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Archived material from historical editions of The Generator

  • Banning bad-biofuels good news for renewables

    From the World Watch Institute  

    Casual observers might consider it a setback for proponents of ethanol and biodiesel now that Europe is planning to ban biofuels made from crops grown on high-value conservation lands. But the truth is, shunning biofuels produced on wetlands, grasslands, and deforested land is good for both critics and supporters. Overall, it’s even good for the biofuel industry because it might restore some faith in their product, which has been attacked from all corners in recent months. The main problem with Europe’s new law, in fact, may be that it is not stringent enough.

    A ban on some biofuels is good because there’s a natural tendency to take advantage of a bull market. As with any crop, when demand grows, farmers will expand production onto new territory, whether it’s the sloping, erosion-prone “back forty,” a parcel of nearby forest, or a patch of wetlands. The rising demand for grains and oilseeds for food, livestock feed, and now biofuels is encouraging farmers across the world to expand their cropland as much as the law and the market tolerate.

    In South America, soybean farmers and ranchers are encroaching on the Amazon, and palm oil plantations are continuing an alarming expansion across large swaths of virgin forests and peatlands in Southeast Asia. There are double benefits for local actors to clear forested land now, because the timber is valuable and so is the new cropland. Even though much of the logging and land conversion is done illegally, governments seldom have enough enforcement muscle to stop such profitable businesses.

    But it’s not just about the growers. Consumers are probably the most important part of today’s raging biofuels market. People are interested in biofuels because they want to do something good for the planet—and if they realize that some of these fuels are linked to alarming social and environmental practices, the demand will dry up as they stop buying biofuel blends at the pump and pressure their governments to reverse biofuel mandates.

    The only way forward for the market is to keep working on sustainability standards and accurate life-cycle measurements of the greenhouse gas impacts of a given biofuel. Like jeans and sports shoes, each gallon of fuel needs a tag that promises it was not produced in the equivalent of a biofuels sweatshop. Without regulation and transparency from field to tank, the industry simply cannot live up to its promise of a cleaner, better future.

    The benefits of biofuels can be many: reducing dependence on oil, keeping money and jobs in the local economy, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants, to name a few. But not all biofuels are created equal, and their benefits in fact vary wildly depending on the feedstock, how it is grown and harvested, where it is grown, and how it is processed.

    Making ethanol from corn doused with chemical fertilizers is much less efficient than making it from corn grown in a no-till rotation and fertilized organically with a cover crop. In the United States, biodiesel produced from soybeans grown locally is much more efficient and climate friendly than corn ethanol, and more so if the beans are grown in a no-till system.

    Meanwhile, ethanol from sugar cane grown in Brazil has far higher energy and climate benefits on average than either of these two options. But if the sugar cane is grown on a converted grassland, irrigated heavily, or treated with lots of inorganic fertilizer and pesticides, it starts losing its environmental benefits. Worse, if it is grown on a plantation where the laborers work in terrible conditions for a pittance, its social benefits leak away too.

    Next-generation biofuel crops that can be produced with little water or fertilizer on dry or easily erodable soils, and that actually improve degraded soils, may have far superior benefits to even the best sugarcane ethanol. But if these second-generation fuels—derived mainly from quick-growing grasses and trees—are not produced with the goal of maximizing social and environmental benefits, they will have no more value than the dirtiest corn ethanol.

    If the biofuels market (and related laws) recognize these differences, there will be an incentive to produce better biofuels. If not, then there’s no reason for a producer not to convert more land and throw more chemicals and water at the crop to make it grow, even on totally unsuitable land. The more guidance growers and importers have, and the more they know that someone is paying attention to their growing practices, the less environmental and social abuse there will be. These rules are pretty much universal, and don’t just apply to biofuels—but also to clothes, electronics, toys, and perhaps most interestingly, your food.

    Bioenergy expert Dr. Jeremy Woods of London’s Imperial College noted recently that less than 1 percent of the market for palm oil is for biodiesel (while 99 percent is produced for food, cosmetics, and industrial uses). So a ban on palm oil for fuel alone is not going to stop deforestation. The good news is, you can check out the ingredients of the products you buy and put down that tub of margarine, package of cookies, candy bar, or bottle of shampoo if you see forest-unfriendly contents like palm oil inside.

    This story was produced by Eye on Earth, a joint project of the Worldwatch Institute and the blue moon fund.

  • Chinese rivers run red

    BEIJING – Pollution has turned part of a major river system in central China red and bubbly, forcing authorities to cut water supplies to 200,000 people and close schools, a government news agency reported Wednesday.

    Some communities along tributaries of the Hanjiang River — a branch of the Yangtze — in Hubei province were using emergency water sources, while at least 60,000 people were relying on bottled water and limited underground sources, Xinhua News Agency said.

