U.S. Offshore Wind Could Provide 20 Percent of Electricity by 2030

U.S. officials calculate that the total potential for offshore wind generation is more than 4,000 gigawatts — or about four times the generating capacity currently carried on the U.S. grid. That estimate assumes one 5-megawatt wind turbine could be placed on every square kilometer of water with an annual average wind speed above 7 meters-per-second. This map illustrates the offshore wind resources by region and depth. (via Yale e360)

The U.S. could generate 20 percent of its electricity from wind energy by 2030 if it develops offshore wind farms in the coastal waters of 26 states, according to a report by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab [PDF]. Developing the nation’s offshore wind potential would also create $200 billion in “new economic activity” and 43,000 jobs, according to the report. While the U.S. currently leads the world in installed land-based wind capacity, the nation has no major offshore wind farms. Last week, however, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar signed a 28-year offshore lease for the nation’s first offshore wind project off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass., which would produce an average of 182 megawatts. State and federal officials are now considering other major offshore wind farm proposals. The Department of Energy report said that if offshore wind farms are densely developed along the U.S. coastline, such installations could theoretically provide four times the electricity capacity that now exists in the U.S.

This post originally appeared on e360 Digest.

Google Backs Offshore Grid To Link Wind Farms Off U.S. East Coast

Google and a U.S. financial firm are investing in a proposed $5 billion undersea transmission line that would connect future offshore wind farms along the mid-Atlantic coast, a development that could eventually remove a major hurdle for the emerging U.S. offshore wind industry. Google and New York-based Good Energies will each will assume a 37.5 percent equity stake in the project, the New York Times reports. The 350-mile transmission line, with a projected capacity of 6,000 megawatts — equivalent to the output of five nuclear reactors — would be installed in shallow federal waters 15 to 20 miles offshore and stretch from northern New Jersey to Norfolk, Va. The first 150 miles of construction could be completed by 2016, according to the Times. While the proposal is expected to face some challenges, industry experts and federal officials called it a promising development. “It provides a gathering point for offshore wind for multiple projects up and down the coast,” said Jon Wellinghoff, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Last week, U.S. officials reported that offshore wind has the potential to meet 30 percent of the nation’s electricity needs by 2030.

This post originally appeared on e360 Digest.

Image of proposed undersea transmission line via The New York Times

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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Energy at 4:30 PM)

When officials gather for an international summit on biodiversity next month, they might look to remind the world why species matter to humans: for producing oxygen, finding new drugs, making agricultural crops more productive, and something far less tangible — a sense of wonder.

by Richard Conniff

We live in what is paradoxically a great age of discovery and also of mass extinction. Astonishing new species turn up daily, as new roads and new technologies penetrate formerly remote habitats. And species also vanish forever, at what scientists estimate to be 100 to 1,000 times the normal rate of extinction.

Over the past few years, as I was working on a book about the history of species discovery, I often found myself coming back to a fundamental question: Why do species matter? That is, why should ordinary people care if scientists discover one species or pronounce the demise of another?

It may seem too obvious to need asking. In certain limited contexts, people clearly do care. We will go to great lengths to protect a boutique species like the giant panda, for instance. We also thrill to the possibility of finding the slightest microbial hint of life in outer space, hardly blinking when the U.S. government spends $7 billion a year largely for that purpose. Meanwhile, we spend pennies exploring the alien life forms that are all around us here on Earth.

Maybe it’s just human nature not to value — or even see — the thing that’s right in front of our faces. And maybe it’s also a failure of communication. That is, scientists may need to explain their work on a far more basic level — not “Why do species matter?” but “Is food important to you?” or “Do you want your children to have effective medicines when they get sick?” or even “Do you like to breathe?” None of these questions overstates the importance of species.

For instance, Prochlorococcus is an ocean-dwelling genus of cyanobacteria and among the most abundant life forms on Earth. Why should we care? Because it produces about 20 percent of the oxygen we breathe — and yet until an MIT microbiologist named Sally Chisholm discovered it in 1986, Prochlorococcus was unknown. We need to understand in short that our lives depend on species most of us have never heard of — species we otherwise tend to shrug off as obscure, trivial, even undesirable.

