R40 -- the level of a typical ceiling, and an unheard-of rate for a door.

"This makes it almost a wall," Lentz said.

Incidentally, many homes are so well-sealed that special ventilation systems also had to be invented. Team Alberta, comprised of students from four post-secondary schools in the Canadian province, designed a hot and cold air exhaust system that saves as much energy as possible. An energy recovery ventilator, which is basically a box fan covered in a special material, allows heat transfer between outgoing and incoming air.

"In old homes, you don't need to worry about mechanical ventilation because the homes were so leaky. That is not really true in newer, high-performance homes," said Michael Gestwick, who is pursuing a master's degree in environmental design from the University of Calgary. "Our system is highly integrated, where many other systems that you'll see are kind of decoupled -- you have one system to do the heating, and a separate one for the cooling, and a ventilating machine on top of all that. We took all these pieces and put them together and wrote control logic to make it work together."

The teams all spent about two years designing, planning and building their homes. Each house had to be assembled at its respective university, taken apart to be trucked to Washington, and re-assembled on the Mall before the competition began. The houses all feature the latest energy-efficient appliances and home entertainment systems -- teams must cook, do laundry and host movie night, among other typical household activities. The 10 categories are meant to prove that solar homes can not only be cool and efficient, but comfortable and livable.

Some teams took the latter to heart, knowing many eco-conscious consumers might not want to live in a house resembling something out of the Jetsons.

"The other houses, while they are really cool and have all the bells and whistles, they kind of look like a spaceship. They wouldn't really fit in areas that we think of, like mid-size Iowa towns," Lentz said.

The Iowa State house resembles a ranch-style home sliced in half, with a roof that slants toward the sun. Others took it even further -- the University of Minnesota and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign teams designed homes with traditional-looking gabled roofs, even opting to sacrifice energy-collection capacity for the purpose of aesthetics.

Form versus function is always cause for debate in architecture; Jeff Stein, dean of Boston Architectural College, part of Team Boston, said the decathlon provides a new way of thinking about both. He noted that in Western society, people spend an average of 72 minutes a day outdoors.

"Buildings are hugely important, and they are way more important than the amount of attention we've been giving them in the last generation. Now, here comes a different way of thinking about them, and the solar decathlon is a trigger for making that (transformation) come into play," he said.

Plus, it will help students find jobs. Lentz, from Iowa State, said he wants to work in the realm of building and energy efficiency.

"There is a lot of room for improvement there," he said. "I've met a lot of people who donated products or services who keep asking, 'When do you graduate?'"

Saudi Arabia is trying to enlist other oil-producing countries to support a provocative idea: if wealthy countries reduce their oil consumption to combat global warming, they should pay compensation to oil producers.

The oil-rich kingdom has pushed this position for years in earlier climate-treaty negotiations. While it has not succeeded, its efforts have sometimes delayed or disrupted discussions. The kingdom is once again gearing up to take a hard line on the issue at international negotiations scheduled for Copenhagen in December.

The chief Saudi negotiator, Mohammad al-Sabban, described the position as a “make or break” provision for the Saudis, as nations stake out their stance before the global climate summit scheduled for the end of the year.

“Assisting us as oil-exporting countries in achieving economic diversification is very crucial for us through foreign direct investments, technology transfer, insurance and funding,” Mr. Sabban said in an e-mail message.

This Saudi position has emerged periodically as a source of dispute since the earliest global climate talks, in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It is surfacing again as Saudi Arabia tries to build a coalition of producers to extract concessions in Copenhagen.

Petroleum exporters have long used delaying tactics during climate talks. They view any attempt to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by developed countries as a menace to their economies.

The original treaty meant to combat global warming, the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, contains provisions that in Saudi Arabia’s view require such compensation.

Mr. Sabban outlined his stance at climate talks in Bangkok this month.

Environmental advocates denounced the idea, saying the Saudi stance hampered progress to assist poor nations that are already suffering from the effect of climate change, and that genuinely need financial assistance.

“It is like the tobacco industry asking for compensation for lost revenues as a part of a settlement to address the health risks of smoking,” said Jake Schmidt, the international climate policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The worst of this racket is that they have held up progress on supporting adaptation funding for the most vulnerable for years because of this demand.”

