Clinton presses for funds to shore up U.S. climate policy leadership
2/25/2010
Washington, DC–The United States needs to become the leader in the international arena of climate change politics and economics, said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“Jobs are going to go by the wayside if we do not get in there; it is a political and economic issue,” she said in her testimony defending her department’s fiscal 2011 budget request. She called on Congress to recognize the strategic importance of taking the initiative on climate change.
The State Department needs $646 million to promote the United States as a leader in green technologies, she said, and added that the clean-energy market is set to be captured by other countries, especially China. The “intellectual capital of the world” and the originator of most of this technology should not be left behind in this clean-energy economy, she said.
Clinton also praised U.S. efforts at Copenhagen, especially President Obama’s decision to barge into a secret meeting being held by China, India, South Africa and Brazil to “figure out how to avoid tough questions.” The end result of that was the Copenhagen Accord, she said.
Copenhagen is the first time after World War II that developed and developing nations have taken equal responsibility for their emissions, she said.
“The world wants the United States to lead; they look to us as the world’s oldest democracy,” she said.
The 2011 budget has a 38 percent increase in funding to address climate change, a move that Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) lauded in his opening comments.
Developed nations have agreed to give $30 billion through 2012 to developing nations to help with their climate change efforts.
“Now we face the even tougher challenge of matching our words with action,” said Kerry.
The Obama administration has requested $1.4 billion for climate-related diplomacy efforts as part of a $58.5 billion budget for the State Department. This is just 1.4 percent of the overall 2011 budget.
In a hearing sparsely attended by the Republican side, ranking member Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) touched lightly on the climate change issue.
“Wasted economic gains from attainable energy efficiencies are a drag on economic recovery,” he said. “We are also concerned about the possible crises that could occur if dramatic climate change takes hold.”
Climate Change May Make Plants More Fragrant
A warming climate could lead to a more fragrant world, but it might disturb an intricate communication system used by plants, according to a review published recently in Trends in Plant Science.
When Jarmo Holopainen grew white cabbages in a greenhouse in Finland, he found that over many years of sunlight and elevated levels of carbon dioxide, the plants’ communication with the world was altered.
Cabbages and most vegetation emit chemicals called biogenic volatile organic compounds, or BVOCs, that are mostly undetectable by humans. But they notify other organisms of danger and opportunity, and also function as methods of plant-plant communication. When we can smell them, they manifest as fragrances.
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Searching for the Wildest Strawberries to Save Crop Diversity
ClimateWire/ New York Times, Mar ‘10– It has been a long journey for the latest shipment of seeds to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The vault, built into a Norwegian mountain near the North Pole, is the final defense for agriculture in the face of growing populations, a changing climate and rising threats to food security.
And the vault now contains the world’s most diverse collection of crops as the shipment, which included a wild strawberry species painstakingly collected from a remote Russian archipelago, brought its numbers to more than half a million.
“We are losing diversity in a very quiet way,” said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which partners with the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center in Sweden to operate the vault. “Diversity is a public good; it belongs to everybody.”
Climate change is expected to negatively affect agriculture, with crops in parts of the world having to deal with warmer temperatures, droughts and rising salinity of water. The first defense is to save seeds that have traits to cope with these challenges. And often, the wild relatives of domesticated crops show greater adaptability.
Scientists can go to extreme lengths to obtain wild species believed to have greater genetic diversity. Recently, Andrey Sabitov, a senior scientist at the Vavilov Research Institute in Russia, hiked into the bear-infested wilderness on the remote island of Sakhalin, Russia. After three days, he arrived at the Atsonupuri volcano, climbed a third of the way up the flank and found what he was looking for: the Fragaria iturupensis strawberry, rumored to be an ancestor of the American berry.
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Companies Work to Harness the Power of Waves
Harnessing the ocean waves for emission-free power seems like a tidy concept, but the ocean is anything but tidy. Waves crash from multiple directions on a seemingly random basis, and converting the kinetic energy into electricity is a frontier of alternative energy research that requires grappling with large unknowns.
But with several utility companies and states, and in one case, the U.S. Navy, investing in wave power, or hydrokinetic energy, may not be too far off in the utility mix. At least two companies hope to reach commercial deployments within the next three to five years.
Off the coast of Orkney, Scotland, is the Oyster, a white- and yellow-flapped cylinder, 40 feet tall and firmly locked into the ocean’s bed. With a total of seven moving parts, two of which are pistons, it captures waves as they near the coast. Oyster funnels them into a pipe and carries the power inland to a hydroelectric power generator. The generator has been supplying the United Kingdom’s grid with 315 kilowatts of energy at peak power since October.
A farm of up to 100 Oysters could yield 100 megawatts, according to Aquamarine Power, the Scottish company that developed the technology.
“From an environmental perspective, in the sea you have a very simple machine that uses no oil, no chemicals, no electromagnetic radiation,” said Martin McAdam, CEO of Aquamarine.
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Injecting Tiny Proteins Into the Hunt for ‘Clean Coal’
As big engineering fixes go, “clean coal” has proved an elusive concept. Carbon capture projects remain experimental, expensive and energy intensive. But working with some of the tiniest things in nature, scientists are engineering proteins found in living things to trap carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants.
