Category: Archive

The Palestinian Investment Fund (PIF), a financial holdings company owned primarily by independent Palestinian shareholders, is investing in the project and heads the negotiations in coordination with Mahmoud Abbas’ government in the West Bank. BG won a majority stake in the concession to develop the Gaza Marine Field and originally targeted Egypt for the sale of the natural gas. But pressure from then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair led the company to redirect its efforts toward Israel and develop plans for an underwater pipeline that would transport the gas to an Israeli refinery at Ashkelon. That deal could have eventually provided Israel with approximately 10 percent of its annual energy requirement, and would have generated approximately $1 billion for the PIF. The Hamas election victory in 2006 put all that in jeopardy.

International human rights activist Mark Turner recently returned from a nine-month stay in Balata Refugee Camp in the northern West Bank city of Nablus. Turner is currently touring the US, presenting his experiences and analysis of the developing situation in occupied Palestine and can be reached at Mark.Turner[@]ResearchJournalismInitiative.net.

Half of the world population and 80 percent of rural households in developing countries cook with solid fuels like wood, coal, crop residues and dung. In many instances, women cook around open fires, typically with a pot atop three large stones and a wood fire in the middle.

No comprehensive worldwide censuses exist to provide hard numbers.

Indoor air pollution, including smoke and other products of incomplete combustion like carbon monoxide, is a major environmental risk factor, usually ranking behind lack of clean water, poor sanitation and malnutrition. The problem does not only afflict the poorest populations. Many affluent households cook on traditional biomass stoves or open fires by choice or because they live in rural areas without electricity or access to modern fuels.

The World Health Organization estimates that 1.6 million people a year die of health effects resulting from toxic indoor air. The problem disproportionately falls on women and children who spend hours each day around the hearth.

Of that 1.6 million, one million children die of pneumonia, and 600,000 women die prematurely of chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases like bronchitis and emphysema. In China, epidemiologic studies indicate that 420,000 people a year die because of indoor air pollution, 40 percent more than the premature deaths attributed to outdoor air hazards in the pollution-choked urban areas there.

Envirofit was formed in 2003 as a result of two senior undergraduate research projects at the Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory of Colorado State. It develops engineering and technology solutions.

The Shell Foundation estimates that it has invested $10 million in Envirofit’s effort to produce 300,000 stoves on a pilot scale and plans to invest $25 million more to sponsor the stove effort.

For decades, numerous small-scale efforts to introduce improved stoves in countries like China, India and Nepal have achieved modest gains.

“You can design something that looks great in the laboratory,” Kirk R. Smith, an environmental health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, said. “But you get it out in the households, and five years later, you can’t even find it, let alone see that it’s actually achieving.”

Dr. Smith, who is not involved with the Shell-Envirofit partnership and who will be an independent reviewer of the program, has researched health effects of air pollution in the developing world since the early 1980s. He said one challenge had been the lack of randomized research trials that can show cause and effect, rather than just correlations.

“It’s been shown that children living in houses using open fires with solid fuels will have more pneumonia than children living in houses that are using cleaner fuels,” Dr. Smith said. “But those houses are different in other ways, too. They tend to be richer, have better education and may have better nutrition. So the effect may not be due to just the pollution.”

Dr. Smith and his colleagues have recently completed a five-year study of Guatemalans cooking on open fires versus improved stoves, the first such randomized trial, they say. The research, the team says, combined with studies in Asia, suggests additional health problems from indoor air pollution, including higher frequency of cataracts, partial blindness, tuberculosis, low birth weights and high blood pressure. The researchers found that cleaner stoves had larger effects than reducing salt in the diet on lowering blood pressure in women, results published last July in Environmental Health Perspectives.

Scientists measure air pollutants by the concentration of small particles considered safe to inhale. The W.H.O. target is an annual average of 10 to 35 micrograms of particles in a cubic meter of air per year. The Environmental Protection Agency calls for 15.

Yet houses that rely on traditional stoves or open fires typically register in the hundreds or, in some cases, thousands, Dr. Smith said.

At Envirofit headquarters in the old Fort Collins power plant, researchers and engineers are designing and testing clean-burning stoves that they say will significantly improve air quality and require less wood fuel. An important feature will be the ability to control carefully the air pulled in, said Bryan Willson, a mechanical engineer who founded the Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory and was a co-founder of Envirofit.

