Showing posts from category energy.
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What’s the Link Between Population and Nuclear Energy?
›The popular Big Green Purse blog, written by best-selling author Diane MacEachern, recently asked the Worldwatch Institute’s Robert Engelman, “What’s the Link between Population and Nuclear Energy?” The blog, which encourages women to use the “power of the purse” to improve the environment, wanted to know: “Why aren’t we talking about reducing population as part of our global strategy to minimize dependence on power sources [like nuclear energy] that pollute the environment and threaten people’s health?”
While “reducing population” is not possible, slowing population growth may be, if fertility rates continue to fall. As always, Engelman answered the tough question with thoughtful aplomb, offering three core values as a starting point:One: see the global environmental dilemma not as a problem to be solved but as a predicament to be responded to. We can’t control our future, but we can act with integrity as we aspire to build just societies in an environmentally-sound world. Addressing our numbers can become part of that.
But I’m wondering how the readers of Big Green Purse – which is replete with media-friendly lists like “Top Ten Eco-Tricks” – can translate population and its messy intersection of human rights, health care, and consumption levels into an individual purchasing decision.
Two, embrace human rights as a foundation for our actions. All people – even if too many or consuming too much – have dignity and a right to be here. As it happens, population policies based on the right of all women to choose whether and when to bear a child actually slow the growth of population. …
Three, acknowledge that no one can claim a greater right than anyone else to use energy and natural resources. This is called equity. We cannot object if the poorest people living today and yet to be born succeed in gaining the means to consume as much as Americans do.
As Engelman writes, “The idea that we can easily trim our individual consumption to come into balance with nature – worthy as that effort is – looks increasingly naïve. If people in the developed world slash their per capita greenhouse emissions by half, their effort could be counterbalanced by people in developing countries boosting theirs by just 11 percent.”
Photo Credit: “Trojan Nuclear Power Plant,” courtesy of flickr user tobo. -
Forest Conservation Method a Fit for Canada’s Oil Sands?
›In Wednesday’s speech on U.S. energy security, President Obama stated clearly that the United States would continue to rely on oil imports from Canada and other stable nations. But serious environmental concerns continue to dog the Canadian oil sands industry. Could an agreement reached by Canada’s Forest Products Association provide a model for a way forward?
In May 2010, the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement (CBFA) was signed by 21 members of the Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC) and nine major environmental groups, including Greenpeace, the Nature Conservancy, and the Pew Charitable Trusts, without government involvement. The three-year agreement represents the largest forest conservation plan in history and protects more than 72 million hectares of Canada’s Boreal Forest. It also ended a long “do not buy” campaign of FPAC products, previously spearheaded by environmental organizations.
The CBFA essentially commits FPAC to the highest environmental standards of forest management and conservation, as well as the suspension of logging in environmentally sensitive areas, in part to protect endangered caribou populations. In return, environmental organizations agreed to support FPAC members.
The oil sands industry faces a similar challenge. In both cases, industry and environmental NGOs have clashed in a long and bitter battle over industry practices and their impact on the environment. The difference is that FPAC realized that directly engaging environmental groups in reasoned discussion might be a more intelligent approach to resolving environmental challenges than shouting back and forth at one another. FPAC also believes that buyers will be attracted to their newfound reputation for sustainable practices and higher ethical standards.
Model Agreements
Oil sands producers have much to gain by engaging the environmental community in new and innovative ways Should the CBFA model be followed, the oil sands industry may be able to negotiate an agreement with environmental organizations and voluntarily agree to higher environmental standards in return for recognition and support of their efforts from key environmental organizations.This wouldn’t be the first initiative where creative engagement between environmental organizations and industry served to mutually benefit both sides. For instance, in 1999, WWF and Unilever created the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), a program that rewards fisheries employing environmentally sustainable practices by recognizing their efforts through MSC certification and eco-labeling. Member fisheries maintain that MSC labeling has helped them retain existing markets, expand into others, and in some cases obtain a price premium for their product.
Such an initiative would go a long way to allow oil sands producers to shed their damaging reputation for producing “dirty oil.” Even if an agreement could not be reached, the oil sands industry would be viewed at the very least as willing to listen to the concerns of environmental organizations and take such issues seriously.
