Dengue Re-emerges in U.S., Spurring Race for Vaccine
June 28 — For the first time in more than 65 years, dengue has returned the continental United States, according to an advisory the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued in late May. While a few cases were reported earlier, they were primarily in Americans who had caught the virus abroad or at the Texas-Mexico border.
The upsurge is not unexpected. Experts say more than half the world’s population will be at risk by 2085 because of greater urbanization, global travel and climate change. Over the past 30 years, a global outcry against using the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT, has led to the resurgence of the mosquito, a voracious consumer of human blood and carrier of infectious disease.
Epidemics have become routine in Latin America, a continent on the verge of becoming highly endemic. Outbreaks are today raging in Brazil, Guatemala and other nations. Thailand, within a week of its annual dengue season this year, has already reported 18,000 cases and 20 deaths, according to the Ministry of Public Health.
High-Speed Rail Will Spur Growth in Hub Cities, Says Mayors Report
June 14 – Billions of dollars of new business and tens of thousands of jobs will flow to four hub cities — Los Angeles, Chicago, Orlando and Albany, N.Y. — where plans for major high-speed rail networks are located, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
Their report, released in Oklahoma City today, is the first attempt to put numbers on the widely held belief that high-speed rail can stimulate local economies and act as a driver of growth. The Obama administration has invested $8 billion in federal stimulus money to create 13 high-speed rail corridors.
The benefits of traveling between 110 and 220 miles per hour will mean better connectivity, shorter travel times and new development around train stations, according to the report. The changes will create 150,000 new jobs and some $19 billion in new businesses by 2035.
Scientists Weigh Use of Bacteria for Cleaner Fossil Fuel Production
May 18 — Much of the world’s oil reserves lies in giant tar sand stretches in places like Alberta and Venezuela. While the oil industry uses an energy-intensive and fairly dirty process to make steam to cook the oil out of the tar sands, underground bacteria simply eat the crude oil and break it down into methane, or natural gas.
In nature, that process takes millions of years. A small group of cross-disciplinary microbiologists with their feet both in the oil industry and academic geochemistry wants to speed up the work. They are trying to get these bugs to break down carbon much faster to produce a steady supply of commercial natural gas, and to enhance the recovery of crude.
Interest in using microbes that grow naturally in oil fields, coal beds and shale deposits is growing, according to a group of industry insiders at the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) 2010 convention last week in Chicago.
“We’ve garnered the attention of large oil and gas producers around the world,” said Mark Finkelstein, vice-president of science at Colorado-based Luca Technologies. “The recent emphasis on climate change and natural gas bodes well for our technology.”
A Road Map to Deliver GM Crops to Third World Farmers
March 31 — In Burkina Faso, a school for the future regulators of Africa’s genetically modified (GM) crops is opening up next month.
The school, called the African Biosafety Network of Expertise (ABNE), has been set up by the African Union and is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The operators are careful to point out that this is an “Africa-based, Africa-owned and Africa-led” initiative, an important point, for there are few debates in agriculture there that raise more political heat than issues of food sovereignty and genetically modified crops.
“We acknowledge that sovereignty is in the hands of Africans,” said Lawrence Kent, deputy director of the Agricultural Development Initiative at the Gates Foundation. “For research to move forward, the African governments must move forward with biosafety capacity building.”
In the transgenic crop fight, the foot soldiers on either side have been dug in for years. But despite the doubts about the necessity of GM, farmers have been voting with their seeds. The acreage where transgenic crops are planted has been increasing. Developing nations and small farming operations are the newest adopters of GM crops. By 2015, the European Commission predicts that there will be 120 commercial crops worldwide, up from the 30 currently grown.
According to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), which monitors the planting of GM crops worldwide, the use of biotechnology increased by 7 percent over the past year. About 90 percent of the 14 million farmers who use GM are “resource-poor farmers,” said Clive James, chairman of ISAAA.
Meanwhile, most scientists are calling for sweeping changes to agriculture to prepare for sustainable development and ensure the security of food supplies in the face of climate change and other challenges. The changes, they say, will invariably include transgenic crops.
Much of the new research is happening in developing nations, especially China. And public-sector scientists in these nations are now wondering how to get their crops to the dinner table, past a stringent and too-expensive regulatory process.
Sam Timpo of ABNE talks with a heavy accent over the phone from Egypt. He says it is necessary to develop regulations in the next few years. There is some haste, for another Gates-funded initiative is in the pipeline — a royalty-free transgenic corn that, in theory, should withstand the droughts of sub-Saharan Africa. But in most African nations, there is no government biosafety agency to approve, monitor and track GM crops.
