Tapping The Sun

"MORE ENERGY—in the form of sunlight—strikes Earth in one hour than all of the energy consumed by humans in an entire year."

It's a staggering statistic and just one of the facts that Nathan S. Lewis lists when he makes the case for the importance of solar energy research. Ready with data and calculations to bolster his argument, Lewis, a chemistry professor at California Institute of Technology, runs down the list of alternatives to fossil fuels—nuclear, wind, hydroelectric, biomass, and geothermal—and argues that the sun is the only viable and renewable source capable of satisfying humanity's great thirst for energy. Currently, on a global scale, energy usage is on the order of 13 terawatts (13 trillion W or 13 trillion joules per second), of which roughly 85% is generated by burning fossil fuels.

Showering Earth with an energy flow of some 120,000 TW, the sun would appear to be a limitless non-carbon-emitting energy fountain capable of meeting worldwide energy demands. "There's no doubt that we have ample energy resource in the sun," Lewis stresses. The challenge, he says, is figuring out how to tap into it inexpensively.

That challenge has been driving researchers to develop new materials and strategies for designing photovoltaic systems that convert sunlight into electricity. In addition to exploring new methods for reducing the cost of solar cells based on silicon, the traditional photovoltaic material, scientists have been experimenting with other semiconductors, inorganic nanocrystals, organic polymers, and a host of other light-sensitive materials.
more from Chemical and Engineering News

Study predicts more severe U.S. storms

WASHINGTON -- As the world warms, the United States will face more severe thunderstorms with deadly lightning, damaging hail and the potential for tornadoes, a trailblazing study by NASA scientists suggests.

While other research has warned of broad weather changes on a large scale, like more extreme hurricanes and droughts, the new study predicts even smaller events like thunderstorms will be more dangerous because of global warming.

The basic ingredients for whopper U.S. inland storms are likely to be more plentiful in a warmer, moister world, said lead author Tony Del Genio, a NASA research scientist.

And when that happens, watch out.

"The strongest thunderstorms, the strongest severe storms and tornadoes are likely to happen more often and be stronger," Del Genio said in an interview Thursday from his office at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. The paper he co-authored was published online this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Other scientists caution that this area of climate research is too difficult and new for this study to be definitive. But some upcoming studies also point in the same direction.
more from the Seattle PI

'Slow foods' help make fast friends

Samuel J. Green Charter School is home to 360 lower- and middle-school students, nearly all of them poor. Principal Tony Recasner still seems a little amazed that his modest campus would be the latest outpost of the trendy "slow foods" movement extolled by celebrity restaurateur Alice Waters.

Green is one of 39 charter schools operating in post-Katrina New Orleans. Collectively, the campuses represent the most radical change on the educational landscape here since desegregation. The schools hire their own teachers and set their own rules -- which is how Waters was able to come to town.

Waters, owner of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley earned fame with her emphasis on the use of fresh, local, seasonal, organic ingredients. A decade ago, her nonprofit Chez Panisse Foundation opened an "Edible Schoolyard" at a Berkeley public middle school.

The students grow food in the on-campus garden (tended by teacher Eric Kugler, above) and cook it in an on-campus kitchen. Teachers use the experience for lessons in nutrition, biology, math and even the social sciences, as they scrutinize where food comes from and who grows it.

After Katrina, Waters was looking for a way to help New Orleans, and Recasner jumped at the chance to bring the second "Edible Schoolyard" to his school. The New Orleans campus planted a garden last year, with support from the Chez Panisse Foundation, among others. Today, the school's sideyard is full of tomatoes, strawberries and herbs. An outdoor classroom is under construction, and an old girls' locker room will soon be converted into an indoor kitchen.

Nearly all of Recasner's students are African American, and the principal believes that the Edible Schoolyard idea, while modest, is much needed in the black community, where poor eating habits often result in obesity, diabetes, hypertension and tooth decay. He hopes students will pass along new, good habits to their parents. He also hopes other schools will start their own gardens.

"All of the things we talk about when we talk about being worried about poor African American kids, we realized we could express positively and elegantly through this garden," he said.

Just as importantly for Recasner, the project shows how a New Orleans public school -- a charter school, that is -- can react nimbly and creatively when approached with a novel idea. Before Katrina, the city's public school system was a disaster: Only 26% of its eighth-graders were proficient in reading. It was also, in the words of an Urban Institute study, "famously mismanaged and corrupt," having turned to an outside rescue firm to take over its business functions just before the storm.

The charter movement may be a source of controversy nationwide, but Recasner likes the autonomy his campus enjoys. The school's ideas, much like its garden vegetables, are fresh and local.

"The odds of us being able to do what we're doing now under the old system, it would have been about 1 in 10 million," he said.

From the LA Times 8/29/07

Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyards 'Manifesto'

the Center for Ecoliteracy supports the Edible Schoolyard and other projects

Cheap, clean and green housing

Elizabeth Teel Galante says there is a reason New Orleans never embraced the "green building" movement before Hurricane Katrina: The economy was so slow that very little was being built.

Today, New Orleans needs to rebuild thousands of homes, and Galante's nonprofit, the Santa Monica-based Global Green USA, has stepped in to push aggressively for environment-friendly building practices.

The group's most visible project is in the Holy Cross section of the Lower 9th Ward. There, among shotgun homes in varying states of disrepair, the organization is building an ultra-modern, low-income mini-neighborhood of five houses, 18 apartments and a community center.

All will be tricked out with the latest environmental gadgets: solar roofs, recycled carpeting, cisterns to catch rainwater, and geothermal heat pumps, which use ground heat to fuel air-conditioning systems.

For a neighborhood that was long on tradition and short on innovation, the project feels revolutionary. Though only a few 9th Ward residents will benefit from the project, it is part of a larger plan to show how modest homes here can be built to high environmental standards.

"We want to demonstrate to the residents of New Orleans and the South that these kinds of building can be built," Galante said. "We don't have many examples here, because it just wasn't done before. We want to demystify it."

Global Green has become one of the best-known of the many environmental groups working in the city, mainly because of its partnership with actor Brad Pitt, who helped judge the design contest for the green building project.

The group has also received $2 million from the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund to improve air quality and soundproofing in public schools.

