Consumers now have little information about the true ecological impacts of what they buy. But that may be about to change, as new technologies that track supply chains are emerging and companies as diverse as Unilever and Google look to make their products more sustainable.

by Daniel Goleman

With climate legislation dead in Congress and the fizzled hopes for a breakthrough in Copenhagen fading into distant memory, the time seems ripe for fresh strategies — especially ones that do not depend on government action.

Here’s a modest proposal: radical transparency, the laying bare of a product’s ecological impacts for all to see.

Economic theory applied to ecological metrics offers a novel way to ameliorate our collective assault on the global systems that sustain life. There are two fundamental economic principles that, if applied well, might just accelerate the trend toward a more sustainable planet: marketplace transparency about the ecological impacts of consumer goods and their supply chains, and lowering the cost of that information to zero.

First transparency. A maxim in economics holds that transparency makes markets work more efficiently. This rule has long been applied to price, but why not also apply it to the ecological impacts of industry and commerce? At present when it comes to the ecological consequence of the things we buy, we have information asymmetry, where sellers know far more than buyers.

This seems about to change. One big mover is WalMart, which last summer announced it will develop a “sustainability index,” a credible rating of the ecological impacts of the products it sells boiled down into a single metric that shoppers can use to compare Brand A and Brand B. There are signs this is more than marketing hype: WalMart has started to pilot life-cycle analyses of products it carries, and, some say, hopes to make transparent such data on the environmental and social impacts of suppliers four levels deep in the chain of vendors. The key, of course, will be to make sure the cost of quantifying and listing such data is minimal, as price will remain the primary determining factor for consumers.

WalMart is by no means the only player in taking steps to become more ecologically transparent. Companies such as Unilever (brands like Dove Soap and Lipton Tea) and Google (its servers consume enormous amounts of energy) are following their own maps to transparency about the eco-impacts of their operations, to find ways to make operations more sustainable.

Several global companies are forming a “Group of Ten” to develop a supply chain transparency system called Earthster into its newest version, “E2 Turbo.” Rather than go to the expense of a full life-cycle analysis (which can cost $50,000 and take months), E2 Turbo asks for data only on the 20 percent or so of a product’s life cycle that accounts for around 80 percent of environmental impacts.

Now under development, this supply-chain-tracking software lets companies understand where their largest negative impacts are, and how to find more sustainable alternatives. A built-in recommendations engine, drawing on a Department of Commerce database, suggests suppliers or other players that can help companies improve those impacts. That guides business-to-business decisions, with companies better able to find vendors that will let them keep their eco-impact scores low.

As more and more companies feed data into E2 Turbo — which is open source — they will together build what amounts to an information commons. There has also been discussion about the U.S. government establishing a site for that commons, creating a public database on ecological impacts that amounts to new public resource that any company, small or large, could draw on to improve the impacts of its operations.

A radical transparency about the ecological impacts may yet emerge from these efforts — and many in the business world are paying attention. A recent article in Harvard Business Review proclaims that sustainability has become an essential business strategy and the key driver of innovation. To be sure, there are large numbers of companies who resist — but they may yet join in, if markets shift toward brands that are more transparent about ecological footprints, creating a compelling business case.

That shift will become far more likely with the application of the second economic principle, lowering to zero the “cost” of this information, the cognitive effort we must make to get relevant data. Consumer surveys show that about 10 percent of today’s shoppers will go out of their way to get information about the ecological impacts of what they buy, while about a third could not care less. The majority in the middle say that if the information were easy to come by, they might use it in deciding what to buy.

That’s where the action is: making crucial data easy to get. That was done, for instance, at the Hannaford Brothers grocery chain in Maine, with nutritional ratings of foods. While the ratings were sophisticated — made by nutritionists at institutions like Yale and Dartmouth — they were boiled down into a three-, two-, or one-star rating posted next to the price tag (there was also zero, which about 80 percent of foods received, mainly because of the salt and fats in processed foods).

The result was a significant shift in purchases toward the more nutritious food and away from the less. The shifts in market share were large enough to get the attention of food brand reps who started asking what they needed to do to get higher ratings.

That switch in a company’s actions because transparency in the marketplace has driven consumer decisions in a better direction has been called a “virtuous cycle” by Archon Fung at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Fung led a group studying how transparency alters market dynamics and becomes a mechanism for positive change.

Such marketplace transparency about the ecological impacts of consumer goods can be seen today at www.GoodGuide.com, a website that aggregates more than 200 databases on the environmental, health, and social impacts of tens of thousands of consumer goods. GoodGuide — a free smart phone app — allows shoppers to compare the eco-virtue of products while in the aisles of a store. Today that comparison requires running your shopping list by the website on your computer or swiping a product’s bar code with a cellphone. But the day will come when a daring retailer puts that data next to price tags — thus reducing the information cost to zero, as Hannaford Brothers did with nutritional data.

Another website, Skin Deep, a project of the Environmental Working Group, reveals the potential medical risks of the chemicals used in personal care products, and so ranks them from safest to most risky. Skin Deep’s ratings are made by searching in medical databases for the biological effects of a given ingredient, and then weighting the health risks accordingly. Skindeep has been consulted more than 100 million times by shoppers wanting to know which skin cream or baby lotion might be a better bet.

These two websites offer ratings that are credible, independent, and transparent themselves — the three criteria proposed by the Kennedy School of Government group. To be sure, systems like GoodGuide have yet to obtain fully transparent data about the total eco-impacts of any company or product. These consumer-facing transparency systems are more proof of concept than state-of-the-art. But they offer a hopeful sign we may be headed in that direction.

As the head of product innovation at a global company pointed out to me, ecological transparency would change the business landscape in two ways. First would be a shift in the “value basis” of a product, adding its ecological impacts into the equation. Second, such transparency would drive intense competition to rethink products to lower those impacts, and so protect a brand’s market position.

As non-proprietary data collection systems like Earthster compile numbers on the ecological footprints of industry, that information could well feed into an emerging metric that has been designed to replace GDP. Called the “General Progress Indicator,” or GPI, this index of national progress rethinks economic indicators by, for example, rising when the poor receive a larger portion of a nation’s income and dropping when they get less.

Among the indicators factored into GPI are resource depletion, pollution, and long-term environmental damage. So while the GDP counts pollution as a double gain for an economy – for the economic activity while it is created and again while being cleaned up – GPI counts the costs of that pollution as a loss. Earthster-type databases could bring more precision and currency to GPI’s metrics.

Another movement in economics that might embrace such data is the attempt to “internalize externalities” — that is, to make companies bear the costs of, say, cleaning up their pollution rather than governments, by taxing their goods proportionally to their negative eco-impacts. That idea remains a hard sell to business, and to most governments. But marketplace ecological transparency makes pollution, toxics and the like a reputation cost for a brand or company. This substitutes a market force for government action, which — given political realities — may be both more realistic and quicker.

While many business people are starting to take ecological transparency seriously enough to embed it in their strategic thinking, the question arises: Are economists paying attention? A few are. But for the most part these potentially disruptive information technologies, and the marketplace transparency they promise, are beneath the field’s radar, or entirely off the map.

One exception is James Angresano, a political economist at The College of Idaho, who sees promise in ecological transparency as a tool for sustainability — itself not a topic central to orthodox thinking in economics. “We’ve got to think differently,” Angresano told me.

When Angresano lectured on these ideas recently to students in environmental economics at Peking University, they were so interested they stayed an extra hour. “Of all the theories I covered over several weeks of lecturing, this resonated the best,” he commented. “They’re depressed just hearing what the problems are. This is a way of making changes; here are some solutions.”

This post originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

See these related stories in the Worldchanging archives for more on this topic:

• The Emergence of a Biosphere Economy | John Elkington and Alejandro Litovsky, 28 Jun 10: “An economic transformation to rival the Industrial Revolution is on its way – and this time nature will be properly valued…”

• Transparency, Accountability and the “dot eco” Debate | Peter ter Weeme, 25 Aug 09: Peter reports on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ idea to introduce a new top-level domain like “.eco”, which could, like the practice of eco-labeling, provide one more tool to help consumers make good, green choices online…

• Sticker Shock: Walmart’s Labeling Scheme Will Be Costly, But Will It Be Effective? Two Views | Joe Romm, 17 Aug 09: “Eco-labeling is becoming globally hot, thanks in part to Walmart. Here are two perspectives. The first is from Stephen Stokes of AMR Research, by way of Climate Inc., edited by David Levy, Professor of Management at UMass, Boston. The second perspective is from the Center for American Progress, with a post titled ‘The Meaning of Eco-Labels’.”

• Interview with Mark Anielski | Hassan Masum, 9 May 08: “We recently had a chance to talk with Mark Anielski, Albertan and author of The Economics of Happiness: Building Genuine Wealth. Mark has been working for many years on better ways of measuring progress, and this conversation delves into the potential of moving beyond GNP. Whether in measuring a sense of community or valuing ecosystem goods and services, better measures of progress can align us on the targets that really matter.”

• The Eco-Nutrition Label | Jeremy Faludi, 17 Sep 07: A classic Worldchanging post where Jer introduced the concept of the eco-label.

• Strategic Consumption: How to Change the World with What You Buy | Alex Steffen, 26 Mar 07: “…the glut of green shopping opportunities is overshadowing the most basic message of all, which is that the most sustainable product is the one you never bought in the first place…So, should we give up on trying to spend our money in ways that could do some good? Absolutely not, but we need to start getting better at buying in ways that make an impact. We need to begin to practice strategic consumption…What makes consumption strategic? Multiplied leverage…The ideal is to buy products that not only do their job more sustainably, but send market signals back through the economy that are likely to result in more meaningful systemic changes…If we want to see these changes, we should pursue five strategies, listed in order of increasing importance…”

• Background Stories: Building Context Connection | Sarah Rich, 6 Mar 07: “One of our running themes at Worldchanging is the importance of knowing the backstory of the things we use and buy. There’s no better incentive to be a responsible consumer than seeing previously invisible (and frequently unsavory) aspects of our commodities. At Doors of Perception, we met a participant who has applied design thinking to backstories. Within the context of this year’s food theme, Arlene Birt has begun designing communications campaigns for edible products; specifically, she has dragged the lifespan of a chocolate bar into transparency, from unharvested cacao bean to first delicious bite, by designing an easy-to-decipher graphic label for the interior of a chocolate bar wrapper.”

• The Happy Planet Index | Alex Steffen, 12 Jul 06: “What ultimate goals should we pursue? The Happy Planet Index offers and claims to measure one answer: happy, long lives within environmentally sustainable ecological footprints. The HPI ranks countries based on the reported happiness of their inhabitants, the length of their lives and the size of their ecological footprints…”

• Joshua Farley, Ecological Economist | Hassan Masum, 24 Feb 06: An interview with Joshua Farley, “a professor at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics – home of the original $33 trillion estimate for ecosystem service value. Joshua co-authored the recent textbook Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications,which reconceptualizes economics with a few key new axioms: ecosystem and resource limits, distribution issues, and broader definitions of human well-being. He’s in the vanguard of a growing movement to get economics right – with sustainability and human well-being as core principles.”

