Category: Archive

The situation in Naples has been  exacerbated by a blockade of the city’s Pianuro refuse site by locals who fear mismanagement at the plant has already allowed the cancer-causing chemicals to be released into the environment.

Italy’s Higher Health Institute has already found evidence of an increase cancer rates in the region.

Alarms were also sounded by a report in medical journal The Lancet Oncology in 2004 that identified a "triangle of death" east of Naples where toxic waste was linked to a higher incidence of cancer, especially liver cancer.

But experts at the Naples Cancer Institute warn that if people burn their own rubbish the situation will get far worse.

In addition, Campania has the "eco-balls" scandal to contend with.

Some rubbish is supposed to be sorted at the region’s Caivano treatment centre into solid and liquid waste, then compacted into "eco-balls", which are piled into a pyramid to be safely burned.

But according to Antonio Marfella at the Naples Cancer Institute "these can’t be incinerated because the waste wasn’t sorted into solid and liquid. And if you let them decompose, they can produce a toxic liquid that can seep into the ground and enter the water system".

Official figures say there are 400,000 tonnes of eco-balls like those at Caivano in the Naples region. It emerged this week that the plant had now run out of space,

And as fears grow over the public health threat, the EU is set to intervene with huge fines, a spokeswoman for EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas warned last week.

A "waste disposal state of emergency," was first decreed in the Naples region in 1994, and it has been renewed annually ever since.

Fingers are mostly pointed at the Camorra and the crooked politicians in its pay. The crime syndicate is accused of sabotaging new refuge disposal contracts as it seeks to profit to the tune of £2bn a year with its own clandestine trade in waste disposal.

Long-running disputes have seen refuse processing sites closed or blockaded. While over £1bn set aside for the construction of new ones has mysteriously vanished. Those that have been built have not worked properly.

Italian environment minister Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio has said that the government had formed a new commission to finally sort out what he considered to be "one of Italy’s greatest scams".

Mafia expert Professor Donato Masciandaro of Milan’s Bocconi University told the Telegraph: "If you’re not Italian, in fact if you’re not from Naples, it’s hard to understand how all this could have been allowed to happen. But the when there’s a major problem like this the mafia can make money out of it."

The storm, one of two predicted for the weekend, hit the Bay Area before dawn and knocked out power to about 1.2 million people from Central California to the Oregon border. With repair crews in some areas forced to retreat in the face of flying debris and tree limbs, Pacific Gas and Electric, Northern California’s chief utility, warned that some customers could be without electricity through the weekend.

Forecasters promised punishing conditions for Southern California as well. Extremely heavy rain was expected there, raising the prospect of mudslides, particularly in areas stripped of vegetation by the wildfires of 2007. In expectation of such slides, The Associated Press reported, officials late Friday ordered the mandatory evacuation of about 1,000 homes in four Orange County canyons.

Here to the north, conditions were already challenging. Several major Bay Area roads, including Highway 101 and Interstate 580, were closed for much of the day by airborne construction materials and overturned vehicles, including five trucks that flipped on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, a major east-west thoroughfare spanning a northern finger of San Francisco Bay.

A downed tree on the tracks stopped BART rail service in the Mission District of San Francisco, sending evacuated passengers into the rain or onto buses. Morning ferry services across the bay were canceled as docked boats rocked like rubber ducks in a bath.

Scaffolding collapsed, breaking windows, taking down power lines and bringing electrically powered buses to a halt along at least one major San Francisco boulevard. People trying to make it to work dodged flying trash cans, orphaned umbrellas and dislocated newspaper vending machines.

Dozens of flights were canceled at the San Francisco airport, where winds topped 65 miles an hour at midmorning, making for even more flight delays than cancellations. Harrowing whitecaps from the bay lapped at the foot of the runways.

The most extreme conditions were about 200 miles to the east of San Francisco, in the Sierra Nevada, where the National Weather Service warned of blizzard and whiteout conditions and gusts of 160 miles per hour. Just hours into the storm, a 163-m.p.h. gust was reported on one mountaintop near Lake Tahoe.

