Author: Max Weiss

Oil Spill Now Covering More Than 1,800 Square Miles

Coast Guard officials said Monday afternoon that the oil spill near Louisiana was now covering more than 1,800 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico, and they have been unable to engage a mechanism that could shut off the well thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface.

The response team was trying three tacks to address a spill caused by an explosion on an oil rig last week: one that could stop the leaks within hours, one that would take months, and one that would not stop the leaks but would capture the oil and deliver it to the surface while permanent measures were pursued.

On Sunday morning, officials began using remote-controlled vehicles to try to activate the blowout preventer, a 450-ton valve sitting at the wellhead, 5,000 feet below the ocean’s surface. The blowout preventer can seal off the well to prevent sudden pressure releases that possibly led to the explosion on the rig last Tuesday night.

If successful, engaging the blowout preventer could seal the well Monday or Tuesday.

The flow of oil from the leaks is about 42,000 gallons of oil a day. The authorities said it was still unclear what caused the explosion. Eleven crew members are missing and presumed dead.

BP struggles to cap leak as US oil slick spreads

British oil giant BP used robotic underwater vehicles Sunday to try to cap a leaking well and prevent a growing oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico from developing into an environmental disaster.

Satellite images showed the slick had spread by 50 percent in a day to cover an area of 600 square miles (1,550 square kilometers), although officials said some 97 percent of the pollution was just a thin veneer on the sea’s surface.

BP has dispatched skimming vessels to mop up the oil leaking from the debris of the Deepwater Horizon rig, which sank on Thursday, still blazing almost two days after a massive explosion that left 11 workers missing presumed dead.

So far winds have been kind and the slick is not threatening the coast — more than 40 miles away — of Louisiana, where it could endanger ecologically fragile wetlands that are a paradise for rare waterfowl.

“In the trajectory analysis we don’t see any impact to any shoreline within the next three days,” Charlie Henry, scientific support coordinator of the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told journalists.

Pressure Is Building on Disputed Wind Farm

Political pressure continues to build on Interior Secretary Ken Salazar as he prepares to announce his decision this week on the fate of a proposed wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass.  that has been stalled for nine years. The governors of six East Coast states called on Mr. Salazar last week to approve the project, which is proposed by Cape Wind Associates and would be the nation’s first offshore wind farm.

The governors of six East Coast states called on Mr. Salazar last week to approve the project, which is proposed by Cape Wind Associates and would be the nation’s first offshore wind farm. Turning it down, they said, especially on the grounds that it would harm the view from historic sites, “would establish a precedent that would make it difficult, if not impossible, to site offshore wind projects anywhere along the Eastern Seaboard.”

Their states — Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island — all have offshore wind projects in the works. Four of the governors are Democrats and two, in New Jersey and Rhode Island, are Republicans, showing that views of Cape Wind do not break down along political lines.

Senator Scott Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, and Representative Bill Delahunt, a Democrat whose district includes Cape Cod, said in their own letter to Mr. Salazar last week that the project was fraught with conflicts.

An up-or-down decision, they said, would prompt years of litigation, so they encouraged him to try to forge a consensus among the stakeholders. That approach has proved problematic for several years and could take several more, given the intensity of interests on all sides.

Perhaps the most prominent opponents have been members of the Kennedy family, whose compound in Hyannis Port looks out on the proposed site. Senator Edward M. Kennedy called the project a special-interest giveaway and fought it until just before his death in August.

Senator John Kerry, the state’s other senator and a Democrat, has not publicly taken sides. When Mitt Romney, a Republican, was governor, he opposed the project.

The proposed 130-turbine farm would lie in Nantucket Sound about five miles from the nearest shoreline and would cover 24 square miles, about the size of Manhattan. The tip of the highest blade of each turbine would reach 440 feet above the surface of the water.

Mr. Salazar has said that he will announce his decision by Friday.

Bolivia ‘people’s conference’ calls for system change, not climate change

A fundamental critique of capitalism as the source of climate change pervaded the People’s World Conference on Climate Change, from the opening speech of Bolivian President Evo Morales on Tuesday to the final declaration agreed upon Thursday.

On the first day, as 15,000 people from 125 countries gathered for the summit, Morales laid out his view bluntly: “Either capitalism lives or Mother Earth lives.”

“The main cause of climate change is capitalism,” he continued. “As people who inhabit Mother Earth, we have the right to say that the cause is capitalism, to protest limitless growth. … More than 800 million people live on less than $2 per day. Until we change the capitalist system, our measures to address climate change are limited.”

Bolivia’s lead climate negotiator, Angelica Navarro, echoed Morales’ points: “You cannot create a climate market to solve climate change. You have to address the structural causes. These causes are not only to be measured in terms of greenhouse gases. They are trade, finances, and economy.”

The conference ended on Thursday — Earth Day — in Cochabamba’s downtown stadium, with world leaders and delegates presenting a final declaration that broadly outlined a path forward for addressing both the impacts of climate change and the economic and political structures that have brought it about.  That statement will now be taken to the U.N. ahead of the next big international climate conference, COP16, to be held in Cancun, Mexico, at the end of the year.

The Bolivian government laid the groundwork for the declaration with a set of four demands: climate reparations from developed countries to developing countries; an International Climate Justice Tribunal; a Universal Declaration for the Rights of Mother Earth; and development and transfer of clean technologies.  The final statement called for creating a multilateral organization to fight climate change and protect climate migrants; ensuring that knowledge related to technology transfer not be privatized; and acknowledging and protecting the rights of indigenous peoples.

The conference sought to avoid the backroom deals and lack of transparency that plagued the U.N. talks in Copenhagen in December. “That is not democracy. That is not the U.N.,” Navarro said of the Copenhagen process. “For months, we were discussing our proposals with other countries. They did not listen. What we want in Bolivia is a true and participatory democracy. If the governments do not come up with a plan for climate change, the people have to lead with a plan.”

The “people’s conference” invited civil society into the process, creating a bottoms-up rather than a top-down approach. Seventeen working groups met over the course of the three days, and dozens of panels and countless informal strategy sessions were held too.  The working groups had varying degrees of success.  Some reached agreements that supporters can organize around and push for at future U.N. climate meetings.

The forest working group rejected the U.N. REDD program (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), arguing that by using market mechanisms to offset carbon emissions, it allows companies to speculate and get around actual carbon reductions.