• Introducing “Inclusive Wealth”: A New Economic Measure of Sustainability | Alan AtKisson, 30 Jun 05: “Allow me introduce you to “Inclusive Wealth.” Technically, Inclusive Wealth is a reform of neo-classical economics, using accounting prices (i.e., substitution prices) to put a monetary value on key capital stocks in nature, the manufactured economy, human welfare, and human knowledge. The core idea: manage all those stocks so that they don’t decline over time, and you get sustainability…”

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This energy chart, produced by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory shows, at left, the different sources of energy and the amounts produced in the United States. At right, the pink boxes show where energy was consumed, while the shades of gray depict the amount of energy lost or rejected, often through heat loss. Energy use in the U.S. dropped nearly 5 percent from 2008 to 2009, with renewable sources of energy — particularly wind power — showing significant growth. (Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

U.S. energy use fell in 2009 and Americans used more wind and solar power and less electricity generated by burning coal and natural gas, according to a survey by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Using data from the U.S. Department of Energy, the laboratory said energy use fell from 99.2 quadrillion BTUs (quads) in 2008 to 94.6 quadrillion BTUs in 2009, a drop of nearly 5 percent. Laboratory analysts said that while some of the decline was due to the economic recession, the drop also came about because Americans are using more efficient vehicles and appliances. The laboratory said that electricity generation from solar arrays, wind turbines, geothermal wells, and hydroelectric dams all grew from 2008 to 2009, with wind power showing the most dramatic increase, from .51 quads in 2008 to .70 quads last year. “The increase in renewables is a really good story,” said A.J. Simon, an energy analyst at the lab. “It’s a result of very good incentives and technological advances.”

This post originally appeared on e360 Digest.

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This is an example of a ecological restoration project. (Photo Credit: Dr. John Kanowski.)

Restoring damaged rainforest is a more effective way of capturing carbon than cultivating industrial, single-species tree plantations, according to a new study. After testing three types of plantations in northeastern Australia — monoculture plantations of native conifers, mixed plantations, and restored rainforests containing a diversity of trees — Australian researchers found that restored forests were more densely wooded than monoculture plantations, had larger trees, and captured 106 tons of CO2 per hectare, compared with 62 tons stored in timber plantations. The findings come at a time when nations and companies are exploring ways to offset greenhouse gas emissions through preservation and restoration of tropical forests. Forestry scientists are concerned that investment dollars will be spent on single-species plantations rather than the restoration of diverse forests, said John Kanowski, an ecologist with the Australian Wildlife Conservancy. While timber plantations are a cheap source of abundant wood and rubber, some ecologists say they are little more than “green deserts” that lack biodiversity.

This post originally appeared on e360 digest. | Image added by Worldchanging via.

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British designers are developing a new type of offshore wind turbine that rotates on its axis, mimicking the spiral of a sycamore seed, and that stretches nearly 900 feet (275 meters) from tip to tip. The so-called Aerogenerator has two enormous arms that extend from the base of the structure in a V-formation, each equipped with sails along their length that act like aerofoils to generate lift and cause the structure to turn at about three revolutions per minute. Designed by the engineering firm Wind Power, and backed by a consortium of academic and business organizations, the design would generate enough electricity to power 5,000 to 10,000 homes, more than twice as much as the most powerful existing wind turbine designs. The developers hope the design is ready for use by 2013. The proposal joins others in an international race to build a 10-megawatt offshore wind turbine, including a proposal by U.S.-based Clipper Marine to build turbines rising nearly 600 feet above the North Sea.

This post originally appeared on e360 Digest.

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The U.S. and Europe added more power capacity in 2009 from renewable sources than from conventional sources such as coal and oil, and this year or next the world as a whole will add more capacity to the electricity supply from alternative energy sources than from fossil fuels, according to two new reports. The reports, issued by the United Nations Environmental Program and the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century, said that in 2009 renewables made up 60 percent of newly installed power capacity in Europe and more than 50 percent in the U.S. Although global investment in green energy decreased in 2009, to $162 billion, some countries, such as China, saw rapid growth; private and public investment in clean energy in China jumped 53 percent in 2009, with the country adding 37 gigawatts of renewable power capacity — nearly half of the 80 gigawatts of renewable power capacity added worldwide last year. China surpassed the U.S. in 2009 as the country with the largest investment in clean energy. Worldwide, investments in solar power and biofuels declined in 2009, but there was record investment in wind power, totaling $67 billion, the reports said. The reports also said the number of countries with policies encouraging green energy investment has doubled in the past five years, from 55 to more than 100.

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New technologies, feed-in tariffs, and tax credits are helping propel the small wind industry, especially in the United States. Once found mostly in rural areas, small wind installations are now starting to pop up on urban rooftops.

by Alex Salkever

The Solarium, a new 8-story apartment building in New York City, is part of a new wave of green buildings in Gotham. Its exterior is made from 100 percent recycled material. The burnished floors are sustainably farmed bamboo. The apartments lack bathtubs in order to save water. Perhaps the most novel green accoutrement of the Solarium, however, is a small, black windmill perched on a short pole rising from the rooftop. Made by WindTronics, the windmill went live in April — it is one of the early beta units from the Michigan startup.

The company claims a single windmill can supply as much as 30 percent of a household’s annual power needs if winds average roughly 10 miles per hour. That is a brisk steady breeze but even homes averaging lesser amounts (5-9 mph winds) can receive significant electrical outputs of 15 to 30 percent of annual power needs. The Solarium’s wind turbine will power light fixtures in common areas and a rooftop theater for residents. “It has no noise and no vibration,” says Cyrus Claffey, the CEO of Clareo Networks, a real estate technology and design company that researched and planned the project for the Solarium’s developers. “It is bird friendly. And it has a great design. Power kicks in at a much lower windspeed than comparable products.”

This WindTronics windmill represents a new wave of technology innovation sweeping through the small wind industry. This innovation combined with national, regional and local incentives, as well as significant cost reductions in installations and products, is driving fast growth for small windmill makers. In 2009, despite an abysmal economy, the U.S. small wind market (turbines with rated capacities of 100 kilowatts or fewer) grew by 15 percent, according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). That growth included an increase of 20.3 megawatts of new capacity and $82.4 million in sales.

The 2009 tally pushed the total installed capacity of small wind turbines in the United States to 100.2 megawatts. (That’s only equivalent to one-fifth the output of an average coal-fired power plant in the United States. But more than half of that capacity came online in only the last three years, making small wind one of the fastest-growing renewable energy resources around.) This adoption is being driven by government incentives, improved zoning procedures, consumers’ growing affinity for residential clean energy, and emerging financing mechanisms. The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act expanded available federal investment tax credits for small windmills to 30 percent of the total cost of a wind system, an enormous boost that puts small wind on equal footing with the fast-growing residential solar industry.

“You can add the federal credit on top of state level rebates that can be 20 percent to 25 percent and that pushes the effective price of installing a small residential wind system down to $15,000 on average,” says Ron Stimmel, the legislative affairs manager for AWEA. With such a system, he notes, consumers are effectively pre-paying their electricity bills for decades. According to Stimmel, most windmills have a lifespan of 20 to 30 years.

To date, most of the growth in small wind in the United States has come in rural and semi-rural areas. This has been due to the requirement for many types of small windmills to sit atop poles that rise at least 40 feet above terra firma. Rural areas have long been more permissive of these types of installations. Looser zoning codes in those areas have allowed farmers to put up windmills without having to go through permitting hoops — or angering neighbors who might have to look at the spinning systems. Even in these types of rural regions, however, penetration remains below 5 percent and room for growth is enormous.

Some rural states have embraced wind at a policy level. Vermont, for example, became the first state to implement a feed-in tariff (FIT) for small wind systems. This tariff guarantees that small wind farmers can resell excess power back to the big utilities at above market rates.

According to AWEA, roughly half of all small wind power additions in 2009 were in the U.S., and the country has more than three times as many small wind manufacturing companies as the next closest competitor, Japan. While the U.S. may lead in small wind innovation, the rest of the world is looking to catch up. Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, China, Germany and Holland all have significant numbers of small wind technology companies.

At present, the United Kingdom and Canada have the most well-developed small wind markets outside of the United States. But 33 countries have put in place FITs for small wind power generated by homeowners and small businesses who wish to sell their power back into the grid. Such tariffs are designed to promote the installation of smaller scale renewable power projects. These countries include most of the developed world and emerging giants such as China and India, but also a number of developing economies including the Philippines and Kenya. International policy and finance bodies are pushing hard to bring small wind systems to isolated rural communities, particularly as a complement to solar installations. The World Bank has undertaken an aggressive program to push small wind to developing nations in South America, Asia and Africa as part of its Renewable Energy in the Rural Market initiative.

Many existing small wind companies have global dealer networks, and renewable energy project finance is now finally catching up, allowing dealers both in the U.S. and abroad to offer buyers financing options to defray costs or maximize tax benefits. “The primary step is going to be distributor financing,” says J.J. Carrasco, a principal at Atoll Financial, which signed a deal in 2009 to underwrite purchases of small wind turbines sold by Helix Wind. While Atoll plans to launch its projects in the U.S., “We are also interested in bringing U.S. energy applications in developing markets such as China and Brazil,” says Carrasco. Other investors and financiers, like Carrasco, have taken a keen interest in small wind. Over the past five years, venture and private equity investors have poured $252 million into U.S. small wind companies, hoping to reap substantial rewards as the market lights up and more homes, commercial buildings and farms turn to spinning blades to lighten their electric bills.

In the U.S., Stimmel and other industry experts believe farmers and others in out-of-the-way tracts will continue to put up tall poles and windmills at increasing rates, effectively hedging themselves against often volatile electricity prices. But smaller windmills are moving closer to the city centers in less dense metropolitan areas and are popping up like mushrooms in exurbs on smaller plots of land of less than an acre.

Take the case of Nancy Tabor. The co-owner of McClane Electric, a small alternative energy contracting firm located near Las Vegas, Nev., Tabor signed up as a dealer for Arizona-based Southwest Windpower in January, 2009, after the new federal tax credit for small wind became law. In the wake of the credits, Southwest Windpower secured a financing vehicle for its dealers, allowing homeowners to more easily borrow money to pay for wind turbine installations.

Several years earlier, the city of Las Vegas had passed new permitting procedures that made it much simpler for homeowners in some areas to receive approval for wind turbines on plots of land as small as a half-acre. Tabor has installed several units and says many more customers are eager to put up a windmill, pending the requisite collection of wind data for their proposed sites. “Out here, you have really good winds in many places, particularly with a little bit of elevation. It’s an excellent place for these types of projects,” says Tabor.