Power was sporadic in some mountain towns along Interstate 80 from Sacramento to Reno, Nev. Only the hardiest of trucks and tire-chained cars were crawling along that stretch Friday.

Forecasters said trying to travel through the storm would be foolhardy.

“It’s an exceptional storm,” said Rhett Milne, a Reno meteorologist with the Weather Service. “If you do get stranded, it’s a life-threatening situation.”

The Weather Service said some upper elevations could get up to 10 feet of snow by the time the twin storms blow through at weekend’s close, and some ski resorts, visibility eliminated by blowing snow, had already shut their high-mountain lifts.

Even in less exposed areas, daily routines were brought to a halt by wind and rain. In San Anselmo, a pleasant commuter town north of San Francisco, shops were closed, floodgates were in use, and merchandise was moved to higher shelves. A New Year’s Eve flood two years ago badly damaged some local businesses there, and sandbagging for this storm started Thursday night, said Lauren Gregory, an owner of Bloomworks, a flower shop.

“It was really, really difficult for businesses to recover,” Ms. Gregory said of the earlier flood’s aftermath. “Most did, but they still haven’t really caught up financially and gotten out of debt. To go through that again would really be devastating.”

Forecasters attributed the storm to a particularly violent collision of subtropical moisture and a blast of arctic air, and the same system also lashed areas farther north. At the Washington-Oregon border, the ocean entrance to the Columbia River was closed to ship traffic, as was the entrance to Tillamook Bay, in northwest Oregon, the Coast Guard said. Inland, the police closed stretches of Interstate 84 for several hours after high winds toppled tractor-trailers.

In Washington, where December storms caused six deaths, meteorologists warned of more snow in the Cascade Mountains. Winds and unstable snow there would make conditions treacherous. Eight fatalities have already been attributed to avalanches in the state this fall and winter, making this the deadliest avalanche season in three decades, and forecasters weighed Friday whether to issue another avalanche warning.

After several consecutive dry years, not everyone in California was unhappy about Friday’s storm. Hydrologists at the California Department of Water Resources said five inches of rain had already fallen in reservoirs in northern counties, and were hopeful that the storm might single-handedly make up for a dry November and below-average rainfall last month.

And in parts of the ski-happy Sierras, where forecasters said snow could fall at a rate of several inches an hour for most of the weekend, resort operators were dreaming of a thick powder unlike any seen in the last couple of winters.

“We’re always pretty well equipped for the weather — that’s why we love living here,” said Roy Moyer, general manager of the Tamarack Lodge and Resort, a cross-country center near Mammoth Lakes, Calif. “So bring it on.”

Which the storm was busy doing. By midafternoon, some two feet of snow had fallen at Mammoth Lakes.

health and pollution > features > ‘china’s pollution increase is inevitable’

‘China’s pollution increase is inevitable’

Posted: 25 May 2006

Concentraded population

Thus, Beijing and the neighbouring city of Tianjin combined have the population of Australia. Chonqing is one of the largest cities in the world. And China’s population is overwhelmingly concentrated on the eastern seaboard, with vast swathes of the inland practically depopulated. These clusters need to be serviced by gigantic power plants. China has 6GW power plants, while the biggest in the US is just 3GW. China also tends to have very large factories.

In contrast, the US benefits from a much more dispersed population and can therefore operate smaller plants whose waste is more manageable.

This explains the paradox that while the US is the biggest polluter in the world in absolute terms, it has much fewer pollution problems than China. Better technology and filtration also play a role.

The World Bank estimates that air pollution causes nearly 170,000 deaths in China every year.

Brock points out that the term pollution needs to be handled with care. Many people regard carbon dioxide (CO2) as a pollutant, but China has not classified it as such, and nor has any other country. CO2 is in fact merely the by-product of burning carbon and is in itself not in the least bit harmful to human health.

However, CO2 has been identified as probably being responsible for global warming, since it traps warmth within the world’s atmosphere.

Methane ignored

One of the signs that the debate over the environment has been hopelessly politicised, according to Brock, is that methane (produced primarily by bovine flatulence) has 20 times the capacity of C02 for trapping heat. Yet so far there has been no movement to transfer cattle to a less ‘windy’ diet.

