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August 27 How green is Obama's VP nominee? Joe Biden is due to take the stage this evening in Denver to accept his party's nomination for vice presidential running mate. It will be interesting to see whether Biden uses his alloted time to discuss a topic dear to him on the campaign trail last year: energy independence and America's role in capping carbon emissions. If you were wondering where Biden stands here's a quick run-down from green pundits and policymakers: The Grist points out Biden scores an 83 (out of 100) from the League of Conservation Voters; Obama clocks in at 86. On the campaign trail last year, Biden favoured the U.S. taking a stronger stance in reducing its carbon impact. Specifically, he wants a cap on emissions, increasing investment in renewable fuels, legislating tougher fuel efficiency standards and establishing a national renewable portfolio standard. The Grist breaks out Biden's environmental record here. And what about the right-leaning Wall Street Journal? Biden believes the energy crisis is the most important issue in the campaign, the WSJ notes, reiterating The Grist's points above as ways to achieve further energy independence. (There is some difference of opinion on whether he supports "clean coal". The WSJ says he does, The Grist says he's not a fan.) The Biden selection created a buzz in Accra, the site of a UN summit on climate change, the Associated Press reports. A German delegate there told the AP that the Biden selection allays some questions in the international community whether the White House next year will be more conciliatory towards an international climate change pact than the current Bush Administration. And what about Republican John McCain who is expected to name his Number 2 after the Democratic National Convention wraps up on Thursday. The Guardian handicaps the front runners here. - Bernhard August 22 In praise of wind turbinesHere's one for fans of wind turbines. There are a few of you other there. Correct? In a court ruling that could finally put a halt to (waning) public gripes to wind turbines in the United States, a Texas appeal court judge last week threw out landowner's opposition to a wind farm they claimed is too loud and is an eyesore. The Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital blog called the ruling an important "legal smackdown of “NIMBYism.” According to The Houston Chronicle, landowners near Abilene, Tex., in 2005 took FPL Energy to court for building a wind farm they say too loud, ruined their scenic views and lowered property values. The judge ruled in favour of the FPL and ordered the plaintiffs to pay its legal bills. Understandably, FPL hailed the victory as "the right result." The legal victory is a big one for the entire region. West Texas is the American capital of wind energy and, according to WSJ, it is the fifth largest producer of wind energy in the world. Far from West Texas, the appeal of wind power has even caught the fancy of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. Forbes reports that the mayor envisages a day when New York will be home to an urban wind farm -- an idea that has a surprising number of supporters. "The question is not when we're going to get wind turbines, but where they're going to go," Kaufman Brothers analyst Theodore Rudd O'Neill told Forbes. Not on top of a Manhattan skyscraper of course. - Bernhard July 23 Gov. Schwarzenegger, the Tree-minator Ok, maybe he's more like The Lorax, as the New York Times writes this morning. The governator signed into law this week an only-in-California piece of legislation that gives the trees "the right to grow" -- even if it means blocking out a neighbour's solar panels from direct sunlight. Why write such an obvious thing into law? The short answer is to bring peace to Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley. The whole thing started with a neighbours dispute, pitting one family who'd planted redwood trees over a decade ago against another neighbour who installed solar panels on his home back in 2001. As redwoods are wont to do, the trees grew quite tall, creating a rather large shadow, impacting the direct path of the sun onto a neighbour's solar panels. A series of legal skirmishes ensued. Now, the state is stepping in with Gov. Schwarzenegger and his mighty pen coming to the aid of the trees. Well, old trees. Had the trees been planted after the solar panels were installed, the new law states, the victimised neighbour could order the trees be trimmed. Still confused? It's a California thing. It's supposed to be baffling. - Bernhard July 22 UNICEF admits Millenium Goal well off markFew thought the target would ever be achieved, but that was besides the point. Just bringing global attention to the problem was viewed as a major advancement. In time, human compassion and ingenuity would wipe out one of the most vexing killers in our world: unsafe drinking water. How are we faring in this crusade? Sadly, not well. By 2015, the UN set a goal to reduce by half the number of people who still have no access to basic sanitation and a sustainable fresh water supply. It was the corner piece of the UN's ambitious Millenium Development Goals struck in 2000. Half-way through, and the progress is worse than expected. According to Edie.net, there are still 2.5 billion people without access to clean water and even the most rudimentary toilets. It now appears as if the goal will fall well short of anyone's expectations. "At current trends, the world will fall short of the Millennium sanitation target by more than 700m people," Ann M. Veneman, UNICEF Executive Director, was quoted as saying. This is a problem that impacts the most vulnerable on earth. According to UNICEF, about 5,000 children die every day from simple diarrheal diseases. Outbreaks of malaria and cholera would also be greatly reduced with improved sanitation. July 01 Malaysia calls a halt to new forest clearing for palm oil industryThe Malaysian government is intent on prohibiting any new forest clearing for the establishment of oil palm plantations, the online journal Mongabay reports. According to Malaysia's Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi only areas zoned for agriculture will be allowed to be converted for palm oil production. "We don't have to reduce the protected forests to increase new oil palm plantations," Abdullah was quoted in the New Straits Times as saying. "With more effective management of the plantations and new technologies, production can go up by 30 per cent." But notes Mongabay," some environmental groups have expressed concern that as Malaysia improves the environmental performance of oil palm within its borders, Malaysian firms have lower standards when operating in neighboring Indonesia where much expansion is taking place." Malaysia — the world's second larger producer of palm oil after Indonesia — has already acquired land in Papua, Kalimantan, Aceh and Brazil for future expansion. Indeed the new policy may be tough to enforce at home. Last last week the Chief Minister of Sarawak province, Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud, said that his government would continue to open up more land for oil palm plantations as it was convinced there was adequate protection for endangered orangutans and the indigenous Penan population. June 13 U.S. to blame for global warming and the sinking global economy? That's the perception of the majority of non-Americans who responded to the latest Pew Global Attitudes Survey, The New York Times reports. The NYT writes: Concern about global warming has increased since last year in 11 of the 20 countries for which trends are available, Pew found. “When asked which country is ‘hurting the environment the most,’ majorities or pluralities in most countries surveyed cite the United States,” the Pew report said. “But people are increasingly pointing fingers at China.” The United States and China are among the 10 countries where majorities do not define global warming as a very serious problem. The survey of 24,717 people is the seventh major study conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project since 2002. Also, of the two dozen countries surveyed, just 8 have majorities who have a favourable view of the U.S. They are: Britain, India, Lebanon, Nigeria, Poland, South Africa, South Korea and Tanzania.