The arrival of more advanced systems, like the WindTronics device, could herald deeper penetration into urban areas previously considered unusable due to the chaotic nature of the breezes and the long periods of relative low winds. The WindTronics system, which resembles a fancy racing bike wheel, is vibration- and noise-free. Birds readily recognize the windmill, and it can be installed on a rooftop, eliminating the need for tall, unsightly poles. More importantly, according to WindTronics, it begins to generate power at wind speeds as low as two miles per hour, five miles per hour less than more traditional windmill designs, and it can continue to generate power at wind speeds as high as 42 miles per hour, nearly 15 miles per hour higher than standard shut-off speeds for most wind turbines.

WindTronics is hardly alone in trying to reinvent the small wind turbine. Hundreds of startups and incumbents right now are vying for traction in the nascent market. The vast majority of these small wind players are located in the U.S., making the country the capital of small wind innovation. Systems either proposed or in production range from very standard four- and three-blade systems, to bicycle-wheel designs like that of WindTronics, to vertical-axis windmills that catch wind power in spiraling motions. A novel wind-power startup based in Hawaii, Humdinger Wind Energy, seeks to produce wind power by capturing flutter and vibration in a stretched membrane, a method akin to capturing the energy produced by the snapping of a flag in the breeze.

This upswelling of innovation bodes well for the future of small wind and could help bring a wind-driven glow to many more homes and buildings in the not so distant future.

This post originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

Image of the gearless WindTronics system, which generates energy at the blades’ tips and can be installed on a rooftop, courtesy of WindTronics via Yale Environment 360.

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Even after the failure to reach agreement on binding CO2 cuts in Copenhagen last December, the United Nations’ outgoing chief climate negotiator is confident that the world is making progress on global warming. The key, he says, is convincing all nations, particularly developing ones, that tackling climate change is in their long-term economic interest.

by Elizabeth Kolbert

For four years, Yvo de Boer, executive director of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, has faced the daunting challenge of persuading nearly 200 nations that it’s in their interests to begin weaning themselves from the fossil fuels that make the world go ‘round. The culmination of his tenure came last December in Denmark, where he and many others tried — and failed — to get world powers to commit to binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

As he prepares to leave his post at the end of June, de Boer — widely admired for his diplomatic skills and commitment to blunting the gathering threat of global warming — says he is not discouraged by the slow pace of talks to reduce emissions. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, conducted by New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert, de Boer said the world community now squarely acknowledges the dangers posed by climate change and that since Copenhagen 127 countries have backed the Copenhagen Accord, with many agreeing to voluntary emissions reductions targets. “Governments around the world are already beginning to shift their policies,” he said. “The world is beginning to move on climate change.”

It’s vital, said de Boer, that the world’s industrialized nations step up efforts to slash emissions, while also working with countries such as China to make the transition to green energy. Innovative policies to shift world economies to renewable fuels are needed to alleviate concerns from major developing countries that cutting emissions will prevent them from lifting their people out of poverty, said de Boer. “At the end of the day, if you can’t make a convincing case that green growth is possible, then it’s end of story,” he said.

De Boer said he is more optimistic today than when he assumed his position in 2006. The struggle to slow global warming will be a long one, he said, but he remains convinced that the world community will one day realize the economic and environmental benefits of making the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. “I really do believe,” said de Boer, “that once we take the first serious bites of this, we’ll actually find it tastes quite good.”

Yale Environment 360: Obviously no one’s had a more comprehensive view of climate negotiations for the last four years than you have. In your opinion, as you get ready to go, what is it going to take to move this process forward? You hear a lot of people saying we’re not going to do anything until there’s a disaster, at which point obviously the science tells us that it’s too late.

Yvo de Boer: Well, I certainly hope we’re not going to wait until there is a disaster because, as you rightly say, then it will be too late. Sometimes international climate policy reminds me a little bit of the frog in water that gets hotter and hotter, and the frog doesn’t notice until it’s too late. If we let things get out of control and are already confronted by extreme impacts of climate change, then it really will be too late.

I don’t have the sense that’s the direction in which it’s going. I think for a multitude of reasons, of which concern over climate change is one, governments around the world are already beginning to shift their policies. In the aftermath of Copenhagen we had 127 countries associate themselves with the Copenhagen Accord. Those countries cover more than 80 percent of global energy-related CO2 emissions. All industrialized countries have submitted 2020 targets and 35 or 36 developing countries, including all the big ones, have submitted national action plans. So I think the world is beginning to move on climate change. The challenge now is to put in place through the negotiations the regulatory framework that will allow them to proceed on that road in a balanced and well-organized way.

e360: You said [recently] that you did not see the process delivering adequate emissions targets in the next decade. What are the consequences of waiting beyond 2020?

de Boer: Well, what I was trying to explain is that the industrialized country targets that were offered post-Copenhagen do not take us into the minus 25 to 40 percent range that the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] says is what gives us a 50-50 chance of avoiding a more than 2 degree [Celsius] temperature increase. And the targets and actions committed by all countries post-Copenhagen are not sufficient to see a global peaking of emissions in the next decade. So that means that we would need to see a very significant increase of ambition in the next couple of years for goals by the end of the decade to measure up to what science tells us is needed. And I think that the likelihood of dramatically increasing on the offers that were made post-Copenhagen by the time we get to [climate talks in] Mexico [in December] is relatively small.

e360: Right. You also said that it’s essential that current pledges grow over the next few years, otherwise the 2 degree C world will be in danger. Now, you know already, even under best-case scenarios, we have a 50-50 chance, science tells us, of staying below 2 degrees C. So what do you see as the odds of staying below that target at this point? And, as a follow-up, at what point do we say that the door to a 2 degree C world has been slammed shut?

de Boer: I think that the key to getting this thing under control quickly enough lies in getting started. I mean, many people remember that when sulfur dioxide trading started in the United States, industry was screaming that this would be the end. And instead they turned out to be well-implementable programs that actually led to significant cost savings.

The big gain of [the] Bali [climate talks] for me was the fact that we recognized that having only industrialized-country targets under Kyoto was not good enough, that we need to move to a comprehensive global response. And I think that there needs to be learning-by-doing experience, especially in developing countries, that embarking on climate policy can be married with economic growth. And the speed at which we learn that lesson depends to a considerable extent on the effectiveness with which we can put an international regime in place. If developing countries are confident that there is financial, technological, and capacity-building support for them to embark on this journey, then I think that the willingness will grow to move forward.

Part of the stalemate, I think, is caused by the fact that developing nations are not particularly impressed by the efforts made by industrialized countries so far, be it in terms of emission reductions or in terms of financial support for the developing world. And at the same time, those developing countries are being asked to take on increasing commitments when they’re not sure that there will be delivery on the necessary infrastructure.

e360: When President Obama was elected there were high hopes in this country at least, and I assume internationally, that U.S. policy was going to change or there was going to be progress on climate. What kind of marks do you give the administration so far?

de Boer: Well it depends, I suppose, on what kind of an educationalist you are. I would give the administration eight out of 10 for effort since I believe in encouragement.

e360: Oh you’re an easy grader.

de Boer: Well, the mark for actual results would be unfortunately a little bit lower. But I must say the Obama administration hasn’t exactly had it easy in the sense that pretty much everything that could go wrong has gone wrong in terms of debates about the economic recovery package. The financial crisis which took up a lot of attention, then getting agreement on the economic recovery package, then health care coming on top of that, where I think President Obama had to use a lot of his credit and leverage. Then the legislation getting stuck in the Senate, now this oil crisis and the whole debate that that is sparking.

e360: Right, but I guess I would argue a lot of those things were self-inflicted. I mean, they didn’t have to do those things. They chose where to spend their chips.

de Boer: Well, I think you can blame President Obama for a lot, but I don’t think you can blame him for the economic crisis. I certainly think that that made the whole health care thing much more difficult, and even though I’ve devoted 14 or 15 years of my life to addressing climate change, I can understand that President Obama accorded a higher priority to health care given how important that is directly to the American people and how long Democratic administrations have been trying to get that fixed.

e360: What in your mind is a realistic stabilization target at this point?

de Boer: I think it’s realistic to work towards a 450 parts per million concentration [of atmospheric CO2] scenario, so the 50-50 for 2 degrees [C increase]. I really do believe that once we take the first serious bite of this, we’ll actually find it tastes quite good. What I find interesting is that countries like China and Korea seem to have realized more clearly than all others that this economic crisis needs to be used to change the economic growth paradigm. I think that China recognizes as no other country that you simply cannot continue to achieve 7, 8, 9 percent economic growth per year with the current economic model. I don’t know how many times in every decade you would need to double the size of the Chinese rail network to move enough coal across the country to keep the current model surviving. So I think there is in many parts of the world a recognition that something needs to change. And I honestly believe that once we begin to embark on that journey in a serious way, we will become increasingly enthusiastic and see that shift.

e360: After Copenhagen you heard people start to argue that the whole UN process is just too unwieldy, you can’t get 190-plus countries to agree to basically anything. And that we need to try to maybe find a new way forward. What would you say to those folks?

de Boer: Well, I would say we got 190 countries to sign up to the climate change convention in Rio, we got 190 countries to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol. We got 190 countries to launch negotiations for the next round in Bali, so I think it’s been done before. That doesn’t mean to say it’s easy. I suppose one of the great drawbacks of democracy is that it takes time and effort, that the fact of the matter is that in these negotiations you’ve got major industrialized countries that are worried about their competitive edge, major developing countries that are worrying about how they’re going to marry climate policy and poverty eradication. Small island countries that are afraid all of this debate is going to take so long they won’t be around to see the successful conclusion. And then oil-, coal-, and gas-producing countries or companies that are afraid climate policy is going to be the end of them.

And trying to find a balance in all of that is difficult. It would be relatively easy to get the 20 biggest emitters around the table and say, “Let’s deal with the emissions side of the equation.” But that doesn’t mean that you’ve addressed the concerns of the 100-plus developing countries that have contributed nothing to climate change but will be confronted with most of the consequences.

e360: Well, that gets to the question of whether there is even in theory a treaty that’s both equitable and effective. I mean, you do have these incredibly profound equity issues that are on the table and by some accounts [are] almost insoluble.

de Boer: Well, in my speech to delegates [at a meeting in Bonn] one of the things I said was that greater legal rigor doesn’t always lead to greater ambition. I don’t know if the attempt or the perceived attempt to impose targets on major developing countries really encourages those countries to step forward and be ambitious. The dilemma in all this is that on the one hand the sense of urgency makes you want to act fast, but on the other hand I at least have the realization that this really needs to be a learning-by-doing process. That it’s a longer journey that we’re on and we need to raise our level of ambition over time.

