Small-scale ethanol production plant

Floyd Butterfield, in his research facility in Paso Robles, won an award in 1981 for a small plant that made ethanol from alcohol. Now he’s working to build trash-to-fuel plants in the Midwest and ethanol makers for personal use.

ETHANOL FUEL

• What it is: Ethyl alcohol, the same type of alcohol found in alcoholic drinks.

• Uses: As a biofuel alternative to gasoline.

• How it’s made: Mass-produced by fermentation of sugar from corn or sugar cane.

• Can I run my car on it? Not yet. Today’s auto engines can handle gas mixed with up to 10 percent ethanol. Autos running on 100 percent ethanol fuel are found in Brazil.

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Floyd Butterfield was ahead of today’s need for alternative energy sources when he built a small Paso Robles plant that would produce fuel from alcohol — in 1981.

But not until recently, as gas prices started creeping up, has Butterfield’s contest-winning design for a small-scale ethanol production plant garnered worldwide attention.

The North County man is now designing and consulting for two innovative ethanol-based businesses. One includes production of four small-scale gas-from-trash plants in the Midwest, and another could bring ethanol production into your own backyard.

“To me, the writing on the wall for the oil business has been there for 20 years. It’s going to slowly get more and more expensive because the resource is disappearing. It makes sense to me that we cannot run the world’s economies on a resource that’s finite,” said Butterfield...

As a young geophysicist, Butterfield worked in water exploration for several years after earning a graduate degree from Colorado’s School of Mines. When he tired of the constant travel, he came home to Paso Robles and tried to think of a business idea.

The 1980 gas crisis fueled his thoughts. Prices at the pump had skyrocketed, not unlike today, and rationing had been instituted. He decided to build a small plant that would make fuel from alcohol.

With backing from Santa Ynez investor Stuart Gildred, Butterfield designed an ethanol plant and built it on property on North River Road between Paso Robles and San Miguel. The design won a statewide competition, but production at the plant lasted only three years.

“We couldn’t make any money,” he recalled, because once prices at the pump stabilized, people were no longer interested in ethanol.

The gas crisis faded and prices went back down. People stopped talking about needing oil alternatives. Butterfield went into farming and grew lima beans and carrots. The plant eventually was abandoned.

How it works

Making fuel from foodstuff is similar to wine production, Butterfield explained. The key ingredient is starchy waste foods. The fuel plants on which Butterfield is working in the Midwest will start with outdated soda pop, old bread, tortillas, cereals, or waste grains or sugar from food manufacturing companies.

A process of fermentation and distillation follows. Chemical processes along the way create a vapor gas that becomes liquid ethanol.

Major U. S. ethanol producers make 100 million gallons a year. The plants Butterfield is working on will be much smaller, between half a million to 5 million gallons annually.

Some gas stations sell fuel that is up to 10 percent ethanol now, usually for a slightly lower price than regular gasoline. Some cities in the U. S. have mandated that all gas stations use ethanol-blended gas.

Butterfield’s other job takes the ethanol production process straight to the consumer. He has developed a $10,000 home-based machine for producing gas. The E-Fuel 100 Microfueler machine, about the size of a standard refrigerator with a washing machine attached, produces up to 35 gallons of ethanol a week. In theory, Butterfield says, consumers would be able to make enough fuel at home to power their cars and other gas-powered things and could stockpile extra for use when needed. Of course, car engines would need to have the ability to run on 100 percent ethanol fuel.

“Our vision is it will be a lot like doing a load of laundry. Instead of putting clothes in, you’ll put in feed stock, close the lid, press a button, a few days later you have gallons of ethanol,” he explained.

The machine has a pump system so that the fuel it produces can be put directly into cars...

“Henry Ford started the automobile revolution using ethanol, predicting that this renewable and accessible fuel would become the ‘fuel of the future,’ ” he said during the May launch of the Microfueler. “If not for the Prohibition laws in the 1920s and the subsequent rise of the oil industry, ethanol may never have lost its public appeal. E-Fuel will deliver on Ford’s prediction and enable consumers to bypass the costly oil infrastructure and their reliance on fossil fuels.”...

“I thought in 1980 the world was running out of oil. All the signs were there,” he said. “That was true back then, it’s just we were able to stave it off for 25 years. Now we can’t.”

"Cheney wanted cuts in climate testimony"

Vice President Dick Cheney's office pushed for major deletions in congressional testimony on the public health consequences of climate change, fearing the presentation by a leading health official might make it harder to avoid regulating greenhouse gases, a former EPA officials maintains.

When six pages were cut from testimony on climate change and public health by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last October, the White House insisted the changes were made because of reservations raised by White House advisers about the accuracy of the science.

But Jason K. Burnett, until last month the senior adviser on climate change to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson, says that Cheney's office was deeply involved in getting nearly half of the CDC's original draft testimony removed.

"The Council on Environmental Quality and the office of the vice president were seeking deletions to the CDC testimony (concerning) ... any discussions of the human health consequences of climate change," Burnett has told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee...

Cheney's office also objected last January over congressional testimony by Administrator Johnson that "greenhouse gas emissions harm the environment."

An official in Cheney's office "called to tell me that his office wanted the language changed" with references to climate change harming the environment deleted, Burnett said. Nevertheless, the phrase was left in Johnson's testimony.

Cheney's office and the White House Council on Environmental Quality worried that if key health officials provided detailed testimony about global warming's consequences on public health or the environment, it could make it more difficult to avoid regulating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, Burnett believes.

The EPA currently is examining whether carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas, poses a danger to public health and welfare. The Supreme Court has said if it does, it must be regulated under the Clean Air Act...