What is undoubtedly harmful to humans is the carbon monoxide, mercury, sulphur and nitrous oxide that burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil emit. It’s these emissions that bring about the lung complaints and other ailments that can kill vulnerable old and young people in high levels.

Techniques such as coal gasification can produce clean energy in both CO2 and health terms. Their usage becomes more feasible as oil prices go up, points out Brock.

But Brock believes that large-scale pollution is inevitable. Causing mass to alter its state will always produce a by-product – otherwise known as pollution or waste.

Tipping point

“That’s simple physics, and is a process known as entropy. And China is producing so many goods of all kinds that the process will throw off enormous amounts of waste in absolute terms, even though the country is introducing strict and effective emission laws,” he says. This waste comes just as much from making a suit or building a factory as it does from fossil fuels.

“It’s no good claiming to be green by buying a Toyota Prius or other environmentally-friendly car. The process of building a car actually produces a lot more CO2 than driving one,” points out Brock.

Satellite image of thick layer of smog and smoke over China. July 11, 2002 © NASA

The choice for the Chinese government is simple: to reduce economic growth, and thereby standards of living, or to keep pressing ahead. Brock is probably right when he says that for the average Chinese citizen environmental issues come well below increasing his standard of living in terms of priorities.

However, that could change if China saw a tipping point of the kind that characterised the rise of the environmental movement in the West, such as the terrible London smogs of the early 1960s, and the bursting into flames of the Love Canal in the Ohio Valley.

Shifting cost

“When it becomes clear that people’s living standards are being significantly affected by pollution, then people will step back and reconsider growth,” estimates Brock. While economists say that the pollution problem should, in principle, be solved by attributing ownership, this is quite hard to do with many kinds of pollution.

Much of the existing CO2 in the atmosphere was put out by the Europeans and the US hundreds of years ago, since C02 takes thousands of years to disperse. Similarly, harmful fossil fuel particles in the atmosphere are hard to trace back to their generators. As a result, it’s tempting for countries intent on rapid growth to shift the cost of clearing up the waste to the victims, or indeed to later generations.

Ultimately, Brock says, the problem will solve itself. Populations stabilise, as in Japan and Europe, standards of living peak, and absolute energy usage goes down. The question is whether the planet – and in particular China’s close neighbours – can survive the time that process will take to come to fruition.

Source: Finance Asia reported by INS

With world energy prices and climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions ballooning in tandem with a surge in energy demand from the hot economies of China, India and Brazil, the world has a major stake in the success of energy reduction efforts, particularly in those three countries, the experts said at the end of a our-year international project.

Energy-Related CO2 Emissions Growth to 2030 (Reference Scenario) Source: International Energy Agency, Paris, 2004

Unlocking today’s potential savings requires simple, highly cost-effective renovation projects to identify and eliminate energy waste, they said. The keys are fostering corporate awareness, supporting catalyst energy efficiency practitioners and enlightening commercial banks to ease access to local financing for such projects.

“Improving energy efficiency for existing buildings and other infrastructure could cut current energy consumption by 25 per cent or more in India, China and Brazil, amounting to millions of tonnes in reduced greenhouse gas emissions and hundreds of millions of dollars in energy savings,” says Robert Taylor, a World Bank Lead Energy Specialist and leader of the Three Country Energy Efficiency Project (3CEE).

Conclusions from the project were captured at a conference in Paris on May 19-20, involving the project’s public and private sector partners. An executive summary of those conclusions will be published online on May 29.

Despite the huge potential, it has been difficult to achieve investments on the ground so far, the project summary concludes.

"Many energy efficiency projects quickly pay for themselves, with typical returns on investment of 20-40 per cent," says Chandra Govindarajalu, a senior World Bank environmental specialist. “Despite the demonstrated benefits, though, companies often cite other, more immediate investment and borrowing priorities. Meanwhile, commercial banks in these countries are generally unfamiliar with financing projects designed to achieve cost savings, rather than develop new product lines or other tangible assets.”