Not Perfect, But It’s a Start
The CBFA model may not be a perfect fit for the oil sands but it demonstrates that environmental groups and industry can find common ground on extremely contentious issues.
Finding this common ground must begin with accepting that the oil sands will never be “green.” According to a study by the Royal Society of Canada, in 2008, oil sands mining and development operations covered an area roughly the size of the state of Illinois and was responsible for emitting nearly 37 million tons of CO2. The study also found that there are legitimate concerns regarding the impact of oil sands development on the quality and quantity of regional freshwater supplies.
Nevertheless, the oil sands also represent a critical source of stable energy supplies for Canada and the United States, and calls by some environmental NGOs to halt oil sands production are unrealistic. More than 20 percent of U.S. oil is sourced from Canada, making it the United States’ leading supplier, and roughly half of that comes from the oil sands.
A CBFA-style agreement could help oil sands producers secure the U.S. market, which currently takes 99 percent of Canada’s oil exports, by quelling campaigns in the United States to stop imports from the oil sands. And under an agreement similar to the CBFA, the environmental community could have a larger say in how it is developed and extracted
As it stands, both industry and the environmental community remain engaged in a heated war of words, with neither side really listening to the other. Until they are willing to sit down and engage each other in new ways, both groups are likely to continue to talk over one another and make little progress on striking an environmental and economic balance that could ultimately benefit both sides.
Ken Crist is a program associate with the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Sources: Sources: The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, National Resources Defense Council, The New York Times, Royal Society of Canada, Vancouver Sun.
Photo Credit: “Athabasca oil sands digger,” courtesy of flickr user . Shell, and “Boreal forest 2009,” courtesy of flickr user Gord McKenna. -
Hu Angang and Liang Jiaochen, ChinaDialogue
China’s Green Five-Year Plan: Making “Ecological Security” a National Strategy
›March 16, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Hu Angang and Liang Jiaochen, appeared on ChinaDialogue.
Five-year plans (FYPs), which set down and clarify national strategy, are one of China’s most important policy tools. Just as they have helped to drive China’s economic success over recent decades, so they will play a pivotal role in putting the country on a green development path. The 12th Five-Year Plan, now under consideration by the National People’s Congress, marks the beginning of that process in earnest (Editor’s note: Since this was originally published, the National People’s Congress voted in favor of the plan).
FYPs embody the concept of progressing by degrees, or developing step by step. This approach has been one of the driving forces behind China’s economic progress in recent decades and will now provide the platform for its green development. It is the methodology underpinning China’s socialist modernization: to reach a new step in development every five years. Unstinting efforts over a number of FYPs have driven China’s transformation.
Climate change presents a long-term and all-encompassing challenge for China. It demands a long-term development strategy and broad goals, as well as near-term action plans and concrete policies. Combining these is precisely the idea behind FYPs.
At the global climate change summit in Copenhagen in 2009, China demonstrated it has the long-term political will to respond to climate change; to work with the world to limit global temperatures to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures (the goal set out in the Copenhagen Accord). In November that year, the Chinese government formally put forward its medium-term targets on climate change: a reduction in energy intensity of 40 percent to 45 percent on 2005 levels by 2020, and generation of 15 percent of energy from non-fossil fuel sources by the same date.
Continue reading on ChinaDialogue.
Hu Angang is a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University and the director of the Centre for China Study. He has worked as the chief editor for China Studies Report, a circulated reference for senior officials. Liang Jiaochen is a PhD student at Tsinghua University’s School of Public Policy and Management.
Sources: Business Green, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, World Resources Institute.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “China: CREME,” courtesy of flickr user IFC Infrastructure (Alejandro Perez/IFC). -
Engineering Solutions to the Infrastructure and Scarcity Challenges of Population Seven Billion (and Beyond)
›March 9, 2011 // By Hannah MarquseeA recent Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME) report, Population: One Planet, Too Many People?, argues that “sustainable engineering solutions largely exist for many of the anticipated challenges” of a world population scheduled to top seven billion this year and projected to reach upwards of nine billion by 2050. “What is needed,” write the authors, “is political and social will, innovative financing mechanisms, and the transfer of best practice through localization to achieve a successful outcome.”City lights on the French-Italian border, from the International Space Station.