When I was in that small group of heads of government negotiating the final deal in Copenhagen, I heard every single industrialized country leader being willing to commit to an 80 percent reduction by the middle of the century. Determining how that is to be achieved, how fast, and with who taking what share of that 80 percent reduction will require many rounds of negotiation.

e360: But couldn’t I argue anyone can agree to a target of 80 percent long after they’re dead. I mean, isn’t the challenge to agree to something that you can be held to, within a time span that people can adequately keep track of?

de Boer: I’ve tried to find the marking point between short term and long term. I think the marking point, the point that marks the transition from short term to long term, is called elections. And it doesn’t matter if the elections are in a week’s time or in three years’ time, that’s the point that marks the transition. If you as a leader commit to something which voters generally see as nonsense or offering platitudes beyond the grave, [it will] not be well received.

e360: If you look back in the history of the world, are there planetary problems that we’ve solved this way?

de Boer: We’ve made a number of transitions in the global economy, be it from steam to modern industry or into the Internet era. I think we have made big global transitions. If I had to compare it with another huge struggle, I think the struggle to get the world to accept that smoking is actually bad for your health is very comparable to what we’re going through on climate change, including much of the industry resistance and fighting the science and all of it. But I think at the end of the day if you can’t make a convincing case that green growth is possible, then it’s end of story. And part of being able to make a convincing case on green growth is pricing carbon properly… We have not made the green economic growth case convincingly. That’s still a process that we are in. I still maintain that the most effective way of making that case is by reversing the polluter pace principle and instead of seeing the producer as the polluter to see the consumer as the polluter. I don’t feel the slightest inclination to exert influence on your lifestyle, although that’s undoubtedly a very good one, as long as you don’t confront me with the bill for your bad behavior. You know, you can drive the biggest Hummer that you want, providing the environmental cost of that vehicle is in the price tag that you pay rather than in the price tag that I have to pick up on my bicycle.

e360: Is there any advice that you’re giving to your successor [Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica] that you can share with us?

de Boer: I think that clearly one of the major issues that we need to address in moving forward is confidence on the part of the developing countries that this actually is in their real long-term economic interest, their environmental interest aside. And I think she being someone who comes from a developing country, and somebody who comes from a developing country that’s decided to act very aggressively on climate change, will give her a definite advantage in terms of understanding where the concerns of developing countries lie and trying to find ways forward that deal with those concerns.

e360: Are you leaving this job more or less optimistic about solving this problem than you entered it four years ago?

de Boer: I’m leaving it more optimistic. I mean, I really think it was a tremendous achievement that under the Bush administration we managed to launch negotiations in Bali. I think the number of countries that have, after Copenhagen, associated themselves with the accord is a testament to the fact that leaders are not willing to be slowed down by lack of formal progress. So I think the world politically has turned a corner on this issue. Having worked in environment ministries for a large part of my life, I’ve always known that unless you get this topic on the agenda of world leaders it’s just not going to move. And 120 heads of state and governments coming to Copenhagen, I think, was in and of itself very significant indeed.

e360: Can you talk to us just a little bit about what you see your role as going forward? What are you going to be doing?

de Boer: Well, I’ve been saying for a long time that while governments need to provide the policy framework, it’s up to the private sector to deliver the results. And what I’m going to be doing over the coming years is looking very hard to see how you can design international and national climate change policy and sustainability policy that makes sense from a business point of view. What do you need to do to make it possible for business to advance?

e360: Is there anything I should have asked you that I missed?

de Boer: Well, what I see if I look around me is a number of global trends. There’s a global trend on energy prices and energy security, which is preoccupying you guys in the U.S. very much. There’s a global trend on climate change. There’s a global trend on natural resource depletion. And those three trends are all basically pointing in the same direction. And coming at those three trends at the speed of about 300 miles an hour is 5.4 billion people currently living on less than 10 dollars a day who would love to get a lifestyle.

e360: Those are very hard to reconcile.

de Boer: It’s possible to reconcile, but you can only reconcile it with a more sustainable economic model. So that means that even if the political climate change debate is delayed a little bit, that’s not going to slow things down on energy prices, resource depletion, or population growth. And I think, I’ve always maintained that the best thing that ever happened for climate policy in Europe was when Russia closed the gas pipeline to the Ukraine. Because then suddenly European energy policy, European climate policy, and industrial policy, which up to then had been in complete conflict with each other, suddenly became aligned.

This interview originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

Image of Yvo de Boer via Yale Environment 360.

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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Climate Change at 11:30 AM)

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A San Francisco company has developed a wireless light-monitoring network that it says can cut the energy use of office buildings by roughly 40 percent. The technology, developed by Adura Technologies, can dim or switch off lights to coincide with changes in the hours of daylight and enables employees to remotely turn lights off and on. The system’s “smart grid” technology assigns an IP address to each light and electrical outlet, providing building owners with a detailed picture of how much energy is being used in a building and how that use can be cut. “I can give you your carbon footprint by cubicle or by room,” said Adura chief executive Jack Bolick. In a recent test by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, giving employees wireless control of the three lights closest to their workstation and allowing them to turn them on or off individually cut the electricity consumed by the building’s lights by up to 72 percent. U.S. businesses spend an estimated $33 billion a year on lighting.

This post originally appeared on e360 Digest.

Image of office building lights at night courtesy of Flickr photographer caribb under the Creative Commons License.

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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Energy at 11:00 AM)

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Researchers say they have identified several classes of organic chemicals that can capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then be used to make more environmentally benign plastics. Researchers at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore used chemicals called imidazoliums and N-heterocyclic carbenes to couple CO2 with “epoxide” molecules to create polycarbonate plastics that can be used in a variety of applications, from drinking bottles to compact discs. Significantly, in addition to finding a use for carbon dioxide, these polycarbonates do not contain bisphenol A (BPA), a potentially harmful chemical found in most commercial polycarbonate plastics in use today. The imidazolium salts are stable enough that they can repeatedly “grab” CO2 molecules and incorporate them into larger molecules in the plastic-making process, according to a study published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science. The process also eliminates the need for petroleum in the manufacture of plastics.

This post originally appeared on e360 Digest.

Image of polycarbonate flag courtesy of Flickr photographer wallyg under the Creative Commons License. Note: Image is not representative of the new technology described in this post.

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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in New Science at 11:57 AM)

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Flying dwarfs any other individual activity in terms of carbon emissions, yet more and more people are traveling by air. With no quick technological fix on the horizon, what alternatives — from high-speed trains to advanced videoconferencing — can cut back the amount we fly?

by Elisabeth Rosenthal

In most departments I have excellent green credibility, and my carbon footprint is small. I have not owned a car in more than 20 years and commute to work by subway. I walk to the market and generally no longer buy produce flown in from far away. I recycle. I have an air-conditioner, but use it only on the hottest of days. I have gone paperless with all my bills.

But my good acts of responsible environmental stewardship are undercut by one persistent habit that will be hard to break, if it is possible at all: I am a frequent flyer, Platinum Card. Last year, I traveled nearly 100,000 miles of mostly long-haul travel. And that figure puts me in the minor leagues compared to legions of business consultants, international lawyers, UN functionaries — and even climate scientists — who certainly travel much more.

Flying, particularly on long-haul flights, is so highly emitting that it dwarfs everything else on an individual carbon budget. Many climate groups have calculated that in a sustainable world each person would have a carbon allowance of two to four tons of carbon emissions annually. Any single long-haul flight nearly “instantly uses that up,” said Christian Jardine, a senior researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University.

Despite the fact that most governments have vowed to reduce carbon emissions by a significant chunk by 2020, most of us are flying more and more. So while emissions from most other sectors are falling, they are relentlessly rising for aviation and will continue to do so.

According to various estimates, emissions from aviation currently represent 2 to 3 percent of CO2 emissions and are likely to double or triple by 2050. The United States’ Federal Aviation Administration projects that even after the air travel slowdowns caused by 9/11 and the recent economic collapse and the rise in fuel prices and the bankruptcy of several major carriers in the past few years, the number of general aviation hours will grow an average 2.5 percent a year through 2030, according to the latest projection.

While jobs and housing and car sales are only slowly recovering from the economic crisis of 2008-9, airline travel has rebounded with a vengeance: In March, international air travel, measured in paid passenger miles, was 10.3 percent higher than a year earlier, according to the International Air Transport Association. Airfreight, measured by the weight of goods flown, was 28.1 percent higher. In fact, current levels of air travel and freight are only 1 percent below their early 2008 highs. Can the stock market replicate that?

The current vogue of canceling out the emissions effect of plane travel by purchasing carbon offsets to support activities like tree-planting in Africa has come under fire as a feel-good illusion and, anyway, cannot be scaled up to cover the amount of flying going on. Although the airline industry is working hard to improve efficiency with more direct routes and less idling time on the runway, it acknowledges such activities yield limited, one-time gains. There is no quick technological fix, like fully renewable airline fuel, on the horizon.

Given the math, it is easy to feel all is lost. George Monbiot concludes in his book, Heat, that to meet current environmental targets set by the British government for 2050, almost all flying will have to stop and the current fleet of planes grounded. “I recognize this will not be a popular message,” he writes.

Many of us by now have adjusted our land transportation habits — buying hybrid cars, revisiting public transportation, or biking to work, for example. But few have addressed what I call the “flyers’ dilemma”: When do we really need to fly on an airplane, and can or should we change that? With business and life so dependent on air travel, it is hard to even imagine how to do with less. In 2005, Allianz employees flew 490 million kilometers a year — 12.5 thousand times around the world, according to the company’s filing with the Carbon Disclosure Project, whose corporate members agree to report their carbon emissions, with an eye ultimately to reducing them.

Anyone who cares about a future with lower emissions and less fossil fuel must face the problem and some, like Paul Dickinson, executive director of the Carbon Disclosure Project, say change is inevitable: “I’m absolutely, definitely sure that people like you and me will be flying a lot less in 5 to 10 years.” Last month the European Environment Agency started a series of workshops with representatives from all over Europe assembled in Copenhagen to think about how Europe might function in the future without air travel — or with much less of it. (Participants, ironically, flew in.) But how to reduce or eliminate an activity that has become as reflexive as hopping in the car?

High-speed trains will steal market share from flying — they are already doing so on some short-haul routes in Asia and Europe. Emissions estimates of train versus plane vary tremendously, depending on the how you do the calculation. Christian Jardine notes that estimates for airline travel range from 98.3 to 175.3 grams of CO2 per kilometer for each passenger, depending on things like aircraft type and whether the warming effect of airplane contrails is added in. Reasonable estimates for trains depend a lot on the source of electricity the train is using (coal versus nuclear versus renewable). Jardine says he uses a per-person estimate of 17.7 grams per kilometer for international train rides and 60.2 for British national travel. (Much of Britain’s electricity comes from coal, while France’s is from nuclear.)

Where there is very high-speed rail and the distance is less than 350 miles, such as Barcelona to Madrid, train is a no-brainer, quicker than flying. Once you’ve ridden Spain’s AVE on the 2 ½-hour ride between those cities, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would fly the route.

Some of the reason, perversely, is price: The explosion of low-cost airlines on routes like Barcelona to Madrid and Paris to London means that it is often cheaper to take a flight than a train, regardless of the emissions consequences.