Other roadblocks within companies include:

• Lack of awareness/experience with newer efficient technologies;
• High transaction costs for smaller sized projects that inhibit implementation;
• High perceived risk by decision makers; and
• A lack of combined technical and financial skills at finance institutions, preventing accurate appraisal and structuring of potential efficiency projects.

Saving energy

“Cutting energy waste is the cheapest, easiest, fastest way to solve many energy problems, improve the environment and enhance both energy security and economic development,” says Mr. Taylor. “What we must develop further are systems to tap huge potential energy savings through thousands of small projects scattered across China, India, Brazil, as well as smaller developing country economies,”

He says the reluctance of companies to undertake energy retrofits is akin to that of countless millions worldwide who fail to buy energy efficient light bulbs for homes, despite proof that they save enough in utility bills to more than pay for themselves.

“Even people who know the financial and environmental benefits of the bulbs may not buy and install them – it seems like such a small thing, why take the trouble? But from a national or global point of view, the potential savings add up to the electricity and pollution produced by many large power plants.

“Imagine, however,” Taylor says, “if I offered to install the efficient bulbs and guaranteed they would pay for themselves in six months or your money refunded. Perhaps then you might then buy a package.

“Rapidly developing countries such as China, India and Brazil need many people and consulting firms to do that same thing at the level of an industrial facility or apartment building, for example, to identify energy efficiencies across the board and exploit large-scale energy use reduction opportunities, and enlightened banks to finance them.”

Such retrofits involve installing, for example, high efficiency lighting, air conditioners, boilers and waste heat recovery systems for commercial and public buildings, industrial plants and other facilities. Project costs (and profits) can be provided to energy service companies (ESCOs), which design and implement energy conservation projects, or participating banks, from a share of utility bill savings.

"Money is available in these countries but can’t be accessed easily by energy conservation promoters and ESCOs. This is a big area for work in the future” says Mark Radka, Head of the UNEP Energy Branch, based in Paris. “It takes time and effort for local businesses, banks, governments and aid organizations to develop energy conservation delivery systems which work and which can be supported by the financial community.”

While energy efficiency projects need to be customized to local circumstances and business practices, the project makes a host of recommendations, including:

• Foster the growth of ESCOs;
• Promote energy efficiency investments by local utilities; and
• Develop special local bank lending arrangements to provide energy conservation financing.

Initiated in 2001, the 3CEE Project has attempting to promote energy efficiency projects in China, India, Brazil by easing typical investment requirements of financial institutions.

The project is a joint initiative of the World Bank, the UN Environment Programme’s Denmark-based Risoe Centre (URC), and partners in Brazil, China and India. The UN Foundation and the World Bank Energy Sector Management Assistance Program provided financial support, with complementary activities supported by the Asia Alternative Energy Program and the UK Department for International Development.

“People worldwide have a vital interest in the success of this initiative to harness the power of the private sector to minimize the energy required for these three countries to realise their economic goals,” says Jyoti Painuly, Senior Energy Planner at the UNEP Risoe Centre on Energy, Climate and Sustainable Development.

Juan Zak, a project team member at the UNEP RISOE Centre, added: “Accelerated polar ice melting is the latest indication that severe climate change may be upon us. The current 380 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere seem already too high. Roughly half of the global consumption of fossil fuels should be avoided if climate is to be stabilized. Using energy much more wisely is one of the very few feasible ways that, combined, would move the world towards this goal without economic disruption.”

Top consumers

The importance of improving energy efficiency in China, India and Brazil (with a combined 2.6 billion people, or almost 40 per cent of world population) is hard to overestimate.

China, India and Brazil, already rank among the world’s top 10 energy consumers with astonishing economic growth rates nearing 10 per cent per year; they are on track to becoming the world’s major greenhouse gas emitters. Although today they emit just 10 per cent as much greenhouse gas per capita as North America, their national emissions are rising far faster.