Galante, a former deputy director of Tulane University's Environmental Law Clinic, has been lobbying city and state officials to adopt green policies, with some success. The group recently helped the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency craft green building guidelines for developers planning to erect federally subsidized low-income housing.

from the Los Angeles Times 8/29/07

Global Green's website

Old city revels in a new spirit of innovation

It's difficult to nail down the last time this antique city was considered cutting edge.

Was it the 1850s, when a coffeehouse owner created the Sazerac cocktail? Or perhaps the 1940s, when a teenager named J.M. Lapeyre invented the automatic shrimp peeler?

Whatever the answer, New Orleans was not defined by its spirit of innovation in the decades preceding Hurricane Katrina. But the flood that changed everything two years ago has changed that too: Today, by accident and by necessity, this city is awash in ideas: the new and the ambitious, the au courant and avant-garde, the idealistic and the slightly nutty.

The New Orleans public education system, long considered one of most ineffective in the nation, has been revitalized with a grand experiment in charter schools; more than half of the city's public campuses are charters, the highest percentage of any major metropolis.

The city housing authority hopes to transform the shuttered St. Bernard Projects, once one of its most notoriously violent properties, into something akin to a public-housing country club with two 18-hole championship golf courses and a 45,000-square-foot YMCA.

Environmental groups have swept into New Orleans, preaching a gospel of green building, solar power and other ideas familiar in Santa Cruz or Santa Monica but rather exotic here.

Local reformers have pushed for important changes to archaic government entities like the public defender's office (each defendant is now assigned to one lawyer, not just to the office in general) and the tax assessor's office (voters in November decided that the city needs one assessor, not seven).

Then there are the inventions. Elizabeth English, a Harvard-educated engineer and architect, is perfecting a method to retrofit shotgun houses with Styrofoam foundations. There will be fewer flooding problems, she figures, if the houses of New Orleans can float. "The old ways of doing things clearly haven't worked," said English, a professor at Louisiana State University.

English's floating house concept lacks funding and the blessing of government. But hers is not the only long shot. No one guarantees that amateur inventor John Knost will ever see the groundbreaking for the flood wall he designed in his French Quarter apartment. Nor are city officials knocking down the doors of the San Francisco architectural firm that has proposed lining New Orleans' shores with huge "sponge combs" -- caterpillar-like things filled with baby-diaper lining that would expand when wet to block surging floodwaters.

For some locals, however, it's enough that the city is reveling in a new spirit of innovation.

more from the LA Times

Flood-Soaked Queens Blames Development, Lagging Sewers and Climate Change

For most of New York City, the flash flooding on the morning of Aug. 8 was brief, if breathtaking. But try telling that to Kathleen Conway of Woodside, Queens, whose son-in-law is busy ripping out the mold-grimed walls of her live-in basement before they crumble.

Or Annette Markim of Fresh Meadows, Queens, who has lost 10 pounds from stress trying to catalog ruined family photographs, religious books and her treasured Manolo Blahniks. She describes the smell of her basement as “rotten sewer, rotten, rotten, rotten sewer.”

“I don’t know where to begin,” said Ms. Markim, who estimates her losses at $18,000. “And I don’t know when it’s going to end.”

The extent of this summer’s flooding damage to Queens has emerged gradually, overlooked in the drama of Brooklyn’s tornado. But politicians and homeowners in Queens warn that floods are overtaxing the sewer system. Even members of an assessment team from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that visited Woodside were “astounded by what they saw,” said Barbara Lynch, an agency spokeswoman.

Emily Lloyd, commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, said that she expected intense storms to occur more frequently over the coming years, and that her agency was investing in preparations.

More from the NY Times

NY Times Katrina Anniversary Special Coverage

The Times has a series of short video stories linked to map of the city. The stories give a pretty good feel about the present state of recovery and the nature of the last two years in the city.

Go to the page

Trying to Connect the Dinner Plate to Climate Change

EVER since “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore has been the darling of environmentalists, but that movie hardly endeared him to the animal rights folks. According to them, the most inconvenient truth of all is that raising animals for meat contributes more to global warming than all the sport utility vehicles combined.

The biggest animal rights groups do not always overlap in their missions, but now they have coalesced around a message that eating meat is worse for the environment than driving. They and smaller groups have started advertising campaigns that try to equate vegetarianism with curbing greenhouse gases.

Some backlash against this position is inevitable, the groups acknowledge, but they do have scientific ammunition. In late November, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization issued a report stating that the livestock business generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined.

When that report came out, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and other groups expected their environmental counterparts to immediately hop on the “Go Veggie!” bandwagon, but that did not happen. “Environmentalists are still pointing their fingers at Hummers and S.U.V.’s when they should be pointing at the dinner plate,” said Matt A. Prescott, manager of vegan campaigns for PETA.
more from the NY Times

Drought catastrophe stalks Australia's food bowl

MOULAMEIN, Australia, Aug 29 (Reuters) - A thin winter green carpets Australia's southeast hills and plains, camouflaging the onset of a drought catastrophe in the nation's food bowl.

Sheep and cattle farmer Ian Shippen stands in a dying ankle-high oat crop under a mobile irrigation boom stretching nearly half-a-kilometre, but now useless without water.

"I honestly think we're stuffed," he says grimly.

"It's on a knife edge and if it doesn't rain in the next couple of weeks it's going to be very ugly. People will be walking off the land, going broke."

Shippen's property "Chah Singh" sits in the heart of Australia's Murray-Darling river basin, a vast plain bigger than France and Germany, home to 2 million people and in good times the source of almost half the nation's fruit and cereal crop.

But years of drought, which some blame on global warming, have savagely depleted the huge dams built 60 years ago to hold the snow melt from the Australian alps and push it hundreds of kilometres inland to the parched west for farm irrigation.

The Murray-Darling normally provides 90 percent of Australia's irrigated crops and A$22 billion ($18.1 billion) worth of agricultural exports to Asia and the Middle East.

But with some crops now just 10 days from failure, farmers are to receive no water at all for irrigation through the summer, while others will get a fraction of their regular entitlement to keep alive vital plantings like citrus trees and grapevines.
more from Reuters

Houston Holds Hope, Despair for Katrina Evacuees

Two years after Hurricane Katrina emptied New Orleans, more than 90,000 evacuees live in Houston, permanently it seems. Their stories are a mix of sadness, loneliness and triumphant hope.

