During the concluding half of the last century, the world was making steady progress in reducing hunger, but during the transition into the new century, the tide began to turn. In February 2007, James Morris, head of the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP), announced that 18,000 children are now dying each day from hunger and related causes. For perspective, this loss of young lives in one day is almost five times U.S. combat deaths in Iraq through four years of fighting. Although these huge numbers of dying children may be an abstraction, each represents a young life ended far too soon.
FCC Chairman Says He Will Take Action to Prevent ISPs from Controlling Users’ Activities
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will take regulatory action to prevent internet service providers (ISP) from blocking or controlling users’ access to online content. The announcement came from the FCC chairman after Comcast moved to manipulate internet access —limiting their freedom to navigate— who had engaged in file-sharing online services, presumably in an effort to control access to content for which the cable provider was not being paid per-content-access.
Transparent Dyes Allow Windows to Act as Super-powerful Solar Panels
Special transparent dyes coating glass or plastic panes concentrate the Sun’s rays, guiding them to solar-voltaic cells lining the edges, allowing a window to act as a solar panel with 10 times the electricity generation capacity of solar cells, by current standards. The ‘organic solar concentrator’ (OSC) system also reduces cost, by reducing the surface area that needs to be coated by solar-voltaic cells and by eliminating the need for large concentrating mirrors and sun-tracking mechanisms.
Oilman T. Boone Pickens Wants to Create National Wind-energy Network in the US
T. Boone Pickens has started what USA Today reports will be “the biggest public policy ad campaign ever” to promote a national economic shift from oil to renewable fuels, primarily wind. The campaign is centered on the PickensPlan website, which shows the oil tycoon explaining how and why the US can and must break its dependence on foreign oil —for which American consumers pay $700 billion per year— by transitioning to an energy economy founded on exploiting the massive wind resources of the Great Plains.
Wind Power Set to Become World’s Leading Energy Source
In 1991, a national wind resource inventory taken by the U.S. Department of Energy startled the world when it reported that the three most wind-rich states —North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas— had enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy national electricity needs. Now a new study by a team of engineers at Stanford reports that the wind energy potential is actually substantially greater than that estimated in 1991.
When Austin Energy, the publicly owned utility in Austin, Texas, launched its GreenChoice program in 2000, customers opting for green electricity paid a premium. During the fall of 2005, climbing natural gas prices pulled conventional electricity costs above those of wind-generated electricity, the source of most green power. This crossing of the cost lines in Austin and several other communities is a milestone in the U.S. shift to a renewable energy economy.
Oil Shock: the Coming Economic Unraveling & How We Can Adjust
Petroleum is the most pervasive base resource other than water in the global economy of the 21st century, and as demand is exploding, production is nearing its geological peak, and untenable price increases are hitting a strained economy hard. Oil prices could be in a stagflation lock, unable to readjust to consumers’ means, unable to compete as emerging energy sources repeatedly slash development and commercial prices. Whatever factors are at play, crude oil prices have jumped over 900% since 1998, and it looks like production cannot meet global demand.
Can We Harness Hydrocarbon Energy without Burning Hydrocarbon Fuels?
As we search for a new way to fuel the global economy, in the midst of a rapidly spreading climate crisis, skyrocketing petroleum-based fuel prices and the likely imminent moment of peak oil production, it is instructive to look at the possibility that energy we already know how to access might be derived in (not cleaner, but) entirely clean ways. If we can find new sources of hydrocarbon fuels, can we access their energy content without burning them or emitting carbon?
Clean Fuel: Toyota to Add Solar Panels to Hybrid Vehicles
The green technology transition is gaining momentum. Japanese auto manufacturer Toyota has announced it will add solar panels to some of its fleet of hybrid vehicles. The “high-end” third-generation Prius models will sport Kyocera-produced solar panels on the roof, aimed at assisting with powering the air-conditioning and other peripheral operations, freeing up battery energy to give the hybrid engines more non-combustion mileage.
What the Market Doesn’t Know Can Hurt You, Whoever You Are
Every participant in any system, is dependent upon the quality of information behind the major forces at play, just as any player in any system is beholden to the quality or jeopardy posed by the system’s prevailing methods. Free flow of information is the best hope of achieving the optimum level of functionality for the broadest array of stakeholders.