    Five schools were closed in Xingou township, while others could not provide food to students, the report said without elaborating.

    Gao Qijin, head of the water company in Xingou township, said officials discovered the Dongjing River — one of the tributaries — was red and bubbly Sunday. The company immediately stopped drawing water from the river, Xinhua cited Gao as saying.

    Tests showed the polluted waters contained elevated levels of ammonia, nitrogen, and permanganate, a chemical used in metal cleaning, tanning and bleaching, Xinhua said. The source of the pollution had not been determined, and an investigation was ongoing.

    Local officials closed a gate linking the Hanjiang River to the tributaries, and were using water from the nearby Changhu Lake to flush out the pollutants, the report said.

    A paper mill dumped waste water directly into the Hanjiang last September, forcing authorities to cut water supplies for a week in some areas, Xinhua said. It did not say how many people were affected.

  • Scientists find sweat gene in plants

    Professor Kangasjarvi says the next stage in the research is to identify how to control the opening and closing of the stomata.

    "First you have to know what to work with, and now we have it," he said.

    "The work that we have been doing is with the so-called model plant of plant kingdom – Arabidopsis.

    "There are hundreds, thousands of research groups around the world who are using Arabidopsis because it is an efficient way of looking at the general plant responses and functions of plant genes, which then can be applied to different species."

    Graham Farquhar, professor of environmental biology at the Australian National University, says the work is promising.

    "I think it is very important. It is a really important piece of the jigsaw," he said.

    "This paper describes a protein that allows the stomata to close, and therefore to reduce water loss.

    "We’ve never known until now how that came about."

    Professor Farquhar believes the research will benefit Australia.

    "Because Australia is the driest continent apart from the Antarctic and we rely completely on our rainfall," he said.

    "We want to make sure that the water that the plants use is used most effectively."

  • Blood diamonds day in court

    But it was in the early 1990s that the most ambitious – and apocalyptic – plan to grab the diamonds was hatched. A man called Foday Sankoh was at its centre. He had once been a soldier in the Sierra Leonean army, but he was by then biding his time as a television cameraman. With several of his Liberian friends – including Sam Bockarie, a hairdresser and nightclub dancer – he decided to launch a wildly ambitious, wildly violent attempt to seize Sierra Leone’s diamond fields and run them as a private criminal empire. He scrambled around for support from a string of dictators: Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi provided training, while Liberia’s Taylor provided arms and some of his own battalions.

    With this, Sankoh raised a private militia, giving it the grand-sounding name of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). He clothed it with the bare minimum of revolutionary rhetoric, plagiarising a few phrases from Mao. This was enough to begin recruiting men from the ghettos of West Africa, promising them a job, food and "liberation". He decided to recruit children: a nine-year old with an AK47 was more use to him than a 40- year-old.

    Everything was now in place to mount a "rebellion" – a de facto invasion – in eastern Sierra Leone, where the diamonds waited. The RUF’s policy was simple, and summarised in the name that Sankoh gave to one of his military manoeuvres: Operation Kill Everything. The aim was to impose maximum terror on the civilian population immediately, to drive them out and make sure nobody ever tried to come back.

    They soon developed a trademark tactic: they would chop off the hands of any civilian they stumbled across. Helen K was a typical young woman found by Human Rights Watch in the RUF’s wake. She explained she had lost her two children after an RUF attack and had no idea where they were. "They captured me and said to lie on the floor," she said. "I was reluctant; they cut me on the neck with a machete. I was cut by a small boy. Then they put my hand on a stone and cut [it off]… I had to bury my own hand."

    The child soldiers were hyped-up with drugs before being sent out to slay. Douglas Farah’s account of the war, Blood from Stones, says: "One thing the children do remember vividly is the preparation for what they called ‘mayhem days’, sprees of killing and raping that lasted until the participants collapsed from exhaustion. They said they were given coloured pills, most likely amphetamines, and razor blade slits near their temples, where cocaine was put directly into their bloodstreams. The ensuing days were a blur."

    It worked. Soon, two million people were homeless and the RUF had its diamonds.

    And here is where we come in. The international diamond industry was waiting with its chequebook open. Charles Taylor was the middleman, taking a cut from the cutting. The diamonds were shipped via Liberia to Antwerp in Belgium, where they were snapped up by the diamond companies. A few saw a PR disaster looming – De Beers wouldn’t touch them. But many others handed cash to the RUF, and the stones were soon on sale across Europe and the US.