One of those Houston transplants is Terry Gabriel. At 40 years old and 6 feet 1 inch tall, Gabriel still seems very much the star basketball player she once was. Strong, attractive and charismatic, Gabriel carries with her an unshakable Christian faith.

Hurricane Katrina tested that faith. Gabriel, her sister and four children fled the storm in a rental car and began living on the floor of the Houston convention center.

Like her fellow evacuees, Gabriel was shell-shocked and disoriented. But she understood earlier than most that her life in Louisiana was over: After a week, she began looking for a job.



"It was so stressful; you were thinking, 'Work just yet?' But what I was seeking first and foremost was a church home … I needed stability and I didn't have it mentally," Gabriel says.

In the last two years, Terry Gabriel has come a long way.

more from NPR

Amid Lingering Chaos, Hope for New Orleans' Future

For many of us, the picture we still hold in our minds of New Orleans, two years after Katrina, is one of a flooded city — of desperate people on rooftops or at the Superdome, of mounds of garbage and debris. It's understandable, given the power of the images that were burned into our brains in the weeks after the most destructive storm in U.S. history laid waste to one of America's most distinctive cities.

In the months after Katrina, I covered the story in New Orleans. It's hard to recall exactly when, for me, despair about the city's future began to turn into hope. As urban planners converged on the city, as the Bring New Orleans Back commission began its work, as old residents and newcomers arrived, many of us began to see the devastation as an opportunity to create something better than what we had lost.

Because the fact is, long before Katrina, New Orleans — a unique gem, with its own architecture, food and musical styles — was in many ways a broken city.


Poverty was endemic, the schools were among the worst in the nation, public housing was a mess, streets and other infrastructure badly needed fixing, and political corruption was a fact of life that led many to believe things couldn't change for the better.

But all people—even reporters—need hope. It says something about the human spirit to recall how eagerly we read, and reported, each news story as a sign that out of the rubble, a better city would emerge.

more from NPR

Architectural soul of the city at stake

"After the storm, the first thing people asked was, 'How's your house?'¤" recalled Tulane University architecture professor John P. Klingman of those nail-biting days almost two years ago, when storm and flood seemed to have destroyed or scarred every structure in New Orleans.

"My house was OK," he said. "But I realized 'How's your house?' was the wrong question. The question was about my city."

Two years later, the question, "How's your city?" is still tough to answer. Architecturally speaking, New Orleans is in flux. The past is not quite over, the present is contentious and the future has not quite begun. As the Neville Brothers might have sung it -- if the Neville Brothers still sang in these parts -- New Orleans architecture is sitting here in limbo, waiting for the tide to turn.



True, most of the city's best-loved landmarks, both historical, such as the St. Louis Cathedral, and contemporary, such as the Louisiana Superdome and the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas, stand ready to have their pictures snapped by tourists, as they did before Hurricane Katrina.

The colorful Creole townhouses of the French Quarter are still pressed charmingly cheek to cheek. Most Garden District mansions purse their lips as proudly as they did before the storm. Gilded-era St. Charles Avenue mansions patiently await the return of streetcar-riding admirers.

Preservation Resource Center Director Patricia Gay reports that of the 1,200 buildings in the historic Lower Garden District, only 27 were lost because of the storm. Unlike San Francisco after the earthquake or Chicago after the fire, New Orleans retains much of her long-relied-upon architectural appeal two years after Katrina.

more from the Times Picayune

Warming-fueled hurricanes need new tactics-experts

WASHINGTON, Aug 27 (Reuters) - Global warming is expected to cause more severe hurricanes, and that means U.S. communities will need new tactics to minimize storm damage, emergency preparedness experts said on Monday.

These tactics range from restoring wetlands -- which may actually slow down approaching storms -- to making homes and other structures better able to withstand hurricanes to organizing finances so more can be spent on prevention, the panel of experts said.

Peter Webster, who teaches environmental engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, noted the consequences of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the U.S. Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005.

"We have a choice ... of being able to take hits like Katrina and pay the cost of $150 to $200 billion and many, many lives, or we have the choice of spending perhaps one-tenth or one-twentieth of that per year in hardening our infrastructure," Webster said.

Many scientists, including most of those working with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have reported a link between global warming and the severity of hurricanes.

World surface temperatures have risen about 1 degree F (.55C) over the last 100 years, and are forecast to rise further this century. Because hurricanes feed on warm ocean water, some climate scientists foresee more severe hurricanes.
more from Reuters

Study links C02 to demise of grazing lands

Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may be contributing to the conversion of the world's grasslands -- crucial for livestock grazing -- into a landscape of useless woody shrubs, according to a study released today.

By artificially doubling carbon dioxide levels over enclosed sections of the Colorado prairie, researchers created a dramatic rise in Artemisia frigida, commonly known as fringed sage.

The study paints a harsh picture of what grazing lands could look like in 2100, when some project carbon dioxide levels will be double today's.

"To the extent that CO2 is driving this conversion, this suggests the problem is going to become more intractable in the future," said Jack Morgan, a plant physiologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and lead author of the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists believe the degradation of range lands, which cover about 40% of Earth's land surface, is mostly because of overgrazing and the modern practice of putting out fires rather than letting them burn, which destroys woody vegetation. But researchers have long suspected that rising carbon dioxide levels also play a role.

more from the LA Times

Environmentalists: Katrina contaminated playgrounds, schools with arsenic

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A new report says schools and playgrounds flooded by Hurricane Katrina were contaminated by high levels of arsenic when flood waters poured into this below-sea level city.

On Monday, the Natural Resources Defense Council, a national environmental group, said a sampling sweep of the city found high levels of arsenic at six schools, two playgrounds and four neighborhoods.

And the report inflamed a running debate about contamination caused by Katrina. Government agencies, which took about 2,000 soil and sediment samples, have said their findings show that Katrina's flood waters were not toxic. Conversely, environmentalists insist they were.

The debate has been complicated by disagreements on how to interpret data, safe-level standards, legal mandates and testing protocol.