Relational Data, the Semantic Web & Key Security Priorities
As the population of users on the world wide web expands at still astonishing rates, and “web 2.0″ —the social networking phenomenon, the integration of real open source innovation, and the free-services standard being pushed by Google— becomes the communicative norm, powerful new realms of innovation could be emerging that will become the third-generation Internet, or web 3.0. We need to understand fully how the interrelation of data and vital security interests can come together to give end-users the richest possible experience.
New Generation of Cellulosic Ethanol Could Avert Food-Price Fallout
The New Scientist magazine this week heralds a ‘plan B for biofuel’, making the case that starch-based ethanol fuels, like corn ethanol in the US, may drive up food prices, but a new generation of biofuels will sidestep the problem and help ethanol live up to its promise. “The corn required to fill an SUV tank with bioethanol just once could feed someone in Africa for a year” reports the UK-based magazine, but most biomass is not the starch currently being used to create bioethanol.
Corn Ethanol is a Destructive Economic Force, Not the Basis of Our Energy Future
Corn-ethanol, long a fascination for US politicians and for the farm lobby that courts their support for ethanol subsidies, may play some role in remediating the economic fallout of soaring gasoline prices, though it seems unlikely, for a number of reasons. First and foremost is the fact that the numbers work against us: in order to produce more corn-ethanol, we must divert cropland destined for food production to fuel production, and that has a severely negative impact on the availability and affordability of corn for human consumption.
Challenge on Food Front: Business-as-Usual Not a Viable Option
A fast-unfolding food shortage is engulfing the entire world, driving food prices to record highs. Over the past half-century grain prices have spiked from time to time because of weather-related events, such as the 1972 Soviet crop failure that led to a doubling of world wheat, rice, and corn prices. The situation today is entirely different, however. The current doubling of grain prices is trend-driven, the cumulative effect of some trends that are accelerating growth in demand and other trends that are slowing the growth in supply.
IEA Says World Needs Sweeping Energy-Technology Revolution
The International Energy Agency has called for a major increase in the price at which carbon emissions are traded in carbon-offsetting schemes designed to reduce emissions. The IEA, as reported by the Financial Times, has called for carbon offsets to be priced closer to $200 per ton, in order to bring carbon-trading schemes in line with the costs of reducing emissions. EU carbon offsets are currently priced at roughly $43 per ton.
Climate Change Topping Concerns in Economics, Security, Law
On the same day that oil futures jumped a record $10.75/barrel, gaining 8% in one day, the US Senate voted on major carbon-capping legislation that would reduce US carbon by 66% by the year 2050, the International Energy Agency proposed drastic increases in the cost of carbon offsets, designed to reduce the overall amount of carbon emissions in a given market, through trading.
Reforestation, Ecosystem Resilience & Paper Technologies
Reforestation is a necessary part of the process of any ecologically responsible development strategy. Forest cover is not only a potent natural resource feeding the overall resilience of an ecosystem, but the hydrological and soil-quality stability, along with the biodensity it can generate, mean it is now more clear than ever that natural levels of forest cover have a very high economic value over the long term.
Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, the Original Paper (1905)
Albert Einstein has earned over the course of the last 103 years the reputation as the most revolutionary and visionary scientist in modern history, perhaps of all time. His discoveries fundamentally changed what science could claim as knowledge about the physical laws of the universe, and the revelations that stem from his work have affected —in some way or another— virtually every aspect of life in the human world. In the spirit of his ability to go beyond the known scientific tradition, we offer his complete original treatise on Special Relativity…
Da Vinci’s Notebooks: Pushing the Limits of Intellectual Pursuit
The complete notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, as collected by the Project Gutenberg, are now available through Scribd iPaper, a unique new document format that allows for scrolling through book-length documents right on a static web page, without downloading. The service is a great complement to any project aimed at expanding knowledge, the free flow of information, and access to the great ideas of the past, present, and the future in progress.
Ziggurat Century: Global Civilization as the New Babel, with Reason for Hope
We are living in a time of unprecedented global integration, where economies, security interests, legal systems, and languages and systems of learning have been dispersed and interwoven across the globe. There are obvious positive effects to this integration, along with certain overarching and seemingly intractable problems that cause real worry for even the most hopeful or studied observers. Languages and cultures intermingle, yet seek to remain distinct and continuous, and individuals seek to enhance their own possibilities (requiring freedom of information, and freedom of movement), while seeking to prevent the corrosion of already structured social fabrics.