June 09 Attention climate change sceptics For those of you who ascribe to the old crack "climate is what you expect; weather is what you get" here's a handy bit of news to reinforce your more sceptical views on climate change. In Italy, from where I write, we are experiencing one of the wettest and coolest Springs in the past 200 years, according to the latest statistics from the Italian research commission at CNR (in Italian). With still two weeks to go in the spring season, precipitation in Spring 2008 is 35 per cent above the national annual average, as recorded during the past 30 years, CNR says. Italy's primavera bagnata of 2008 would seem to obliterate all those calculations predicting climate change would inflict North African-style drought on the Mediterranean region, particularly when you consider last summer was so hot and dry half the country was engulfed in brush fires. But that's the thing about what we're entering into: extreme climatic fluctuations. Desert conditions one year, underwater the next. Though, here in Italy, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion we'll be having a lot more of the former. Correct that. What we expect to get. -- Bernhard May 28 Do cars belong in the city centre?One Italian city is trying to be the first (dicounting Venice) significantly sized city to go car-free in its town centre. It is Perugia, the capital city of Umbria. On a few frigid days in December I had the opportunity to visit the Mini Metro construction project, a 95-million-euro alt-transport project that, at its height, can ferry 72,000 people a day in and out of the town centre. If you are heading to Perugia this summer for the Jazz Fest or later in October for the decadent Chocolate Festival, you should give it a ride. You'll be silencing the critics if you do. (And, if you are in Perugia from 15-30 June, you may want to check out an interesting art exhibition, the works of the eclectic artist Michael Eldridge. It's in the centre of town on the Via Oberdan in the ex-Chiesa di Santa Maria della Misericordia.) - Bernhard May 20 Could clean energy be the next credit crunch victim?The ripple effects from the sub-prime crisis and the resultant credit crunch in the United States is being felt well beyond the financial sector. Investments in clean energy in the U.S. are down, according to a report
in the Wall Street Journal. It notes that investments from private
equity firms totalled just $2.4 billion (£1.2 billion) in the first quarter of 2008, down from $3.7 billion in Q1 2007. By our maths, that's a greater-than 50 per cent drop year-on-year. Not a promising start to the year. According to an editorial in The San Francisco Chronicle, any reduction would be bad news as private equity is the fastest growing area of clean energy investment. The author of the commentary, Daniel M. Kammen, from the Energy and Resources Group, noted that "no nation is better positioned to adopt a low-carbon energy diet than we (the United Nations) are."Kammen calls for more government investment in this area. Perhaps, market forces (and some help from canny Spanish investors) will make up the difference. As the always reliable Greenbang reports, Spanish utility Iberdrola has promised to invest €8.6 billion into the US renewable energy market between 2008 and 2010, with an eye to claiming 15 per cent market share of the U.S. renewables market by the end of the decade. All this movement comes as the multilateral process headed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is trying to encourage private
investors to get more involved in clean energy. They meet next month. May 15 Degradated mangroves exacerbated Burma cyclone disasterAs Burma and the international community start to grapple with the true scale of destruction from last week's cyclone, one top regional politician claims massive mangrove destruction exacerbated the damage. Speaking at a meeting of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Singapore, secretary-general Surin Pitsuwan said widespread coastal developments had resulted in mangroves, which act as a natural defence against storms, being destroyed, the BBC reports. "Encroachment into mangrove forests, which used to serve as a buffer between the rising tide, between big waves and storms and residential areas; all those lands have been destroyed," the AFP news agency reported him as saying. "Human beings are now direct victims of such natural forces." Burma's coastal degradation has been a worry for some time. In 2002, The World Rainforest Movement highlighted the problems in a report "in which it described the mangroves of the Irrawaddy Delta as 'some of the most degraded or destroyed mangrove systems in the Indo-Pacific'. WRM blamed the declining mangroves on upstream deforestation and the conversion of mangrove forests into prawn farms," the Democratic Voice of Burma website reports. This is not a new trend. As the Wall Street Journal writes, "Researchers in Myanmar estimate that 83% of the mangroves in the Irrawaddy were destroyed between 1924 and 1999. The destruction was spearheaded by British colonial authorities who encouraged rice cultivation in the delta, which was once known as the "rice bowl" of the world." And neither is Burma an exceptional case. As the WSJ notes, the cyclone highlighted "an environmental problem plaguing Asia's coastlines: widespread degradation of mangrove forests that once protected coastal villages from tidal surges and strong winds."
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