As for the new report's findings, NRDC said the government has a responsibility to create a safe environment for people trying to rebuild their lives after the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

The group said that if further sampling shows there's a problem, those areas and other spots polluted with arsenic ought to be cleaned up. A cleanup would involve removing the top 6 inches of soil.
more from the Times Picayune

Progress and pain

Fresh from hiring a respected big-city superintendent to run the Recovery School District, State Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek recently promised quick and substantial improvement in the quality of public schools, both the buildings and the education going on inside.

But Pastorek, the New Orleans lawyer now deeply immersed in the campaign to repair school buildings, hesitated when asked to assess the region's overall movement toward recovery since Hurricane Katrina. High insurance costs and the cumbersome Road Home grant program are still slowing progress, he said.

Among friends and associates, Pastorek hears pessimism.

"There is enough ambiguity around the community that it creates a certain sense of hopelessness," he said. "We need to make some progress, we need to proclaim it, and we need to make some more progress."

His impatience resonates.

Though people see measurable progress here and there, many have grown frustrated, weary. They see a smattering of wins in rebuilt homes or spruced-up neutral grounds, but still wait for focused leadership, for a breakout season.

At the symbolic marker offered by Katrina's second anniversary, broad evidence of at least a slow recovery can be found in the region's population count, now up to nearly 1.1 million in seven parishes, according to the demographic research firm ESRI. That equates to a 16 percent drop from the pre-Katrina figure cited by census officials but an improvement of six percentage points since last fall.

Orleans Parish's population remains 39 percent lower than before Katrina, while St. Bernard Parish's population is down 64 percent. Both parishes still see people returning, if not as quickly as their neighborhood pioneers would like.

In part, that's because vast sums of recovery money still sit on the sidelines, mired in bureaucratic muck. Billions of dollars allocated for Road Home rebuilding grants and a Federal Emergency Management Agency infrastructure repair effort still idle in federal coffers.

more from the Times Picayune

Forecast for solar power: Sunny

Solar power has long been the Mercedes-Benz of the renewable energy industry: sleek, quiet, low-maintenance.

Yet like a Mercedes, solar energy is universally adored but prohibitively expensive for most people. A 4-kilowatt solar photovoltaic system costs about $34,000 without government rebates or tax breaks.

As a result, solar power accounts for well under 1% of U.S. electricity generation. Other alternative energy sources, such as wind, biomass and geothermal, are far more widely deployed.

The outlook for solar, though, is getting much brighter. A few dozen companies say advances in technology will let them halve the price of solar-panel installations in as little as three years. By 2014, solar-system prices will be competitive with conventional electricity when energy savings are figured in, Deutsche Bank (DB) says. And that's without government incentives.

If that happens, solar panels would become common home and business appliances, says Brandon Owens of Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
more from USA Today

Cleaner Skies Could Mean More Landfills

As the nation's coal-fired power plants work to create cleaner skies, they'll likely fill up landfills with millions more tons of potentially harmful ash.

More than one-third of the ash generated at the country's hundreds of coal-fired plants is now recycled - mixed with cement to build highways or used to stabilize embankments, among other things.

But in a process being used increasingly across the nation, chemicals are injected into plants' emissions to capture airborne pollutants.

That, in turn, changes the composition of the ash and cuts its usefulness. It can't be used in cement, for example, because the interaction of the chemicals may keep the concrete from hardening.

That ash has to go somewhere - so it usually ends up in landfills, along with the rest of the unusable waste.
more from AP

Will warming temperatures make nuclear power unfeasible?

The shutdown of a Browns Ferry reactor last week because of high Tennessee River temperatures was international news.

In the mainstream press from Britain to Germany to Malaysia, on National Public Radio, and in anti-nuclear blogs worldwide, people who could not find Alabama on a map became experts on Browns Ferry.

The interest stems from a raging environmental debate that deemed last week’s shutdown of Unit 2, and the power reductions in Units 1 and 3, as relevant to the viability of nuclear power.

Nuclear power has created a schism among environmentalists.

On the one hand, the world has yet to find a satisfactory solution for disposing of nuclear waste, and the risk of a catastrophic failure is alarming.

On the other hand, an operating nuclear plant creates essentially none of the greenhouse gases that most experts believe are contributing to climate change.

The shutdown dropped Browns Ferry into the middle of the debate. What use is nuclear power if plants become inoperable as global temperatures rise?

“I think both sides of the issue tend to overstate their case,” said Dave Lochbaum, director of nuclear safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

more from The Decatur Daily

In Nature’s Casino

It was Aug. 24, 2005, and New Orleans was still charming. Tropical Depression 12 was spinning from the Bahamas toward Florida, but the chances of an American city’s being destroyed by nature were remote, even for one below sea level. An entire industry of weather bookies — scientists who calculate the likelihood of various natural disasters — had in effect set the odds: a storm that destroys $70 billion of insured property should strike the United States only once every 100 years. New Orleanians had made an art form of ignoring threats far more likely than this; indeed, their carelessness was a big reason they were supposedly more charming than other Americans. And it was true: New Orleanians found pleasure even in oblivion. But in their blindness to certain threats, they could not have been more typically American. From Miami to San Francisco, the nation’s priciest real estate now faced beaches and straddled fault lines; its most vibrant cities occupied its most hazardous land. If, after World War II, you had set out to redistribute wealth to maximize the sums that might be lost to nature, you couldn’t have done much better than Americans had done. And virtually no one — not even the weather bookies — fully understood the true odds.
more from the NY Times

As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes

BEIJING, Aug. 25 — No country in history has emerged as a major industrial power without creating a legacy of environmental damage that can take decades and big dollops of public wealth to undo.

But just as the speed and scale of China’s rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut.

Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water.

Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union. Beijing is frantically searching for a magic formula, a meteorological deus ex machina, to clear its skies for the 2008 Olympics.

more from the NY Times

Eco-home is where heart is / Such houses cut energy consumption, but out of reach for many

Attention is increasingly focused on environmentally friendly eco-houses, which are designed to reduce energy consumption. But such dwellings remain out of reach for the general public, as government measures to promote such houses are insufficient. Let us examine the cost and energy-saving effect of eco-houses by looking into a few examples built by ordinary people.

Toru Takagi, 44, and his four family members live in a valley in Kawanehoncho, Shizuoka Prefecture, where a whistle from a steam locomotive can be heard from the nearby Oigawa Railway. He works for a company that makes machines used at poultry farms.