Biosafety regulations of countries are usually modeled after the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, an international agreement that promotes a “precautionary approach.” It says that GM crops can be adopted if they are of minimal risk to the environment and human health. It lays out a clear set of guidelines to test for that risk.
But guidelines alone don’t suffice. “As many as 100 developing countries lack the technical and management capacity needed to review tests and monitor compliance,” wrote Jose Falck-Zepeda, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, in a recent policy brief.
Since the first green revolution, investment in agricultural science from the public sector has been lagging in most parts of the world. The private players — Monsanto, DuPont, Bayer CropScience and others — dominated most of the research, creating fears about a monopoly over seed supply.
China develops the technology and the markets
The exception is China, which has the world’s largest pool of agricultural scientists. With a stable of more than 100 crops waiting for approval, it is the most serious contender with private enterprises for engineering crops.
“They have pretty big capacity of biotech Ph.D.s, probably one of the biggest in the world, if not the biggest, in plant biology,” said Guillaume Gruere, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. “More than a hundred crops have been tested both in the lab and in the greenhouse. Most of those crops haven’t gone further, but they could one day just get it out if they want to.”
China’s needs are big. It has to feed a population that will steadily grow, and it takes its food security challenges seriously, according to Falck-Zepeda.
The country also doesn’t have to contend with some of the public perception issues that plague other nations. In November, the government approved insect-resistant rice and insect-resistant corn for final field trials, which should hit the commercial markets in two years. Given the nature of rice as a staple, this is an important milestone in the commercialization of a food crop.
“They have the money and understand that biotechnology is power,” said Robert Zeigler, director-general of the International Rice Research Institute, based in the Philippines, which was instrumental in helping Asia increase its rice yields during the first “green revolution.”
Looming ‘South-South’ transfers
China is investing heavily in pushing crops through its regulatory system. Late last year, the government invested about $900 million in market biotechnology and teaching researchers how to transfer their nascent crops into the marketplace, according to Falck-Zepeda.
“They know that their internal market is so big and you have so many people internally in China that’ll be customers,” he said. “They have economies of scale.”
And China is initiating “South-South” technology transfers of its seeds. Its non-transgenic hybrid rice seeds are being aggressively marketed in India, Bangladesh and Africa. Its transgenic cotton (a Chinese-developed variety) is available in India.
“Chinese transgenic material is coming,” said Swapan Kumar Dutta, crop science director at the government-run Indian Council of Agricultural Research, referring to Chinese Bt cotton. “The Chinese know their business. They are doing it very purposefully.”
Once China’s recently approved transgenic seed hits the market, there are few regulations that could keep it from seeping into international markets. Given that developing nations usually have a better grasp of each others’ needs, this would be a good development, according to policymakers. Farmers typically tend to purchase seeds that deliver the greatest profit, according to Dutta. And although the transfer of seeds involves the Cartagena Protocol, most nations do not have as strict an interpretation of risk as does the European Union.
In Argentina, soybean farmers simply borrowed some biotech seeds from neighboring fields in Brazil before the country decided to adopt the GM seeds. In India, Bt cotton was a reality in the illegal seed market long before the government approved Monsanto seeds, according to Gruere.
The dangers of black markets
The African Union and international aid organizations are working to fill in gaps in regulation because a regulated seed market would be safer than an illegal market, based on seeds smuggled in from abroad.
“The danger is when people adopt GM crops in a free-for-all atmosphere,” said Francis Nang’ayo, regulatory affairs manager for the drought-tolerant corn initiative called Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA).
A significant number of traits have already been developed by public-sector agencies in other parts of the world, as well. But the costs necessary for getting regulatory approval, which can run into millions of dollars, cannot be met by most of these agencies. Most GM crops die in the lab.
This is true in the United States, as well, where public-sector research into plant science has been slow. Getting through the regulatory system can cost as much as $150 million for a single plant, according to Denise Dewar, executive director for plant biology at the industry-sponsored group CropLife International.
“The regulatory system is so expensive and time-consuming that the only organizations that can afford it are big biotech companies,” said Nina Fedoroff, science and technology adviser to the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Since private companies choose to develop crops that make money, transgenic crops that are necessary for food security get left out, she said.
A business or a ‘moral imperative’?