Food Riots Spread Across the World as Soaring Prices Impact Poor Areas
Food riots from Haiti to west Africa, Egypt and the Philippines, in recent weeks, have sparked concern among policy-makers, diplomats and economists, that the current state of the global food supply is so precarious that such violence will spread and political and economic instability could follow. Concerns about the American economy, home to most productive grain-producing region in the world, and a shift to biofuels there, could mean added difficulty in bringing food prices down.
Openness May Be New Gold-standard for Government, Business, Technology
The open-source movement has been a revolutionary phenomenon of startling proportions. It has changed the way software works for us in our daily experience, by bringing costs down far enough that now anyone with an internet connection can launch a web-based publication in literally seconds. Its efficiency, its appeal, its human element, make it a standard to watch as other sectors of economics and public life evolve to integrate the latest communications technologies, and aim for optimum end-user freedom and flexibility.
The Commons May Eventually Replace the Firewall as Security Standard
As the world acclimates to digital technology, and its usefulness in everyday life becomes increasingly relevant to how we achieve a higher quality of life, higher quality of education, and more efficient means of deploying solutions to complex problems, the standard for securing data and ideas may shift from closed environments behind firewalls to a new open standard, where the commons guarantees provenance, and thereby, rights, when warranted.
Taking the Plunge: into the Commons of Ideas & Invention
The digital age has brought the most potent test for the security of intellectual property, and thanks to the open source movement, has also shown that intellectual property is not always most productive or most valuable when kept under wraps. Increasing numbers of large firms and institutions are opting not only to use open source software —to avoid licensing fees—, but are also building their own products and services with open source code, meaning they cannot keep the contents safely secret.
Ecosystem Services-Based Farming in Ethiopia Increases Crop Yields & Empowers Women
The Tigray Project in northern Ethiopia sounds too good to be true. It is said to demonstrate how sustainable agriculture can lead to increased crop yields, raised water tables, improved soil fertility, increased incomes and empowering of women. The government has now adopted the project’s approach for combating land degradation and poverty in the whole country. SDU went there to check out if the project is as good as rumour has it.
Canada to List Key Chemical in Common Plastics as Toxic
A report in the New York Times cites an anonymous Canadian government source as saying Canada will soon declare bisphenol-a (BPA), a chemical found in some plastics, toxic. The move is prompted by concerns over observed effects on animals, potential environmental contamination, and fears of public health impact in the human population.
In the heart of Madrid, the dollar’s woes have reached fevered extremes. The euro at its worst, shortly after its introduction, could buy only $0.69; it is now worth $1.57, an appreciation of 127.5%, or 2.275 times its lowest value against the dollar. What’s worse, money changers advertising “no commission” do not adhere even loosely to the official rate of exchange…
Food Riots in Haiti, Protests in El Salvador, as Corn Prices Skyrocket
In a period of roughly 18 months, the price of corn across central American markets has doubled, making staple foodstuffs too expensive for many in the region. Today, what is described as an “angry mob” of protesters suffering food scarcity attacked the government palace in Port-au-Prince; UN peacekeepers responded by firing teargas, while food markets remained closed throughout.
Zero-combustion Paradigm Approaching: Emissions Standards, Economics Will Push Research
As governments, businesses and scientists work toward creating cost-effective solutions for zero-emissions propulsion technologies, the possibility of a zero-combustion energy production and industrial fabrication model is emerging. Preservation of the natural environment and containment of emissions-induced global climate change both require new technologies that will allow full economic output, including industry and transport, that eliminate the need for combustible fuels.
Demonstrations Against China’s Tibet Policy Spread to Nepal, Police Attack Demonstrators
Demonstrations against Chinese rule in Tibet turned violent in Nepal’s capital Kathmandu, yesterday, as police wielded bamboo clubs and beat demonstrators, including Buddhist monks and nuns. The UN has said Nepal’s harsh clampdown on Tibetan demonstrators violates international human rights law, including the right to peaceful assembly, as embodied in treaties signed by Nepal.