The working group on climate refugees drafted a statement that was included in the final declaration, calling for protections for the hundreds of millions of people expected to be displaced by rising sea levels, droughts, floods, and dwindling water supplies. In his opening address on Tuesday, Morales had called for borders to be opened to climate refugees.

The conference also provided a boost to the climate-justice movement, giving advocates an opportunity to network, organize, and share stories about local and regional environmental and indigenous struggles.

But there was also dissent at the conference. Various organizations and an unofficial 18th working group focused on the discrepancy between Morales’ rhetoric on behalf of Mother Earth and his policy of resource extraction, emphasizing the environmental degradation brought about by mining and oil and gas drilling. Revenues from natural gas help to keep Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, afloat. Eduardo Gudynas has referred to this policy as the “new extractivism” of Latin America.

Oscar Olivera, who was active in organizing the “water wars” against privatization in Bolivia 10 years ago, argued that there are currently two kinds of movements: those on the inside of the government and those on the outside. He said, “Social movements in Bolivia are fragmented not because of ideological reasons but because of cooptation by the government. One of the characteristics of this government is that there is not room left for autonomous spaces, for grassroots organizing. Until 2004, the people of society in Bolivia were very strong and organizing horizontally. The issue of land distribution is not solved. Despite the rhetoric, oil and gas have not been nationalized.”

Still, most conference attendees rallied together around the main anti-capitalist message: to solve climate change, we must stop the push for unlimited growth that capitalism is based on.  This is well summed-up by a slogan that got attention in Copenhagen and even more traction in Bolivia: “System change, not climate change

Green Monster

The gas guzzlers at the Pentagon are under orders to get ecofriendly. The impact could be huge.  The U.S. military isn’t exactly underworked, what with salvaging Afghanistan, helping out Haiti, fighting off pirates, and getting out of Iraq. But now, it has been handed a new mission: leading the campaign to cut back on foreign oil, in the interests of both national security and saving the planet. The Defense Department certainly has the money, the technology, the intellectual capital, and the pull in the marketplace to make or break the environmental movement. And when it puts its top minds on a problem, there’s a long track record of world-changing breakthroughs (the Internet, for one). But will the Pentagon really make the move to go green when there’s so much else on its plate?

Decades ago, the Defense Department was a world leader in developing new sources of energy. In 1961, the Navy commissioned the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Three years later, the sea service began looking into tapping the geothermal energy around its China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station in California. But it took 29 years for China Lake’s geothermal plant to reach full power. A few Pentagon-backed alternative-power efforts have been more successful: a massive solar array at Nellis Air Force Base and a sizable wind farm at Guantánamo Bay, for instance. Until recently, however, those projects were the exception, not the rule. Energy efficiency has often taken a back seat to other tactical or strategic considerations.

A new crop of green-minded Pentagon leaders has begun ambitious projects to change that. The military R&D arm that paved the way for the Internet is now focusing on algal feedstock for biofuel and next-generation solar panels. One of the world’s largest solar-power projects is planned for the Army’s main training center, at Fort Irwin, Calif. Billions in stimulus money were spent to green military facilities. Then again, we’re talking about transforming an organization that currently consumes a million barrels of petroleum every three days.

The Defense Department in recent years has warned over and over about the dangers of climate change and the risks in relying on unstable petro-regimes. The problem is that where the military uses the most oil — in fuels that power combat hardware — it also faces the steepest obstacles to technical and institutional reform.

The Pentagon recently set ambitious targets to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by a third in 10 years. However, that figure exempts the military’s bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the jets, ships, and ground vehicles that swallow up 75 percent of the military’s fuel supply. A single B-52 bomber, for instance, burns 3,500 gallons of fuel per flight hour. Efforts to green military vehicles have largely flopped. In 2004, the Army abandoned its hybrid Humvee project, supposedly because the electric powertrain wasn’t reliable enough. (It rebooted part of the project last year.) In 2006, the Air Force flew just a single B-52 test mission using a synthetic fuel blend developed more than six decades earlier, in Nazi Germany.

China debates whether human activity or nature is to blame for drought

An unusually long dry season, along with deforestation, pollution and dam-building, leaves farmers struggling. In some areas, people cannot even wash their hair regularly.

The images are heart-rending, farmers kneeling over the cracked earth that looks to be straight out of a post-apocalyptic movie, the dust swirling in the wind.

But what underlies China’s worst drought in nearly a century is a matter of great debate. Is it Mother Nature or human failure?

Beyond the official explanation of “abnormal weather,” Chinese environmentalists are pointing to deforestation, pollution, dams, overbuilding and other man-made factors. Scientists are searching for clues about why rain hasn’t come in some parts of the country.

At its worst, the drought has left parched more than 16 million acres of farmland in more than four provinces, threatening the livelihood of more than 50 million farmers, according to government statistics. Up to 20 million people have been left without drinking water.

The Chinese army and paramilitary have been deployed in some hard-hit areas to deliver water, while residents of some mountainous villages inaccessible by motor vehicle have had to hike hours downhill and climb up again lugging plastic jugs of water in bamboo backpacks.

An unusually long dry season — which has stretched from September to the present — is at least part of the problem, but the underlying reasons are less clear. Some Chinese scientists believe that abnormally cold, wet weather in the north of the country is also linked to the drought in the southwest.

“The Earth is reacting to climate change,” said Kuang Yaoqiu, a professor with the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, who predicted the drought last year. “China’s mainstream meteorologists haven’t accepted these theories. It will take time.”

In Chinese government circles, many people still subscribe to Mao Tse-tung’s famous dictum that ‘’man should conquer nature,” but that’s proving difficult to accomplish.

The drought-related losses are both economic and highly personal. For all the tea in China, this year’s crop is expected to be a fraction of what it was in previous years because of drought conditions in Yunnan and Guangxi provinces, home to much of the tea production.

Approps panel to discuss Obama’s rail request

Senate appropriators this week will discuss President Obama’s fiscal 2011 funding request for the federal rail program.

The Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Subcommittee will meet Thursday to quiz Transportation Department and Amtrak officials over the president’s proposed budget, which allots $1 billion for high-speed rail, $1.6 billion for Amtrak and roughly $300 million for the Federal Railroad Administration’s safety and oversight programs.

The Amtrak request is roughly in line with the $1.56 billion lawmakers gave to the government-owned passenger rail corporation in fiscal 2010. The high-speed rail request is less than half of the $2.5 billion lawmakers appropriated in 2010 but is the same amount Obama asked for in last year’s budget.