Since nearly all of the population growth in the next 40 years will occur in the developing world, the report recommends nations adopt five “Engineering Development Goals” (listed below), alongside the Millennium Development Goals, to meet the needs of the world’s growing poor. The report also recommends that developed countries provide technical engineering expertise to developing countries in the model of the UK Department for International Development’s Resource Centers. This assistance will help them implement these goals and “leapfrog” the “resource-hungry, dirty phase of industrialization.”
Population Growth a Threat?
While the report issues a clear call to action for engineers and governments, it does not address the issue of population growth per se, which has caused some to argue that population growth might not be the problem after all. The Independent, for example, initially headlined their article about the report, “Population Growth Not a Threat, Say Engineers,” but changed it after publication to “Population Growth a Threat, Say Engineers.”
The IME authors clearly state that “population increase is likely to be the defining challenge of the 21st century,” and the report provides practical steps governments can take given current population trends. But its focus on “engineering solutions” highlights the ongoing debate between those who argue that technological fixes alone can solve the world’s social and environmental problems, and those who advocate for contraception as a low-cost path to a sustainable world.
“I would love there to be technological solutions to all our problems,” said Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston at a recent ECSP event on the UK Royal Society’s forthcoming People and the Planet study, but “we’ve got to make sure that population is recognized, while not the sole problem, as a multiplier of many others. We’ve got to make sure that population really does peak out when we hope it will.”
The projections on which the report is based will be difficult to hit without dramatic reductions in fertility, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa – a goal that is nigh impossible without increased investment in access to voluntary family planning. The UN high variant projection, which calculates a much less dramatic decrease in current fertility levels, has world population reaching 11 billion by 2050.
“There is no need to delay action while waiting for the next greatest technical discovery,” write the IME authors. “If action is not taken before a crisis point is reached there will be significant human hardship. Failure to act will place billions of people around the world at risk of hunger, thirst, and conflict as capacity tries to catch up with demand.”
Engineering Development Goals
1. “Energy: Use existing sustainable energy technologies and reduce energy waste.”
Currently, “over 1.5 billion people in the world do not have access to energy,” says the IME report. In addition, global demand for energy is expected to rise by 46 percent by 2030, and the world will need to invest $46 trillion over the next 40 years to shift towards renewable energy sources. The report points out that “there are no insurmountable technical issues in sourcing enough energy for an increasingly affluent larger global population.” Instead, “the difficulties lie in the areas of regulation, financing, politics, social ethics, and international relations.”
2. “Water: Replenish groundwater sources, improve storage of excess water and increase energy efficiencies of desalination.”
Global water consumption, write the IME authors, is predicted to rise 30 percent by 2030 due to population growth and increased energy and agricultural consumption. These numbers are troubling, considering that a recent study in Nature found that more than 1.7 billion people, almost entirely from the developing world, already face chronically high water scarcity.
However, this problem is not simply one of a shortage of water, rather “a case of supply not matching demand at a certain time and place where people are living,” says the IME report. Engineering solutions must involve the capturing and storage of rain water, more cost-effective desalination techniques, and aquifer storage and recovery techniques, says the report. But more importantly, “decision-makers need to become more aware of the issues of water scarcity and work more closely with the engineering profession in finding localized solutions.”
3. “Food: Reduce food waste and resolve the politics of hunger.”
The IME report cites the World Bank’s prediction that demand for agricultural production will double by 2050, due to a combination of population growth, more people turning to meat-heavy diets, and agricultural shortages from extreme weather events. Efficiencies can go a long way towards filling this supply-demand gap, says the IME report. In developed countries an average of 25 percent of edible food is thrown away in the home after purchase, while in developing countries, as much as half of crops are lost before ever reaching market due to lack of adequate transportation and storage infrastructure.