China’s emissions, for instance, are expected to double by 2020, in which case China will surpass the US as the leading source of climate-altering gases. By one estimate, the China power market will require an average 48 gigawatts of new capacity every year, equal to two-thirds of the UK’s total installed capacity.

Global GDP is projected to more than double by 2030, 80 per cent of that growth accounted for by non-OECD countries, where current energy intensity of GDP (expressed as barrels of oil equivalent—BOE—per $1,000 of GDP) was approximately three times that of the OECD countries in 2005. Without gains in energy efficiency, such global GDP growth would raise daily global energy demand from 205 million BOE today to more than 500 million BOE by 2030.

Much of that energy in India and China will be supplied by coal. China is both the world’s largest coal consumer and producer. While coal in China’s overall energy mix is projected to decline from 66 per cent in 2002 to 41 per cent in 2030, its total CO2 emissions are still projected to increase from 3307 Mt to 7144 Mt.

India’s installed capacity for power generation has tripled over the last 20 years and now exceeds 101,000 MW. However, the total demand is expected to increase by another 3.5 times in the next two decades, even under a best-case scenario that envisions intensified efforts to modernize power plants, improve transmission and distribution efficiency, and adopt more efficient generation technologies.

India’s soaring power demand will necessitate tripling installed generation capacity from 101,000 to 292,000 MW over the next two decades, much of it derived from poor quality coal. Similar demand increases are forecast for all fuels, and CO2 emissions are projected to increase from 1016 Mt to 2254 Mt by 2030.

The 3CEE report notes that improvements in energy efficiency will bring China, India and other coal-dependent countries the important additional benefits of cleaner air, better health and other environmental improvements.

Brazil’s growing emissions

Brazil is the world’s 10th largest energy consumer, yet its fossil fuel CO2 intensity per unit of energy consumed is low due to widespread use of renewable energy from hydro electricity, ethanol and other biomass. However, Brazil’s overall energy intensity (measured as energy consumption per dollar of GDP) has been increasing.

Fossil fuel intensity increased 18 per cent between 1990 and 2004, while electricity increased by 29 per cent. Brazil’s economic growth has been much slower than India’s or China’s over the past decade and projections are also much lower, hence projected energy supply increases are less dramatic – electricity consumption would increase 65 per cent (244 trillion kw/h) by 2015, assuming annual GDP growth of 4 per cent.

The International Energy Agency projects an increase in Brazil CO2 emissions of 302 Mt to 665 Mt by 2030.

“Energy efficiency in these three countries is a win-win strategy. It is one of the cleanest, cheapest and fastest ways to reduce carbon emissions,” says Timothy E. Wirth, President of the UN Foundation, which provided the project’s core funding.

After some initial success with ESCOs in China, the 3 CEE project has now moved on to help China develop lending programmes in local banks for large-scale energy efficiency projects, to be financed in part by a $200 million World Bank loan.

China has called for a "conservation society" and its commitment to a further 20 peer cent improvement in energy intensity over 2005 levels by 2010 and the project initiatives fit well with that objective. The topic of energy efficiency is now granted special attention (along with “energy development”) in all of China’s energy-related planning. The project report highlights potential savings as well in the industrial, construction and transportation sectors.

Hopefully other countries will see that success and create a similar programs to meet their needs and apply it to other natural resource areas such as water where inefficiencies are equally high Mr Taylor says.

New approaches

India’s potential energy efficiency market is estimated at more than US $3.1 billion, which would produce a savings of 54 terawatt hours per year. To help realize this impressive potential, the Indian Government established a Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) and, the Bank says, a variety of commercial interests are beginning to pick up the energy efficiency business. But more support and financial backing is required.

Brazil’s annual untapped energy savings potential is estimated at US$ 2.25 billion and many projects would enjoy an average payback of less than 30 months.

Brazil’s has a strong national ESCO association (ABESCO)and is also among the few developing countries to have established a “wire charge,” which streams a small portion of power companies’ revenues into energy conservation. At the Paris meeting, the Brazilian Development Bank (BDNES) announced a new guarantee programme to assist ESCOs and accept 80 per cent of loan risks on accepted energy reduction projects.“

Why should voters consider you the strongest candidate on environmental issues? What sets your green platform apart from the rest?