Senate appropriators had originally planned to provide $1.2 billion for high-speed rail in the fiscal 2010 budget but that number grew to $2.5 billion during negotiations with the House, which had proposed to spend $4 billion.

FRA has traditionally served mostly to regulate rail safety, but the DOT agency has been thrust into a higher-profile role since last year’s stimulus package gave it $8 billion to implement Obama’s high-speed rail plan.

The agency decided to split the stimulus cash mostly between three large-scale projects: a new high-speed line linking Tampa and Orlando, Fla.; a new high-speed line connecting Southern and Northern California; and incremental upgrades to existing lines in the Midwest. But FRA also sprinkled $2 billion among projects in 20 other states.

Republicans and some Democrats have criticized Obama’s decision to spread the cash so widely, arguing the money would have been better invested in only a few major projects that could rival the top speeds of the European and Asian bullet trains many in Congress have lauded.

A number of lawmakers have also complained that the administration overlooked Amtrak’s Acela service in the Northeast Corridor, which links Boston, New York City and Washington, D.C. That line received $112 million from the high-speed rail stimulus pot. It is the only line in the United States that is capable of reaching speeds of 110 miles per hour, which is the minimum top-speed required to be deemed “high-speed” by DOT.

The president has said he hopes to spend a total of $5 billion over the next five years on high-speed rail through the appropriations process, with additional cash possibly coming in the next multiyear highway and transit bill.

A $500 billion, multiyear bill drafted by the bipartisan leaders of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee would give $50 billion to high-speed projects. But work on that proposal has been stalled as lawmakers search for ways to raise the revenues needed to pay for it.

Powerful ocean currents off Antarctica factor in climate change

Oceanographers said on Sunday they had measured a system of mighty currents off Antarctica that are a newly-discovered factor in the equation of climate change. The system, known as Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW), is generated in clockwise movement in four big sea shelves that abut Antarctica – the Weddell Sea, Prydz Bay, Adelie Land and Ross Sea.Extremely cold water sinks to the bottom of these shelves and slides out northwards along the continental shelf.

Extremely cold water sinks to the bottom of these shelves and slides out northwards along the continental shelf.

At the edge of the shelf, some of the water mixes with a well-known ocean movement, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which sweeps around the abyss off Antarctica.

The rest of the AABW, though, makes its way northward through a maze of ridges and gullies, reaching into the southern latitudes of the Indian and Pacific Oceans and into the Atlantic as far north as southern Brazil.

The study, led by Yasushi Fukamachi of Japan’s Hokkaido University, is published online in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Fukamachi’s team used an array of eight seabed sensors, anchored at a depth of 3500 metres for two years over 175 kilometres on the Kerguelen Plateau, east of Antarctica, where current exits from the Prydz Bay shelf.

On average, about eight million cubic metres of water colder than 0.2 degrees Celsius were transported northwards over this narrow section, the researchers found.

That is four times more than the previous record documented in an AABW flow, at the Weddell Sea, on the other side of Antarctica.

Over two years, the Kerguelen monitors recorded the current’s average speed at more than 20 centimetres per second, the highest ever seen for a flow at this depth.

The findings are important because ocean currents are major players in climate change.

They circulate heat, moving warm waters on the surface to the cold ocean floor. After this water is chilled, it is eventually shuttled back by currents to the surface, for warming again.

Currents also help determine the success of oceans as storage of carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal greenhouse gas.

Microscopic marine plants called phytoplankton take in CO2 at the surface under the natural process of photosynthesis.

Obama Wants Senate to Tackle Climate Bill After Wall St. Reforms

President Obama expects the Senate to move on to comprehensive energy and climate change legislation once it finishes work over the next few weeks on Wall Street regulatory reform.

“This is one of these foundational priorities from my perspective that has to be done soon,” Obama said of the climate bill Friday during a White House meeting of outside experts helping the administration on economic recovery plans.

Obama predicted several weeks of Senate debate on the financial reform package, with lawmakers working behind the scenes on a climate bill that must get support from industry if it has any chance of passing.

“There has been a good bipartisan process taking place that would put a price on carbon,” Obama said. “The one thing will be for the business community to be with us on this.”

Obama said he expected a tough political fight cobbling together the votes on the Senate bill, which lead authors John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) have dubbed the “American Power Act.” The Senate trio plans to release the bill next Monday.

“As Tip O’Neill said, ‘All politics is local,’” Obama said in reference to the former House speaker. “Individual members of Congress may be worried about the impact in the short term of these moves.

“I fear that if we don’t take these steps soon, we’re going to have some big, big problems,” Obama added.

John Doerr, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, prompted Obama’s remarks about the nexus between economic recovery and energy issues. “Some sort of Kerry-Graham-Lieberman idea is a very promising way to do this and is very important,” Doerr said.

Senior White House aides have been gearing up behind the scenes for the Senate debate by meeting with all sides of the energy debate. Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett and Carol Browner, the president’s top staffer on energy and climate issues, will host U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue tomorrow as part of the administration’s ongoing courtship of the nation’s largest industry voice.

“They asked for the meeting,” Bruce Josten, executive vice president for government affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said Friday.

China, East Asia can halt emissions growth

Some of the biggest nations of East and South-East Asia, including China, could stabilise their greenhouse gas emissions within 15 years at a price of $80 billion a year, the World Bank says. China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam could make a concerted switch to renewable energy and greater energy efficiency at modest cost in order to stop carbon emissions growing by 2025, the bank says in a report.

China is now the world’s biggest emitter and among those developing nations with the fastest growing emissions profiles as they rapidly industrialise, lifting their people out of poverty. Importantly, the World Bank study concludes that the low-carbon effort would not compromise the high rates of growth in the six countries considered. However, the bank also acknowledges that attracting the required $80 billion of investment annually in these countries will be a hard task, if history is anything to go by.

The report, “Winds of Change: East Asia’s Sustainable Energy Future” is part of a wider economic assessment of the East Asia and Pacific region which finds the it bouncing back from recession. It estimates that real GDP growth in developing East Asia is set to rise to 8.7 per cent in 2010 after slowing from 8.5 per cent in 2008 to 7 per cent last year.