"THE ISLAND IN THE WIND" (Samsø in Denmark)

A Danish community’s victory over carbon emissions.
by Elizabeth Kolbert

From the New Yorker

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Samsø, which is roughly the size of Nantucket, sits in what’s known as the Kattegat, an arm of the North Sea. The island is bulgy in the south and narrows to a bladelike point in the north, so that on a map it looks a bit like a woman’s torso and a bit like a meat cleaver. It has twenty-two villages that hug the narrow streets; out back are fields where farmers grow potatoes and wheat and strawberries. Thanks to Denmark’s peculiar geography, Samsø is smack in the center of the country and, at the same time, in the middle of nowhere.

For the past decade or so, Samsø has been the site of an unlikely social movement. When it began, in the late nineteen-nineties, the island’s forty-three hundred inhabitants had what might be described as a conventional attitude toward energy: as long as it continued to arrive, they weren’t much interested in it. Most Samsingers heated their houses with oil, which was brought in on tankers. They used electricity imported from the mainland via cable, much of which was generated by burning coal. As a result, each Samsinger put into the atmosphere, on average, nearly eleven tons of carbon dioxide annually.

Then, quite deliberately, the residents of the island set about changing this. They formed energy coöperatives and organized seminars on wind power. They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using.

The residents of Samsø that I spoke to were clearly proud of their accomplishment. All the same, they insisted on their ordinariness. They were, they noted, not wealthy, nor were they especially well educated or idealistic. They weren’t even terribly adventuresome. “We are a conservative farming community” is how one Samsinger put it. “We are only normal people,” Tranberg told me. “We are not some special people.”

his year, the world is expected to burn through some thirty-one billion barrels of oil, six billion tons of coal, and a hundred trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The combustion of these fossil fuels will produce, in aggregate, some four hundred quadrillion B.T.U.s of energy. It will also yield around thirty billion tons of carbon dioxide. Next year, global consumption of fossil fuels is expected to grow by about two per cent, meaning that emissions will rise by more than half a billion tons, and the following year consumption is expected to grow by yet another two per cent.

When carbon dioxide is released into the air, about a third ends up, in relatively short order, in the oceans. (CO2 dissolves in water to form a weak acid; this is the cause of the phenomenon known as “ocean acidification.”) A quarter is absorbed by terrestrial ecosystems—no one is quite sure exactly how or where—and the rest remains in the atmosphere. If current trends in emissions continue, then sometime within the next four or five decades the chemistry of the oceans will have been altered to such a degree that many marine organisms—including reef-building corals—will be pushed toward extinction. Meanwhile, atmospheric CO2 levels are projected to reach five hundred and fifty parts per million—twice pre-industrial levels—virtually guaranteeing an eventual global temperature increase of three or more degrees. The consequences of this warming are difficult to predict in detail, but even broad, conservative estimates are terrifying: at least fifteen and possibly as many as thirty per cent of the planet’s plant and animal species will be threatened; sea levels will rise by several feet; yields of crops like wheat and corn will decline significantly in a number of areas where they are now grown as staples; regions that depend on glacial runoff or seasonal snowmelt—currently home to more than a billion people—will face severe water shortages; and what now counts as a hundred-year drought will occur in some parts of the world as frequently as once a decade.

Today, with CO2 levels at three hundred and eighty-five parts per million, the disruptive impacts of climate change are already apparent. The Arctic ice cap, which has shrunk by half since the nineteen-fifties, is melting at an annual rate of twenty-four thousand square miles, meaning that an expanse of ice the size of West Virginia is disappearing each year. Over the past ten years, forests covering a hundred and fifty million acres in the United States and Canada have died from warming-related beetle infestations. It is believed that rising temperatures are contributing to the growing number of international refugees—“Climate change is today one of the main drivers of forced displacement,” the United Nations’ high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, said recently—and to armed conflict: some experts see a link between the fighting in Darfur, which has claimed as many as three hundred thousand lives, and changes in rainfall patterns in equatorial Africa.

“If we keep going down this path, the Darfur crisis will be only one crisis among dozens of others,” President Nicolas Sarkozy, of France, told a meeting of world leaders in April. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, has called climate change “the defining challenge of our age.”

In the context of this challenge, Samsø’s accomplishments could be seen as trivial. Certainly, in numerical terms they don’t amount to much: all the island’s avoided emissions of the past ten years are overwhelmed by the CO2 that a single coal-fired power plant will emit in the next three weeks, and China is building new coal-fired plants at the rate of roughly four a month. But it is also in this context that the island’s efforts are most significant. Samsø transformed its energy systems in a single decade. Its experience suggests how the carbon problem, as huge as it is, could be dealt with, if we were willing to try.
amsø set out to reinvent itself thanks to a series of decisions that it had relatively little to do with. The first was made by the Danish Ministry of Environment and Energy in 1997. The ministry, looking for ways to promote innovation, decided to sponsor a renewable-energy contest. In order to enter, a community had to submit a plan showing how it could wean itself off fossil fuels. An engineer who didn’t actually live on Samsø thought the island would make a good candidate. In consultation with Samsø’s mayor, he drew up a plan and submitted it. When it was announced that Samsø had won, the general reaction among residents was puzzlement. “I had to listen twice before I believed it,” one farmer told me.

The brief surge of interest that followed the announcement soon dissipated. Besides its designation as Denmark’s “renewable-energy island,” Samsø received basically nothing—no prize money or special tax breaks, or even government assistance. One of the few people on the island to think the project was worth pursuing was Søren Hermansen....