For businesses, Dickinson of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) believes that high-quality video conferencing, like Cisco-AT&T’s Telepresence, will displace a huge amount of flying. (Full disclosure: Dickinson has financial interest in a company that sets up conferences). Video conference? I know. Videophones have been on display for decades at Disney’s EPCOT Center but, in real life, the concept has never quite gelled; it long had the feel of those telephone chats with astronauts floating in the Space Station. But with Broadband it can really be different, with images and sound so clear that it appears that the people you face on a large screen are actually in the room.

Indeed, even though Dickinson has been promoting the idea for several years, he, himself, continued to fly a lot. But when a volcanic ash cloud recently turned London into a no-fly zone, he was forced into a serious road test: On April 18 he was scheduled to interview candidates for the job of CDP’s China director in Beijing. When his flight was canceled, he decided to nonetheless proceed with the interviews, virtually. “I interviewed three candidates and chose one — it was unbelievably good,” he said. “Next time I won’t buy a ticket.”

I think this attitude will spread, and is embedded already in the generation now emerging from universities and graduate schools. While people of my generation feel the need for eye contact to negotiate or a handshake to seal a deal, this new generation is far more comfortable with the reality of virtual presence. My two teenagers happily do group school projects and debate team preparation over Skype, MSM or Google chat. When I (50-something) suggest they should meet up in person, they roll their eyes. What would be the point of schlepping across town for tasks like this? You schlep for fun things, like movies and parties.

Price pressure, too, I think will force us to rethink this flying habit. In 2012, airlines enter Europe’s emissions trading scheme. If airline fuel or emissions are ever taxed or traded — and I’d guess they will be — ticket prices will rise, and travel will decline.

Of course all this won’t be enough to totally solve the aviation emissions problem, and will not be the solution that airlines want. I can’t imagine my job — or many jobs — getting done with one long-haul flight each year. But we could reduce our flying and emissions from air travel an awful lot. Whatever gains can be achieved through behavior, policy, and technical changes in different sectors will be important.

So now a challenge for 2010: Last year more than 40,000 people flew to Copenhagen to attend the United Nations Climate Conference, COP-15. There were scientists, negotiators, students, journalists (myself included), as well as politicians, many with 20-person retinues in tow. They were there because they cared passionately about climate. Perhaps, as COP-16 in Cancun approaches this year, each of us should ask what we add, or take away, by being on site? Do we really need to fly there?

This post originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

Image of airplane courtesy of Flickr photographer AMADEUS KANAAN under a Creative Common’s License.

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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Transportation at 10:37 AM)

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The practice of “commissioning,” in which an engineer monitors the efficiency of a building from its design through its initial operation, just may be the most effective strategy for reducing long-term energy usage, costs, and greenhouse gas emissions from buildings. So why is it so seldom used?

by Richard Conniff

In a different world, it could be a reality television show — “Buildings On Trial,” with a street-savvy engineer going into skyscrapers, factories, offices and other commercial buildings to find the dumb mistakes that make them waste energy and produce a disproportionate share of the nation’s global warming emissions.

And in almost every case, even new buildings proudly displaying a LEED “green building” plaque by the front door, the engineer would come back out with a list of energy hog culprits: Here’s the ventilation system fan installed backwards, so it blows full force into another fan blowing in the right direction. Here’s the control system set up so heating and cooling systems both work at once, like driving with your feet on the brakes and the accelerator at the same time. Here are the stuck dampers that prevent the building from drawing on outside air when the temperature is right.

Such mistakes are commonplace even in the best buildings — and often costly. In one case, says Dave Moser of Portland Energy Conservation, Inc., an Oregon nonprofit, it cost a building owner $5,000 to fix stuck dampers — and cut $50,000 off the annual energy bill. In a case of simultaneous heating and cooling at an 85,000-square-foot academic building, a minor programming fix cost almost nothing and saved $100,000 a year in wasted energy, according to Mark Miller of Strategic Building Solutions, a Connecticut company.

The business of finding and fixing these mistakes is called “building commissioning,” a term borrowed from the standard naval practice of commissioning a new ship with sea trials to determine whether it’s fit for service. People started doing roughly the same thing with non-residential real estate in the mid-1990s, as buildings with computer-controlled systems became almost as complex as ships at sea. Commissioning frequently involves no more than a few weeks of testing out systems. But in the most complete form, the commissioning agent works with architects in the design stage, to help save money by specifying properly sized energy systems, then follows the building through construction, trains the operating staff, and tracks energy performance in different seasons through the first year of operation. Older buildings now also go through retro-commissioning, in search of improved efficiency.

But if you imagine that real estate developers must be lining up for this service — if only to save money, or determine whether they are getting the building they paid for — you would be mistaken. Even now, well under 5 percent — and probably closer to 1 percent — of new commercial buildings actually go through the process. Projects seeking certification under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (or LEED) program, managed by the U.S. Green Building Council, can earn extra points by going through “enhanced” commissioning. But they’re only required to do “fundamental” commissioning — a sort of commissioning-lite, potentially performed not by a third party, but by an “independent” employee of the construction manager whose contractors made the mistakes in the first place.

And yet building commissioning is “arguably the single-most cost-effective strategy for reducing energy, costs, and greenhouse gas emissions in buildings today,” according to a 2009 report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. If applied to the nation’s entire non-residential building stock, including retro-commissioning of older buildings, it would yield $30 billion in potential energy savings every year by 2030, the study projects, and avoid 340 million tons of global warming emissions annually. To put the latter number in perspective, other studies project that the United States is now on a path to increase global warming emissions by more than a third, up to 9.7 billion metric tons a year by 2030. Roughly 35 percent of emissions come from heating, cooling, and providing electric power for buildings and homes, split evenly between commercial and residential. So building commissioning is hardly the only remedy required. But the potential savings ought to make it one of the most attractive.

Why isn’t it more popular? A lot of developers, and even some building efficiency experts, have simply never heard of commissioning. Others have gotten turned off, says Glenn Hansen of Portland Energy Conservation, Inc., by early experiences in which “a fairly junior engineer” would go through a building checking off boxes on a clipboard. In a 2008 study by the New Buildings Institute, the energy performance in many LEED-certified “green” buildings was actually worse than in the average conventional building, probably because inexperienced people doing “fundamental” conditioning had failed to detect problems.

“Just because you have a paper process doesn’t mean you’re going to get the desired result,” says Hansen. As the commissioning industry has matured, he says, it has gotten better at putting together “a team of people who have good in-field experience at shaking buildings out.”

But the main roadblock to building commissioning is that it can seem expensive. And the company that develops a building typically has little incentive to take on that extra upfront burden, since a different company will often end up owning and operating the building. For new buildings, full commissioning typically adds $1.16 on top of construction costs of roughly $230 a square foot, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study. For existing buildings, it costs 30 cents a square foot. That’s not counting the cost of changes recommended as a result of commissioning. But the bottom line still looks good, the study reports: Energy savings from commissioning typically result in a payback time of 4.5 years for new buildings and 1.1 years for existing buildings.

Several new programs attempt to address the problem of one company getting stuck with the upfront costs while another company reaps the benefits from commissioning and other energy efficiency measures. Last year, the city of Berkeley, Calif., issued the nation’s first “property assessed clean energy,” or PACE bonds, which pay the initial costs of such improvements on both commercial and residential properties, then recoup the investment over 20 years through a property tax surcharge that stays with the building even as ownership changes. Sixteen states have already approved enabling legislation for PACE bonds, and at the federal level, the Waxman-Markey climate bill also contains supporting language. On a similar model, an ESCO, or energy service company, will provide efficiency improvements in a building and sometimes guarantee the energy savings that should result; the ESCO makes its money back by pocketing some of the difference between the building’s old energy bill and the new one. About 30 U.S. utility companies also provide rebates or other incentives for commercial customers to undergo building commissioning.

Commissioning of larger commercial properties could eventually be required by building codes. A push for such a requirement recently failed in Oregon. But commissioning is currently under discussion for the 2012 version of the International Energy Conservation Code, which serves as a model for building codes in many jurisdictions.

So-called “monitoring-based commissioning” could also make building owners and operators more comfortable with the idea that the process is actually yielding bottom-line results. Even in the most successful commissionings, says Glenn Hansen, equipment can eventually go out of whack again, or the operating staff can stop paying attention, allowing energy costs to creep back up. But relatively inexpensive control systems now make it possible to monitor usage throughout the life of a building, breaking it down by energy use per degree day, or per square foot, and sending alerts if the chillers, say, start operating inefficiently, or if the whole building misses certain benchmarks.

Given the complexity that makes it prudent for buildings to be commissioned like ships, those kind of monitoring systems can provide critical reassurance. Instead of steering blindly, operators of a building will know hour by hour whether they are in fact heading in the right direction.

This post originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Green Building at 11:50 AM)

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by Elizabeth Kolbert

Is human activity altering the planet on a scale comparable to major geological events of the past? Scientists are now considering whether to officially designate a new geological epoch to reflect the changes that homo sapiens have wrought: the Anthropocene.

The Holocene — or “wholly recent” epoch — is what geologists call the 11,000 years or so since the end of the last ice age. As epochs go, the Holocene is barely out of diapers; its immediate predecessor, the Pleistocene, lasted more than two million years, while many earlier epochs, like the Eocene, went on for more than 20 million years. Still, the Holocene may be done for. People have become such a driving force on the planet that many geologists argue a new epoch — informally dubbed the Anthropocene — has begun.

In a recent paper titled “The New World of the Anthropocene,” which appeared in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, a group of geologists listed more than a half dozen human-driven processes that are likely to leave a lasting mark on the planet — lasting here understood to mean likely to leave traces that will last tens of millions of years. These include: habitat destruction and the introduction of invasive species, which are causing widespread extinctions; ocean acidification, which is changing the chemical makeup of the seas; and urbanization, which is vastly increasing rates of sedimentation and erosion.

Human activity, the group wrote, is altering the planet “on a scale comparable with some of the major events of the ancient past. Some of these changes are now seen as permanent, even on a geological time-scale.”

Prompted by the group’s paper, the Independent of London last month conducted a straw poll of the members of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the official keeper of the geological time scale. Half the commission members surveyed said they thought the case for a new epoch was already strong enough to consider a formal designation.

“Human activities, particularly since the onset of the industrial revolution, are clearly having a major impact on the Earth,” Barry Richards of the Geological Survey of Canada told the newspaper. “We are leaving a clear and unique record.”

The term “Anthropocene” was coined a decade ago by Paul Crutzen, one of the three chemists who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for discovering the effects of ozone-depleting compounds. In a paper published in 2000, Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, a professor at the University of Michigan, noted that many forms of human activity now dwarf their natural counterparts; for instance, more nitrogen today is fixed synthetically than is fixed by all the world’s plants, on land and in the ocean. Considering this, the pair wrote in the newsletter of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, “it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term ‘anthropocene’ for the current geological epoch.” Two years later, Crutzen restated the argument in an article in Nature titled “Geology of Mankind.”

The Anthropocene, Crutzen wrote, “could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane.”

Soon, the term began popping up in other scientific publications. “Riverine quality of the Anthropocene,” was the title of a 2002 paper in the journal Aquatic Sciences.