Saudi Arabia is highly dependent on oil exports, which account for most of the government’s budget. Last year, when prices peaked, the kingdom’s oil revenue swelled by 37 percent, to $281 billion, according to Jadwa Investment, a Saudi bank. That was more than four times the 2002 level. At one point in 2008, the average gasoline price in the United States surpassed $4 a gallon.

Saudi exports are expected to drop to $115 billion this year, after oil prices fell. American gasoline prices are hovering around $2.50 a gallon.

The one-year swing in the kingdom’s revenues shows that oil prices are likely to be a bigger factor in Saudi Arabia’s future that any restrictions on greenhouse gases, said David G. Victor, an energy expert at the University of California, San Diego.

Mr. Victor dismissed the Saudi stance as a stunt, saying that the real threat for petroleum exporters came from improvements in fuel economy and rising mandates for alternative fuels in the transportation sector, both of which would reduce the need for petroleum products. “Oil exporters have always, in my view, far overblown the near-term effects of carbon limits on demand for their products,” Mr. Victor said. “For the Saudis this may be a deal-breaker, but the Saudis are not essential players. In some sense, one sign that a climate agreement is effective is that big hydrocarbon exporters hate it.”

A recent study by the International Energy Agency, which advises industrialized nations, found that the cumulative revenue of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries would drop by 16 percent from 2008 to 2030 if the world agreed to slash emissions, as opposed to the projection if there were no treaty.

But with oil projected to average $100 a barrel, the energy agency estimated that OPEC members would still earn $23 trillion over that period.

Mr. Sabban, however, cited an older study by Charles River, a consulting firm, which found that the losses in revenue for Saudi Arabia alone would be $19 billion a year starting in 2012.

The Copenhagen talks were a major point on the agenda of the last OPEC conference.

But not every oil-exporting country is falling in line with the Saudi position. Some have been trying a different approach that has earned the backing of environmental groups. For example, Ecuador, OPEC’s newest member, said last year that it was willing to freeze oil exploration in the Amazon forest if it got some financial rewards for doing so.

The Saudi negotiator said that the compensation mechanism was an integral part of the global climate regime that has been in place since the 1990s and that was not up for renegotiation.

“It is a very serious trend that we need to follow and influence if we want to minimize its adverse impacts on our economies and our people,” Mr. Sabban said in an e-mail message to other OPEC officials. “That does not mean we would like to obstruct any progress or that we do not want to join any international agreement. We will do that if the deal is fair and equitable and does not transfer the burden to us.”

Global warming and climate change have finally garnered the attention of the U.S. military and intelligence officials who are now factoring the warnings into their conflict estimates.stockxpert.com

The Tibetan Plateau is enormous — four times the size of Texas. Both the Yellow and Yangtze rivers issue from it, carrying the glacial runoff from the Himalayas to China. This runoff is a primary source of fresh water for China's 1 billion citizens, 800 million of whom live in poverty.

Experts believe that China's continued economic growth depends on its access to the water that traverses the Tibetan Plateau, a view clearly shared by China's rulers. This helps explain why China holds Tibet in an iron grip. So long as its water is one of China's most precious resources, Tibet has little hope of attaining independence.

International power — who holds it, and in what measure — is directly related to the character and disposition of the natural world: where the oil is, where the water is, what the soil's like, what the weather's like, who controls the trading routes. Natural resources are limited, and their allocation has always been the foremost cause of human conflict. China isn't afraid of the Dalai Lama - it's afraid of drought.

And so it's hardly surprising that there is growing concern in Washington about the consequences of climate change on international peace and stability. Although specific projections vary, scientists agree that over the course of the 21st century, climate change will reconfigure the biosphere, with destabilizing consequences for societies, governments and the global economy.

"Global warming has been seen as an environmental issue for a long time," said Sharon Burke, the vice president of the Center for New American Security, a Washington think tank. "But now that there's a broad public acceptance that climate change is a serious problem. It's a natural evolution to start talking about what it means for world stability, and it's clear that it's going to have very serious national security implications."

In 2005, British Prime Minister Tony Blair garnered considerable attention when he declared that climate change is, "probably long term, the single most important issue we face as a global community." He warned that "there will be no genuine security if the planet is ravaged by climate change." Since then, government and diplomatic leaders from India to NATO have acknowledged, in public statements and in security planning, the potential consequences climate change holds for international stability.