The 2000-Watt Society ->

Most of the people in the world today consume far less than this. The average Bangladeshi, for example, uses only about twenty-six hundred kilowatt-hours a year—this figure includes all forms of energy, from electricity to transportation fuel—which is the equivalent of using roughly three hundred watts continuously. The average Indian uses about eighty-seven hundred kilowatt-hours a year, making India a one-thousand-watt society, while the average Chinese uses about thirteen thousand kilowatt-hours a year, making China a fifteen-hundred-watt society.

Those of us who live in the industrialized world, by contrast, consume far more than two thousand watts. Switzerland, for instance, is a five-thousand-watt society. Most other Western European countries are six-thousand-watt societies; the United States and Canada run at twelve thousand watts. One of the founding principles of the 2,000-Watt Society is that this disparity is in itself unsustainable. “It’s a basic matter of fairness” is how Stulz put it to me. But increasing energy use in developing countries to match that of industrialized nations would be unacceptable on ecological grounds. Were per-capita demand in the developing world to reach current European levels, global energy consumption would more than double, and were it to rise to the American level, global energy consumption would more than triple. The 2,000-Watt Society gives industrialized countries a target for cutting energy use at the same time that it sets a limit for growth in developing nations.

The last time Switzerland was a two-thousand-watt society was in the early nineteen-sixties. By the end of that decade, energy use had reached three thousand watts, and by the mid-seventies it was up to four thousand watts. This rapid rise could be said to follow from technological advances—the spread of automobiles, the advent of jet travel, the proliferation of appliances and electronic devices—or it could be seen as just the reverse: a failure to apply technology where it is needed...

"Utah is going to a 4-day workweek to save energy"

Starting next month, it will be "TGIT" for Utah state employees. As in: "Thank God It's Thursday."

In a yearlong experiment aimed at reducing the state's energy costs and commuters' gasoline expenses, Utah is about to become the first state to switch to a four-day workweek for thousands of government employees.

They will put in 10-hour days, Monday through Thursday, and have Fridays off, freeing them to golf, shop, spend time with the kids or do anything else that strikes their fancy. They will get paid the same as before....

"Pirate fishing boats target Africa"

From the BBC

There is a kind of theft that happens every day in a majority of the world's poor countries - and in many of the richer ones too.
It usually happens out of sight, and most perpetrators get away with it.

The monetary value of this theft is about $15bn per year; the ecological cost can only be guessed at.

Yet many people would turn their noses up if they chanced upon a trove of this treasure.
Because these jewels are fish.

"Those that are fishing illegally, they are paying nothing, so we are losing something from our country", says Mamadou Diallo, programme manager for the environmental group WWF's West Africa office, and a former fisheries officer.

The amount that Africa is losing, if new figures from David Agnew of Imperial College London are right, is about $1bn per year - the cost of licences that illegal fishers should have paid to catch what they are catching.

The ecological cost may, in the long run, be much higher.

"The immediate ecological impact is damage to habitat, because they are using trawls, and trawls are not always good for the ecosystems - they damage habitat for fish," says Dr Diallo.

"The second thing is pollution, because they are discharging at sea, and they can do anything they want."

Precisely how much fish is removed illegally from West African waters is not known - apart from anything else, there is little good data on the state of stocks before the plunder began.

Elsewhere, where ecosystems and commercial fish numbers have been studied for longer, it is clear that illegal fishing can help wreak major damage.

In the Mediterranean Sea, where scientists estimate that illegal catches of bluefin tuna in recent years have almost matched legal catches in weight, changes are afoot...

"Solar Water Heaters Now Mandatory In Hawaii"

Hawaii has become the first state to require solar water heaters in new homes. The bill was signed into law by Governor Linda Lingle, a Republican. It requires the energy-saving systems in homes starting in 2010. It prohibits issuing building permits for single-family homes that do not have solar water heaters. Hawaii relies on imported fossil fuels more than any other state, with about 90 percent of its energy sources coming from foreign countries, according to state data.

The new law prohibits issuing building permits for single-family homes that do not have solar water heaters. Some exceptions will be allowed, such as forested areas where there are low amounts of sunshine.

State Sen. Gary Hooser, vice chairman of the Energy and Environment Committee, first introduced the measure five years ago when he said a barrel of oil cost just $40. Since then, the cost of oil has more than tripled.

“It’s abundantly clear that we need to take some serious action to protect Hawaii because we’re so dependent on oil,” Hooser said. “I’m very pleased the governor is recognizing the importance of this bill and the huge public benefits that come out of it.”

Can't save everything :(

"Long-held views on saving the planet's ecosystems considered anew"

The Defenders of Wildlife, like many environmental groups, is dedicated to the philosophy of biologist Aldo Leopold - that "saving all the parts" of the world's ecosystems is the foundation of conservation.

"To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering," Leopold wrote in his classic 1940s essay "Round River." Those words became part of the foundation of the modern environmental movement.

So when Defenders climate scientist Jean Brennan and others suggest that it may be time to change the Endangered Species Act to allow some species to go extinct, it underscores the crisis they say the West and the world face from climate change.

The nation's top scientists say climate warming is "unequivocal," and much of it is "very likely due" to human causes - and that has forced corporations, investors and government officials to reconsider long-held views.

Now the emerging and fast-moving realities of climate change are forcing wildlife advocates and environmentalist to rethink their philosophies as well.

Do the benefits of nuclear energy outweigh the risks? Will drawn-out court battles on governmental decisions cause more environmental harm than they do good? And the question that tears at the center of Leopold's doctrine: Can all species be saved? "If you think too much about it, it sends you into despair," said Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor at the University of Vermont.