“Soils and sediments in the anthropocene,” read the title of a 2004 editorial in the Journal of Soils and Sediments.

Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the Britain’s University of Leicester, found the spread of the concept intriguing. “I noticed that Paul Crutzen’s term was appearing in the serious literature, in papers in Science and such like, without inverted commas and without a sense of irony,” he recalled in a recent interview. At the time, Zalasiewicz was the head of the stratigraphic commission of the Geological Society of London. At luncheon meeting of the society, he asked his fellow stratigraphers what they thought of the idea.

“We simply discussed it,” he said. “And to my surprise, because these are technical geologists, a majority of us thought that there was something to this term.”

In 2008, Zalasiewicz and 20 other British geologists published an article in GSA Today, the magazine of the Geological Society of America, that asked: “Are we now living in the Anthropocene?” The answer, the group concluded, was probably yes: “Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene… as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization.” (An epoch, in geological terms, is a relatively short span of time; a period, like the Cretaceous, can last for tens of millions of years, and an era, like the Mesozoic, for hundreds of millions.) The group pointed to changes in sedimentation rates, in ocean chemistry, in the climate, and in the global distribution of plants and animals as phenomena that would all leave lasting traces. Increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, the group wrote, are predicted to lead to “global temperatures not encountered since the Tertiary,” the period that ended 2.6 million years ago.

Zalasiewicz now heads of the Anthropocene Working Group of the ICS, which is looking into whether a new epoch should be officially designated, and if so, how. Traditionally, the boundaries between geological time periods have been established on the basis of changes in the fossil record — by, for example, the appearance of one type of commonly preserved organism or the disappearance of another. The process of naming the various periods and their various subsets is often quite contentious; for years, geologists have debated whether the Quaternary — the geological period that includes both the Holocene and its predecessor, the Pleistocene — ought to exist, or if the term ought to be abolished, in which case the Holocene and Pleistocene would become epochs of the Neogene, which began some 23 million years ago. (Just last year, the ICS decided to keep the Quaternary, but to push back its boundary by almost a million years.)

In recent decades, the ICS has been trying to standardize the geological time scale by choosing a rock sequence in a particular place to serve as a marker. Thus, for example, the marker for the Calabrian stage of the Pleistocene can be found at 39.0385°N 17.1348°E, which is in the toe of the boot of Italy.

Since there is no rock record yet of the Anthropocene, its boundary would obviously have to be marked in a different way. The epoch could be said simply to have begun at a certain date, say 1800. Or its onset could be correlated to the first atomic tests, in the 1940s, which left behind a permanent record in the form of radioactive isotopes.

One argument against the idea that a new human-dominated epoch has recently begun is that humans have been changing the planet for a long time already, indeed practically since the start of the Holocene. People have been farming for 8,000 or 9,000 years, and some scientists — most notably William Ruddiman, of the University of Virginia — have proposed that this development already represents an impact on a geological scale. Alternatively, it could be argued that the Anthropocene has not yet arrived because human impacts on the planet are destined to be even greater 50 or a hundred years from now.

“We’re still now debating whether we’ve actually got to the event horizon, because potentially what’s going to happen in the 21st century could be even more significant,” observed Mark Williams, a member of the Anthropocene Working Group who is also a geologist at the University of Leicester.

In general, Williams said, the reaction that the working group had received to its efforts so far has been positive. “Most of the geologists and stratigraphers that we’ve spoken with think it’s a very good idea in that they agree that the degree of change is very significant.”

Zalasiewicz said that even if new epoch is not formally designated, the exercise of considering it was still useful. “Really it’s a piece of science,” he said. “We’re trying to get some handle on the scale of contemporary change in its very largest context.”

This post originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

Image of person overlooking sea of clouds courtesy of Flickr photographer ewan and donabel under the Creative Commons License.

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Earlier this year, climatologist Ellen Mosley-Thompson led an expedition to drill into glacial ice on the Antarctic Peninsula, one of the world’s fastest-warming regions. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Mosley-Thompson explains what the Antarctic ice cores may reveal and describes what it’s like working in the world’s swiftly melting ice zones.

Ellen Mosley-Thompson and her husband, Lonnie Thompson, are two of the world’s most respected climatologists and glaciologists, traveling around the globe to bore holes in shrinking glaciers and ice sheets. Mosley-Thompson works mainly at the poles, in Greenland and Antarctica, while her husband has done more ice corings of low-latitude glaciers — in the Andes, Africa, and the Himalayas — than any other person alive. Their work, taken together, paints a sobering portrait of the rapid retreat of most of the world’s glaciers and ice caps in the face of the buildup of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Several months ago, during the Antarctic summer, Mosley-Thompson — the director of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University — returned to Antarctica for the ninth time to head a six-person expedition to the Bruce Plateau on the Antarctic Peninsula. The peninsula has warmed faster than almost any other place on Earth, with winter temperatures increasing by 11 degrees F over the past 60 years and year-round temperatures rising by 5 degrees F. As a result, sea ice now covers the western Antarctic Peninsula three months less a year than three decades ago, 90 percent of glaciers along the western Antarctic Peninsula are in retreat, and large floating ice shelves are crumbling.

The most famous of those ice shelves is the Larsen B, a slab of ice — once the size of Connecticut — that disintegrated spectacularly in 2002 in the Weddell Sea. Mosley-Thompson’s expedition was part of a larger study to research the collapse of the Larsen A & B ice shelves and to place this major event in the context of previous eras of climate change.

Working for 42 days in frigid temperatures at 6,500 feet, Mosley-Thompson and her team encountered numerous hardships and difficulties, including the loss of ice drills. Thanks to the ingenuity and engineering skills of her team members, the group finally succeeded in drilling 1,462 feet to the bedrock atop the Bruce Plateau. When the ice cores return to Ohio State in June, Mosley-Thompson and her colleagues hope to analyze the ice to track the history of climate change for thousands of years, perhaps to the last glacial period and beyond.

But even before she analyzes her latest drilling samples, Mosley-Thompson tells Yale Environment 360 senior editor Fen Montaigne, one thing is clear: the retreat of the world’s glaciers, coupled with evidence from other Antarctic ice cores showing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at their highest levels in more than 800,000 years, “tells us very clearly that we have a serious problem.”

Yale Environment 360: I wondered if you could describe for our readers the purpose of this ice coring expedition.

Helen Mosley-Thompson: We were part of a much larger International Polar Year project sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The name of the big project is LARISSA (LARsen Ice Shelf System, Antarctica). This was a very large, multidisciplinary international effort to get a better understanding of the interaction of the various systems operating in the Larsen B embayment — for example, the oceanographic system, the ice system, the ecological system, the atmosphere.

e360: And [the Bruce Plateau] is basically a big ice cap or glacier in the midst of these beautiful mountains that run the length of the Antarctic Peninsula?

Mosley-Thompson: Yes, that’s correct. Actually, the Bruce Plateau itself is relatively narrow at the spot where we were drilling. So on our six clear days — we were there 42 days — we had excellent horizon. We could see mountains and we could look out into the distance where we knew the remaining part of the Larsen B Ice Shelf and the Larsen C Ice Shelf were out to the east.

e360: Was [this project] basically an attempt to understand the warming behind the break up of the Larsen B [Ice Shelf] and how it fits into a climate history record?

Mosley-Thompson: Yes. Of course the break up of the ice essentially makes an area available that has not been available for five to ten thousand years. So the idea is that the ecologists could actually look at an ecosystem on the ocean bottom in an area that, eight or nine years ago, was covered by ice – and [had been] for thousands of years — [compared] to one that is now open water. And of course the ecosystems in that area will be adjusting to the new normal. So the idea for the ecologists was that they would be able to look at the potentially rapid changes in a disturbed ecosystem.

For the glaciologists, one of the critical things that they wanted to examine closely was — and still is — since the 2002 break up, how much more rapidly are the land-based glaciers discharging ice out into the ocean. Some measurements back in 2004 based upon satellite imagery suggested some of those glaciers increased their flow speed by four to eight times. Because if the ice shelf is gone, then you’ve lost that buttressing effect. And so the question really is how much additional ice is being dumped through those major glaciers?

e360: And, the glaciers whose motion to the sea is being accelerated because the ice shelf isn’t holding them back, that leads to direct sea level rises?

Mosley-Thompson: That’s correct. Any ice that’s on land that you put in the water will raise sea level. And so then the marine group had people who were looking at changes in marine geochemistry. They have chemical measurements of the ocean, they have drilled cores in the ocean bottom along the outer margins of the Larsen B, when it was in place. And the idea is that they could now come into the area that was ice covered very recently and collect new cores. So then [we] integrate those records, [and] where appropriate, where the time scales overlap, compare with the records that we’ll be getting from the cores that we drilled.

You know one of the things we don’t really know for that region is how extensive the ice cover on the peninsula was during the last glacial stage, when North America, from Canada and the northern part of the U.S., and the Finnish/Scandinavian area, was covered by these large ice sheets during the last glaciation. The perception is that you would have had more extensive ice cover in the Antarctic Peninsula, but there’s no evidence to either support or refute that. Those records [are] not in hand yet. And so one of the big questions for the ice core that we drilled was, does the basal or bottom ice contain ice that was deposited during the last glacial stage, or has all of the ice that exists on the spine of the peninsula been deposited since the beginning of Holocene.

e360: Which is what, ten, twelve thousand years ago?

Mosley-Thompson: Exactly. And so we don’t have those answers yet. The ice cores that we drilled won’t even arrive in Columbus, Ohio [until] June 18th. So they’re still in transit.

e360: What are you hoping to find out about the climate records of the recent thousands of years?

Mosley-Thompson: Well we want as many details as we possibly can. So we’ll be looking at the oxygen and hydrogen isotopic ratios that tell us something about the temperatures in the area. We’ll be measuring particulates. We’ll be looking at the sulfate — that, we already know, gives us an excellent record of the volcanic activity. We’re going to look at something called methane sulfonic acid, MSA. If you have more MSA, the thinking is that you probably then have more open water because the primary source for that would be from phytoplankton. So we’re going to be looking at this to see if it might be consistent with other evidence that would tell us whether the sea ice was more extensive, less extensive, or absent.

e360: MSA, from the photosynthetic process that involves phytoplankton’s growth, would put compounds into the atmosphere that you could actually find in the [glacial] ice?

Mosley-Thompson: Right. They convert to dimethyl sulfide, DMS. DMS is actually what is put in the atmosphere and then that converts to this MSA. That’s what we can measure in the ice. We also have a facility here that we’ve just implemented or installed in the last few months that can do what’s called trace element analysis. So if there are specific areas of the core that are of interest — I mean once we have constructed a robust time scale for the core, there will be periods in the past that are of specific interest to the climatological community. We can then go into those parts of the core and measure very, very tiny concentrations.

e360: What do you think is the minimum age that you’ll be able to go back to?