Vultures, for instance. When we cause a species to go into decline, we almost never know — and hardly even stop to think about — what we might be losing in the process. In truth, it may be hard to think about, because the cascading effects of our actions are sometimes freakishly distant from the original cause. So in India in the early 1990s, farmers began using the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac for the apparently worthy purpose of relieving pain and fever in their livestock. Unfortunately, vultures scavenging on livestock carcasses accumulated large quantities of the drug and promptly died of renal failure. Over a 14-year period, populations of three vulture species plummeted by between 96.8 and 99.9 percent.

Black Vultures (Photo via Flickr / barloventomagico)

Losing these efficient scavengers meant livestock carcasses often got left in the open to rot. It was one of those “ecosystem services” — manufacturing oxygen, soaking up carbon dioxide, preventing floods, taking out the garbage — that species generally provide unnoticed, until they stop. But the impacts went well beyond the stench, according to a 2008 article in Ecological Economics. Moving into the niche vacated by the vultures, feral dog populations boomed by up to 9 million animals over the same period. Dog bites and the incidence of rabies in humans also increased, and the authors conservatively estimated that an additional 48,000 people died during the 14-year period as a result. Calculating the bottom-line worth of what we get from the natural world is notoriously difficult. But even pricing lives at a fraction of developed world values, the near-total loss of three insignificant vulture species has so far cost India an estimated $24 billion.

A diversity of species can also help prevent the emergence of new diseases, though we tend to blame, rather than credit, nature for this particular ecosystem service. We sometimes respond to Lyme disease, for instance, by trying to kill the major players, blacklegged ticks and white-footed mice. But the “dilution effect,” proposed by Rick Ostfeld at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, suggests counter-intuitively that having the broadest variety of host species in a habitat is a better way to limit disease. Some of those hosts will be ineffective, or even dead ends, at transmitting the infectious organism. So they dilute the effect and keep the disease organism from building up and spilling over to humans. But when we reduce biodiversity by breaking up the forest for our backyards, we accidentally favor the most effective host — in this case, the white-footed mouse. And we free the undiluted disease organism to operate at full strength.

The implications go well beyond Lyme disease. Around the world over the past half-century, researchers have tracked about 150 emerging infectious diseases, from Ebola to HIV, with 60 to 70 percent being zoonotic — that is, transmitted from animals to humans. “The question,” says Aaron Bernstein, a Harvard pediatrician and co-editor of the 2008 book Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity, “is whether humans are doing something to make these zoonotic diseases come out of the woodwork.” Clearly, we are doing a lot of one particular thing — knocking down forests and creating species-poor habitats with no “dilution effect” in their place. Thus the fear is that many more such epidemics may lie ahead.

And yet the value of even big, charismatic species remains so poorly understood that a Rutgers University philosopher writing in The New York Times recently proposed gradually wiping out cruel carnivorous species and replacing them with gentle vegetarians. He was upset that lions do not lie down with lambs, except to eat them for dinner. And he was apparently oblivious to the larger cruelty called a trophic cascade: Loss of predators strips a habitat of its diversity and leaves behind the animal equivalent of the civil service, or what writer David Quammen has called “a pestilence of minor nibblers.”

For instance, in the rocky world between high and low tides on the Pacific Coast near Seattle, the food chain (or trophic community, from the Greek trophikos, or nourishment) consists of barnacles, limpets, chitins, anemones, and particularly mussels. Starfish are the dominant predator. So mussels normally crowd up along the high tide line, where starfish are less likely to chomp them. In one study, a biologist removed the starfish to see what would happen. The mussels soon crept down toward deeper water, crowding out other species. Within a few years, only eight of the 15 original species still lived in that neighborhood. For all their apparent cruelty, killer species can be a means of fostering biodiversity.

So do individual species matter? Or is it just the diversity of species? The truth is that our understanding of the natural world is far too primitive for anyone to say one species is important, and another isn’t. In fact, scientists don’t even have names for most species; they’ve described only about 1.8 million of them, with an estimated 10 to 50 million still to go. So instead of waging pitched battles for individual species, conservationists in recent years have prudently tended to emphasize diversity, working to protect large swaths of habitat for a multitude of species. It’s the motorcycle mechanic’s approach to conservation, as articulated by Aldo Leopold: “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

But that should not stop us from trumpeting the benefits to humanity from individual species that might otherwise get written off as worthless, or even as impediments to human progress. Some conservationists may cringe at the thought of cheapening the natural world by defending it in economic terms. But NASA manages to hold onto a sense of wonder about its mission while simultaneously touting the idea that space exploration can pay for itself in technology transfers to the civilian world. (There’s actually a NASA “spinoff coloring book.” It celebrates an outer space mirror-polishing technology now also used to make ice skates go “super fast!”) The difference is that the spinoff argument for exploring species here on Earth is far more persuasive.