“Biomimetic design” is the idea of using nature as a template to create new technologies. Trees are among nature’s most efficient carbon sequestration systems. They trap carbon dioxide and convert it to glucose, placing it in a form in which it stays stable for geologically significant durations.
But at the biochemical level, they are still too slow, according to Michael Drummond, a scientist at the University of North Texas who is trying to identify new “carbon capture” enzymes.
When plants spend about three and half seconds to convert carbon dioxide to glucose during photosynthesis, they are spending an inordinate amount of time. The problem is that an enzyme called RuBisCO, which catalyzes the process, is highly inefficient.
But the basic idea of using biological molecules to capture atmospheric carbon is sound enough to get grants from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.
Scientists are studying faster enzymes. One that is getting much new attention is carbonic anhydrase — a protein found in blood, among other places, that captures carbon dioxide exhaled by cells. In one second, the enzyme can change a million molecules of the gas into harmless bicarbonate, according to Jonathan Carley, the vice president of business development at CO2 Solution, a Montreal-based company that is one among the few working on biomimetic design.
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Does the Huge China-Australia Coal Deal Square With the Copenhagen Accord?
Environmental activists are attacking a $60 billion deal that will keep Chinese power stations supplied with Australian coal for at least the next two decades.
Under the agreement announced last week, the Australian coal and iron ore mining company Resourcehouse will build a new mining complex to give China Power International Development 30 million tonnes of coal annually for the next two decades. Resourcehouse Chairman Clive Palmer called it the “biggest-ever export contract” for Australia, which is the world’s leading exporter of coal.
But in supplying China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, green groups are accusing Australia of ignoring the role it plays in maintaining dirty energy economies around the world.
“It is hypocritical for Australia to on the one hand blame China for climate change and on the other hand try so hard to sell more coal to China,” said Ailun Yang of Greenpeace China. The deal, she said, “will only lock China further up in its unhealthy dependency on coal.”
Bradley Smith, spokesman for Friends of the Earth in Queensland, Australia, said it “drives another nail into the coffin of climate change. If the project goes ahead, then emissions from the exported coal would equal 20 percent of Australia’s total domestic emissions.”
The tensions come on the heels of last year’s climate change summit in Copenhagen. There, President Obama and the leaders of other industrialized nations like Australia successfully pushed China and other fast-growing developing nations to scale back the growth of carbon emissions. While the pledges are voluntary, U.S. leaders have described them as an important step in persuading all the major economies to take responsibility for their role in causing global warming.
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A roaring economy is hitched to a galloping coal addiction
JHARIA, India — Night falls here by 5 p.m. and people stream into the open-air market to catch the latest political news. They have much to discuss, because elections are currently on in the state of Jharkhand, which is famous for three things: corruption, a home-grown terrorism threat called Naxalism, and this area’s economic life, which is marked in every imaginable way by coal.
Coal-fired electricity lights a single incandescent bulb in each shop, and the combined yellow glow gives the market a festive air. Underneath this town, the earth is burning. Suresh Kumar, 50, secretary of a local union, leaves the tea shop where he has his makeshift office and steers his motorbike down a road lined with dark piles of mining debris.
The light from his headlight is blocked by plumes of smelly, sulfurous smoke seeping out of the ground. He stops suddenly, seeing how close he has come to the edge of an open-pit mine. In the far distance, there is an orange glow in the sky. It is a non-natural sunshine reflecting the burning of millions of tons of prime coking coal. The underground fire has burned out of control for nearly a century.
Coal is the bane of Jharkhand, and the reason why Kumar and his fellow residents need to move out of the town. If the government has its way, 17 open-pit mining complexes will be built here. Below the town lie 19 seams of prime coking coal. The government’s goal is to get at the coal before the fire does.
There are many offshoots of this little drama that illustrate the high environmental and public health costs of extracting the biggest natural resource sustaining India’s economic boom.
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Automakers Hit Pay Dirt in Rural India
Rickshaws and bullock carts may be anachronisms elsewhere, but they are the standard means of transportation in rural India. But with government incentives and aggressive salesmanship by manufacturers, cars are making inroads into these untouched markets.
India is currently the 11th-largest passenger car market, and in the next five years it will become the seventh-largest, according to Ernst & Young. By 2030, the nation is expected to be the third-biggest after China and the United States. The country adds 1.5 million cars every year to its roads, and experts say sales could explode, a move that could greatly inflate India’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“India is an underpenetrated market,” said Kapil Arora, a partner in the automotive practice at Ernst & Young. “It has nine cars per 1,000 people. In the United States, there are about 800 cars per 1,000 people.”
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New Studies Point to ‘Carbon Starvation’ as a Cause for Tree Mortality
Tree death rates could increase globally because of rising temperatures and prolonged droughts linked to climate change, according to multiple studies.
The reasons for tree mortality in a warmer, drier world have been narrowed down to three main scenarios — greater prevalence of insects and diseases in a warmer world, the drying out of plants, and a third mechanism where water-stressed trees stop photosynthesizing, called carbon starvation.