Mosley-Thompson: We picked up 100 percent of the ice [down to the bedrock], contained in 445 meters of core. So what that means is that as we get lower and lower in the core, time is going to become very compressed. We do not know at what point we will lose our ability to pick up annual variation. Our intent is to analyze the core in the highest possible time resolution, so that we don’t lose any valuable information. But there will be a point beyond which we will not be able to look at the seasonally varying parameters and count those years.

e360: And that’s because the weight of the snow and ice just compresses those years so tightly that you can’t distinguish them.

Mosley-Thompson: That’s right… But we should know pretty quickly whether or not that bottom ice was deposited during a warm period, like the Holocene, or during a somewhat [colder] or much colder period, like the end of the last glacial stage. And we’ll know that from the oxygen and hydrogen isotopic ratios. There’s a very clear signature in the depletion of oxygen 18 [indicating cooling] in the glacial stage ice… We anticipate that this ice probably did build up in the latter part of the last glaciation. Knowing that answer will provide some really interesting constraints on what the climate must have been like at the end of the last glacial and in the early Holocene period.

Another thing that our team here at Ohio State is intently studying is a fairly large abrupt climate event around 5,200 years ago that seems to be very widespread, and no driving mechanism has yet been identified for that. We do not know whether there’s any signature of it in Antarctica. But since this event was most strongly expressed in mid- to low- latitudes, if it is in Antarctica you would expect it’s going to be in the peninsula for sure, because of the [Antarctic Peninsula’s] tighter connection to the mid-latitudes of the southern hemisphere.

e360: Is this the same signal that your husband, Lonnie Thompson, picked up in some Andean glaciers?

Mosley-Thompson: Exactly. The Quelccaya ice cap in the southern Andes of Peru is rapidly retreating, and as it has retreated the plant deposits are exposed and they’re very fresh, which means that they’ve never been exposed before. They literally dry out in the course of a year and so these are fresh plant deposits, but they’re all 5,200 years old. Which means that that ice cap advanced over those plants and that ice cap has never been smaller for 5,200 years. But there is evidence for this abrupt shift all the way from logs that are now coming out of glaciers in Alaska as they retreat, [to] very rapid changes in bogs in Patagonia. All throughout the tropical regions there are different types of evidence suggesting a very rapid change. And the change wasn’t consistent. In some areas the change was to cold and dry and in other areas it was to cold and wet. So is it evident in the [Antarctic] Peninsula? That’s one of the key things we want to answer.

e360: Out of your core atop the Bruce Plateau, do you expect that for quite a few hundred or more than a thousand years back you will have a good CO2 and temperature record?

Mosley-Thompson: There is no reason to expect that we will not.

e360: As some of our readers may know, there have been some extremely deep ice cores taken in Antarctica at Dome C that go back 800,000 or 900,000 years.

Mosley-Thompson: Right.

e360: I understand that the Dome C record shows very clearly that we’ve got more CO2 in our atmosphere now than at any time in 800,000 years.

Mosley-Thompson: Oh yeah. Very clearly. If you look back over the eight glacial/interglacial cycles, you essentially see that CO2 never rises above 300 parts per million and we’re at about 389 now. Methane never rises above about 800 parts per billion, and I think we’re at about 1,700 parts per billion. So we’re clearly outside the range of natural variability. I personally think that graph simply showing the natural fluctuations in those two important greenhouse gases, over almost a million years of Earth history — and then you see the two dots [today] that are so much higher than anything that we see in that near-million history — tells us very clearly that we have a serious problem.

e360: I know you have done a lot of ice coring in Greenland and Antarctica and I know your husband has done groundbreaking work in low-latitude glaciated areas like the Andes and the Himalaya. What does this cumulative ice coring work show about what we’re experiencing in the last century or so in terms of the warming of the planet?

Mosley-Thompson: Well, from the tropical work, the cores in the Andes and the Himalaya, the oxygen isotopic ratio in those cores, when you stack those cores together, show very clearly that the last 50 or 60 years have been the warmest in the last 2,000 years. There’s a lot of regional variability. So for example, we’ll often hear that the Medieval Warm Period, roughly 1,000 years ago, was as warm as today. And it’s interesting if we look at the three ice cores from the Andes, we do see a Medieval Warm Period signature and a very, very distinct Little Ice Age cool signature. That’s not surprising because both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age are expressed most strongly around the Atlantic Basin. And the moisture that builds the glaciers in the Andes of Peru actually comes from the southern part of the North Atlantic and the equatorial Atlantic, and not from the Pacific, as people might think. So these Andean cores showed a very distinct Atlantic signature.

But the four cores from the Tibetan Himalaya show virtually no signature of medieval warming or Little Ice Age cooling. They’re sampling a totally different region, and so when we put these records together, the medieval warming is very modest and the Little Ice Age signature is strongly muted as well. And what really stands out when you put these all together and into the composite, is the last 60 years. The oxygen isotopic enrichment in the tops of the cores [indicating warming] is very striking.

The other thing that we are now seeing, particularly with the tropical ice fields — and it’s not something that we really were looking for when we started going to the high mountains — is that these glaciers are retreating very rapidly. And, in fact, several of the ice fields, particularly one that we recently published the results [for] in the southwestern Himalaya, it has not gained mass or has no ice that was deposited after 1950. It’s like these glaciers are just literally being decapitated. And it’s very frightening.

e360: When you see global warming skeptics seize on a bit of sloppy work in the IPCC report that predicted the end of Himalayan glaciers in 2035, the skeptics then say, “Well, see, the glaciers aren’t melting.” It must be extremely frustrating to you that this kind of misinformation gets out to the public when in fact you and your husband see that the world’s glaciers are disappearing at a very rapid rate.

Mosley-Thompson: Of course it is frustrating, but you know any time that a system, a human system, shows change and people may have to make changes and there are clearly economic consequences, you get into these debates. The unfortunate thing is that scientists generally operate by one set of rules, and the way that we debate and the words that we use and the standards to which we try to hold ourselves are quite different from political debate. In political debate you can use quite different language, things don’t have to be precise, you can virtually lie if you want to and then apologize later. But a scientist, if you speak untruthfully, then what’s on the line for you as a scientist is your credibility and your reputation. But frankly, I’d like to turn that around and say that when you look at the breadth of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, and how much information is in there, the fact that this must be the most egregious error, otherwise they would be making more of something else — I think it’s astounding that the IPCC got as much right as they did because there was just tremendous potential for error.

e360: You and your husband work in the world’s ice zones, and so you’re getting a first-hand and almost shocking look at the rate of melt. Do you sometimes wish that if the general public could somehow accompany you on your work they would have a much greater sense of urgency about doing something about global warming?

Mosley-Thompson: Well, you know, a picture is worth a thousand words. Generally when we go and give talks and we show that the loss of ice is occurring in virtually every environment that has ice, people walk out and say, “Wow, I just didn’t realize the scope of this.”

e360: And if we don’t begin to rein in CO2 emissions, where do you think the cryosphere, the Earth’s ice zone, is heading?

Mosley-Thompson: To the oceans. Ultimately that’s where all water goes, to the lowest level.

This post originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

All images re-posted from Yale Environment 360. Image credits and captions, from top to bottom, are as follows:

Mosley-Thompson from Ohio State University

Map from Hamilton College/National Science Foundation
“This map shows the distribution of scientific expeditions involved in the National Science Foundation’s LARISSA project on the Antarctic Peninsula. The LARISSA project is designed to study the collapse of the Larsen A & B ice shelves — which occurred because of the rapid warming of the Antarctic Peninsula — and to place these events in the context of previous eras of climate change. The location of the Bruce Plateau ice core drill site is marked by a blue circle two-thirds down in the center of the map.”

Cutting Core Segments from Ohio State University
“Several months ago, during the Antarctic summer, climatologist Ellen Mosley-Thompson, director of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, traveled to Antarctica for the ninth time to head a six-person expedition to the Bruce Plateau on the Antarctic Peninsula. During the 42-day expedition, the team drilled 1,462 feet to the bedrock atop the Bruce Plateau. In this photo, Thompson, left, and members of the research team cut a core into segments for storage.”

Stored Core Segments from Ohio State University
“Once sections of the ice core have been retrieved, segmented and packaged in plastic sleeves inside cardboard tubes, they are stored in a snow pit adjacent to the drill dome. Ultimately, they are carried out from the drill site to the British Rothera station where they are stored in freezers awaiting transport by ship back to Ohio State University.”

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Insecticides such as DDT have long been used to combat the scourge of malaria in the developing world. But with the disease parasite becoming increasingly adept at resisting the chemical onslaught, some countries are achieving striking success by eliminating the environmental conditions that give rise to malarial mosquitoes.

by Sonia Shah

For over half a century, the battle against malaria has been waged with powerful anti-malarial drugs and potent mosquito-killing insecticides, weapons born from the wonders of synthetic chemistry. In recent years, however, fed up with the financial and ecological drawbacks of chemical warfare, malarious communities from China to Tanzania to Mexico have been forging a new way to fight the scourge, one that draws inspiration from the lessons of ecology more than chemistry. Rather than attempt to destroy mosquitoes and parasites outright, these new methods call for subtle manipulations of human habitats and the draining of local water bodies — from puddles to irrigation canals — where malarial mosquitoes hatch.

The most striking example comes from Mexico, which has completely abandoned its previously lavish use of DDT in malaria control for insecticide-free methods and has seen malaria cases plummet.

Like many countries, Mexico for decades relied upon insecticides to fight the disease, by spraying mosquito-killing chemicals on the interior walls of homes where blood-feeding mosquitoes rest, among other methods. Between 1957 and 1999, taming Mexico’s malaria required 70,000 tons of DDT.

New, environmentally-sensitive methods, such as clearing vegetation along waterways and around homes, were introduced in Oaxaca, the country’s most malarious region, in 1998. By 2002, malaria cases had fallen from more than 17,500 to just 254, and Mexico incorporated the new methods into its national anti-malaria program. By 2000, Mexico had completely phased out use of DDT in malaria control; by 2002, it had phased out all other insecticides in malaria control as well, while simultaneously keeping malaria in check. No deaths from malaria were reported in Mexico in 2008, the most recent year of data available from the World Health Organization.

Similarly, in Sichuan, China, new, non-chemical methods involving the manipulation of water flow in irrigation canals have led to the near cessation of malaria, with malaria rates plummeting from 4 per 10,000 in 1993, to less than 1 per 10,000 by 2004. In several counties of the province, no malaria cases were reported at all between 2001 and 2004. Similar non-chemical gains against the disease have been achieved in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as well.

Malaria currently infects 300 million people a year and kills nearly one million, and though the incidence of malaria is decreasing in some countries, it still rages in many others.

The new, greener methods of control rely upon insights into the exacting set of local environmental conditions that malaria transmission requires. While it is commonly considered a disease of poverty, malaria is just as much a disease of the environment. In part, that’s because both malaria parasites and the mosquitoes that carry them thrive in warm, humid conditions.