The report compares a business-as-usual scenario with one aimed at switching to a sustainable energy path. Without the switch, a doubling of energy needs in the next two decades would see greatly increased consumption of fossil fuels, rising air pollution and degraded environments.

But bulk of the rising energy need can be met with a portfolio of renewable energy sources such as hydro, wind, biomass, geothermal and solar. For example, coal’s share of energy production could be cut from 70 per cent in the region to 36 per cent, assuming carbon capture and storage played a role. But early signs of a shift toward renewable energy and energy efficiency must be up-scaled and accelerated significantly, it says.

The challenge is more complicated for Indonesia. Also a major emitter in world terms, its carbon footprint is dominated by land-based emissions – largely deforestation – rather than energy or industrial emissions.

US solar start up secures backing from South Korean blue chips

US renewable energy start up Matinee Energy has emerged from stealth mode with the announcement of a new alliance with South Korean heavyweights Hyundai and LG Electronics that will see the three firms work together to invest up to $1bn in new US solar energy power plants.

Hyundai Heavy Industries and LG yesterday signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Matinee as part of a deal that also saw them accept an invitation to become lead partners in the first 240MW phase of a planned series of solar projects across the southern states.

Matinee, which was formed in late 2006, also announced that it has secured the financial backing of JP Morgan Securities to help raise finance for the proposed projects.

Company chairman Michael Pannos said that the new partnerships meant that the firm has now finalised the “total financing solutions” for its proposed new developments and will now be able to “reach economies of scale in both solar and wind turbine energy projects”.

The company remains highly secretive and few details are known about the precise nature of the partnership with Hyundai and LG or the nature of the technology it plans to use in the new projects.

However, it did confirm that it ultimately plans to build 900MW of utility scale energy plants mainly in the south west of the US over the next few years, and is looking to sign partnerships with a number of additional companies to support the project.

The firm also indicated that it will soon make “a major wind turbine announcement”, although further details were not available.

Matinee has already partnered with some US construction and technology companies for certain contracts, including Colorado-based The Industrial Company, however the alliance with two South Korean firms could further fuel concerns that US renewable energy projects are becoming overly reliant on overseas investors.

Senate Energy panel looks to move forward on carbon capture bills

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee meets tomorrow to begin discussions on three carbon capture and sequestration measures that could become fodder for larger energy and climate legislation.

The bills under discussion would promote research into carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies, incentivize commercial-scale projects and clarify ownership of underground pore space in rock to facilitate sequestration projects on federal lands.

CCS funding is seen by some as a negotiating tool to sway coal-state support for sweeping energy and climate legislation. And a committee aide said the CCS measures to be discussed tomorrow could make their way into the committee-passed energy bill (S. 1462) if it moves forward.

“We can’t move to the next step of our energy future without addressing the technologies we need today,” Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) said in a statement when he introduced draft CCS legislation last month. “I believe we can pass a responsible bipartisan solution to protect jobs and our economy, rather than a countrywide cap-and-trade scheme” (Greenwire, March 22).

The committee tomorrow will hear testimony on a portion of Voinovich’s measure, introduced jointly with Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.). That language would offer $20 billion in incentives for early deployment of CCS systems.

The measure has been praised by the coal industry, but some critics say the language does not do enough to get CCS going. For instance, the $20 billion in incentives is one-third of the $60 billion provided by similar language in the House-passed climate bill (H.R. 2454).

“Conceptually, an incentive program to speed up adoption of CCS is valuable, but this one is too little money … and it lacks the most important ingredient, which is a price on carbon pollution,” Daniel Weiss, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said last month.

Avatar director vows to fight on for Amazon

Avatar director James Cameron vowed Friday to fight on for the indigenous people of the Amazon after a Brazilian court overturned a ruling that would have halted construction of a huge dam that would flood tribal lands.

“We are disappointed but we knew this would be a long battle,” Cameron told AFP by phone during a brief visit to Washington.

“If Brazil lets me back in, I would love to come back down and work with the indigenous people I met” during several visits to the vast South American country after the release of Avatar, Cameron said.

“But I want to go back as a film-maker, not a sign-waver. I want to film the culture of the Kayapo Indians and let the world see how they live in harmony with the forest,” he said, evoking strong parallels with Avatar.

The blockbuster movie tells the story of the peaceful Na’Vi people who live in harmony with nature on the planet Pandora and are forced to wage a bloody fight against strip-miners from Earth who have no compunctions about destroying the Na’Vi culture to get their hands on a precious mineral, unobtainium.

“Avatar was based on real but abstract stories. It came out of articles in National Geographic and documentaries on TV.

“But after meeting the indigenous people of the Amazon with whom we communicated very clearly and emotionally, it’s real for me. And it’s personal,” Cameron said.

After he had finished filming Avatar, the veteran film director and self-avowed environmentalist traveled several times to Brazil on fact-finding missions to “drill down and study the tectonic interface between progress pushing up against the natural world and bulldozing it out of the way.”

“It’s happening now and it’s a reality for these people” in the Amazon, he said, adding that his visits to Brazil had helped to shine an international spotlight on the fight being waged by Amazon communities to preserve their forest and river communities.

“Through our visits, we were able to get the story on the front page of newspapers in the US, and I don’t believe that the powers that be in Brazil really expected that kind of media scrutiny of a process they had tried to keep out of the public eye,” Cameron said.

Global warming reduces grain output

Rising temperatures and inadequate rainfall are causing grain output to stagnate in India, threatening food security in the world’s second-most populous nation, according to a weather scientist.

In the past decade, average temperatures have increased by 0.25 degree Celsius when the monsoon crops are sown in June, and by 0.6 degree Celsius when winter crops are planted in October, said Krishna Kumar, a senior scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, a state-owned researcher.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is counting on a bigger harvest to tame inflation from a 17-month high and to meet an election promise of ensuring food security for the poor by providing rice and wheat at below market prices. India’s economy slowed in the quarter ended December after a drought last year ravaged crops and pushed global sugar prices to a 29-year high.

“Warmer nights affect rice output while day temperatures hurt wheat production,” Kumar said in an interview on April 16 in the western city of Pune. “Night temperatures are increasing more rapidly than day temperatures since the late 1980s” due to rising human greenhouse-gas emissions, he said.

Dry weather caused by El Nino has raised concerns this year that output of rice in the Philippines and Thailand, palm oil in Malaysia and Indonesia, and coffee in Vietnam may be reduced. A drought in India pushed imports of sugar and cereal to a record last year. Warmer-than-normal weather in Pakistan led to food shortages causing nationwide riots, and reduced tea production in Sri Lanka, the world’s fourth-biggest grower.