Takagi's two-story wooden house, rebuilt in February last year, has total floor space of 170 square meters. Double-glazed windows and outer walls formed by heat-insulation panels stuffed six centimeters thick with polyurethane both meet the latest government energy-saving standards. A highly efficient electricity-powered water heater and a 42-kilowatt output solar-powered electricity generator also were installed.

Takagi decided upon the solar-powered electricity generator after seeing a similar panel installed on the roof of a house. "I thought it would be fun to generate electricity at home and sell it," Takagi said. The extra electricity can be sold to Chubu Electric Power Co. The power company buys as much electricity from Takagi as it sells him. The power company transferred monthly payments--ranging from 2,409 yen in March last year to 5,943 yen in April last year--to his account at a local bank. At the same time, monthly utility bills ranging from 8,754 yen (in March last year) to 29,546 yen were withdrawn from his account.

more from Environmental Health News

Death Toll Climbs in Flood-Stricken Midwest

CHICAGO, Aug. 23 — The death toll from several days of storms climbed to 12 as heavy rain and flooding that have covered a large part of the Midwest continued Thursday.

Though more rain was predicted into Friday across much of the region, clearer skies were expected in many areas by Saturday, the National Weather Service said.

Reports of four additional deaths have brought to 12 the number of people who have died since the heavy rains began last weekend.

In Madison, Wis., a woman, her toddler and a man were electrocuted Wednesday afternoon when a utility pole was struck by lightning and dropped a live power line in a flooded intersection where the mother and child were awaiting an approaching bus, the Madison police said.

The man, whom the police called a hero, left the bus to try to help the woman, but was electrocuted when he stepped into the water, the police said.

Two other people were injured and taken to a hospital.

In Mansfield, Ohio, a 74-year-old man died early Tuesday from carbon monoxide poisoning when floodwater tipped a gasoline can in his garage and a pilot light for a hot water tank ignited a fire, said Assistant Chief Jim Bishop of the Mansfield Fire Department.

In Oklahoma City, still waterlogged in the wake of a separate storm system, that of former Tropical Storm Erin, the authorities searched a lake Thursday for a 17-year-old cross-country runner who was swept away Wednesday when he tried to swim across a flooded running path, The Associated Press reported.

In the Chicago area, where rivers were already swollen from several recent storms, sunny skies quickly darkened Thursday as violent weather swept across northern Illinois and into northwestern Indiana in the afternoon, bringing heavy rain, high winds and reports of tornadoes just west of the city.

more from NY Times

Peru quake hit rural areas hard

CANETE, PERU -- The villagers of Las Palmas set up camp in a pasture next to the cow and goat pens, pitching tepee-like tents fashioned of branches and plastic scraps.

Women take turns at a communal outdoor kitchen preparing food for residents of this irrigated oasis, a patch of green amid the unforgiving coastal desert that stretches south from the capital Lima.

Last week's 8.0 magnitude earthquake smashed a broad swath of Peru, collapsing thousands of buildings from the coast to the high Andes. The adobe homes of all 46 families in Las Palmas were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable.

"Everyone is pitching in to help out," said Victor Ramirez, a village elder in this isolated agricultural hamlet. "The most important thing is that the children and the old people get something to eat, and that they have blankets at night."

Much of the public attention since the Aug. 15 temblor has focused on the devastated city of Pisco, where most of the more than 500 fatalities occurred.

But, as inspectors have edged out into the countryside, it has become clear that the damage there is overwhelming, even though the number of casualties is lower. Reaching many hard-hit rural areas on buckled, debris-laden roads can be a challenge.
more from LA Times

Noise of modern life blamed for thousands of heart deaths

Thousands of people in Britain and around the world are dying prematurely from heart disease triggered by long-term exposure to excessive noise, according to research by the World Health Organisation. Coronary heart disease caused 101,000 deaths in the UK in 2006, and the study suggests that 3,030 of these are caused by chronic noise exposure, including to daytime traffic.

Deepak Prasher, professor of audiology at University College London, told the New Scientist magazine: "The new data provide the link showing there are earlier deaths because of noise. Until now, noise has been the Cinderella form of pollution and people haven't been aware that it has an impact on their health."
more from The Guardian Unlimited

WHO warns of global epidemic risk

Infectious diseases are spreading faster than ever before, the World Health Organization annual report says.
With about 2.1 billion airline passengers flying each year, there is a high risk of another major epidemic such as Aids, Sars or Ebola fever.

The WHO urges increased efforts to combat disease outbreaks, and sharing of virus data to help develop vaccines.

Without this, it says, there could be devastating impacts on the global economy and international security.

In the report, A Safer Future, the WHO says new diseases are emerging at the "historically unprecedented" rate of one per year.

Since the 1970s, 39 new diseases have developed, and in the last five years alone, the WHO has identified more than 1,100 epidemics including cholera, polio and bird flu.

"It would be extremely naive and complacent to assume that there will not be another disease like Aids, another Ebola, or another Sars, sooner or later," the report says.
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Yucatan weathers Dean's fury

FELIPE CARRILLO PUERTO, Mexico — Nature, good luck and good planning all combined Tuesday to deliver what the people of the Yucatan Peninsula called a miracle.

Hurricane Dean, packing 165-mph winds, was a Category 5 storm when it made landfall near this town of 20,000 people early Tuesday. And it remained a "monster" as it crossed the peninsula, causing widespread destruction.

But there appeared to be few injuries. And as of late Tuesday, no deaths had been reported, despite the fierce winds that caused heavy damage to more than one-third of the buildings in some seaside communities.
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Research underlines powerline cancer risk

PEOPLE who live close to high-voltage powerlines during childhood are up to five times more likely to develop cancer, according to Australian research.

The Tasmanian study of more than 850 patients adds weight to the link between electromagnetic fields and cancers such as leukaemia, lymphoma and multiple myeloma. It is still not known whether there is a cause and effect relationship.

Those who lived within 300 metres of a powerline up to the age of five were five times more likely to develop cancer, while those who lived that close to a powerline at any point during their first 15 years were three times more likely to develop cancer as an adult, according to the study published in the Internal Medicine Journal.