But federal and state scientists and managers say they have no choice but to start, and they gathered in Boise last week at the first meeting of federal officials to look ahead at what policies and strategies need to be changed.

Twenty to 40 percent of all known species could go extinct, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist and endangered species recovery expert Jeff Burgett said. And scientists say that even if greenhouse gases are dramatically reduced, it will take more than 100 years to dissipate the high levels of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.

The dire news was a wake-up call for agency biologists, regional managers and others who hardly were allowed even to discuss climate change over the last eight years of the Bush administration.

Brennan, Parenteau and most wildlife advocates aren't ready to give up on most species. But they no longer are looking to return ecosystems to a former pristine state. Climate change will eliminate many ecosystems around the world and create new ones that no longer can sustain the creatures and plants there now, Brennan said.

Many ecosystems that will exist in 2100 exist nowhere on Earth today, she said.

"Our grandchildren are going to grow up in a world that's unrecognizable today," said Dale Goble, a University of Idaho law professor and co-author of the book "The Endangered Species Act at Thirty." The idea that we can address the threats that species face and bring them back to recovery is the core concept that underlies the Endangered Species Act, Goble said. But "recovery" - as the law requires - is not likely to be an option.

At least 80 percent of endangered species and even many game species that survive will need special, individual management into perpetuity, Goble said.

Species like pikas, a small mammal, and even mountain goats that live in high mountains will lose their habitat and are likely to go extinct.

The warmer weather already may be affecting diseases, which could be moving north into new habitat now warm enough for them to thrive in. A parasitic brain worm is killing moose in Minnesota. West Nile virus, carried by mosquitoes, has moved west and north to threaten sage grouse and even kill people.

"We have to get a whole lot lighter on our feet," Goble said. "We have to be able to act more quickly. Taking risks means you have to try something, and if it doesn't work, you have to try something else." Parenteau has been training environmental lawyers for years to slow things down so more deliberative decisions are made about development. But now, he advocates changes in the National Environmental Policy Act that would allow the nation to move faster on alternative energy development like wind plants, solar and other non-carbon sources.

He points to held-up wind projects and a recent moratorium on solar development in western desert areas.

"I am an environmentalist who has used NEPA to slow things down," Parenteau said. "I'm now saying NEPA should be used to speed things up."

In the latest lawsuit against the dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers, salmon advocates pointed out the lack of a definitive discussion on the effects of climate change on salmon.

Tim Personius, deputy regional director of the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages some of those dams, wonders whether the salmon advocates are looking at the big picture.

The salmon groups say the only way to recover Snake River salmon is to breach four dams on the river in Washington - but the electrical generation lost would have to be replaced with sources more damaging to the climate.

"That effectively would increase carbon emissions an average of 4 million tons per year," Personius said.

Parenteau believes the trade-off of removing the relatively low-power dams to restore salmon is worth the carbon impacts. But he acknowledged that considerations like the larger impacts on thousands of species - including the salmon - from climate change should be taken in to account in Endangered Species Act decisions...

"Electric car system planned in Denmark..."

From "The International Herald Tribune"

"Electric car system planned in Denmark by 2011 using surplus wind power"

COPENHAGEN, Denmark: Denmark's DONG Energy A/S and a Silicon Valley-based startup firm on Thursday said they would install an electric car network in the Scandinavian nation with some 20,000 recharging stations.

The grid, which is set to be in place by 2011, will be operated by Project Better Place, an initiative by Israeli-American entrepreneur Shai Agassi, using excess power from DONG Energy's wind turbines.

A similar network is being built in Israel.

A fleet of battery-driven electrical vehicles will be introduced in Denmark after the recharging stations are built at parking lots and outside homes, Agassi said.

French car maker Renault will provide the vehicles and Japan's Nissan will make the lithium-ion batteries under a partnership with Project Better Place announced earlier this year. Agassi said other car makers and battery producers would join the project later.

The battery would allow a car to drive a maximum of 150 kilometers (90 miles) before recharging, he said, adding that he expects the network to expand to other European countries soon.

"We're in discussion with 30 countries — Europe, America and Asian nations," he told The Associated Press after a news conference in Copenhagen.

When Israel's network was endorsed by the government there in January, supporters hailed it as a bold step in the battle against global warming and energy dependency, but skeptics warned that much could still go wrong along the way.

DONG Energy chief executive Anders Eldrup told reporters that the grid would run on excess energy that its wind turbines generate on windy days. Windmills make up around 20 percent of Denmark's electricity production.

"The extra energy we have, we can use in an intelligent way by putting it in batteries," Eldrup told reporters.

However, on days with no wind the grid would need to use energy from DONG's coal-fired plants, he said, adding that it would still be more environmentally friendly than having cars running on gasoline.

"The cars' CO2 emission would still be half of what it is today with fossil fuels," Eldrup said.

DONG Energy operates some of the thousands of windmills that dot Denmark, a country of 5.4 million. The small Scandinavian nation began a national windmill program in 1979 under pressure from grass roots organizations demanding new sources of electricity that have less impact on the environment than conventional plants.

NOAA Report Connects Extreme Weather to Global Warming

The "U.S. Climate Change Science Program" and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research today released a scientific assessment that provides the first comprehensive analysis of observed and projected changes in weather and climate extremes in North America and U.S. territories. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change previously evaluated extreme weather and climate events on a global basis in this same context. However, there has not been a specific assessment across North America prior to this report.