To begin with, people can look at my track record. I’m proud of the fact that one of the first sets of endorsements I received in my race for the U.S. Senate was from the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters. I’ve since cast tough votes on behalf of the environment. For example, I voted against the "Clear Skies" bill that George Bush was promoting, despite the fact that the administration had heated up support for the bill in southern Illinois, which you know is a coal area of the country. So I think people can feel confident that I don’t just talk the talk, I walk the walk.

How central will energy and the environment be to your campaign?

I consider energy to be one of the three most important issues that we’re facing domestically, along with revamping our education system and fundamentally reforming our health-care system. And the opportunities for significant change exist partly because awareness of the threat of climate change has grown rapidly over the last several years. Al Gore deserves a lot of credit for that, as do activists in the environmental community and outlets like Grist. People recognize the magnitude of the [climate] problem and are ready to take it on.

How central of a role do you think the issues of energy and the environment will play overall in the 2008 campaign? Will they take a backseat to Iraq?

Bringing the war in Iraq to a responsible end is the most pressing challenge we face, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only challenge we face. Reducing our dependence on foreign oil and slashing our greenhouse-gas emissions will also be defining issues in this campaign.

You’ve consistently emphasized consensus and putting aside partisan battles. Many argue that, when it comes to climate change, the maximum of what’s politically possible falls short of the minimum we need to do to solve the problem. In other words, consensus won’t get us where we need to go. Will you fight the political battles needed to move the consensus on this issue, even if that means aggravating partisan rifts?

I am the cosponsor of the most aggressive climate-change legislation in the Senate, along with Barbara Boxer [D-Calif.] and Bernie Sanders [I-Vt.], which would reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050. We are going to have to make some big decisions to meet those goals. Consensus doesn’t mean 100 percent consensus — there is undoubtedly going to be resistance from certain parts of the energy sector, and there may be ideological resistance within the Republican Party, and we are going to have to attend to the regional differences in terms of how people get energy. But I believe that we can put together a strong majority to move forward, as long as we are thoughtful about the potential losers in any big piece of energy legislation.

Do you believe that we can achieve political consensus on this goal of 80 percent reductions by 2050?

I think with presidential leadership we can meet this goal, and it will be one of my top priorities. But it is going to require a thoughtful approach that accounts for the possibility that electricity prices will go up, and that low-income people may need to be compensated. We’ll have to deal with the fact that many of our power plants are coal burning, and consider what investments we’re willing to make in coal sequestration. If we make sure that the burdens and benefits of a strong environmental policy are evenly spread across the economy, then people will want to see us take on this problem in an aggressive way.

Do you believe that we need a carbon tax in addition to a cap-and-trade program?

 

 

I believe that, depending on how it is designed, a carbon tax accomplishes much of the same thing that a cap-and-trade program accomplishes. The danger in a cap-and-trade system is that the permits to emit greenhouse gases are given away for free as opposed to priced at auction. One of the mistakes the Europeans made in setting up a cap-and-trade system was to give too many of those permits away. So as I roll out my proposals for a cap-and-trade system, I will price permits so that it has much of the same effect as a carbon tax.

You have personally addressed automakers with a call for more efficient car technologies. Is Detroit ready for this shift?

We made some progress recently in the Senate, with the first fuel-efficiency standards increase in 20 years. It only went up to 35 miles per gallon — far short of what we needed and what technology would allow.

You’ve received a lot of criticism from enviros of your support for coal-to-liquids technology. You recently shifted your position somewhat, but haven’t retracted it. Why?

I was always firm that if the life-cycle carbon emissions of coal-to-liquid were higher than gasoline, we couldn’t do it because it would contradict my position on reducing greenhouse gases. But I also believe that, because of the abundance of coal in the U.S., coal-based fuels could be a substitute for some of the oil we import from the Middle East, as long as we can reduce the resulting CO2 emissions to 20 percent below current levels from petroleum-based fuels.

How much should we be willing to pay in taxpayer money to make liquid coal that clean?