    Ian Smillie, a diamond expert who served on the UN panel investigating the pillage, explains: "There is no way the war could have happened the way it did, and carried on for 10 years, without rich Westerners buying the diamonds. The RUF had very little support anywhere. It had no tribal base in the country, it had no other governments supporting them apart from Taylor."

    The RUF soon stepped up the supply, to the diamond industry’s delight. It was a simple causal relationship: so rich Westerners could have a glistening choker, poor children were choked.

    We are getting somewhat better at arresting state criminals: we got (albeit briefly) Slobodan Milosevic, Augusto Pinochet, and Charles Taylor, and in time we’ll get Henry Kissinger, Robert Mugabe and more. But corporate criminals routinely get away with murder. Literally.

    Taylor is alone in the dock. The diamond dealers who knowingly paid him for his services are free and fat on the profits. If you or I paid a known murderer to go and rob somebody for us, we’d go to prison. But if a corporation does it on a massive scale, there is no punishment. This is almost invariably the case with corporate human rights abuses: Union Carbide has paid no price for killing 5,000 people in Bhopal, Shell has paid no price for its role in the decimation of the Niger Delta, and on, and on.

    The diamond industry has been allowed to act as though rape and mutilation are an acceptable part of its supply chain. Sure, it eventually developed a system for certifying diamonds as the slaughter was ending anyway (and even that is filled with holes). But for the hundreds of thousands of handless women like Helen K, diamonds are for ever. For them, at the very least, there needs now to be an international diamond tax, with the proceeds providing reparations for Sierra Leone, and the other countries raped for their diamonds: Angola and the Congo.

    But we need more. If corporate criminals are not charged and jailed, they will carry on committing crimes against humanity. It is glorious to see Charles Taylor in the dock. But this should be merely the first sentence of justice for the people of Sierra Leone – and the victims of profit-driven slaughter everywhere.

    j.hari@independent.co.uk

  • China and Iran in gas deal

    TEHRAN, Feb 27 (Reuters) – The signing of a contract with China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) to develop Iran’s northern Pars gas field has been postponed to the "near future", an Iranian official said on Wednesday.

    The deal was first announced in late 2006 but signing it has been delayed in the past. An Oil Ministry news report said on Tuesday the deal was worth $16 billion, lower than the $20 billion previously reported.

    "The contract signing has been postponed to the near future. The reason why it was postponed today was because (Oil Minister Gholamhossein) Nozari could not take part," a spokesman for Pars Oil and Gas Company, told Reuters. He did not elaborate.

    The deal is to be signed between CNOOC, which leads China’s fledgling LNG industry, and Pars Oil and Gas Company. CNOOC is the parent of Hong Kong and New York-listed CNOOC Ltd.

    Iran plans to export the northern Pars production in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG).

    Northern Pars field contains 80 trillion cubic feet of gas and said each phase of development could have the capacity to produce 1.2 billion cubic feet per day, the Oil Ministry’s news Web site previously reported.

    China has in recent years expanded commercial ties with the Islamic Republic and has been reluctant to impose tough economic sanctions on Iran, China’s third-largest supplier of oil.

    China’s Sinopec Group, parent of Sinopec Corp. , signed a deal in December to develop Iran’s huge Yadavaran oilfield.

    Iran has the world’s second-biggest crude reserves after Saudi Arabia and the second-largest gas reserves behind Russia. Although a major oil exporter, the OPEC member has been slow to expand gas exports because of sanctions and has no LNG plants. (Reporting by Hashem Kalantari; editing by James Jukwey)

  • Off grid solutions for remote poor

    Planners and policy makers have long pondered how best to supply light and power to remote areas of developing countries, where some 1.6 billion people — about a quarter of the world’s population — still live without electricity. The usual solution is to build out centralized power systems, or extend the grid. But such capital-intensive projects present huge challenges for poorer nations, even when foreign aid is involved. On top of servicing debt, "you have to have a system where people pay their bills. You need functional governments," says Russell Sturm, leader of the Sustainable Energy Team at International Finance Corp., the World Bank’s private-sector lending arm.

    New approaches are gaining favor that are inexpensive, safe and don’t rely on big utilities or their grids. Aid agencies, nonprofits, environmentalists and start-ups all are involved in initiatives to promote "off-grid" power-generation using renewable resources and other environmentally friendly technology.

    The United Nations Development Program, for one, is implementing 153 renewable-energy projects around the world with funding totaling some $556 million. The program has awarded $18 million in small grants of up to $50,000 to communities operating about 820 small-scale renewable energy projects. These include solar-powered water desalination in Mauritius; wind energy for water pumping in Egypt; and micro-hydroelectric plants, harnessing the energy of nearby rivers, to electrify homes and schools in the Dominican Republic.

    Elsewhere, Western environmental groups are helping to create off-grid homes, often with electricity
    generated by solar panels or wind turbines.