For example, the authors point out that in India, “between 35 percent and 40 percent of fruit and vegetable production is lost each year between the farm and the consumer” – an amount greater than the entire annual consumption of the UK. Americans are also big food wasters. A USDA study found that in one year, 27 percent of all edible food was thrown away in the United States after purchase. Developed countries can significantly increase efficiency “through behavioral change that recognizes the value of food,” says the report.
4. “Urbanization: Meet the challenge of slums and defending against sea-level rises.”
Urbanization “presents one of the greatest societal challenges of the coming decades,” write the IME authors, but cities also represent a “significant opportunity…to be very efficient places to live in terms of a person’s environmental impact.”
According to the World Bank, by 2050, three quarters of the world will live in cities, and nearly all of this growth will occur in the developing world. Already, one third of the world’s urban population live in “appalling slum conditions,” says the IME report. Challenges for the urban poor are especially severe in coastal areas – home to three quarters of the world’s large cities – where they are vulnerable to flooding and extreme weather events, which according to new studies, have increased as a result of climate change.
The report calls for nations to use an “integrated, holistic approach” that brings in engineering expertise early in the planning process to create infrastructure that is individualized to a city’s unique cultural, geographical, and economic needs.
5. “Finance: Empower communities and enable implementation.”
Implementation of the above four goals will require “innovative soft loans and micro-financing, ‘zero-cost’ transition packages, and new models of personal and community ownership, such as trusts,” write the IME authors. Furthermore, communities must play a central role in decision-making in order to find appropriate and local solutions.
In all five of these goals, “barriers to deploying solutions are not technological,” says the report. Instead, they are political and social. Better international cooperation, dialogue, and sharing of expertise between and amongst engineers, decision-makers, and the public, is crucial to implementation.
Sources: Department for International Development, Guardian, The Independent, Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Nature, The New York Times, UN Habitat, United Nations, USDA, World Bank.
Image Credit: “City Lights, France-Italy Border (NASA, International Space Station Science, 04/28/10),” courtesy of flickr user NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. -
What’s Behind Iraq’s Day of Rage? It’s Pretty Basic
›March 4, 2011 // By Schuyler NullIraq’s “Day of Rage” – a phenomenon that has swept the Middle East since Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution” – reportedly claimed the lives of nearly 20 people last week. But though the protests may have been inspired by the current broader movement in the region, they are also a symptom of long-standing grievances ordinary Iraqis have had with their government since the American invasion, including lack of public services like access to clean water and especially, reliable electricity.
While these protests alone are unlikely to lead to revolution, they reveal basic livelihood challenges that neither the United States nor the Maliki government have effectively addressed.
The protests in Baghdad and more than 10 other cities were the largest since last summer, when demonstrations over access to electricity led to the death of two protestors in Basra. The New Security Beat spoke to Iraq’s first Minister of the Environment, Mishkat Al Moumin, after those protests to ask her about the lack of services and Iraq’s other non-security challenges, including water security, women’s empowerment, and demographics. She said that decentralizing decision-making power might help alleviate pressure on the government and provide more effective local services:Enacting policies at the local level establishes a sense of ownership among local communities and provides them with an incentive to protect their environmental resources. Moreover, it provides a better opportunity to involve the main stakeholders in policymaking.
Frederick Burkle, senior public policy scholar at the Wilson Center and a senior fellow of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative at the Harvard School of Public Health, recently cited the military’s failure to restore services, specifically public health services in Iraq, as something the State Department and USAID should seize on to justify the end of “militarized aid.” He pointed out that a 2004 joint report by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and Red Cross found more death and illness was due to the country’s decimated public health infrastructure and social protections than to the violence of war:These indirect deaths from war are preventable but require attention from the occupying powers to the invaded country’s declining public health, social, and physical protections. Iraqis were well aware of this deficiency, and the United States’ lack of attention to the matter led to the loss of lasting trust.
For more on Iraq, be sure to also check out The New Security Beat’s interview with Steve Lonergan, former head of Canada-Iraq Marshlands Initiative, on the state of the southern marshes and their potential for peacemaking.