The yew, for instance, was until recently a “trash tree,” says David J. Newman of the National Cancer Institute; he figures it was last valued around the time his ancestors used it to fashion bows for firing arrows at the Battle of Agincourt. But it’s now the source for taxol, relied on by tens of thousands of people as a life-saving treatment for breast, prostate, and ovarian cancers. Sales topped $1.6 billion last year, according to IMS Health, a healthcare information and consulting company. Likewise, no one ever marched to save the gila monsters, but their venom is the source of a new drug for people who resist conventional treatments for Type 2 diabetes, an epidemic disease now on track to affect more than a third of all Americans over their lifetimes.

In fact, the common idea that drug companies can cook up their medicines out of thin air through “rational drug design” in the laboratory is simply wrong. One recent study looked at more than 1,000 drugs approved worldwide over a 20-year period and found not one that was traceable to a totally synthetic source. Getting our ideas from species in the natural world is still the rule.

Likewise, wild species continue to be the mother lode of genetic material for making agricultural crops more productive, or more resistant to pests, disease, and drought. That kind of bio-prospecting is likely to become far more important over the next few years as biologists begin to explore the bacteria, fungi, and other microbial life forms that help plants do what they do. In fact, we will have little choice but to find smarter ways of exploiting the hidden resources of the natural world. If NASA in its glory years had a mission — to get to the moon in 10 years — biologists now have one, too: To sustain the species and habitat here on Earth that will be essential to providing food, medicine, and sanity as the human population grows to 9 billion people over the next 40 years.

There is one final argument for the value of species, and it has to do with beauty, biophilia, and a sense of the sacred. In the course of researching my book on species discovery, it seemed to me that one young 19th-century specialist in marine mollusks made the case most persuasively. In pursuit of new species along the coast of Alaska, naturalist William T. Dall experienced all the usual adventures, among them a long frigid trip in a sealskin dory across open water, trying to avoid being crushed by waves loaded with cakes of ice.

He gave his family an eloquent explanation of what motivated him, and by extrapolation most other species seekers: “There is a singular delight,” he wrote home in 1866, “in taking these delicate and almost microscopic animals and putting them under a strong glass, seeing the tiny heart beat, and blood circulate and gills expand, counting the muscles and blood vessels and almost the tiny disks that form the blood and to know that you are the first that has penetrated these mysteries and are perhaps the only one who ever will, and that all your notes and drawings and observations are so much solid knowledge added to the power and grace and beauty of the Infinite.”

This post originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

Related stories in the Worldchanging archives:

• Biodiversity 100: An International Campaign is Launched | Amanda Reed, 20 Aug 10
  
• Biodiversity: An Introductory Video and a Chart of Industry’s Impact | Amanda Reed, 14 Jul 10
  
• IPBES – A New Assessment of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services | WorldChanging Team, 22 Jun 10
  
• Roundup: The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity | Amanda Reed, 4 Jun 10

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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Biodiversity and Ecosystems at 12:00 PM)

by Fred Pearce

In 1929, Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov traveled to Central Asia on one of the many seed-collecting expeditions that took him to five continents over more than two decades. In what is now present-day Kazakhstan, Vavilov — the father of modern seed banks — found forests of wild fruits and numerous cultivated varieties. Around the city of Alma Ata, he was astonished by the profusion of apple trees, writing in his journal that he believed he had “stumbled upon the center of origin for the apple, where wild apples were difficult to even distinguish from those which were being cultivated.”

Correctly surmising that this region of Kazakhstan was “the chief home of European fruit trees,” Vavilov collected the seeds of the many varieties of apple and other trees, eventually hauling them back to his scientific base in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg.

The trees that sprouted from those seeds, and more than 5,000 other varieties of fruits and berries, now grow in a sprawling, 1,200-acre collection of fields about 20 miles south of St. Petersburg, not far from the opulent, 18th-century czarist palace of Pavlovsk. This living repository of trees and bushes — with Europe’s most extensive collection of fruits and berries — has been at the center of a dispute in recent months as a federal Russian housing agency has tried to confiscate part of the Pavlovsk Research Station to clear the land for upscale dachas for Russia’s burgeoning new elite.