Back in the USA
Officials in the Obama administration, including the president himself, now regularly invoke the danger climate change poses to national security when they discuss the need to reduce fossil fuel use.

But perhaps the clearest evidence that the U.S. government is taking climate change seriously as a security threat will come in February, when the Pentagon issues its Quadrennial Defense Review to Congress. The review is considered the most important long-term national security strategy document the military produces, and a significant portion of the upcoming edition will reportedly be devoted to climate change.

Speculation about what the greenhouse effect will mean for international stability has evolved considerably in the last few years. A recent report by the Council on Foreign Relations identified 2007 as the year when debate about climate change "broadened beyond economics" to include national security considerations. But where two years ago most of the discussion seemed to emanate from universities and security-oriented think tanks, today more and more of it is coming from within the government itself, including the military.

In early August, the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College issued a particularly notable report, not so much because of what it said - its chief points have been covered elsewhere - as the way in which it was said. The military is not normally associated with visions of environmental apocalypse, so it's remarkable to find, in the paper's introduction, not only a warning that climate change has "profound security implications" for the United States, but this simple declarative sentence: "The life-sustaining capacity of our planet may be in jeopardy."

As dramatic as that sounds, it conforms to the latest climate science, which has been deeply unpleasant. At the current rate of growth of carbon emissions, according to the leading climate laboratories of the American and British governments, the world is on track to warm by an average of 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

The last time the world was 11 degrees warmer was 55 million years ago; at the time, tropical vegetation grew above the Arctic Circle, and, according to paleoclimatologist Peter Ward, in his book Under a Green Sky, continental centers were vast dust-blown deserts.

But defense experts aren't only worried about environmental cataclysm. Scientists agree that even if carbon emissions are sharply reduced in the near future a significant amount of global warming is now inevitable. The consequences of even a 4-degree warming will be unpredictable and destabilizing, and because climate change spans the entire globe, it poses a uniquely complex menace.

"Unlike most conventional security threats that involve a single entity acting in specific ways and points in time, climate change has the potential to result in multiple chronic conditions, occurring globally within the same time frame," noted a 2007 report by a think tank funded by the U.S. Navy.

Scientists and policymakers have mapped out a series of projections for a 3.6-degree F warming over the course of the century, which is now generally considered the "best-case" scenario. They make for distressing reading.

Under a 3.6 F scenario, parts of the world vulnerable to Islamic extremism are likely to see worsening socioeconomic conditions because of climate change. These include increasing drought in the Middle East and North Africa, reductions in glacial freshwater in Bangladesh and India, coastal storm surges and flooding in Indonesia, and more severe storms and temperature fluctuations in the mountains of Afghanistan and Southwest Pakistan.

China and Russia both are expected to experience severe stress on the subsistence farmers who make up substantial portions of their respective populations. Africa may witness an explosion in the number of failed and failing states, and the revival of long-simmering civil strife. Latin America, North America and Europe will all be subject to increasing competition for energy resources.

All of these scenarios carry with them the potential for massive refugee crises, historically one of the most common causes of war. "One of the biggest problems associated with climate change is the potential for mass migrations," said Oran Young, a professor of International Governance and Environmental Institutions at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"The projections are that we could be talking about at least tens of millions of people. When you have countries that are relatively poor and/or have political systems that are relatively weak, these kinds of things can be a very threatening development. Governments of various states like Pakistan and Bangladesh may collapse. People now talk about the concept of 'climate chaos'" — energy wars, mass migrations, failed states and political radicalization.

Requiem for Bangladesh
Evidence that governments around the world are beginning to prepare for climate-generated security instability is increasingly plain to see. An especially prominent example concerns Bangladesh. One of the most densely populated nations in the world, Bangladesh is also one of the most low-lying, with an average elevation of less than 30 feet. Eighty percent of the country sits in the Gangetic Plain - a massive, flood-prone delta that just barely rises above sea level.

This puts it at severe risk in a warming world. "The population of Bangladesh - which stands at 142 million today — is anticipated to increase by approximately 100 million people during the next few decades, even as the impact of climate change will steadily render the low-lying regions of the country uninhabitable," found a 2007 report on climate change and international stability jointly published by the Center for New American Security and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

For much of the last decade, the report went on to note, India has been building a giant wall along its 2,500-mile border with Bangladesh. Snaking through jungles, rivers and villages along five different Bangladeshi states, the barrier is meant to prevent Bangladeshis from crossing into India. The report points to the wall as evidence that India believes there will be climate-related mass migration and that action now is necessary.