Sources: Foreign Affairs, The New York Times.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “Tangle of electrical wires in Baghdad,” courtesy of flickr user News Hour (PBS News Hour – Larisa Epatko). -
Choke Point China: Escalating Confrontation Between Water Scarcity and Energy Demand Has Global Implications
›The original version of this article, by J. Carl Ganter, appeared on The Huffington Post. Visit Circle of Blue for the latest articles in the Choke Point: China series.
Water scarcity, rapid economic growth, and soaring energy demand are forming a tightening noose that could choke off China’s modernization.
Writes my colleague Keith Schneider in the first installment of the new report, Choke Point: China, from Circle of Blue:Underlying China’s new standing in the world, like a tectonic fault line, is an increasingly fierce competition between energy and water that threatens to upend China’s progress. Simply put, say Chinese authorities and government reports, China’s demand for energy, particularly for coal, is outpacing its freshwater supply.
The 12-part Choke Point: China series presents powerful evidence of the fierce contest between growth, water, and fuel that is virtually certain to grow more dire over the next decade. The project is produced in partnership with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ China Environment Forum.
Tight supplies of fresh water are nothing new in a nation where 80 percent of the rainfall and snowmelt occurs in the south, while just 20 percent of the moisture occurs in the mostly desert regions of the north and west. What’s new is that China’s surging economic growth is prompting the expanding industrial sector, which consumes 70 percent of the nation’s energy, to call on the government to tap new energy supplies, particularly the enormous reserves of coal in the dry north.
The problem, scholars and government officials told us, is that there is not enough water to mine, process, and consume those reserves and still develop the modern cities and manufacturing centers that China envisions for the region. “Water shortage is the most important challenge to China right now, the biggest problem for future growth,” said Wang Yahua, deputy director of the Center for China Study at Tsinghua University in Beijing. “It’s a puzzle that the country has to solve.”
The consequences of diminishing water reserves and rising energy demand have been a special focus of our attention for more than a year. In 2010, in our “Choke Point: U.S.” series, Circle of Blue found that rising energy demand and diminishing freshwater reserves are two trends moving in opposing directions across America. Moreover, the speed and force of the confrontation is occurring in the places where growth is highest and water resources are under the most stress – California, the Southwest, the Rocky Mountain West, and the Southeast.
Stripped to its essence, China’s globally significant choke point is caused by three converging trends:- Production and consumption of coal – the largest industrial consumer of water – has tripled since 2000. Government analysts project that China’s energy companies will need to increase coal production by 30 percent by 2020.
- Fresh water needed for mining, processing, and consuming coal accounts for the largest share of China’s industrial water use, a fifth of all the water consumed nationally. Though national conservation policies have helped to limit increases, water consumption nevertheless has climbed to record highs.
- China’s total water resource, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, has dropped 13 percent since the start of the century. In other words China’s water supply is 350 billion cubic meters (93 trillion gallons) less than it was at the start of the century. That’s as much water lost to China each year as flows through the mouth of the Mississippi River in nine months. Chinese climatologists and hydrologists attribute much of the drop to climate change, which is disrupting patterns of rain and snowfall.
We found a powerful narrative in China in two parts, and never before told: First is how effectively the national and provincial governments enacted and enforced a range of water conservation and efficiency measures that enabled China to progress as far as it has.
Second is that despite the extensive efforts to conserve water, and to develop water-sipping alternatives like wind and solar energy, China still faces an enormous projected shortfall of water this decade to its energy-rich northern and western provinces. How government and industry leaders respond to this critical and unyielding choke point forms the central story line of the next era of China’s unfolding development.
J. Carl Ganter is director and co-founder of Circle of Blue, a leading source of news, science, and data about water issues globally. Choke Point: China is produced in partnership with the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum.
Image Credit: Two tunnels beneath the Yellow River to be completed by mid-decade that will transport more than 35 million cubic meters (9 billion gallons) of water a day from southern China to thirsty cities in the north. Courtesy of Aaron Jaffe and Circle of Blue. -
A Dialogue on Managing the Planet
›“Collectively, the impact of humanity on the way the planet works is enormous and headed in disturbing directions,” said George Mason University professor Thomas Lovejoy in January at the first in a monthly series, “Managing the Planet,” led jointly by George Mason University and the Woodrow Wilson Center. The series will focus on how to take “environmental management to the scale of the entire planet,” as climate change, increasing energy consumption, and population growth place increasing stress on natural resources. We need to “chart a better course for the human future,” said Lovejoy.