The fate of the station is now in limbo as, after an intense lobbying campaign by botanists and conservation groups around the world, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has announced that the government is investigating the effort to uproot one of the most valuable botanical collections on Earth.

The priceless nature of the Pavlosk station can be traced directly back to Vavilov and his painstaking efforts to collect seeds from what he viewed as hot spots of plant diversity around the world, now known as Vavilov Centers. His insights into the importance of preserving botanical genetic diversity, particularly among food crops, are highly relevant today as that diversity faces unparalleled threats from industrial agriculture dominated by monoculture crops, destruction of wild habitats, and climate change.

The heat wave and subsequent fires that have destroyed much of Russia’s wheat harvest this year may have helped increase the chances that Vavilov’s storehouse of plants will live on at Pavlovsk. The fires triggered new fears in Russia about the nation’s ability to feed itself and the impact of global warming, and raised the profile of scientists working to protect the country’s food varieties. As the heat wave has faded, many Russians are now hoping that Pavlovsk can be saved.

The Pavlovsk Research Station, part of the N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry, houses one of the world’s largest collections of seeds and planted crops, roughly 90 percent of which are found in no other scientific collections in the world. The station’s inventory includes almost a thousand types of strawberries from more than 40 countries; a similar number of black currant varieties from 30 countries, including North America, Europe and the Far East; 600 apple types collected from 35 countries; and more than a hundred varieties each of gooseberries, cherries, plums, red currants, and raspberries. More than half of the black currant varieties grown in Russia, the world’s leading producer, were bred at Pavlovsk. Sales of black currants in Russia are valued at more than $400 million annually.

These old varieties are still needed to provide genes to protect commercial varieties against new threats ranging from pests to climate change, and to confer new attributes. Such older varieties are mostly held in trust by commercial and international institutions, either in the form of seeds held in cold storage or plantings in places like Pavlovsk.

The station had seemed destined to fall victim to a drive by the Russian government to free up public land for sale to developers. Pavlovsk is in the St. Petersburg suburb of Pushkin and is increasingly surrounded by up-market apartments and holiday homes, in an area made fashionable because of its proximity to Pavlovsk, the palace built by Catherine the Great. In late 2009, the Russian Ministry of Economic Development handed over one-fifth of the station’s fields to the Federal Fund of Residential Real Estate Development, which is tasked with finding housing land.

The Vavilov Institute appealed the decision. The case has been rumbling on in the courts ever since. But the Pavlovsk station’s director, Fyodor Mikhovich, who has worked there for 32 years, says he was told by one official: “Go to sleep. Just go to sleep. We are taking the land.”

News that the Pavlovsk station was threatened with a state land grab first emerged over the summer. However, what looked like a done deal has attracted a high-profile international campaign that could be on the verge of success — just as the world’s governments meet in Japan next month to celebrate the International Year of Biodiversity.

Cary Fowler, an American conservationist who runs the Global Crop Diversity Trust in Rome, Italy, visited the station earlier this year. He says the loss of the collection would be “the largest intentional, preventable loss of crop diversity in my lifetime.”

It remains unclear exactly how much of the collection will be destroyed by the development. The scientists there say that three-quarters of their “priceless collection” is grown on the 227 acres being demanded for housing. This encompasses all its berries, including its strawberries, red currants, black currants, and gooseberries. The federal real estate fund says publicly that the fields are “not utilized” and are “covered with weeds and mowed grass.” But its own report of its visit to the station last year says that half the land on one of the two plots they plan to build on is “utilized for berry trees.”

In any case, Fowler says the long-term intention is clear. The region’s planners have zoned the entire station for development, and the land that the federal real estate fund wants to take first is in the middle of the station’s fields. “So if they get that, it is only a question of time before the rest of the fields will be taken,” says Fowler.

The station is undeniably dilapidated, and little plant breeding or research into plant genomes is now carried out there. A visit by American scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as long ago as 1975, said “the buildings are old and run down and poorly equipped… the laboratories are grossly inadequate by U.S. standards.” Stripped of funds since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, parts of the station lie virtually abandoned. In other areas, the staff does little more than maintain the collection of old varieties. Even so, the collection is unique and potentially of great value.