“The projected warming over the water-limited tropics is likely to further depress yields and exacerbate water scarcity, constraining attempts to increase grain production,” Cristina Milesi, a scientist at the California State University and at NASA Ames Research Center, said in a report last month.

‘Leading Example’

India’s population and the largest water-limited tropics croplands, makes it a “leading example of the observed declines in food grain production,” she said.

The combined global land and sea-surface temperatures last month was 0.77 degrees more than the twentieth century average of 12.7 degrees, making March the warmest on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. March was also the hottest on record in India, government-owned India Meteorological Department, or IMD, said on its Web site.

A ‘Hamburger Helper’ for Diesel Fuel

In the never ending search for substitutes for oil in cars and trucks, a Nevada company has found an unusual partial replacement: natural gas.

Natural gas, of course, is already used in thousands of buses, in compressed form. But building a compression station for fueling, and converting the buses, is expensive. The Nevada company, Advanced Refining Concepts, of Reno, has developed a fuel that runs through conventional fuel pumps, truck fuel tanks and diesel engines.

That is crucial, said Peter W. Gunnerman, who co-founded the company with his father, Rudolf. “You can have the best fuel in the world, but the second you tell mechanics you have to change this or change that, it just doesn’t get done,’’ he said.

His company produces something called GDiesel, which starts with ordinary ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel and with natural gas, which is primarily methane.

In its refinery, Advanced Refining Concepts bubbles the gas through the diesel fuel. In the presence of a proprietary catalyst, the methane and the diesel fuel react chemically, with the diesel fuel pulling apart the methane and absorbing its component atoms, hydrogen and carbon.

As the molecules of diesel fuel absorb the natural gas, they get bigger. Mr. Gunnerman said that the liquid grows by more than 10 percent.

Diesel fuel is sold by volume (gallons refers to size, not energy content) so anything that expands the product becomes a sort of Hamburger Helper, an inexpensive filler. Natural gas is considerably cheaper than diesel.

As the fuel’s density declines, the amount of energy declines very slightly. But that seems fine with the company’s customers, said Mr. Gunnerman. They report going more miles on a tank and needing fewer oil changes. Users include a construction company and truck fleet operators.

None of the benefits have been confirmed by a lab, but sales are growing, through a distributor that serves northern Nevada and northern California.

Mr. Gunnerman’s company has produced the fuel at a single processing unit. The unit could make 10,000 gallons a day but has been limited to 4,000 because there is not much natural gas available at the spot where it is installed, in Sparks, he said. In October, the company broke ground at an industrial park nine miles east of Reno, where it is installing 10 such units. Start-up is scheduled to begin next month.

Substituting natural gas for diesel fuel may be profitable and make sense from an energy security standpoint, even if it has no environmental benefit.

But Mr. Gunnerman said that the next step would be to find sources for methane other than natural gas.

Landfill gas, methane from sewage processing plants and similar sources are all potential pollutants and should be available for fuel instead, he said, and he is shopping for such sources.

Europe Finds Clean Energy in Trash, but U.S. Lags

The lawyers and engineers who dwell in an elegant enclave here are at peace with the hulking neighbor just over the back fence: a vast energy plant that burns thousands of tons of household garbage and industrial waste, round the clock. The Vestforbraending plant in Copenhagen, the largest of the 29 waste-to-energy plants in Denmark. Their use has reduced the country’s energy costs.

Far cleaner than conventional incinerators, this new type of plant converts local trash into heat and electricity. Dozens of filters catch pollutants, from mercury to dioxin, that would have emerged from its smokestack only a decade ago.

In that time, such plants have become both the mainstay of garbage disposal and a crucial fuel source across Denmark, from wealthy exurbs like Horsholm to Copenhagen’s downtown area. Their use has not only reduced the country’s energy costs and reliance on oil and gas, but also benefited the environment, diminishing the use of landfills and cutting carbon dioxide emissions. The plants run so cleanly that many times more dioxin is now released from home fireplaces and backyard barbecues than from incineration.

With all these innovations, Denmark now regards garbage as a clean alternative fuel rather than a smelly, unsightly problem. And the incinerators, known as waste-to-energy plants, have acquired considerable cachet as communities like Horsholm vie to have them built.

Denmark now has 29 such plants, serving 98 municipalities in a country of 5.5 million people, and 10 more are planned or under construction. Across Europe, there are about 400 plants, with Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands leading the pack in expanding them and building new ones.

By contrast, no new waste-to-energy plants are being planned or built in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency says — even though the federal government and 24 states now classify waste that is burned this way for energy as a renewable fuel, in many cases eligible for subsidies. There are only 87 trash-burning power plants in the United States, a country of more than 300 million people, and almost all were built at least 15 years ago.

Instead, distant landfills remain the end point for most of the nation’s trash. New York City alone sends 10,500 tons of residential waste each day to landfills in places like Ohio and South Carolina.

“Europe has gotten out ahead with this newest technology,” said Ian A. Bowles, a former Clinton administration official who is now the Massachusetts state secretary of energy.

Still, Mr. Bowles said that as America’s current landfills topped out and pressure to reduce heat-trapping gases grew, Massachusetts and some other states were “actively considering” new waste-to-energy proposals; several existing plants are being expanded. He said he expected resistance all the same in a place where even a wind turbine sets off protests.

Europe Urged to Share Power Across Continent

Renewable energy in Europe should be generated and distributed on a continental scale to make the greatest contribution toward reducing greenhouse gases, according to a report that raises significant challenges for a fragmented region.

The report, to be released Tuesday, was compiled by the European Climate Foundation, a group financed by philanthropic organizations, using studies carried out by McKinsey, a consulting firm.

Among its recommendations is a gigantic power cable that would link solar farms in Spain with energy-hungry countries like Poland. Such a link could ship huge volumes of so-called clean electricity, but it could face political opposition in countries like France.

The report underscores how various renewable power sources, including wind from the North Sea, will need to be linked on a transcontinental grid to generate a secure and reliable supply of alternative energy to substitute for fossil fuels.

Such a grid would probably be easier to build in countries that span continents, as in the United States and China. In Europe, power grids remain largely confined to countries, with limited cross-border connections.