Price of Rice Doubles on World Markets, Undermining Asian Stability
Rice is a basic food staple for nearly half the world’s population. The world’s two most populous nations, China and India, depend heavily on the grain for basic sustenance, and for economic stability. The price of rice has doulbed in the last 3 months, causing concern about potential for conflict along Asian border regions.
Nuclear Material Found in Andes Sign of Proliferation Threat
Reports out of Colombia cite government sources saying the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) acquired uranium on the black market. Colombian authorities claim to have recoverd 66 pounds of uranium. The radioactive material, which in some forms can fuel to a nuclear device, was said to have been recovered after information on 3 laptops seized led authorities to it.
Fredrik Moberg/Miriam Huitric, Albaeco :: Food prices are skyrocketing. Initially, many put the blame on the rising demand of biofuels in the transport sector, but bio-ethanol is far from the only thing driving up food prices. New diets, soaring oil prices and climate change are all in the complex soup of explanations behind the recent development putting food beyond the reach of the planet’s poor.
The price of wheat has doubled in less than a year.
Photo: Wen-Yan King: medapt.org, azote.se
More than 800 million people are still undernourished in the world today. The Haitian riots over soaring food prices in April this year were a startling reminder of the inequalities between developed and developing countries – with the latter feeling the impact of the growing global food crisis in ways that go beyond the imagination of most people living in developed countries.
The price of wheat has doubled in less than a year and prices for milk and meat have more than doubled in some countries. International nominal prices of all major food commodities are at the highest levels in nearly 50 years. While this crisis is real – so much so that the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) recently held a High-Level Conference on World Food Security: the Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy – its causes are not so clear.
Initially, many put the blame on bio-ethanol and claimed that food prices were surging because we have chosen to feed our cars instead of feeding human beings (see SDU Issue 4/2007). Lately, however, the discussions have broadened to also include a whole set of other explanations. A recent post on the ecogeek weblog was right to the point: “All-in-all, it’s not a good time to be burning what can otherwise be eaten. But there is no good reason to say that biofuels are the one and only problem. SUV’s are certainly limiting the future of the world, but not by burning hungry people’s food.”
Six major factors behind the rising food prices
Soaring fossil-fuel prices (needed to produce fertilizers, pesticides and for transportation)
Emerging economies and Westernisation of diets (rich people eat more and buy more meat and milk that increase demand for grains to feed livestock)
Population growth (food demand growing faster than supply)
Climate change (drought, more frequent flooding etc already beginning to have significant impact on agricultural production)
Use of crops for fuel (shifting production from food to biofuels)
Market speculation (investors from traditional markets now focus on financial products tied to agriculture commodities as food prices increase)
Even more recently, however, the British daily “The Guardian” claimed to have obtained a confidential World Bank report that claims that biofuels are the main cause and have forced global food prices up by 75% – far more than previously estimated (at the other extreme, the US Government says it is less than 3%).
Key causes of the soaring food prices
Until recently global production of food matched demand. In fact, for a rather long period of time there has been an excess of production in many parts of the world. These surpluses have often been “dumped” at low prices in developing countries with disastrous impacts on national farmers who could not compete with the low prices offered. This was until recently. Demand now seems to have passed the tipping point where it exceeds production, according to several experts.
Another key aspect to consider when trying to understand the food price crisis is drought, which is predicted to increase in frequency and severity as the climate changes. In 2007, prices soared to a large extent due to failed crops in the drought stricken fields of Australia’s food bowl that are central to the worldwide price of grains.
CafeSentido.com :: The former vice president of the United States, Al Gore, yesterday announced an ambitious goal, which he says the nation can meet, of transitioning its entire domestic energy production to clean resources by 2018. The speech marks a major moment in the process of transition to the green technology boom, which will be the next step in the ongoing economic development of the United States and the world. Gore, however, warned that failing to meet the challenge to date means “the United States of America as we know it is at risk”.
The United States currently consumes roughly one-quarter of all the world’s petroleum, while representing just 4.6% of the world’s population. Experts calculate that global energy production is at or near its peak, and total demand is fast expanding beyond production capacity. In a globalized economy, with major developing nations like China and India expanding GDP by between 7% and 10% per year, this imbalance is untenable. So crude oil prices are shooting up, and the US is increasingly at risk for economic hardship, perhaps already in motion, as a result of coming market corrections.
Mr. Gore opened his address [full text] with a caution to those who fail to perceive the complexity of a new kind of security risk:
There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment.