While members of the military and intelligence communities in Washington are beginning to consider adaptation strategies for climate change, many experts believe that the most effective thing they can do is push for broad policy responses to the problem.

"The military has limited tools for addressing climate change," said Geoffrey Dabelko, director of Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. "One of the most important things they can do is break through the political logjam by waking up senators: Here's somebody who's not a tree-hugger, and they're telling me they don't have the tools to deal with it, but those of us who in the civilian world do."

Burke echoed Dabelko, noting that the unpredictable nature of climate change makes it difficult for the Pentagon to be able to plan. "The military likes to have 20-year time lines, where they think they know what's going to happen. But it's very hard to plan for something that could happen tomorrow or could happen 10 years from now, especially when you don't know how severe it'll be."

While polls generally show that a majority of Americans see climate change as a pressing concern, movement in Washington toward policies that would limit and then reduce fossil fuel emissions — although quickened by the Obama administration — proceeds slowly. In the fall, Congress is expected to vote on a carbon-trading bill that will, if passed, represent a major step forward in the creation of a clean economy, both in the U.S. and abroad.

But many experts believe change isn't occurring quickly and strongly enough, and that the opportunity to avert the worst consequences of climate change is closing. "There's a sense [in the scientific community] that there's a mounting disconnect between the magnitude and the speed in the development of the problem, and the nature and slowness of the response process," said Young

If the world has not yet progressed past a climate "tipping point," it may not be much longer until it does-five to 10 years are commonly cited figures. Young and others hope that the increasing linkage between climate change and national security coming out of Washington will help drive political will toward major policy movement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"At the end of the day, we have to do the hardest thing of all, which is to invest in prevention and to do more to cut emissions," said Burke. "A certain amount of climate change is going to happen now no matter what, but the worst-case scenario — we just can't afford that."

Solar shingles that any roofer can install.

Dow Chemical has unveiled a residential roof shingle in the form of a solar panel designed to be integrated into asphalt-tiled roofs.

Jane Palmieri, managing director of Dow’s Solar Solutions unit, said the Powerhouse thin-film shingle slashes installation costs because it can be installed by a roofer who is already building or retrofitting a roof.

“As a roofer is nailing asphalt shingle on roof, wherever the array needs to be installed he just switches to solar shingle,” said Ms. Palmieri, who said the solar singles are similarly attached to the roof with nails.

“You don’t have to have a solar installation crew do the work or have an electrician on site,” she added. “The solar shingle can be handled like any other shingle – it can be palletized, dropped from a roof, walked on.”

An electrician is still needed to connect the completed array to an inverter and to a home’s electrical system, but unlike conventional solar panels that must be wired together, the solar shingles plug into each other to form the array.

Dow plans to begin test-marketing the solar shingle in mid-2010, initially targeting new-home construction. Ms. Palmieri said the market could be worth $5 billion by 2015 and noted that 90 percent of homes in the United States use asphalt shingles.

Dow designed the shingles, which will initially be manufactured at the company’s Midland, Mich., facility. Global Solar of Tucson, Ariz., is supplying the thin-film solar cells.

Thin-film has generally not been used for residential systems because of its relatively low efficiency – Global Solar’s cells are 10 percent efficient. That means a larger array is required generate the same of amount of electricity as conventional solar panels.

But Dave Parrillo, the senior research and development director for Dow Solar Solutions, said the solar shingles can offset between 40 percent and 80 percent of a home’s electricity consumption.

Ms. Palmieri said a solar shingle array is 10 percent to 15 percent cheaper than a standard rack-mounted solar panel system and about 40 percent less expensive than competing building-integrated photovoltaic products.

“Our objective is to prove that this can be a mainstream adopted product,” she said.

Leaders of the world’s richest and fastest-growing economies are pushing for climate action even though their citizens have yet to wake up to the scale of the problem. Above, national leaders pose at the most recent G8 meeting last June in Italy. (White House Photo).Something unusual seems to be happening in the struggle to wake the world up to the reality of climate change. Almost unprecedented for an environmental issue, national leaders appear to be out ahead of public opinion in their respective countries.