The report, to be presented in Brussels to the European Union energy commissioner, Günther Oettinger, and the climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, said that cross-border connections would need to change if clean power was to be distributed more widely.

“Transmission must develop from a minor trading and reserve-sharing role to one that enables significant energy exchanges between regions across the year,” according to the report.

The addition of a huge interconnector crossing France could help French utilities export more nuclear power, but it also could cut into those exports by providing customers with an alternative source of electricity.

Climate treaty realities push leaders to trim priority lists

As prospects for a binding global climate treaty this year have evaporated, leaders and environmental advocates have focused their efforts on reaching agreement on a few top priorities, including preserving tropical forests and helping developing countries cope with climate change.

The U.N.-sponsored climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, in December are increasingly viewed as an interim step to a final deal. Many heads of state and activists had hoped that they could produce a successor agreement to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The climate pact’s first period ends in 2012.

Instead, negotiators have begun to focus on what U.N. Foundation President Timothy E. Wirth calls “the building blocks” of a global climate strategy.

In an interview Monday, Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said that it was overly ambitious to include everything from emissions targets to technology transfer provisions and funding for preventing deforestation. “We cannot expect all of this in an agreement covering all issues. But what I hope is we are able to make some progress on some issues.”

U.S. special envoy for climate change Todd Stern said the administration was focused on bringing essential elements for an eventual treaty “to some level of closure” by the end of the year. “There’s a bunch of work to be done,” he said.

Connie Hedegaard, who led the climate talks in Copenhagen last year and serves as European commissioner for climate action, said that focusing on those priorities could help win over the leaders of some developing countries. “Why don’t we focus on content: specific actions, specific deliverables,” Hedegaard said. “Then they could see there’s something in it for them.”

The divide between rich and poor countries was evident over the weekend in Bonn, Germany, where delegates from 175 nations met for a working session to lay the groundwork for this year’s talks. The procedural debate, on questions such as whether to include the U.S.-brokered Copenhagen Accord in the ongoing U.N. talks, became so contentious it prompted committee chairwoman Margaret Mukahanana-Sangarwe to comment Sunday, “If we can’t agree on this, then we may have problems when we really start negotiating.”

White House Rhetoric May Signal Climate-Bill Surge

With the bruising health care debate over, President Obama’s top economic adviser left little doubt last week that energy and climate has taken its place atop the administration’s agenda.

During a 30-minute speech (pdf) at a Washington energy conference, Larry Summers, the head of the White House’s National Economic Council, used lofty rhetoric to warn of the long-term consequences if Congress fails to follow through this year on a sweeping overhaul of how the nation generates and uses energy.

“Read the history of great nations,” Summers said. “Read how they succeed and read how they fail. Their ability to mobilize to solve problems before they are absolutely imminent crises is what determines their longevity.

That’s why this task of economic renewal is so important broadly. And that’s why I believe it is so important that we move for economic reasons to pass comprehensive energy legislation.”

Summers, a former Treasury secretary and president of Harvard University, went on to outline ways a climate and energy bill can help the U.S. economy grow, from creating short-term jobs to reducing uncertainty and increasing confidence for new private-sector investments.

“Ultimately, economic policy choices, like investment decisions for a family, involve seeking opportunity and involve minimizing risk,” Summers said. “If you think about the risks to our ecology, the risks to our security, we minimize those risks with comprehensive energy policy. And if you think about the opportunity to lead in what is really important, we maximize that opportunity with comprehensive energy legislation. That’s why energy is so crucial a part of President Obama’s economic strategy.”

Advocates for U.S. action on climate change welcomed Summers’ remarks, saying they saw in them an important message from the Obama administration. With the health care bill signed into law, key White House players are turning their attention to an energy debate that will demand considerable heavy lifting if an energy and climate measure is going to have a chance to pass the Senate and reach the president’s desk before the midterm election.

“It was very important symbolically that the rest of the White House, beyond Carol Browner and CEQ, is getting engaged in this battle,” said Dan Weiss, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, referring to Obama’s top climate and energy adviser and the Council on Environmental Quality.

Renewable energy helps fuel Dow above 11,000

The benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 11,000 for the first time since stock markets began their nosedive 18 months ago. And the rebound in investor and trader confidence seems to be taking renewable energy and clean technology stocks with it.

An uptick in the price of a barrel of oil, the coming 40th anniversary Earth Day celebrations and renewed focus on energy and climate legislation in Congress could once again be sparking market enthusiasm, at least for the short term, market watchers are speculating.

But the upturn could prove short-lived as some banks and investment firms remain wary of the sector’s long-term performance, warning their clients of shrinking public support for subsidies and an end to government stimulus spending globally.

The Dow settled at 11,005.97 at the closing bell Monday. That’s just 0.1 percent higher than Friday’s closing level, a rise of only 8 points. But it represents the first time the stock market index broke the 10,000 range since the bankruptcy of Wall Street icon Lehman Brothers Holdings sent the entire financial system into a tailspin more than a year and a half ago.

Solar company stocks, in particular, have been performing well at the close of the year’s first fiscal quarter. That’s despite ominous news of rapidly shrinking subsidies that have been the real engine of growth for the industry. Several large European nations have been announcing steep cuts to their feed-in tariff programs, through which governments guaranteed higher subsidized electricity prices for solar power generation, in a bid to plug huge budget deficits.

Among U.S. firms, First Solar saw its shares rise by 2.3 percent last week, and the stock bounced up again by more than 3 percent in trading Monday. Holdings in the largest solar company in the United States closed yesterday at almost $128 per share, from about $124 at the beginning of the day. The stock rose to nearly $130 in the first half of the day before settling back.

MEMC, a wafer supplier, rose by more than 5 percent last week and bumped up again by nearly 2 percent Monday. Competitor LDK Solar’s share price rose by 11.9 percent last week and rose almost 4 percent higher still yesterday. Analysts cite rising prices for their products as reason for the strong performance.

“Prices are expected to further increase in 3Q10,” Credit Suisse analysts said in a new report.

Up in the Air

Joe Bastardi, who goes by the title “expert senior forecaster” at AccuWeather, has a modest proposal. Virtually every major scientific body in the world has concluded that the planet is warming, and that greenhouse-gas emissions are the main cause. Bastardi, who holds a bachelor’s degree in meteorology, disagrees. His theory, which mixes volcanism, sunspots, and a sea-temperature trend known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, is that the earth is actually cooling. Why don’t we just wait twenty or thirty years, he proposes, and see who’s right?