The fact is, moods are changing, and the political environment has evolved dramatically in the last two years. Gore cites this trend as cause for hope in this moment of economic and environmental peril, and the best reason for calling for this grand infrastructure readjustment. Skeptics who have long cited the “prohibitive cost” of making the adjustment to clean energy technologies are out-argued by the soaring cost of carbon-based fuels: their historic efficiency is no longer guaranteed, and the economy as a whole is being magnetized to new technological opportunities to reduce energy overhead.
Noting the same problem of oil “addiction” Pres. Bush cited in his 2006 State of the Union address, Mr. Gore urged Americans to think with a can-do attitude about how to make fundamental changes to the core energy metabolism of our economy, specifically:
our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges – the economic, environmental and national security crises. We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change.
How does an entire nation come together to undertake such a massive energy overhaul —priced at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion, according to a range of analysts from competing disciplines—, if not by using the levers of democratic political pressures to steer the entire economic output of the nation in a new direction? Moving public awareness can be as unwieldy as steering the ship of state, and in an economy that represents nearly one-third of the entire global economic output, the task is daunting.
There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment.
The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more – if more should be required – the future of human civilization is at stake. I don’t remember a time in our country when so many things seemed to be going so wrong simultaneously. Our economy is in terrible shape and getting worse, gasoline prices are increasing dramatically, and so are electricity rates. Jobs are being outsourced. Home mortgages are in trouble. Banks, automobile companies and other institutions we depend upon are under growing pressure. Distinguished senior business leaders are telling us that this is just the beginning unless we find the courage to make some major changes quickly.
The climate crisis, in particular, is getting a lot worse – much more quickly than predicted. Scientists with access to data from Navy submarines traversing underneath the North polar ice cap have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months. This will further increase the melting pressure on Greenland. According to experts, the Jakobshavn glacier, one of Greenland’s largest, is moving at a faster rate than ever before, losing 20 million tons of ice every day, equivalent to the amount of water used every year by the residents of New York City.
Two major studies from military intelligence experts have warned our leaders about the dangerous national security implications of the climate crisis, including the possibility of hundreds of millions of climate refugees destabilizing nations around the world. Just two days ago, 27 senior statesmen and retired military leaders warned of the national security threat from an “energy tsunami” that would be triggered by a loss of our access to foreign oil. Meanwhile, the war in Iraq continues, and now the war in Afghanistan appears to be getting worse.
And by the way, our weather sure is getting strange, isn’t it? There seem to be more tornadoes than in living memory, longer droughts, bigger downpours and record floods. Unprecedented fires are burning in California and elsewhere in the American West. Higher temperatures lead to drier vegetation that makes kindling for mega-fires of the kind that have been raging in Canada, Greece, Russia, China, South America, Australia and Africa. Scientists in the Department of Geophysics and Planetary Science at Tel Aviv University tell us that for every one degree increase in temperature, lightning strikes will go up another 10 percent. And it is lightning, after all, that is principally responsible for igniting the conflagration in California today.
Like a lot of people, it seems to me that all these problems are bigger than any of the solutions that have thus far been proposed for them, and that’s been worrying me. I’m convinced that one reason we’ve seemed paralyzed in the face of these crises is our tendency to offer old solutions to each crisis separately – without taking the others into account. And these outdated proposals have not only been ineffective – they almost always make the other crises even worse.
Yet when we look at all three of these seemingly intractable challenges at the same time, we can see the common thread running through them, deeply ironic in its simplicity: our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges – the economic, environmental and national security crises. We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change. But if we grab hold of that common thread and pull it hard, all of these complex problems begin to unravel and we will find that we’re holding the answer to all of them right in our hand.
When Henry David Thoreau published Walden, a narrative of his experiences and meditations near Walden Pond, in the densely wooded hill country of Massachusetts, it was a breakthrough treatise on the role of human industry and individual will in terms of the natural environment. Thoreau infused an explanation of day to day existence with a transcendental consciousness of the value of the natural world around him, and explored the manner in which human civilization is both habitually divorced from and irrefutably dependent upon that environment.
The Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation explains:
In 1845, Thoreau went to live and work at Walden Pond. He stayed for two years, keeping a journal of his thoughts and his encounters with nature and society. Over the next few years, Thoreau wrote and rewrote (seven drafts in all) Walden; or Life in the Woods, one of the most famous works in American literature. Published in 1854, this classic has never been out of print and is still read by people all over the world.