    Private companies, meanwhile, are interested in the Third World as a potential market for inexpensive, energy-efficient appliances such as solar-powered lights and hand-crank radios. Some are teaming up with nonprofits and government agencies to get their products in the hands of consumers. Cosmos Ignite, for example, charges $40 for its solar-powered MightyLights, which is more cash than most poor Indians usually have on hand. A several-month supply of kerosene would cost about the same, though, and Cosmos Ignite says its lights last for years. That’s why nonprofit microlenders and Indian government agencies are stepping in to help with such purchases.

    In the Philippines, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spearheaded a drive since 2001 to use solar cells and micro-hydro power to electrify hundreds of remote rural communities on the conflict-wracked island of Mindanao. So far, the Alliance for Mindanao Off-grid Renewable Energy, or AMORE, has electrified 413 villages, 320 community centers, 145 schools, and installed 319 streetlights. USAID says the group plans to light up 520 villages by 2009.

    Fighting between Philippine forces and Muslim militant groups, including the Al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf, for years stymied government efforts to expand the island’s electric grid to large areas. At the same time, the widespread darkness gave the militants more room in which to maneuver.

    "Kerosene was hard to get, so the villages weren’t lighted at night," says Calista Downey, the officer of USAID’s Philippine desk. "Abu Sayyaf and other rebel groups moved about in the darkness. Lighted areas were always safer."

    Electricity also has given the local economy a big shot in the arm. Fishermen now have a few more hours of light in which to mend their nets. Markets stay open longer. Children have more light to do their homework. And security has improved. "Perhaps more important than having light, when the villages see their life improving, they’re less likely to give refuge to insurgents," Ms. Downey says.

    AMORE, which comprises USAID, the Philippine government, the Atlanta-based power company Mirant Corp., and local authorities, trains locals to operate the power-generating systems. The locals decide who gets to use the power.

    Initiatives such as AMORE are getting a boost from the big advances now under way in the production of solar-, wind- and hydro-power technology. "The prices for [solar-energy’s] photovoltaic cells and wind turbines keep coming down," says Gordon Weynand, a USAID expert on renewable energy who is based in Washington, D.C.

    That’s also the case with LED technology. While LED products still cost more to produce than conventional lighting, they last longer, produce more light and use very little energy. Long used in automobile rear-window, brake lights, and in the infrared beams of television remote controls, LEDs now are so powerful they can be used to create ambient lighting for a whole room, like the lights Cosmos Ignite makes.

    Mr. Scott, who now lives in London, and who teamed up with Indian entrepreneur Amir Chugh to form Cosmos Ignite, says the company’s MightyLight LED lamp is now three to four times brighter than it was four years ago. "Most other lighting technologies are static, but LEDs will continue to improve," he says. That’s made a big difference to his business model. "We can now offer more light for the same wattage," he says.

    In addition to running on solar power, LEDs can be recharged using hand cranks or pedal power. Freeplay Energy PLC, a London-based company, pioneered a radio operated with a hand crank that has sold well throughout Africa, and it is now applying the same technology to a range of LED lights for the poor.

    There are many small, high-tech start-ups working on the technology, says Mr. Sturm of the World Bank’s IFC. "Refugees from the dot-com bust," he calls them.

    Some of the biggest names in the lighting business are getting interested in this market, too, such as Philips Electronics NV of the Netherlands. In 2005, Philips launched a pilot project in India aimed at bringing affordable, energy-efficient lighting to the poor, using rechargeable, portable lanterns and hand-cranked LED flashlights. Company spokeswoman Santa van der Laarse adds that Philips expects the falling cost of producing LEDs to make such products increasingly affordable for Third World customers over the next few years.

    The IFC is interested in this market as well. It sees its mission as helping to disseminate such products in the developing world by educating consumers and helping the companies stitch together supply chains. Last year it unveiled its Lighting Africa initiative, a plan to help provide inexpensive, safe and clean lighting to 250 million people in sub-Saharan Africa by 2030. As part of that initiative, it launched a competition to design low-cost, environmentally friendly lighting products tailored to the local market: Some 500 lighting companies, suppliers and distributors have expressed an interest, Mr. Sturm says, including big names like Philips, and smaller operators like Cosmos Ignite, too.

    The biggest enemy of off-grid technologies, meanwhile, could be their rapid success. Rising demand is leading to serious shortages of equipment. "It’s rare that you can get photovoltaic cells off the shelf, and on wind turbines you’re sometimes looking at a year’s wait," says USAID’s Mr. Weynand. "It affects all thedonors. You have to get in the queue like everyone else."

    Originally published in The Wall Street Journal , 11 February 2008