This is “the greatest lab experiment ever,” he said recently on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show.

Bastardi’s position is ridiculous (which is no doubt why he’s often asked to air it on Fox News). Yet there it was on the front page of the Times last week. Among weathermen, it turns out, views like Bastardi’s are typical. A survey released by researchers at George Mason University found that more than a quarter of television weathercasters agree with the statement “Global warming is a scam,” and nearly two-thirds believe that, if warming is occurring, it is caused “mostly by natural changes.” (The survey also found that more than eighty per cent of weathercasters don’t trust “mainstream news media sources,” though they are presumably included in this category.

Senate Trio Targets Week of Earth Day for emissions bill

The three senators at the center of climate and energy negotiations are aiming to unveil their bill during the week celebrating the 40th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22.

And that just happens to coincide with the launch of my new book Straight Up, which puts the bill and forthcoming debate into context.  Here’s more background on the bill.

Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Lieberman will finish writing their draft proposal that sets a first-ever price for the industrial releases of greenhouse gas emissions and expands domestic production of oil, gas and nuclear power.

The three lawmakers expect to be out of Washington for much of the two-week recess that starts today, but they said their staffs will be busy on Capitol Hill writing the bill and meeting with key industry officials and environmental lobbyists to glean last-minute ideas for the proposal.

Graham yesterday outlined several specific decisions already made, including sector-specific emission limits for power plants starting in 2012, with manufacturers to follow four years later. For allowances, the senators will propose recycling all revenue generated by the sale of the utility industry’s allowances back to consumers through local distribution companies.

They also will add a “price collar” to give industry certainty about compliance costs. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) is taking a lead on this issue, meeting with Kerry, Graham and Lieberman, along with Tom Ferrell, the chairman, president and CEO of Richmond-based Dominion Resources Inc., and Tom Kuhn, the president of the Edison Electric Institute.

“One of the things you saw was wide swings of predictions of what this bill would cost and one thing is to try and give folks who want to make investments in alternative energy predictability and also give utilities predictability,” Warner told reporters.

Lieberman said the trio also plans to include several of the suggestions offered yesterday by a collection of industry trade groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Petroleum Institute. This was the third meeting for the U.S. Chamber-led group, also known as the Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth.

Several of the industry officials left their 90-minute meeting with the senators offering praise for the process, even though they still are waiting to see the details.

“Candid,” said Paul Schlegel, director for public policy at the American Farm Bureau Federation. “I think the senators are being genuine in their outreach to people, and that’s a big deal.”

“It was another extraordinary session with a direct and frank exchange of ideas between industry leaders and the senators sitting around the table, talking about specific needs that should be contained in a final legislative product,” said John Shaw, senior vice president of government affairs at the Portland Cement Association.

Senate bill allocation fight expected to go down to the wire

The food fight is just getting started. Senators cobbling together a sweeping energy and climate bill are at the early stages of divvying up valuable emission allocations among regulated firms and well-financed interest groups.

Their decisions are big ones, worth hundreds of billions of dollars over the climate program’s roughly 40-year lifespan. Already, lawmakers are fighting over who should get a bigger share of the allowances, as well as the broader philosophical mechanics of pricing greenhouse gases.

Interests pressing for Senate allocations run the gamut. Investor-owned power companies say they need more than a third of the free allocations for their customers to help them compensate for higher energy bills. States that stepped up first on climate policy claim their early actions deserve recognition. Other voices in the debate include retirees, wildlife conservationists, religious groups and advocates for keeping tropical rain forests standing.

Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said yesterday they were getting closer to unveiling their “breakthrough” proposal on allocations with Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), promising a bill that would be both business and consumer-friendly. Graham and Lieberman said about 60 percent of the revenue raised by the government would immediately go directly back to the public as soon as the climate program starts.

Sources briefed on the senators’ proposal say it has been dubbed “reduction and refund” instead of the “cap and trade” term that has been demonized by opponents.

The senators said that each industrial sector — electric utilities, petroleum refiners, manufacturers — will face different emission limits and startup dates. As such, the allocation plan for each also will be different.

For transportation fuels, the senators said an idea being offered up by BP America, ConocoPhillips and Shell Oil Co. involves a “linked fee” that would be tied to the carbon market price for the other industrial sectors.

“The money we generate comes from the companies. It’s an assessment on what they do in the carbon world,” Graham said. “They’re creating a carbon product, they’re going to pay a fee. Some of it will be passed on. Some of it will be absorbed. But the money we collect from them gets passed back to the consumer, which holds them harmless. Bill Gates may not get it, but most people in my state will. And any money not going back to the consumer from this linked fee has to go to do something the country needs, like retire the debt, or I won’t support it.”

Industry officials earlier this month suggested funneling some of the linked fee revenue into the Highway Trust Fund, à la federal gasoline taxes. But Graham said yesterday that the idea had lost traction. “That may be more problematic, but the one thing I can tell people about the money, if you don’t get it, it’s going to help your kids.”

The senators also said they are planning to direct the electric utilities’ allocations back to the public and industrial customers via local distribution companies, or LDCs.

Graham said the approach has an added layer of complexity because it is tied to the four additional years before major manufacturers must begin compliance when compared with the electric utilities.

California solar projects rush to beat deadline for subsidies

NextEra Energy Resources thought it had a golden project. The company proposed a 2,000-acre solar farm, named Beacon, on fallow agricultural land on the edge of California’s Mojave Desert. The site has the great desert sun but is on degraded land near a freeway, an auto test track and old buildings

The site “is exactly where solar should be,” says David Myers, head of conservation group Wildlands Conservancy.

But two years later, NextEra still awaits permission to begin construction from the California Energy Commission, which grants permits on such projects after environmental reviews. Time is running short, not only for NextEra but for several dozen green-energy projects in California. Ground must be broken on them before year’s end to get federal stimulus funds worth 30% of the projects’ cost.

The deadline — and the push for green energy by President Obama and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger— has inspired unprecedented coordination among regulators and environmentalists who want green energy but not rampant destruction of wilderness. If they succeed in siting so many large solar projects quickly, California may set a precedent for how other states resolve concerns over land use vs. the benefits of green energy.

“It’s a scene that’s being played out all over the country,” says Benjamin Kelahan, senior vice president for energy of the Saint Consulting Group. But California, he says, is “a hotbed of activity.”