Researchers from the University of Tasmania and Bristol University in Britain compared an existing database of all patients in Tasmania diagnosed with lymphatic and bone marrow cancers between 1972 and 1980, with controls matched for sex and age. Residential histories were then gathered.

People who had lived within 50 metres of a high-voltage powerline at any time were at double the risk of developing cancer than those who had never lived within 300 metres of a powerline. For every year lived within 50 metres of a powerline, the risk of cancer increased by 7 per cent, the study found. There was also evidence the risk of cancer increased with higher voltages.

more from The Sydney Morning Herald

Pet Cats Serving as Canaries for a Home Pollutant

Hyperthyroidism in cats was virtually unknown three decades ago. But it has become common, particularly in older pets. As in people, cats’ overactive thyroids can lead to weight loss, rapid heartbeat and other problems.

The increase in feline hyperthyroidism coincides with the advent of flame-retardant chemicals known as PBDEs, or polybrominated diphenyl ethers, in materials like carpet and upholstery padding, plastics and electronic equipment. So a study by Janice A. Dye of the Environmental Protection Agency and colleagues sought to explore possible links between the chemicals and the condition.

The researchers analyzed PBDE levels in serum from three groups of cats: young and healthy, hyperthyroid older cats and older cats with other diseases. Because of variability in each group, it was not possible to associate hyperthyroid cats and total PBDE levels. But over all, as the researchers report in Environmental Science and Technology, PBDE levels were high in all cats, 20 to 100 times greater than in humans.

This may be because of cats’ diets (the researchers analyzed PBDEs in cat food, and found canned seafood-flavor food in particular had relatively high levels) and because they spend so much time on or near furnishings. Being meticulous groomers, cats may ingest PBDE-laden dust picked up from couches and carpets.

The researchers say more work is needed to explore the link between PBDEs and thyroid activity. What is clear, they say, is that cats are highly exposed to PBDEs, and thus may serve as a sentinel for understanding the effects of human exposure to the chemicals.
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Solar photovoltaic panels could lead to cheques from your electricity supplier

Paul Norris has the kind of power bill we all dream of - his electricity supplier sends him a cheque.

He generates so much electricity from the solar photovoltaic (PV) panels on the roof of his three-bedroom house in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, that he not only satisfies his own needs but also exports excess supplies to the National Grid.

"The main reason I had it installed was because I was worried about climate change, but it's great to actually make some money out of it," he says.

"Most people imagine it only really works during a sunny summer's day, but it even produces a decent amount of power on a cloudy day in the middle of winter."
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Tenn. nuclear fuel problems kept secret

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — A three-year veil of secrecy in the name of national security was used to keep the public in the dark about the handling of highly enriched uranium at a nuclear fuel processing plant — including a leak that could have caused a deadly, uncontrolled nuclear reaction.

The leak turned out to be one of nine violations or test failures since 2005 at privately owned Nuclear Fuel Services Inc., a longtime supplier of fuel to the U.S. Navy's nuclear fleet.

The public was never told about the problems when they happened. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission revealed them for the first time last month when it released an order demanding improvements at the company, but no fine.

In 2004, the government became so concerned about releasing nuclear secrets that the commission removed more than 1,740 documents from its public archive — even some that apparently involved basic safety violations at the company, which operates a 65-acre gated complex in tiny Erwin, about 120 miles north of Knoxville.

Congressmen and environmental groups have criticized the policy, and now the commission staff is drafting recommendations that may ease its restrictions.

But environmental activists are still suspicious of the belated revelations and may challenge the commission's decision not to fine Nuclear Fuel Services for the safety violations.

"That party is not over — the full story of what is going on up there," said Ann Harris, a member of the Sierra Club's national nuclear task force.
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Ocean Supergyre Link To Climate Regulator

Australian scientists have identified the missing deep ocean pathway - or 'supergyre' - linking the three Southern Hemisphere ocean basins in research that will help them explain more accurately how the ocean governs global climate. The new research confirms the current sweeping out of the Tasman Sea past Tasmania and towards the South Atlantic is a previously undetected component of the world climate system's engine-room - the thermohaline circulation or 'global conveyor belt'.

Wealth from Oceans Flagship scientist Ken Ridgway says the current, called the Tasman Outflow, occurs at an average depth of 800-1,000 metres and may play an important role in the response of the conveyor belt to climate change.

Published this month in Geophysical Research Letters the findings confirm that the waters south of Tasmania form a 'choke-point' linking the major circulation cells in the Southern Hemisphere oceans.

"In each ocean, water flows around anticlockwise pathways or 'gyres' the size of ocean basins," Mr Ridgway says. "These gyres are the mechanism that distribute nutrients from the deep ocean to generate life on the continental shelves and slopes. They also drive the circulation of the world's oceans, creating currents and eddies and help balance the climate system by transferring ocean heat away from the tropics toward the polar region."
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/19/AR2007081900967.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/19/AR

Two years after lawmakers put the kibosh on a gas additive that became a national scourge, the country's new recipe for fuel is under the microscope for its potential to cause the environmental problems it was meant to prevent.

While environmental regulators are confident ethanol, non-drinkable grain alcohol, won't create a repeat of the MTBE debacle, questions remain about what it will do when it makes its way from gas stations into the ground.

''You're trading one problem for another,'' said Gary Brown, an environmental engineer and president of Montgomery County-based RT Environmental Services Inc. ''The thought in Pennsylvania is that because people aren't using MTBE anymore, you don't have to worry about MTBE releases coming from tanks … Now you're getting ethanol in water. You're just getting a different kind of contamination.''
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The Bounty Around Us

The food world is catching up with Fred Berman.

The emphasis lately in that changing and often socially conscious world has been on eating local foods, organic alone not being enough to cure the ills of the world. No pesticides or herbicides, yes, but also no food that burns up more calories getting to the dinner plate than it can deliver once it's there.

Author Barbara Kingsolver is the latest to discover food doesn't have to travel hundreds of miles in a refrigerated truck. She writes about that discovery in her new book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life."

And for their book, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon spent a year eating only food that came from within 100 miles of their Vancouver, B.C., apartment.