Indeed, the book is considered by some a foundational text in the eventual springing up of a vast conservation movement, popular environmentalism, and later efforts to bring the federal government and the rule of law into the work of ensuring that human civilization does not thoughtlessly plunder the resources of the natural environment, on which it depends for survival. The text is as relevant now as ever to giving us perspective as to how to move forward in a human-affected geological epoch.
Former US vice-president Al Gore is calling on the nation to marshal its resources and divorce itself from the combustible fuels economy. Gore says the US can produce all its energy requirements from renewable resources within 10 years, if concerted action is taken. The bold initiative is designed to drive debate on the topic and move discussions about how to deal with high fuel prices toward the new opportunity they provide for funding renewable infrastructure development.
Rising fuel costs, climate change and the national security threats posed by U.S. dependence on foreign oil are conspiring to create “a new political environment” that Gore said will sustain bold and expensive steps to wean the nation off fossil fuels.
When Pres. Bush announced he would lift the executive ban on offshore oil drilling and urged Congress to do the same, critics retorted that the science shows the potential energy output is too far off and too small to affect prices, but that new drilling would “enable” the nation’s “addiction” to carbon-based fuels. Pres. Bush himself used the word addiction in a State of the Union address, to describe what could be a crippling reliance on petroleum-based fuels.
Gore’s proposed initiative has been compared to Pres. John F. Kennedy’s promise that the United States could land a man on the moon within the decade of the 1960s. Ecological economist Lester Brown, of the Earth Policy Institute, has long called for the US to treat the climate crisis as a major threat and to begin to overhaul its energy economy “at wartime speed”, referring specifically to how Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the industrial economy of the US to war production to fight and win World War II.
Gore has not shied away from the issue of cost, but points out that the cost is no longer higher than simply filling in gaps in current demand with new output from high-contamination fuel-sources like coal:
The Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan group that he chairs, estimates the cost of transforming the nation to so-called clean electricity sources at $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion over 30 years in public and private money. But he says it would cost about as much to build ozone-killing coal plants to satisfy current demand.
Gore says his goal is to drive public opinion toward an alternative fuels revolution, noting how this process seems to have begun already as a response to soaring gasoline prices. The fuel-source issue has come to dominate every aspect of current economic analysis, as transport costs are now being blamed for a rise in inflation across the US and for 9-figure losses for at least two major airlines.
No longer a politician, but keenly involved in the political sphere, Gore is now devoted to the complex project of informing and changing attitudes, hoping to “enlarge the political space” where government and the private sector can “deal with the climate challenge.” His words may help spur bolder action by politicians, which would help business make the investment commitments necessary to revolutionize their own infrastructure and/or industrial output.
New solar technologies that make solar-power generation perhaps 10 times more efficient mean prices for producing renewable energy are coming down dramatically, just as prices for conventional fuel sources are skyrocketing. While both candidates’ energy plans include coal as a viable resource for expanding production, the major progress being made in renewable fuel sources may make such expansion unnecessary before new plants come online.
Critics have often said the renewable resources market is too costly to be implemented in a way that benefits most consumers economically, but this is no longer the case, and what Mr. Gore is pushing for is precisely the kind of national innovation initiative that brings the most efficient clean energy technologies within the economic range of all consumers. Sustaining these clean technologies would be far less costly than cleaning up after high-contamination combustibles, so the long-term gains, added to the economic boom from infrastructure development, will be part of a needed green technology boom.
TRANSCRIPT OF ENERGY INFORMATION ADMIN. REPORT ON RENEWABLE ENERGY CONSUMPTION
Data For: 2007
Report Released: May 2008
Next Release Date: May 2009
Renewable energy consumption declined 1 percent between 2006 and 2007 to 6,830 trillion Btu, according to preliminary 2007 data (Table 1 and Figure 1). In contrast, both total energy and non-renewable energy increased 2 percent.
There was wide variation in the consumption behavior of individual renewable energy sources. Hydro electricity dropped 14 percent in 2007 due to reduced precipitation in several regions of the country. On the plus side, biomass-based energy grew 7 percent and wind-generated electricity jumped 21 percent (Table 3). Major increases in consumption of biomass to produce and use biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel) were almost entirely responsible for the increase in biomass during 2007 (Table 1).