President Obama has made climate action one of his top priorities after health care. Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, is spending much of his time trying to lay the grounds for a successful deal at December’s climate conference in Copenhagen, while his chief rival, Conservative Party leader David Cameron (expected to succeed him after national elections in the spring) has made combatting global warming a signature issue.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, an unexpected environmentalist, is backing a carbon tax. The recently reelected German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has long been in the vanguard of moves to tackle climate change. The new Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, announced a stringent target for carbon cuts as one of his first acts after being elected last month. And Kevin Rudd, Australia’s leader, has likewise radically overturned the obstructionist position of his predecessor.

Yet not one of these leaders has been under great pressure from their citizens to get serious about global warming. Though there is plenty of evidence that the majority of people in their countries accept climate change as a reality and think that something should be done to tackle it, there is little sign of an overwhelming demand for urgent action. Indeed, Gordon Brown and his ministers have often privately urged green NGOs to mobilize a mass campaign so as to give them the “political space” to act.

The paradox is even more marked in some rapidly industrializing countries in the developing world, where there is even less sign of popular pressure. Yet, Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderon, is preparing a detailed offer to cut the growth in his country’s carbon emissions to place on the table in Copenhagen. Hu Jintao, meanwhile, chose to make the first-ever speech by a Chinese president to the UN General Assembly at last month’s climate summit.

Even Manmohan Singh, prime minister of the hitherto somewhat recalcitrant India, has ordered a more internationalist approach, telling ministers: “We may not have caused the problem, but we must be part of the solution.”

This leadership of the leaders is welcome, but it has its limitations, most obviously in the United States where the constitutional separation of powers makes senators responding to their respective states’ interests prove a powerful obstacle. But other countries are not immune from political inaction. The embattled Gordon Brown is getting no measurable political uplift from his work on climate change, while a sympathetic Conservative backbencher says that support for David Cameron’s sincere concern is “paper thin” in his parliamentary party.

Yet the leaders surely need not be isolated, for despite a vocal skeptic minority, solid majorities in developed countries, at least, understand that climate change is real, is caused by human activity and requires action.

Eighty-five percent of Britons, polls show, are convinced that global warming is already a threat or will become so soon. Sixty-seven percent of Australians back their government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, even though it has run into trouble in parliament. And 83 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Republicans in the United States have told pollsters that they believe global warning is already happening.

So why does this not turn into intense political pressure? One reason seems to be that much of the concern is still relatively soft and has not been translated into action even on a personal level. In the United States, one survey found that just 18 percent of respondents were alarmed enough to be doing something in their own lives to address climate change (not bad compared to the 7 percent of outright deniers, but far short of overwhelming). In Britain, only about a third of those concerned said that they thought they did enough personally to address global warming.

Experts point to two apparently contradictory, but not mutually exclusive, reasons for this. The first is that most people do not realize how serious things are, partly because the scientists have not been yelling. “For long we have been reluctant to spell out clearly the true implications of our analysis, instead couching out conclusions as challenging but politically palatable,” says Prof. Kevin Anderson of Britain’s blue-chip Tyndall Centre for Climate Change. Prof. Clive Hamilton of the Australian National University adds: “There is a widespread belief in the scientific community that the public cannot handle the truth, and so it has been pulling its punches.”

The second reason is that people are not sure what they can do, or if any actions will actually make a difference. But there is mounting evidence that changes in behavior come when people get information from a trusted source on what needs to be done, and why it is worthwhile.

National leaders, of course, do know they can make a difference and have been briefed on the true extent of the climate crisis. That may explain why they have leapt out front on this issue. Their countrymen now urgently need to be brought up to speed.

Two Chinese scientists have successfully made an artificial black hole. Since you’re still reading this, it’s safe to say that Earth hasn’t been sucked into its vortex.

That’s because a black hole doesn’t technically require a massive, highly concentrated gravitational field that prevents light from escaping, as postulated by Albert Einstein. It just needs to capture light — or, to be more precise, electromagnetic radiation, of which visually perceived light is one form.

The desktop black hole, described in a paper submitted to arXiv on Monday, is made from 60 concentrically arranged layers of circuit board. Each layer is coated in copper and printed with patterns that alternately vibrate or don’t vibrate in response to electromagnetic waves.

Together, the patterns completely absorbed microwave radiation coming from any direction, and converted their energy to heat.

Like a near-black hole designed earlier this year and made from photon-absorbing carbon nanotubes, the material could be used in solar energy panels.