Joining Lovejoy at the kickoff meeting were Dennis Dimick, executive environment editor at National Geographic, and Professor Molly Jahn of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. [Video Below]
Signs From Earth
“The entire human enterprise is based on the assumption of a stable climate,” said Lovejoy. The “most dramatic part of the story” in recent decades has been the melting of ice in the Arctic and in the mountain ranges of tropical zones. At current rates, tropical glaciers will completely disappear within the next 15 years. Though scientists predicted it would last until at least 2015, Bolivia’s Chacaltaya glacier – once renowned as the world’s highest elevation ski area – was reduced to a “few lumps of ice” in 2009, according to the BBC.
Glacial melt has raised water temperatures, altered species migrations, and threatened water supplies, coastal ecosystems, and the communities that depend on them, said Lovejoy. Higher ocean temperatures also cause the “fundamental partnership” between coral reefs and algae to break down, and “the Technicolor world essentially goes black and white,” he said.
Ocean acidification, fresh water shortages, melting glaciers, pollution, forest fires, and a “vast whipsaw” of temperature and weather extremes are just some of the effects human consumption has had on the planet, said Dimick. “It’s a sign from the Earth. It is telling us, ‘not all is well.’”
Finding Balance
As the world’s population nears seven billion this year, “we have one planet, yet we live like we live on four,” said Dimick. National Geographic’s new series “Population 7 Billion” seeks to answer the questions, he said, of “how do we find balance? How do we find ways to lower the intensity of our demands on an Earth that is telling us it is strained?”
Finding solutions to these challenges will require us to “look forward and confront the future,” said Dimick. “We need to rethink our whole global energy system,” he said, and “rethink our basic premise about what we need, as opposed to what we want.”
The global emissions limit of 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon – the level needed to achieve the two-degree warming limit agreed upon at Cancun and Copenhagen – “is probably too high,” said Lovejoy. Most scientists agree that 350 ppm is a safer level; however, the world is already at “390 and climbing,” he noted, and global temperatures are projected to rise two degrees Celsius by 2035. If we want global warming to stop at two degrees, carbon emissions will need to stop growing by 2016, he said.
Figuring Out “Plan B”
“We have a problem that is presenting itself in a whole host of ways, with urgency that cannot be denied or dismissed,” said Jahn. “The way we do agriculture is a very significant contributor” to that problem, she said. Today, in the United States, “we waste 40 percent of the food we grow,” she said.
“Plan A…was about maximizing productivity at all costs,” said Jahn. “It looks like we may need another plan.” But figuring out “Plan B” will require steps by both policy and science communities. “We still have enormous gaps in our understanding towards even the basic science platform upon which these very important decisions about ways forward lie,” she said.
Managing the planet must begin with managing data so that we can “transition between data, information, and knowledge, and march this information out to…those making decisions that matter,” said Jahn. The information management structure that developed in the medical sciences and led to the creation of the National Library of Medicine is a useful model for managing the planet, she argued. “Personalized medicine” for the planet would allow people to use data to make better decisions about who should be doing what and where.
Using and expanding the knowledge base is a crucial step towards bringing together the science and policy communities on an international scale in search of solutions to managing the planet. “If we work together, we can change the world,” said Dimick.
Sources: 350 Science, BBC, Earth System Research Laboratory, United Nations Environment Program, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Photo Credit: “Sun Over Earth (NASA, International Space Station, 07/21/03),” courtesy of flickr user NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. -
First Steps on Human Security and Emerging Risks
›The 2010 Quadrennial Development and Diplomacy Review (QDDR), the first of its kind, was recently released by the State Department and USAID in an attempt to redefine the scope and mission of U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century. Breaking away from the Cold War structures of hard international security and an exclusive focus on state-level diplomacy, the QDDR recognizes that U.S. interests are best served by a more comprehensive approach to international relations. The men and women who already work with the U.S. government possess valuable expertise that should be leveraged to tackle emerging threats and opportunities.