Among the major findings reported in this assessment are that droughts, heavy downpours, excessive heat, and intense hurricanes are likely to become more commonplace as humans continue to increase the atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

The report is based on scientific evidence that a warming world will be accompanied by changes in the intensity, duration, frequency, and geographic extent of weather and climate extremes.

"This report addresses one of the most frequently asked questions about global warming: what will happen to weather and climate extremes? This synthesis and assessment product examines this question across North America and concludes that we are now witnessing and will increasingly experience more extreme weather and climate events," said report co-chair Tom Karl, Ph.D., director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

"We will continue to see some of the biggest impacts of global warming coming from changes in weather and climate extremes,” said report co-chair Gerry Meehl, Ph.D., of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. "This report focuses for the first time on changes of extremes specifically over North America."

The full CCSP 3.3 report, Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate, and a summary FAQ brochure are available online.

Global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases, according to the report. Many types of extreme weather and climate event changes have been observed during this time period and continued changes are projected for this century. Specific future projections include:

•Abnormally hot days and nights, along with heat waves, are very likely to become more common. Cold nights are very likely to become less common.
•Sea ice extent is expected to continue to decrease and may even disappear in the Arctic Ocean in summer in coming decades.
•Precipitation, on average, is likely to be less frequent but more intense.
•Droughts are likely to become more frequent and severe in some regions.
•Hurricanes will likely have increased precipitation and wind.
•The strongest cold-season storms in the Atlantic and Pacific are likely to produce stronger winds and higher extreme wave heights.
•The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department, is dedicated to enhancing economic security and national safety through the prediction and research of weather and climate-related events and information service delivery for transportation, and by providing environmental stewardship of our nation's coastal and marine resources.

NOAA plays a key role in the Climate Change Science Program, which is responsible for coordinating and integrating climate research, observations, decision support, and communications of 13 federal departments and agencies.

"North Pole ice 'may disappear by September'"

Ice at the North Pole may disappear completely within the next few months for the first time in 20,000 years.

Arctic sea ice is now retreating so quickly that scientists say there is now a 50-50 chance that it will have gone completely by September.

The Polar regions have been the first to show the critical changes brought by global warming and it will be a hugely symbolic moment if the North Pole is left surrounded by water.

The sight of ships able sailing to the Pole for the first time would be seized on by environmental groups as an example of the consequences of a failure to take action on a global scale to combat global warming.

The Arctic is seen as an important indicator of the potentially catastrophic changes that scientists say will come as the planet warms.

Scientists who monitor the Arctic say the volume of Arctic ice peaked in March and has been in dramatic decline since.

"There is supposed to be ice at the North Pole - not water," said Mark Serreze of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Colorado.

The Centre has been predicting that the Arctic Ocean could be virtually ice-free by 2012 but that point may be reached within months rather than years.

The extent of the ice stood at 5.59m square miles in April - 0.24m square miles more than it was in 2007 - but still less than the 1979-2000 average for April.

Although there is more ice than this time last year, the average decline rate through the month of April was 2,300 square miles per day faster than last April.

"Taken together, an assessment of the available evidence points to another extreme September sea ice minimum. Could the North Pole be ice free this melt season? Given that this region is currently covered with first-year ice, that seems quite possible," the Centre says in its latest bulletin.

First-year ice - which has replaced much of the thicker ice formed over millennia - is thinner and more vulnerable to melting,

The rapid decline has been due to the warm conditions over the Arctic and peripheral seas in April which in some areas was 5ºC higher than expected. Scientists say the warmer conditions were probably due to shifts in atmospheric circulation that brought warm air into the region....

Prof Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University, Professor of Ocean Physics and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group, who was the first scientist to study what was happening beneath the Arctic in a Royal Navy submarine, agreed that there was an even chance that the ice would disappear this year.

"It is certainly the case that ice has been disappearing and last year it disappeared almost completely. Small areas of the Pack Ice have opened up before but now we have open water at the very edge of the ice below the North Pole," he said.

"As far as we can tell this has not happened for at least 20,000 years. The real shock is that it has happened so quickly with ice formed in the winter melting by the summer.

"These are the big changes that have been predicted happening before our eyes. This is perhaps the first sign of what we are in for."

"U.S. Advised Iraqi Ministry on Oil Deals"

From the New York Times

A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say.

The disclosure, coming on the eve of the contracts’ announcement, is the first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals to open Iraq’s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism.

In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said.

It is unclear how much influence their work had on the ministry’s decisions.

The advisers — who, along with the diplomatic official, spoke on condition of anonymity — say that their involvement was only to help an understaffed Iraqi ministry with technical and legal details of the contracts and that they in no way helped choose which companies got the deals.

Repeated calls to the Oil Ministry’s press office for comment were not returned.

At a time of spiraling oil prices, the no-bid contracts, in a country with some of the world’s largest untapped fields and potential for vast profits, are a rare prize to the industry. The contracts are expected to be awarded Monday to Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron, as well as to several smaller oil companies.

The deals have been criticized by opponents of the Iraq war, who accuse the Bush administration of working behind the scenes to ensure Western access to Iraqi oil fields even as most other oil-exporting countries have been sharply limiting the roles of international oil companies in development.

For its part, the administration has repeatedly denied steering the Iraqis toward decisions. “Iraq is a sovereign country, and it can make decisions based on how it feels that it wants to move forward in its development of its oil resources,” said Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman.

Though enriched by high prices, the companies are starved for new oil fields. The United States government, too, has eagerly encouraged investment anywhere in the world that could provide new oil to alleviate the exceptionally tight global supply, which is a cause of high prices.

Iraq is particularly attractive in that light, because in addition to its vast reserves, it has the potential to bring new sources of oil onto the market relatively cheaply.