Yet the sheer number and size of the California projects, especially a dozen huge solar farms unlike anything regulators have reviewed in 20 years, is stressing agencies and stakeholders alike. No other state has so many huge solar projects in the pipeline. Billions of dollars in stimulus funds ride on whether the permitting process can be sped up without sacrificing California’s stringent environmental standards.

No corners are being cut, regulators say. But some environmentalists fear that the tight deadlines will lead to projects that could’ve been better with more time. And companies say that some projects, like NextEra’s, have suffered delays born of inefficient permitting.

“These are large projects at a scale we’ve never seen before on a time schedule that’s never been done before,” says Kimberley Delfino, California program director for the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife. “This is not going to be an easy thing to do.”

If all are built, the 49 projects seeking stimulus funding would generate 11,000 megawatts of electricity a year. That’s enough to supply 7 million California homes and give California utilities a big boost in meeting mandates to get 33% of their energy from renewable sources by 2020.

The projects also would drive 10,000 construction jobs, 2,200 operational jobs and up to $30 billion in investment, including up to $10 billion in federal stimulus dollars, says Michael Picker, Schwarzenegger’s renewable-energy adviser.

Big benefits in anti-warming policies

Policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, if swiftly implemented, would create 45 trillion yen ($486 billion) in new business and 1.25 million new jobs, the Environment Ministry said.

Contrary to calculations by the previous administration headed by Taro Aso that said measures against global warming could hinder economic growth, the ministry’s report Friday concluded both can be achieved.

According to the report, policies that subsidize solar power generation and tighter standards on housing heat insulation would generate new investments totaling 33 trillion yen in 2020 for the development of energy-saving technologies and other purposes.

Exports of the new technologies would create 12 trillion yen more in new demand, it said.

Quebec budget tackles climate change

The 2010 budget will move the province into a deeper shade of green and that will be good for business, Finance Minister Raymond Bachand said Tuesday.

“Sustainable development will be an important thrust and a signature feature of our economy for the next 20 years at least,” Bachand told the National Assembly.

“Tackling climate change will provide Quebec with new opportunities and openings for developing a green economy.”

New measures to combat climate change provide for investments of $72 million over three years and include $30 million for the development of a made-in-Quebec electric bus along with $24 million for the marketing of carbon-certified products.

And, included in a three-year, $1.1 billion package for research and innovation, are pilot projects to advance green technologies. They focus on developing more environmentally-friendly aircraft and, in the pulp-and-paper sector, developing new products such as biofuels.

Bank-Funded Coal Plant Tests Green Agenda

Decision-makers around the world are in a period of transition when it comes to the future of supplying energy. Even if everyone agrees that a low carbon future is the inevitable solution, there is nothing close to consensus regarding which path to take.

Increasingly, industrial and developing countries find themselves favoring different paths – not only for their own countries but for each other.

These differences were on full display at the Copenhagen climate talks in December. Now, the battleground has moved to World Bank energy projects and investments.
On Apr. 8, the World Bank’s board is expected to approve a 3.75-billion-dollar loan for a coal-fired power plant in South Africa.

Earlier this month, it was reported that the United States was opposed to the loan due to the high greenhouse gas emissions of coal-fired plants and that its representatives on the bank’s board would abstain from voting on the proposal. U.S. officials have since denied that a decision has been made.

An abstention would allow the loan to go forward, while also allowing the U.S. to go on record in opposition to it.

U.N. Official Says Climate Deal Unlikely Until 2011

A new legal agreement committing nations around the world to curb greenhouse-gas emissions is unlikely to be completed until the end of 2011, two years later than originally envisioned, the top U.N. climate official said Wednesday.

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. climate-change secretariat, said countries need to restore confidence in U.N. negotiations following the dismal results of the Copenhagen summit in December, which ended in a vague agreement of principles and a pledge of finances for poor countries most threatened by climate change.

“There was a great deal of frustration at end the end of the Copenhagen.

Climate change is the new health and safety

All public bodies should have a legal duty to protect their workers from climate change in the same way as institutions currently carry out health and safety checks, according to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.

The body set up to warn Government about the risk of environmental disasters said climate change will cause floods, droughts and heatwaves in future.

In a key report on ‘Adapting Institutions to Climate Change’ the committee of experts recommended that every school, hosptial and business should have a legal duty to adapt to climate change. For example by putting in place flood defences and plans for water shortages.

Sir  John Lawton, Chairman of the Royal Commission, said global warming is a real risk and could cause huge problems for Britain.

He said all businesses and public bodies should have to carry out a “climate change adaptation test” in the same way as they currently conduct health and safety checks.

“The planet is already slightly above the worse case scenario so if we do nothing we could be looking at a temperature rise of 4C (7.3F) by 2100,” he said.

“Any society confronted with those kind of dramatic changes to their climate would be very wise to take due attention to the risk that poses to society, infrastructure and people’s lives and begin to plan accordingly. That should become central because just like health and safety scenarios – where people are going to get killed or injured – people are going to get killed or injured by climate change and that is why it is important.”

Brazen Environmental Upstart Brings Legal Muscle, Nerve to Climate Debate

A tiny activist group with a shoestring budget and an aggressive attitude is fast becoming a rising power in environmental policy.

The Center for Biological Diversity, an organization focused on saving imperiled species, chalks up victories even as it rebels against much of the environmental community. It secured Endangered Species Act protection for the polar bear. It won a court decision forcing federal agencies to look at climate change repercussions as part of environmental reviews. It pushed Wal-Mart to make green concessions as it opens new stores.

Started by a philosopher, physician, psychology major and biologist who met while tracking spotted owls, the group eschews both traditional inside-the-Beltway tactics and fringe group approaches. It does not lobby, negotiate or campaign for climate legislation. It rejects showy protests like taking over coal plants or unfurling banners on national monuments.

Instead, CBD relies on a strategy of relentless lawsuits. It is controversial, with critics charging that the tactic clogs up the courts, burdens federal agencies and fails to bring a comprehensive solution. It is also highly successful. The center has won 93 percent of its cases.

“They have convinced courts that agencies have ignored or improperly implemented a whole host of environmental and natural resource management statutes,” said Robert Glicksman, a professor of environmental law at George Washington University Law School. “They have taken the initiative to bring these lawsuits. They have done their homework in terms of making convincing claims.”