In recent years, nobody has crosschecked the station’s plants with other collections outside Russia. “It is possible that some samples are being duplicated elsewhere, but the majority are not,” says the director general of the Vavilov Institute, Nikolai Dzyubenko. Nonetheless, international authorities say the collection probably contains many genes of potentially great value in developing new commercial varieties. Many of its varieties are unusually hardy in cold temperatures and are disease-resistant.

“It would be a major tragedy if the collection were lost,” says one of the world’s leading strawberry breeders, Jim Hancock of Michigan State University. Norman Looney, president of the International Society for Horticultural Science, says the station’s collection “represents work performed over more than 150 years and has survived both climatic and political catastrophe. It is the largest such collection in Europe and the only one at this far-north latitude.”

Vavilov began collecting plants across Asia in 1916, working first on wild and early cultivated varieties of wheat and other grain crops, before moving on to other crops and other continents and establishing the research stations that housed his collections. Through his travels in the Caucasus, Afghanistan, the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia, Japan, China, Korea, the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America, Vavilov realized that cradles of botanical diversity were most often found in mountainous regions, where the many changes in topography and climate led to the evolution and development of highly diverse species.

The Pavlovsk experimental station, established in 1926, is one of 11 seed banks that Vavilov created across the former Soviet Union. In the 1930s, he worked diligently to expand his collections, but as the decade wore on he ran afoul of Joseph Stalin for disputing the views of the quack scientist, Trofim Lysenko, a Stalin favorite who maintained that characteristics acquired through the environment could be inherited. Vavilov was arrested by Stalin’s secret police and thrown into the gulag, where he died of starvation in 1943. During the Nazi siege of Leningrad during World War II, scientists at Vavilov’s institute protected its collections, with some succumbing to starvation rather than consuming the collection’s rice and other crops.

Vavilov’s successors have continued his work until today, particularly in Siberia and the Russian Far East, where wild berries remain an important part of the local diet. Sergey Alexanian, vice director of international relations for the Vavilov Institute, says “there have been hundreds of explorations involving thousands of researchers.”

Crop diversity has always been the Cinderella of conservation, even though the hundreds of thousands of crop varieties bred by farmers and scientists over several millennia represent a hugely important resource. But the fight to save the Pavlovsk station has attracted a great deal of international support. Fowler launched a “Tweet Medvedev” campaign in mid-July. And top crop scientists and research organizations have added their voices to the protests, including DIVERSITAS, a network of scientists devoted to preserving biodiversity, and the International Society for Horticultural Science.

Should the Russian government ignore the international outcry and move ahead with plans to develop the Pavlovsk Station, scientists are discussing the need for an emergency rescue plan. But there are serious doubts about how much of the collection could be saved. One option might have been to rush seeds from Pavlovsk to the “doomsday vault” of crop seeds from round the world, which is currently being assembled on the Norwegian island of Svalbard in the Arctic. But according to Fowler, whose job includes overseeing the vault, few of the fruits and berries held at Pavlovsk produce seeds that would survive freezing. To be saved, they would need to be planted elsewhere, a huge logistical task.

“We will try to help them rescue the station,” he told me. “We have contacted a number of institutions to alert them that we may need to swing into action at short notice. But there will be little time, there is no place [in Russia] to put the collection and quarantine regulations will prevent us sending it abroad quickly.” The Vavilov Institute claims transfers would take 15 years and cost “several dozens of millions of U.S. dollars.”

The international campaign has clearly helped buy time for the station and may ultimately save it. Earlier this month, the federal real estate development fund announced that it had postponed the auction of the first parcel of land, intended for Sept. 23, until at least the end of October, and had set up an international scientific commission to look into the issue and make recommendations.

“This is a very positive development,” says Fowler. “It ensures that decisions will be made with solid scientific input. We really couldn’t ask for more.”

Image Captions and Credits (top to bottom): A botanist measures a mountain ash tree at the Pavlovsk Station in 2010; by Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images. | A sign at Pavlovsk marks a collection of decorative perennial plants; via Flickr/N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry. | Nikolai Vavilov created 11 seed banks across the Soviet Union before he ran afoul of Joseph Stalin; via U.S. Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons.

This post originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.