As sabotage on oil export pipelines has declined with improved security, this potential is closer to being realized. American military officials say the pipelines now have excess capacity, waiting for output to increase at the fields.

But any perception of American meddling in Iraq’s oil policies threatens to inflame opinion against the United States, particularly in Arab nations that are skeptical of American intentions in Iraq, which has the third-largest oil reserves in the world.

“We pretend it is not a centerpiece of our motivation, yet we keep confirming that it is,” Frederick D. Barton, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said in a telephone interview. “And we undermine our own veracity by citing issues like sovereignty, when we have our hands right in the middle of it.”

...Consultants said the advice was necessary because the Oil Ministry, like other sectors of the Iraqi government, has experienced an exodus of qualified employees and lacks lawyers schooled in drawing up contracts....

"Iran-Contra’s ‘Lost Chapter"

by Robert Parry


As historians ponder George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, they may wonder how Republicans perfected a propaganda system that could fool tens of millions of Americans, intimidate Democrats, and transform the vaunted Washington press corps from watchdogs to lapdogs.

To understand this extraordinary development, historians might want to look back at the 1980s and examine the Iran-Contra scandal’s “lost chapter,” a narrative describing how Ronald Reagan’s administration brought CIA tactics to bear domestically to reshape the way Americans perceived the world.

That chapter — which we are publishing here for the first time — was “lost” because Republicans on the congressional Iran-Contra investigation waged a rear-guard fight that traded elimination of the chapter’s key findings for the votes of three moderate GOP senators, giving the final report a patina of bipartisanship.

Under that compromise, a few segments of the draft chapter were inserted in the final report’s Executive Summary and in another section on White House private fundraising, but the chapter’s conclusions and its detailed account of how the “perception management” operation worked ended up on the editing room floor.

The American people thus were spared the chapter’s troubling finding: that the Reagan administration had built a domestic covert propaganda apparatus managed by a CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist working out of the National Security Council.

“One of the CIA’s most senior covert action operators was sent to the NSC in 1983 by CIA Director [William] Casey where he participated in the creation of an inter-agency public diplomacy mechanism that included the use of seasoned intelligence specialists,” the chapter’s conclusion stated.

“This public/private network set out to accomplish what a covert CIA operation in a foreign country might attempt - to sway the media, the Congress, and American public opinion in the direction of the Reagan administration’s policies.”
However, with the chapter’s key findings deleted, the right-wing domestic propaganda operation not only survived the Iran-Contra fallout but thrived.

So did some of the administration’s collaborators, such as South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon and Australian press mogul Rupert Murdoch, two far-right media barons who poured billions of dollars into pro-Republican news outlets that continue to influence Washington’s political debates to this day.

Before every presidential election, Moon’s Washington Times plants derogatory — and often false — stories about Democratic contenders, discrediting them and damaging their chances of winning the White House.

For instance, in 1988, the Times published a bogus account suggesting that the Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis had undergone psychiatric treatment. In 2000, Moon’s newspaper pushed the theme that Al Gore suffered from clinical delusions. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

As for Murdoch, his giant News Corp. expanded into American cable TV with the founding of Fox News in 1996. Since then, the right-wing network has proved highly effective in promoting attack lines against Democrats or anyone else who challenges the Republican power structure.

As President George W. Bush herded the nation toward war with Iraq in 2002-03, Fox News acted like his sheep dogs making sure public opinion didn’t stray too far off. The “Fox effect” was so powerful that it convinced other networks to load up with pro-war military analysts and to silence voices that questioned the invasion...

However, the failure of the Iran-Contra report to fully explain the danger of CIA-style propaganda intruding into the U.S. political process would have profound future consequences. Indeed, the evidence suggests that today’s powerful right-wing media gained momentum as part of the Casey-Raymond operations of the early 1980s.

According to one Raymond-authored memo dated Aug. 9, 1983, then-U.S. Information Agency director Charles Wick “via Murdock [sic] may be able to draw down added funds” to support pro-Reagan initiatives.

Raymond’s reference to Rupert Murdoch possibly drawing down “added funds” suggests that the right-wing media mogul was already part of the covert propaganda operation.

In line with its clandestine nature, Raymond also suggested routing the “funding via Freedom House or some other structure that has credibility in the political center.”

Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, publisher of the Washington Times, also showed up in the Iran-Contra operations, using his newspaper to raise contra funds and assigning his CAUSA political group to organize support for the contras.

In the two decades since the Iran-Contra scandal, both Murdoch and Moon have continued to pour billions of dollars into media outlets that have influenced the course of U.S. history, often through the planting of propaganda and disinformation much like a CIA covert action might do in a hostile foreign country.

Further, to soften up the Washington press corps, Reich’s S/LPD targeted U.S. journalists who reported information that undermined the pro-contra propaganda. Reich sent his teams out to lobby news executives to remove or punish out-of-step reporters — with a disturbing degree of success. [For more, see Parry’s Lost History.]

Some U.S. officials implicated in the Iran-Contra propaganda operations are still around, bringing the lessons of the 1980s into the new century.

For instance, Elliott Abrams. Though convicted of misleading Congress in the Iran-Contra Affair and later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush — Abrams is now deputy adviser to George W. Bush’s NSC, where he directs U.S.-Middle East policy.

Bob Kagan remains another prominent neocon theorist in Washington, writing op-eds for the Washington Post. Oliver North was given a news show on Fox.

Otto Reich now is advising Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Latin American affairs. Lee Hamilton is a senior national security adviser to Democratic candidate Barack Obama...