Currently, four crops (soybeans, corn, cotton and canola) and two traits (insect resistance and herbicide tolerance) that are most profitable are being developed by these companies. Other traits or crops that may be useful to the poorer world are largely ignored, since companies’ primary responsibility is to the shareholder, according to Falck-Zepeda.
The drought-tolerant corn donated by Monsanto to sub-Saharan Africa seems to be an exception to this rule. “We see it as a moral imperative and think it is beholden upon us to share it,” said Vanessa Cook, the project leader from Monsanto.
Monsanto could have other motivations for donating the drought-tolerant corn. The adoption of the crop could improve the standard of living over time and improve farmers’ perceptions of other biotech seeds that may arrive for sale. It would be a long-term investment.
“It’s no loss to them; they gain public relations,” said Falck-Zepeda. “Eventually, they may be able to buy seed from Monsanto.”
And having a socially advantageous and necessary crop such as drought-tolerant corn could hasten the establishment of biosafety systems.
“If you have a great crop that is ready, maybe it’ll push things to go forward and have a bill on biosafety,” said Gruere. “If the regulation is not ready, they won’t approve anything and [the technology] will just stay in the lab and that’s it.”
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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India’s Future Energy Business Plan — Shop the World for More Coal
BOKARO, India — The men who work at Bokaro Steel City (there are few women) behave as though they are in the Wild West. Some are slick and charming with their words. They stand in air filled with fine coal dust that gets into every crevice of the skin and upper respiratory system, while saying that the dust filters are 99.9 percent efficient.
Others, such as the gun-toting security guards, are silent and watchful. They need to be, in order to cope with the pressures that are unique to Jharkhand, India’s richest coal state. The state is among the most corrupt in the country. It is the richest in mineral wealth, and faces a home-grown communist threat called Naxalism. It has a thriving coal mafia, and millions of dollars get traded between politicians leveraging the future of the residents to gain control over the fuel.
Bokaro is an insignificant player in these politics, for all it does is use the coal to make steel. The steel city rises in majestic order above the chaos of Jharkhand. It is immense, occupying 70 square miles including an airstrip, 186 miles of locomotive tracks and a 320-megawatt coal-burning thermal power plant. All this was built in the 1960s, when India was leaning toward socialism and Jharkhand was still mostly forest. It was India’s first steel plant, built with the help of the Soviets.
“This is where hell can be seen on earth,” said David Mony, general manager of operations for Bokaro, referring to the steel-making process.
Navin Srivastava, one of Mony’s subordinates (or “boys,” as he called them), placed his eye against a tiny peephole that serves as a window into the 2,500-degree-Fahrenheit steel kiln filled with blue-hot gas. Black chunks of hard coke imported from Australia are added from the top. Orange-hot liquid steel accompanied by sparks pours out into molds at the bottom.
The ‘boys’ from ‘hell’ take over the globe’s steel business
Despite significant technological advances since the Iron Age, there are few materials on Earth that can replace coal in the steel-making process. There are two varieties of the fuel: metallurgical or coking coal, used in manufacturing, and thermal or steam coal, used in thermal power plants. India is a major importer of coke, and in recent times, supply shortages of thermal coal have been seen, as well. If the gaps get any larger, experts say India could become the largest importer of coal in the world by 2020.
Together with power generation, manufacturing helps make India the fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Steel and cement, in turn, are driving the construction of buildings, highways and other new infrastructure in developing nations. Even as steel demand from the West fell with the economic recession, developing countries picked up their own production, according to the World Steel Association.
In India, the metal is linked to development in the energy, transport and housing sectors. State-owned Steel Authority of India Ltd., which runs Bokaro, is planning to double its hot metal production in two years, and more steelmakers are moving to the mineral-rich belt of India that includes coal-rich Jharkhand and Orissa.
India’s only source of coke comes from the fields of Jharia, 30 miles away from Bokaro, but the coal extracted here accounts for only a fraction of the needs of steelmakers. The steel plants have adapted by importing coal. The fuel travels a long distance to make it to this remote corner of India. While state-owned Coal India Ltd. supplies 95 percent of cooler-burning steam coal used to generate electricity in thermal power plants, India is a net importer of coke, according to the company’s chairman, Partha Bhattacharyya.
“We can only meet 25 percent of India’s metallurgical coal needs,” he said.
Bokaro brings in 80 percent of its coke from Australia and New Zealand, explained Mony. For the rest, the operators have shopped the world in recent years, according to the World Steel Association. India imports from South Africa and Indonesia, among others. Indonesia, which is the top exporter, also sells to China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.
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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.