But it is also because malaria-carrying mosquitoes, all of which hail from the genus Anopheles, don’t generally venture far from where they hatch, and each species tends to lay its eggs in a specific kind of water body. Some prefer shady, flowing waters; others require sunlit puddles. Some can tolerate brackish water, while others must have clear water. That means that if people’s exposure to the habitats of local malarial mosquitoes can be reduced, they will get fewer bites, and thus less malaria.

Malaria transmission is also critically dependent on the life span of the mosquito. The malaria parasite won’t become infective inside the insect until it completes a 7-12 day cycle of development. That means that anything that decreases mosquito longevity — a dearth of useful places to hide from predators, say, or excessively dry conditions — can also effectively squelch malaria.

In Oaxaca, Mexico, malariologists found that the local malaria vector, Anopheles pseudopunctipennis, hatches from the still, algae-choked waters on the edges of streams, rarely flying more than 2 kilometers from its birthplace. And so, starting in 1999, they recruited volunteers in malarious communities to remove green algae and trash from the rivers and streams near their settlements.

“As a gift,” says Jorge Mendez, former chief of Mexico’s anti-malaria agency in the Ministry of Health, “we gave house paint to the local residents, to motivate community participation.” The density of Anopheles larvae dropped by 90 percent within three years. Mexican health officials made life more dangerous for the surviving insects, too, by clearing the vegetation around domiciles, where Anopheles mosquitoes hid from both predators and the desiccating sunshine. They also provided prophylactic anti-malarial drugs. The program ultimately cost 75 percent less than the insecticide-reliant one it replaced.

In Sichuan, China, Anopheles hyrcanus prefers the standing water found in rice paddies, traditionally kept permanently flooded. A water-saving “wet/dry” irrigation scheme introduced in 1994 called for periodically drying out the rice fields. “The Chinese have fine-tuned this to an art,” says Princeton University malariologist Burton Singer. The result was the destruction of Anopheles’ larval habitats, a four-fold reduction in malaria, and increased harvests to boot.

In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Anopheles gambiae lays its eggs in trash-blocked sewer drains, and so community workers there began a program of clearing drains and spreading the microbial insecticide Bacillus thuringiensis into sewers. “This was the lowest-hanging fruit of them all,” says Gerry Killeen of the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania, “the most basic and undramatic environmental management.” It led to a 30 percent drop in A. gambiae’s transmission of malaria.

Other techniques, useful in areas where destroying or minimizing mosquito habitats is untenable, can be as simple as making sure people close the eaves of their houses. More capital-intensive methods include leveling roads to avoid the formation of puddles, and installing running water and sanitation systems so that homes are less likely to be near stagnant water.

These nuanced — but decidedly low-tech — programs recall an earlier, pre-chemical era, when malaria control workers made similar gains against the disease by tinkering with the local environment, mostly because they had few other options. In the copper mines of Zambia during the 1930s, for example, malariologists significantly reduced malaria by clearing vegetation, removing obstructions from local waterways, and draining flooded areas. In Panama, during the building of the canal in the early 1900s, anti-malaria workers drained swamps and coated puddles with a thin skin of larvae-suffocating oil, part of a multi-pronged anti-malaria strategy that enabled the canal to be built. Similar measures helped eradicate malaria in the southern United States.

Environmental management methods fell into disuse after World War II, with the development of a string of synthetic insecticides and drugs, led by DDT and chloroquine. Powerful and highly effective, modern insecticides and anti-malarial drugs can kill malaria mosquitoes and parasites quickly and cheaply, wherever they are used, regardless of local conditions. They can be implemented in even the most remote locales, with minimal infrastructure.

Managing the local ecosystem to minimize malaria vectors, in contrast, requires concerted effort from local communities, and expertise not just from health officials, but from ecologists, farmers, and engineers as well. It is labor-intensive. Ditches must be dug, drains cleared, vegetation removed. And what might be the perfect salve in one place could be the worst possible thing to do in another. “The details of what you need depend on the local ecological conditions,” says Singer. “You can’t mastermind it with a master plan.” And while insecticide-spraying campaigns, drug distribution, and the doling out of insecticide-treated bednets can bring malaria mortality down rapidly, reaping the benefits of environmental tinkering takes years.

And so today, while the preferred chemicals have changed — instead of DDT and chloroquine common in the postwar era, the chemicals of choice are now primarily pyrethroid insecticides, impregnated in bednets, and anti-malarial drugs based on artemisinin, an extract from the sweet wormwood tree — the emphasis on chemical control has not.

The current war against malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, for which financing from governments and NGOs increased tenfold between 1998 and 2008, calls for 730 million bednets doused with insecticides, 172 million homes sprayed annually with insecticides, 228 million drug treatments for malaria patients, and 25 million preventive drug treatments for pregnant women, to be blanketed across Africa’s malarial heartland, as the inter-agency Roll Back Malaria Partnership has outlined. Today, 11 countries are conducting formal campaigns to eradicate the disease, and malaria declines in the wake of chemical-based anti-malaria campaigns have been reported in Equatorial Guinea, Zanzibar, Sao Tome and Principe, Rwanda, and Ethiopia.

And yet, as dramatically effective and universally applicable chemical methods may be, they cannot provide the long-lasting sustainability of environmental management methods. None of the chemical methods of malaria control last longer than a handful of years. Insecticide-treated bednets must be replaced or re-treated every three to four years. Drugs must be continually administered. Interior walls must be re-sprayed with insecticide every six to 12 months.

With sustained funding and political commitment, insecticidal and pharmaceutical treatments for malaria could, in theory, go on indefinitely. The trouble is that in the meantime, the malaria parasite and the mosquitoes that carry it become increasingly adept at resisting the chemical onslaught. Plasmodium parasites that could circumvent the killing action of artemisinin drugs have already emerged in parts of Southeast Asia. By 2007, artemisinin drugs were failing in up to 30 percent of malaria cases in parts of Thailand and Cambodia, and by 2009, those drug-resistant parasites had spread deeper into southern Cambodia. Experts worry that it is only a matter of time before these drug-resistant malarias spread into the malarial heartland in sub-Saharan Africa.

Similarly, malaria-carrying mosquitoes that can resist the pyrethroid insecticides commonly used to treat bednets were first reported in 1993, and have since turned up across sub-Saharan Africa. In a 2005 study in Cameroon, just as many kids using treated nets came down with malaria infections as those using untreated ones.

While DDT is still used in indoor spray campaigns against malaria, resistance to the chemical — and related insecticides — is widespread.

“Our enthusiastic programs are again going to founder in the swamp of biological resistance,” warned malariologist William Jobin, on the scientific website MalariaWorld in April.

Finally, as the chemical war against malaria intensifies, so, too, do fears of toxicity. While the volume of DDT and other insecticides used in spray campaigns against malarial mosquitoes is miniscule compared to agricultural use, environmentalists and farmers worry that the increasing availability of DDT for malaria control could result in surreptitious diversion onto farms. Concerns simmer, too, about the understudied problem of disposal of the insecticide-treated bednets.

The environmental management programs in Mexico, China, and Tanzania all arose in the wake of just such concerns. Mexico’s program, for example, was implemented after a 1996 agreement with the United States and Canada to phase out all uses of DDT. The irrigation program in Sichuan, China was implemented after the cost of running a 1986-1993 program of insecticide-treated bednet distribution became unmanageable. In Dar es Salam, the local malaria vectors had adapted to the widespread presence of bednets by biting outdoors instead.

The benefits of environmental management techniques — their longer-term sustainability, ability to harness community participation, and lower overall costs — may tip the balance in their favor in other fronts in the war on malaria, too. Health officials from Ecuador and Nicaragua, for example, have been flocking to Mexico to learn about their malaria program, Mendez says.

Many experts hope these techniques — still limited to just a handful of countries — will become more widespread, not to replace chemical methods entirely, but as complementary alternatives that will reduce the use of insecticides and drugs.

“Current methods are good at dramatic reductions, but the resilience and long-term sustainability are open questions,” says Robert Bos, a senior scientist for the World Health Organization. Adds Mendez, “We need to put on the table a new model, in order to get an enduring control.”

Sonia Shah is an author and science journalist whose writing has appeared in The Nation, New Scientist, The Washington Post and elsewhere. Her third book, The Fever: How Malaria Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years, will be published in 2010.

This article originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

Image of mosquito courtesy of Flickr photographer James Jordan.

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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Health at 2:58 PM)

Technorati Tags: Global Warming Blog, Global Warming Statistics

The effects of climate change and sea-level rise on coastal cities present a new challenge to urban planners, one that inspires the exhibition, Rising Currents, now at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Working in collaboration with the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, five teams of architects and landscape designers were asked to envision projects for New York City’s future coastline. The plans all create what they call “soft” infrastructures — landscapes that will allow rising sea levels to flow within and around the building sites where power, water, sewer, and gas lines are encased in waterproof vaults beneath the sidewalks. The plans imagine the open spaces surrounding these building sites becoming estuarine habitats that will provide cost-effective storm-water management, as well as revitalize the harbor’s biodiversity. The designers have conceived new oyster habitat as well as archipelagos of constructed islands to dampen the effects of increased storm surges. These new habitats will, in turn, provide new open space in the form of marshland parks — something the city predicts will become more necessary as temperatures rise a predicted 3 to 5 degrees F over the next century. Scientists forecast that sea levels around New York City could easily rise several feet by 2100. The exhibition runs through Oct. 11.

Here is a preview of some projects on display:

(Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio)
In this proposed plan, Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio’s concept, “New Urban Ground,” transforms Lower Manhattan by creating more waterfront access and a network of walkways that allow people to walk among the marsh and tall grass.

(nARCHITECTS)
nARCHITECTS crafted a vision for the neighborhoods on both sides of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, an area that includes parts of Brooklyn and Staten Island. The so-called “New Aqueous City” offers a paradigm for a city that can control and absorb rising seas even as it accommodates rising population. This view shows residential buildings hung from shared bridge structures, floating wetlands, and wave-absorbing public piers.

(SCAPE)
Landscape architect Kate Orff and SCAPE proposed transforming the highly polluted Gowanus Canal area by revitalizing its long-lost natural oyster reef. The proposal calls for building structures in the shallow waters of the Bay Ridge Flats, just south of Reed Hook, Brooklyn, for growing native oysters and cultivating other marine life.

(LTL Architects)
Areas such as Liberty State Park, the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island could become partially submerged as the seas rise. Rather than react with defensive structures like sea walls, LTL Architects proposed extending the coastline by 45 miles, creating a new landscape that connects to the New Jersey shoreline. This drawing includes a concert pier. The vision, they say, is an aqueous landscape more reminiscent of Venice than New York.

(Matthew Baird Architects)
Considering that climate change could open Arctic shipping routes, bringing more traffic to New York Harbor, Matthew Baird Architects proposed new uses for the World War II-era piers and warehouses around Bayonne, New Jersey, and Staten Island, such as sites for new energy production, industrial recycling of glass, and solar plants.

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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Imagining the Future at 12:16 PM)

Technorati Tags: Global Warming Blog, Global Warming Statistics