Bush’s former White House press secretary Scott McClellan described similar use of propaganda tactics to justify the Iraq War in his book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

From his insider vantage point, McClellan cited the White House’s “carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval” — and he called the Washington press corps “complicit enablers.”

"China’s Turtles, Emblems of a Crisis"

The turtle used to be a goddess in China...

From the New York Times . Part of a Series on China's pollution crisis.

Unnoticed and unappreciated for five decades, a large female turtle with a stained, leathery shell is now a precious commodity in this city’s decaying zoo. She is fed a special diet of raw meat. Her small pool has been encased with bulletproof glass. A surveillance camera monitors her movements. A guard is posted at night.

The agenda is simple: The turtle must not die.

Earlier this year, scientists concluded that she was the planet’s last known female Yangtze giant soft-shell turtle. She is about 80 years old and weighs almost 90 pounds.

As it happens, the planet also has only one undisputed, known male. He lives at a zoo in the city of Suzhou. He is 100 years old and weighs about 200 pounds. They are the last hope of saving a species believed to be the largest freshwater turtles in the world.

“It’s a very dire situation,” said Peter Pritchard, a prominent turtle expert in the United States who has helped in trying to save the species. “This one is so big and it has such an aura of mystery.”

For many Chinese, turtles symbolize health and longevity, but the saga of the last two Yangtze giant soft-shells is more symbolic of the threatened state of wildlife and biodiversity in China. Pollution, hunting and rampant development are destroying natural habitats, and also endangering plant and animal populations.

China contains some of the world’s richest troves of biodiversity, yet the latest major survey of plants and animals reveals a bleak picture that has grown bleaker during the past decade. Nearly 40 percent of all mammal species in China are now endangered, scientists say. For plants, the situation is worse; 70 percent of all nonflowering plant species and 86 percent of flowering species are considered threatened.

An overriding problem is the fierce competition for land and water. China’s goal of quadrupling its economy by 2020 means that industry, growing cities and farmers are jostling for a limited supply of usable land.

Cities or factories often claim farmland for expansion; farmers, in turn, reclaim marginal land that could be habitat. Already, China has lost half of its wetlands, according to one survey.

For the Chinese scientists and conservationists trying to reverse these trends, the challenge begins with trying to convince the government that protecting wildlife is an important priority. For centuries, Chinese leaders emphasized dominance over nature rather than coexistence with it. Animals and plants are still often regarded as commodities valued for use as medicine or food, rather than as essential pieces of a natural order.

“The whole idea of ecology and ecosystems is a new thing in the culture,” said Lu Zhi, a professor of conservation biology at Peking University...

“China is one of a small handful of countries, maybe a dozen, that has remarkably high numbers of species, and a remarkably high number of species that are not found anywhere else,” said Jeffrey A. McNeely, chief scientist for the World Conservation Union...

China has a large system of nature reserves, mostly in the country’s more remote western regions, though financing levels are far below those even in other developing countries. No Chinese protection program is considered more successful than the robust effort to save the panda. Roughly 2,000 pandas now live in panda reserves. Other captive breeding programs have helped pull the Chinese alligator and the Tibetan antelope away from the brink of extinction.

But these successes, which involve animals of symbolic national importance, are modest compared with the number of species that are neglected and edging closer to extinction. Last year, the Yangtze River dolphin, a freshwater mammal known as the baiji, was declared extinct.

“So many species are neglected,” said Dr. Lu, who also heads the China affiliate of Conservation International. “Look at the baiji. The extinction was announced and what has been done? Nothing. People felt pity.”

Then, alluding to the Yangtze giant soft-shell, also known as the Rafetus swinhoei, she added:

“This turtle will be next.”...

"Latest collider at CERN won't end the world"

There's always someone who sees disaster in everything....

"This is not the first time, as the government noted, that Mr. Wagner has forecast the apocalypse. In 1999 and 2000, he sued to stop the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or Rhic, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island using the same arguments, which were found to be “speculative.” ...

Others see religion...

The enormous constructions at Cern evoke great cathedrals and Egyptian pyramids, says Jonathan Glancey. Paradoxically, this extreme expression of modern science may be the most spritual structure of our time.

CMS – one of the LHC's four giant detectors. The Compact Muon Solenoid is a general-purpose "camera" designed to look for anything and everything that may emerge from collisions between particles in the LHC tunnel.___________________________________

From arstechnica.com - Safety report: latest collider at CERN won't end the world:

Physicists around the world are waiting with excitement as the final preparations for CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) take place in advance of the start of operations this summer. Others, however, are much less enthused, as they worry about the prospects for cataclysmic forces to be released through the exotic forms of matter that will appear in the debris of the collisions that take place within the LHC's detectors. Those worries sparked a lawsuit intended to block the LHC's operation. Physicists are aware of the concerns, however, and CERN sponsored a safety report back in 2003. Now, with final preparations for operation under way, they've issued a followup safety evaluation, updated in light of the progress physics has made in the intervening time. The report's conclusion is that, if the LHC were capable of destroying the earth, nature would have beaten us to the punch.

Black holes for everyone
The LHC Safety Assessment Group, which prepared the report, has provided both a fully referenced analysis and a version targeted for the general public (both PDFs). Those looking for a really condensed reason not to worry can find reassurance in the fact that, "each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes."

Those looking for more sophisticated reasoning will find plenty of it. At its most basic level, the safety assessment boils down to a probability calculation. The collisions in the LHC will have an energy content that's equivalent to that of a cosmic ray hitting the earth with an energy of 1017eV. We've measured cosmic rays hitting the earth with energies of up to 1020eV, meaning that we're really doing nothing new.