From 2003 through 2007, renewable energy consumption’s average annual growth rate was 3 percent, compared with just 1 percent for total energy consumption. Again, biofuels and wind were largely responsible for the increase, with 5-year average annual growth rates of 25 and 29 percent, respectively.
Just over half of renewable energy consumption occurred in the electric power sector in 2007 (Table 2). The industrial sector was the second-leading consumer of renewable energy, accounting for nearly 30 percent. The transportation, residential, and commercial sectors accounted for 9, 8, and 2 percent, respectively. While the electric power sector currently consumes the most renewable energy (51 percent), its use dropped 8 percent between 2006 and 2007. In 2003, the electricity sector accounted for 59 percent of total renewable energy consumption.
In contrast, transportation sector renewable energy consumption increased 30 percent during 2007, and residential sector consumption grew 12 percent. Residential sector growth was due to healthy increases in all three energy sources: biomass, geothermal, and solar/photovoltaic. Commercial and industrial uses of renewable energy changed little between 2006 and 2007 and have also changed little as a fraction of total renewable consumption since 2003. That could change for the industrial sector if ethanol and biodiesel use continues to grow rapidly resulting in increased feedstock consumption. This is especially significant in view of the fact that the largest biomass fuel consumed in the industrial sector, wood and derived fuels, has grown little since 1989 and appears to have peaked in 1997.[1]
Within the electric power sector, wind energy consumption has grown each year since 1998.[2] From 2003 to 2007, wind’s share of total renewable energy consumption increased from 2 percent to 5 percent. For the first time ever in 2007, wind energy consumption in the electric power sector exceeded geothermal. Hydro electricity accounted for 36 percent of total renewable consumption in 2007, down from 46 percent in 2003. However, hydro consumption is tied mostly to precipitation, which can vary year to year. Few plants are being built or retired.
Electricity generation from renewable sources fell 9 percent in 2007 to 351 billion kilowatthours (kWh), largely due to reduced precipitation (Table 3). Excluding hydro electricity, however, renewable electricity generation grew 7 percent. This gain was led by a 21 percent increase in electricity from wind and moderate increases in electricity from biomass waste. There has been little change in generation from the largest non-hydro renewable electricity source, wood and derived fuels, since 2003.
US pres. George W. Bush has lifted the executive ban on offshore oil drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), and has challenged the US Congress to act to open the OCS to new oil exploration, saying the US needs to increase domestic production to reduce its dependence on imported oil. The ban was put in place by his father, George H.W. Bush, the 41st US president, for environmental concerns and in part because the oil companies have leases for huge expanses of underwater terrain they have not explored or exploited.
Critics say lifting the ban will have little to no effect, short or long-term on the price of crude oil or on gasoline at the pump, in part because the US is not part of the OPEC cartel that sets production rates and prices, and in part because it will take so long for any of the new production to come online. Opponents in Congress have said it is just a ploy to put political pressure on Democrats in an election year when gas prices are high.
Both presidential candidates have made a point to repeatedly state their intention to provide heavy increases in funding for the development of alternative energy sources. Sen. John McCain, however, has said he backs lifting the ban, and he has backed policy intervention to alter the price of gasoline, like lifting the federal gas tas temporarily. Sen. Obama has often talked of the need to tap America’s resources, but he supports maintaining the ban.
The truth of the matter at present is that there is no known way for offshore drilling to bring oil prices down to sustainable levels, as the projected rise in global demand far outstrips the expected production capacity of the US offshore reserves. As evidenced by oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens’ massive national campaign for wind-power, only by changing the structure of our national energy economy can we bring energy and transport-fuel prices back within reach of the average consumer.
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In line with this information, and because climate scientists, US courts, international treaties, and American law, all suggest that we move toward a long-term ongoing decline in carbon emissions, the US Congress continues to oppose lifting the ban, which they would have to do with new legislation. According to the San Francisco Chronicle:
On the surface, President Bush’s decision Monday to lift the presidential moratorium on offshore drilling - a policy initiated by his father and extended by Bill Clinton - appeared only to embolden Democrats in their efforts to preserve the 27-year-old federal ban.