Too much intake cools the process, leading to incomplete combustion. In a modern gas stove, nearly 100 percent of the carbon is burned to carbon dioxide. With traditional stoves in the developing world, 90 percent is fully converted to CO2. The remainder forms a toxic cocktail of byproducts like benzene, carbon monoxide and formaldehyde that billow out in soot and smoke. Envirofit’s stoves will be designed with an insulated chamber that cuts down on energy loss and maintains heat inside the chamber walls.

Envirofit has plans not only to engineer the stoves, but also to market them. The hundreds of prior stove projects, Dr. Willson said, were not “guided by a real strategic vision of what it means to understand who the customer is, what they need and how to get it produced.”

Envirofit has been visiting rural areas to study factors like the ergonomics of cooking habits and preferred color schemes. In India, women tend to squat while cooking, making height an important consideration.

Envirofit will offer a variety of sleek ceramic stoves from single to multipot, with and without chimneys, and with colors like apple red, baby blue and gold. The cost is to start at $10 to $20 and run to $150 to $200..

“The women and the families that are buying them are no different from us,” the Envirofit program coordinator, Jaime Whitlock, said. “They want to buy something they’re proud of.”

The product development will be at Colorado State, and Envirofit will work with distributors to create rural supply chains.

Harish Hande, managing director of Selco India, a solar lighting company that plans to work on marketing and financing the stoves, said the measure of success would be if they caught on with the women.

Mr. Hande said he believed that although many women did not realize how bad the smoke was for their own health, they did have an intuitive sense that it was not good for their children and were “very interested in getting solutions.”

He said that with the right products and a “Tupperware marketing strategy,” in which women make house calls to talk about the stoves, a change might be imminent.

“Let the women who have been using it for two or three months talk about it,” he said, “and people will accept it.”

In London, about 4,000 hives – two-thirds of the bee colonies in the capital – were estimated to have died over last winter. Of the eight colonies inspected so far this year, all have been wiped out.

The losses are being blamed on Colony Collapse Disorder, a disease that has severely affected bee populations in America and Europe, and a resistant form of Varroa destructor, a parasitic mite that affects bees.

The decline in honeybees is risking the sustainability of home-grown food. They pollinate more than 90 of the flowering crops we rely on for food. They are estimated to contribute more than £1 billion a year to the national economy yet the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), spends an average of only £200,000 a year on research to protect them.

The BBKA will this week launch a campaign aimed at forcing ministers to take the plight of the bee more seriously, and to spend the £8 million over the next five years which it believes is essential to guarantee its survival.

At their annual meeting held earlier this month, the association’s 11,200 members voted unanimously to condemn the Government’s position.

At a showdown meeting, between Lord Rooker, the farming minister, and the BBKA last month, the minister refused to increase the spending, even though in November, he appeared to admit the severity of the threat, when he said: "If we do not do anything, the chances are that in 10 years’ time we will not have any honeybees."

Mr Lovett added: "Defra has been alerted, but chooses to take no action. If nothing happens, we may not even have to wait 10 years."

Professor Francis Ratniek, a bee expert at Sheffield University, said: "If there was to be a bee collapse the effect on Britain would be huge.

"In Britain we haven’t had our fair share of bee research funds and research into bee disease has decreased just as the threat to colonies is increasing. A complete die-off is a worst case scenario."

The new film Into the Wild is being launched in Australia and has got people talking about the value of wilderness experiences. Because the Generator is actively engaged in protecting the wilderness and thinking about how we can plan future development to live in harmony with the planet, we talked to local adventurer, Howard Whelan.

The interview is available in three parts, each dealing with a slightly different aspect of the discussion.

Part 1: Deals with the movie and the relationship between the wilderness and the individual

Part 2: Deals with Howard’s Pacific Crest walk and the impact it had on his life

Part 3: Deals with the role of wilderness in the environment

You may also be interested to hear Howard join us in a discussion about Sea Shepherd.

Howard’s Anatarctic photographs are available at Retrospect Galleries.

Giovanni and Malcolm had Antarctic expedition leader, Howard Whelan on the show on January 21st, 2008. Giovanni had put together a compiliation of interviews with Paul Watson, and other Sea Shepherd activists on the Generator over the last twelve months.

Listen to Howard with the lads, discussing the work of Sea Shepherd.

For up to date information on Sea Shepherd’s campaign to stop the Japanese whaling in the Antarctic visit their website .