That's nothing for Berman: Most of the food he and his family ate for more than 20 years came from within 500 yards of where they lived. An organic farmer for 27 years and a chef for 24, he's glad the books have made more people aware of the benefits of eating locally grown food. But he was already there.
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Study Finds Volatile Organics In Turf Fields

The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station has completed its study on the tire crumbs used in synthetic turf athletic fields, showing significant amounts of four volatile organic compounds are released into the air when the material is under conditions mimicking a hot summer day.

The study says that crumb rubber, from ground-up tires, readily heats up under direct sunlight to temperatures 40 degrees or more hotter than the surrounding air temperatures, so subjecting it to testing in temperatures of up to 140 degrees is reasonable.

“Based on these data,” the study reads, “further studies of crumb rubber produced from tires are warranted under both laboratory, but most especially field conditions.”

The study was posted this week on the experiment station's Web site.

The authors, four analytical chemists at the experiment station, characterized it as a “very modest study” due to time and staff limitations. The study was commissioned by the nonprofit group Environment and Human Health Inc. of North Haven for $2,000 after it became concerned about the synthetic turf fields were being installed around the state without adequate testing. Locally, Montville High and Connecticut College have synthetic turf fields.

The four compounds identified in the study are benzothiazole, hexadecane, 4-(tert-Octyl)-phenol and butylated hyroxyanisole. According to information provided by Environment and Human Health Friday, benzothiazole is a skin and eye irritant that can be harmful if swallowed or inhaled. Hexadecane is a carcinogen, while 4-(tert-Octyl)-phenol can cause burns and is “very destructive of mucous membranes,” according to the organization. The fourth chemical is an irritant, it said. The information is attributed to the Material Safety Data Sheet for each chemical.
more from Environmental Health News

"Volcano Cure" for Warming? Not So Fast, Study Says

A controversial theory proposes mimicking volcanoes to fight global warming. But throwing sulfur particles into the sky may do more harm than good, a new study says.

The temporary solution would pump particles of sulfur high into the atmosphere—simulating the effect of a massive volcano by blocking out some of the sun's rays. This intervention, advocates argue, would buy a little time to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But as well as cooling the planet, the sulfur particles would reduce rainfall and cause serious global drought, a new study says.

"It is a Band-Aid fix that does not work," said study co-author Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.

It's just one of several drastic measures proposed to combat global warming, now that most scientists are in agreement that carbon dioxide, primarily from burning fossil fuels, is changing Earth's climate.
more from National Geographic

APEC soft on emissions

A SECRET document prepared for the world leaders attending John Howard's climate summit reveals they are being asked to back a weakened plan to set an "aspirational" goal to cut greenhouse gases, rather than firm targets.

The secret full draft of the declaration for the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum, obtained by the Herald, is supposed to be announced by the 21 leaders at the close of next month's summit in Sydney.

The document reveals Mr Howard, the US President, George Bush, and the other APEC leaders will call for the aspirational global goal to be included in the next round of UN climate negotiations. The APEC leaders will also back agreements to promote energy efficiency and new technology, including nuclear power, to combat global warming.
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Traffic ban fails to beat city smog

Beijing officials forced 1.3 million cars off the city streets yesterday, but I still ended up in a traffic jam.

With a year to go before the Olympics and 1,200 new cars on the roads of the capital every day, bureaucrats are experimenting with ways of freeing the city’s chronic gridlock. Cars with even-number licence plates were banned yesterday and will be again tomorrow; today and Monday they have the run of the roads as vehicles with odd-numbered plates are forced to stay at home.

With taxis and military cars exempt, the four-day experiment puts a third of Beijing’s 3 million cars out of action. The results were varied.

Traffic in the preweekend rush hour flowed more swiftly than usual. Maybe the tooting of horns by drivers trying to gain an inch here or there was less frenetic. But I was still stationary for more than ten minutes during an 8km (5 mile) journey that took me half an hour – not bad for getting home on a Friday evening.
more from The Times

Credits offer profits for going green

SAN FRANCISCO -- From a 12th-floor conference room overlooking the Financial District, four traders deal in an obscure but increasingly important corner of the investment world.

The traders at the Cantor Fitzgerald brokerage firm specialize in air pollution. They buy and sell emissions permits that allow industry to create smog in Los Angeles, say, or acid rain in the Northeast. Their belief: Greed can help save the planet.

"The public benefits because the air gets cleaner as a result of the profit motive," said Josh Margolis, managing director of the firm's pollution-trading arm, CantorCO2e.

That philosophy is about to be tested like never before. California is establishing a "cap and trade" market for greenhouse gases that will serve as a centerpiece of the state's crusade against global warming.

As envisioned by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other advocates, the market will work like this: Starting in 2012, state regulators will distribute, either free or through an auction, a set amount of emissions permits to power plants, cement manufacturers and others. These permits cap the volume of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases they can emit. The cap will ratchet down over time, and firms unable to sufficiently reduce their emissions will have to buy permits on the open market.
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Atlantic yields climate secrets

Scientists have painted the first detailed picture of Atlantic ocean currents crucial to Europe's climate.

Using instruments strung out across the Atlantic, a UK-led team shows that its circulation varies significantly over the course of a year.

Writing in the journal Science, they say it may now be possible to detect changes related to global warming.

The Atlantic circulation brings warm water to Europe, keeping the continent 4-6C warmer than it would be otherwise.

As the water reaches the cold Arctic, it sinks, returning southwards deeper in the ocean.

Some computer models of climate change predict this Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, of which the Gulf Stream is the best-known component, could weaken severely or even stop completely as global temperatures rise, a scenario taken to extremes in the Hollywood movie The Day After Tomorrow.

Last year the same UK-led team published evidence that the circulation may have weakened by about 30% over half a century.

But that was based on historical records from just five sampling expeditions, raising concerns that the data was not robust enough to provide a clear-cut conclusion.
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Water, Air And Soil Pollution Causes 40 Percent Of Deaths Worldwide

About 40 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution, concludes a Cornell researcher. Such environmental degradation, coupled with the growth in world population, are major causes behind the rapid increase in human diseases, which the World Health Organization has recently reported. Both factors contribute to the malnourishment and disease susceptibility of 3.7 billion people, he says.