Of course, it's possible that the frequency of collisions in the LHC is so high that we might unmask an extremely low-probability event. Based on the frequency of high energy cosmic rays, however, the authors calculate that, "nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth already—and the planet still exists." Those numbers go up when one considers the sun, which is a much larger target for cosmic rays. Backing out even further, to the entire visible universe, the calculations suggest that every second, there are the equivalent of 3 x 1013 times the total number of collisions expected over the lifetime of the LHC. If any of these resulted in the sort of cataclysms people are worrying about, we'd be seeing the explosions.


The LHC's collider ring covers several miles near the Swiss Alps
The report also looks specifically at some of the exotic species that are proposed for bringing about global destruction. Patches of lower vacuum energy are ruled out by the cosmic ray analysis, as, were they possible, "bubbles of new vacuum would have expanded to consume large parts of the visible universe several billion years ago already." Magnetic monopoles have also been mentioned, but calculations show that the dangerous ones are too heavy to be created by the LHC; anything light enough to be within reach of the collider would only destroy a total of one microgram of matter before leaving the earth.

Microscopic black holes are another popular source of doom, but the report lists a whole lot of issues with them. For starters, Relativity suggests that gravity is simply not potent enough to overcome all the other forces acting on particles during these collisions, and even if that weren't the case, Hawking radiation should cause any black holes of this size to evaporate immediately. The only possible exception comes through some forms of String Theory, but even those have problems. In any versions of the theory with greater than seven dimensions, the black holes would draw in matter so slowly that we'd have several billion years to worry about them; less than seven, and we would already have observed neutron stars and white dwarfs exploding.

One last problem comes from quantum mechanics. Any object formed through quantum effects can decay through exactly the same pathway, meaning that these black holes aren't actually black in the traditional sense; they should decay back to the particles that formed them quite rapidly. All in all, black holes seem to be pretty seriously ruled out.

Last up in the report's list of things not to lose sleep over are strangelets, atoms that, instead of the normal up and down quarks, contain some strange quarks. A strange quark outside of a nucleus has a half life on the order of nanoseconds, but there are some hypothetical strange atoms that might be relatively stable. In a hypothetical once-removed, these might convert other normal atoms to strange matter, setting off a chain reaction. Fortunately, there is no way to get this to actually work in a collider.

Strange quarks are only produced at high energies, but atomic nuclei can't form at these energies. The time it takes to cool down to the point where they could form is longer than the lifetime of a strange quark. As a result, "the likelihood of strangelet production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions can be compared to the likelihood of producing an icecube in a furnace." The continued inability of Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider to bring about the end of the earth is cited as further evidence.

Overall, it's hard to read this report and not wind up viewing the apocalyptic fears as simply being poorly thought through....

Bottled water "debate"

I thought the debate was over. Bottled water is a waste of plastic that fills landfills unnecessarily - and is often the same as tap water - which it supposedly replaces. ...

Story on Yahoo...

A debate over water is boiling over in the United States and elsewhere amid growing environmental concerns about bottled water and questions about safety of tap water.

The US Conference of Mayors in June passed a resolution calling for a phasing out of bottled water by municipalities and promotion of the importance of public water supplies.

While largely symbolic, the vote highlighted a growing movement opposing regular use of bottled water because of its plastic waste and energy costs to transport drinking supplies.

Janet Larsen, director of research at the Earth Policy Institute, cites a "backlash against bottled water as more people are realizing what they get out of the bottles is not any better than what they get out of the faucet."

The Pacific Institute, a California think thank on sustainability issues, contends that producing bottles for US water consumption required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil in 2006, not including the energy for transportation.

The group says bottling water for Americans produces more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide and consumes three liters of water for each liter of bottled water produced.

The debate in the US mirrors that taking place worldwide in places such as Paris; Liverpool, England; Florence, Italy; Vancouver, Canada. According to the EPI, the issue making waves among policymakers in locations including Denmark and New South Wales, Australia, among others.

The backlash comes even amid surging sales of bottled water in the United States. Some of this is linked to concerns about contamination of public water supplies, although critics of the industry say marketing hype is a greater factor.

Aficionados of Evian from France or Fiji from the South Pacific swear by the taste and health benefits of those waters, but others decry the high cost of energy for a product that may not be any better than local water.

A Natural Resources Defense Council concluded that "most of the tested waters were found to be of high quality (but) some brands were contaminated."

The group said bottled waters "are subject to less rigorous testing and purity standards than those which apply to city tap water."

In fact, says the group "about one-fourth of bottled water is actually bottled tap water" while government rules "allow bottlers to call their product 'spring water' even though it may be brought to the surface using a pumped well, and it may be treated with chemicals."

Americans drank about 8.8 billion gallons (33 billion liters) of packaged water in 2007, or 15 percent of their total liquid intake, according to the Beverage Marketing Corp. Per capita bottled US water consumption is up to 29 gallons (109 liters) per year, from 20 gallons in 2002.

The US is the largest consumer of bottled water, but on a per capita basis it ranks far behind Italy, the leader which consumes nearly twice as much, and others such as the United Arab Emirates, Mexico and France....

Beyond questions of safety and environment, some activists say the bottled water industry is seizing a public resource.

In the northeast state of Maine, a battle is brewing over access to a large aquifer by Poland Spring, a large US bottler owned by Swiss-based Nestle.

"Nestle's water grab is ruining streams, ponds, wells and aquifers," said Judy Grant of the activist group Corporate Accountability.

"Nestle's practices are raising serious questions about who should be allowed to control water, our most essential resource, and to what end."