Congress has renewed its ban on drilling on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts every year since 1981, and top Democrats said Monday they will do so again this year, despite the pressure from Bush. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Bush’s action a hoax that “will neither reduce gas prices nor increase energy independence.”
Coming just days after the EPA announced it would not institute caps on carbon emissions this year, the executive action is likely to intensify political attacks related to the issue of energy production and oil prices. Pres. Bush has sought to blame Congressional Democrats’ opposition to drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska for the recent upsurge in oil prices. Since that policy has not changed in nearly 3 decades, it is hard to see the immediate cause and effect.
If we look for geopolitical causes, we find ongoing chaos in Iraq, threats of a possible military action against Iran, Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, interrupting potentially more than one-third of the world’s oil traffic, a rogue regime in Sudan and a surge in sabotage on Nigerian oil fields. On the economic front, we have the collpase of major financial institution in the US, the dollar now worth less than half its 2001 value against the euro, and the predicted approach of peak oil production.
a report last year threw cold water on the idea of new offshore drilling as the way to lower gas prices. It said that new offshore drilling “would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030″ and that the impact on prices would be “insignificant.”
Pres. Bush’s own Energy Information Administration issued that report. Rep. Capps went on to note that “the oil and gas industry is sitting on 68 million acres of public lands where it could be drilling but isn’t. It has some 6,000 leases in the Gulf of Mexico (where the majority of oil and natural gas reserves are found) that are not being explored.”
The argument that oil and natural gas firms would gladly lower prices if only they were given access to drillable reserves does not hold up, if we consider that they are not doing this now, though they can. So the summer will likely see a heated contest for public support between Congressional conservationists and the Bush White House, with Senators McCain and Obama squaring off as spokespeople for the competing points of view, but something other than future drilling will have to be done to lower prices at the pump.
The chairman of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Stephen Johnson, says the Clean Air Act is “ill-suited” to fighting the greenhouse effect, and that Congress should pass laws mandating the regulation of carbon emissions, with global warming in mind. The move may lead to a more comprehensive regulatory regime, but as the Guardian newspaper notes: “Last year’s Massachusetts v. EPA Supreme Court ruling had found that greenhouse gases can be regulated under the U.S. Clean Air Act. The decision pressured the EPA to reconsider its refusal to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from new cars and trucks.”
Johnson’s call for Congressional action likely means there will be no effective measures to regulate carbon emissions until the next president is sworn in. Congress has scheduled only 35 days of business between now and the November elections, and none between the election and the initiation of the new Congress in January. Some critics have said it is the latest in a series of moves by the Bush administration to stall efforts to regulate carbon emissions, despite the landmark Supreme Court ruling ordering the EPA to do so via the Clean Air Act.
When the EPA staff began drafting proposed emissions regulations in line with the provisions of the Clean Air Act, the White House quipped that the type of “onerous command-and-control regulation contemplated in the EPA staff draft would impose crippling costs on the economy in the form of a massive hidden tax, without even ensuring that the intended overall emissions reductions occur.”
EPA chief Johnson has said he believes the EPA cannot easily craft effective regulations through the provisions of the Clean Air Act, and that doing so would be like walking across the entire country on foot, while an act of Congress would be like traveling by supersonic jet, in speeding the reform of the nation’s regulatory policy.
The EPA has asked for a 120-day period of public comment on a range of issues related to potential regulatory measures. The comment period follows a series of interrupted draft proposals and internal debate on the issue, prompted by the Supreme Court ruling. Johnson expressed concern that regulating carbon emissions “under any portion of the Clean Air Act could result in an unprecedented expansion of EPA’s authority that could have a profound effect on virtually every sector of the economy and every household”.
Senators from both parties have been harshly critical of the administration’s response to the issue. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) said “The deliberate efforts to delay adherence to the Supreme Court’s decision is reckless and irresponsible”, while Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) has quipped that “After more than seven years, this administration is still not willing to make the hard choices to confront global warming”. Carper chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety.
There has been stiff resistance from automakers to the notion of mandating higher standards of efficiency or steep reductions in carbon emissions, and they have said there needs to be a comprehensive framework for crafting real solutions on a global scale. Economic side-effects would need to be softened by legislation, and trade imbalances might need to be shored up by reaching agreement on global standards, via some binding treaty, presently not considered near.