David Pimentel, Cornell professor of ecology and agricultural sciences, and a team of Cornell graduate students examined data from more than 120 published papers on the effects of population growth, malnutrition and various kinds of environmental degradation on human diseases. Their report is published in the online version of the journal Human Ecology (available here to be published in the December print issue).

"We have serious environmental resource problems of water, land and energy, and these are now coming to bear on food production, malnutrition and the incidence of diseases," said Pimentel.

Of the world population of about 6.5 billion, 57 percent is malnourished, compared with 20 percent of a world population of 2.5 billion in 1950, said Pimentel. Malnutrition is not only the direct cause of 6 million children's deaths each year but also makes millions of people much more susceptible to such killers as acute respiratory infections, malaria and a host of other life-threatening diseases, according to the research.
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Ice cap meltdown to cause 22ft floods

The Greenland ice sheet is doomed to melt away within the next three centuries and flood hundreds of millions of people out of their homes.

This is the stark warning given by a scientist who claims that current forecasts grossly overestimate how long the ice sheet will survive.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has previously stated that a total meltdown is likely to take at least 1,000 years.

However, Dr Tim Lenton of the University of East Anglia, believes the risk are far greater than the IPCC suggests.

Speaking at a meeting in Cambridge organised by the British Antarctic Survey, Dr Lenton said: "We are close to being committed to a collapse of the Greenland ice sheet. But we don't think we have passed the tipping point yet."

A remnant of the last Ice Age, Greenland's ice cap is nearly two miles high.

But if the climate change crisis reached the point of no return and it were to melt then global sea levels would rise by 22ft and swallow up most of the world's coastal regions.
more from The Telegraph

Home Again on the Kitchen Range

ON fancy china and in hot dog rolls and burger buns, buffalo is finally coming of age as an alternative red meat. But it almost didn’t happen.

The first time buffalo ranching took off, in the 1990s, the public wasn’t ready. People wanted only the fancy steaks and burgers; the other cuts were seen as tough and gamy, and producers couldn’t give them away. In 2000 the market collapsed. Bulls that had sold for $2,100 were going for $500.

The producers who held on until 2003 found a different climate as sales began to perk up. By then many Americans had started looking at their food with a more critical eye, and they were ready for buffalo, also called American bison.

Today buffalo meat, shunned no longer, has achieved an enviable position: simultaneous praise from chefs, nutritionists and environmentalists. At last, steak without guilt.

more from the NY Times

Concerns Linger for 2020 Nuclear Dump Opening

The entrance to Finland's nuclear waste storage site looks somehow familiar, like the entrance to any underground parking lot at a bank or a mall.

It is located just around a curve in a sloping road. There are concrete retaining walls on both sides, and construction is still going on. But there will be no hourly tickets here – only permanent parking for about one million pounds of nuclear waste. In the dark inside, Timo Seppälä says this wide tunnel will eventually branch into scores of smaller ones.

"It's like a comb," he says.

The Set-Up

Seppälä is with Posiva Oy, a company created by Finland's nuclear energy providers to deal with the problem of waste. He says each small tunnel — the teeth of that comb — will house dozens of huge iron and copper canisters. Each canister is five yards long, one yard around and weighs 20 tons, not to mention it is full of highly radioactive-spent fuel. The canisters are to be the first of several barriers keeping the dangerous waste in place.

"There is bentonite clay surrounding the canister," Seppälä says. "It functions as a buffer."

No one has done this before and much is still being researched – the exact structure of the bedrock, how to manufacture the canisters, the design of the truck to bring them in, etc.

"The largest challenge is, of course, that we are doing a business that has a time scale of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years," says Eero Patrakka, Posiva's CEO.

The site is due to open in 2020 and will likely be full 100 years later. Nevertheless, the waste inside will remain dangerous much longer, so the company must try to design a dump that can survive many possible geological changes.
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Fisher: Youth group sets civic example, helps shut down toxics plant

If folks in East Palo Alto are breathing a bit easier these days, they have a bunch of kids to thank.

After more than 40 years, Romic Environmental Technologies was forced to close its hazardous-waste disposal and recycling operation. The company has been sold, and the land will be cleaned up. The glistening smokestacks that have been a bayfront landmark will be gone.

It would be a stretch to say that Youth United for Community Action, a local organization made up of activists in their teens and 20s, single-handedly closed down the controversial plant - changing times and changing rules contributed just as much. But the group's eight-year campaign against the company certainly made a difference.

And fresh from this victory, they're tackling other issues in town, like the need for decent, affordable housing.

"This shows that we are able to fight those injustices that we see in society," said Re'Anita Burns, who joined the movement seven years ago when she was just 14. "That's something that we often lack today as young people."

The Romic plant has been handling toxic chemicals from area companies since long before activists like Burns were born - and before East Palo Alto was a city. When the plant opened in 1964, the baylands were littered with auto wrecking yards and warehouses. In fact, it wasn't until about 1990, after a series of fires and an investigation into chemical contamination, that the existence of Romic became a big issue in town.
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Carbon Market Encourages Chopping Forests - Study

WASHINGTON - The current carbon market actually encourages cutting down some of the world's biggest forests, which would unleash tonnes of climate-warming carbon into the atmosphere, a new study reported on Monday.


Under the Kyoto Protocol aimed at stemming climate change, there is no profitable reason for the 10 countries and one French territory with 20 percent of Earth's intact tropical forest to maintain this resource, according to a study in the journal Public Library of Science Biology.

The Kyoto treaty and other talks on global warming focus on so-called carbon credits for countries and companies that plant new trees where forests have been destroyed. Trees and other plants absorb carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas emitted by petroleum-fueled vehicles, coal-fired power plants and humans.

At this point, there is no credit for countries that keep the forests they have, the study said.

"The countries that haven't really been the target of deforestation have nothing to sell because they haven't deforested anything," said Gustavo Fonseca, one of the study's authors.


PERVERSE INCENTIVE

"So that creates a perverse incentive for them to actually start deforesting, so that in the future, they might be allowed to actually cap-and-trade, as they call it: you put a cap on your deforestation and you trade that piece that hasn't been deforested," Fonseca said in a telephone interview.

The countries most at risk for this kind of deforestation, because they all have more than half their original forests intact, are Panama, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Peru, Belize, Gabon, Guyana, Suriname, Bhutan and Zambia, along with the French territory of French Guiana.
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