Our original bill on coal-to-liquids — which generated a lot of heat in the environmental community, no pun intended — proposed $200 million for demonstration projects, to see where this technology might take us.

Do you support a freeze in the U.S. on new coal development until these clean-coal technologies are commercially available?

I believe that relying on the ingenuity of the free market, coupled with a strong carbon cap, is the best way to reduce carbon emissions rather than an arbitrary freeze on development.

As president, would you oppose subsidizing any technology that increases global warming — even if it reduces our dependence on foreign oil?

As a general principle I would agree with that. I would not make huge investments or try to take technologies to scale that worsen the climate-change situation. But it may be appropriate for the federal government to make small investments in pilot projects to see if we can make dirty fuels cleaner.

Some argue that we should only commit to a global climate treaty if China and India do as well. Do you agree? How would you bring China and India to the table?

We shouldn’t look at it as a single tit-for-tat exchange. The U.S. is the world’s largest economy and the largest single source of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, so it is our responsibility to take the first step. We cannot expect China and India, with a billion people each, to take the lead on this if we do not — but we can expect them to join us if we demonstrate leadership. If we must take the first step, our second and third steps must be conditioned on meaningful participation by all countries. This is also an enormous opportunity for us to provide our technological expertise to these nations so they can leapfrog to cleaner technologies.

You are a strong supporter of both corn and cellulosic ethanol, both of which would get a major boost from your proposed National Low Carbon Fuel Standard. How, specifically, will you structure policies that transition the U.S. away from corn ethanol and toward cellulosic?

No single feedstock is going to get us to energy independence, and none will be the perfect solution — each faces its own challenges. Corn-starch ethanol provides a critically important bridge toward energy independence and corn remains a strong part of the domestic biofuels industry. But developing greater volumes of cellulosics is a critical next step in domestic biofuel development, and is the key component of my Low Carbon Fuel Standard bill.

What environmental achievement are you proudest of?

In 2006, I developed an innovative approach to gradually increase CAFE standards while protecting the financial future of American automakers. The resulting Obama-Lugar-Biden Fuel Economy Reform Act gained the support of senators who had never supported CAFE increases before. This, in turn, helped lay the foundation for Senate passage of updated CAFE standards last month.

After climate and energy, what do you think is the most important environmental issue facing the nation?

Restoring the strength of the EPA to adequately enforce our clean-air, clean-water, and other environmental-protection laws, after over six years of ruling by ideology rather than science and adherence to the law.

Who is your environmental hero?

If I think historically, Rachel Carson probably had as much to do as anybody in helping trigger an environmental consciousness in this country.

If you could spend one week in a natural area in the U.S., where would it be?

I have very fond memories as a kid of traveling to Yellowstone, marveling at the scenery, and chasing after bison, much to my mother’s distress.

What have you done personally to lighten your environmental footprint?

We just bought a Ford Escape, so I traded in a non-hybrid for a hybrid. We are in the process of replacing our light bulbs in our house and trying to limit the use of our air conditioning, trying to make sure that we unplug and turn off all of our appliances when we’re not using them. It’s a fun project to work on with my 9-year-old and my 6-year-old.

"Major oil companies are already examining biodiesel as an alternative to petroleum," said R.E. "Buddy" Babcock, professor of chemical engineering. "With the current price of petroleum diesel and the results of this project and others, I think energy producers will think even more seriously about combining petroleum-based diesel with a biodiesel product made out of crude and inexpensive feedstocks."

Under Babcock’s guidance, Brent Schulte, a chemical-engineering graduate student in the university’s College of Engineering, subjected low-grade chicken fat, donated by Tyson Foods, and tall oil fatty acids, provided by Georgia Pacific, to a chemical process known as supercritical methanol treatment. Supercritical methanol treatment dissolves and causes a reaction between components of a product — in this case, chicken fat and tall oil — by subjecting the product to high temperature and pressure. Substances become "supercritical" when they are heated and pressurized to a critical point, the highest temperature and pressure at which the substance can exist in equilibrium as a vapor and liquid. The simple, one-step process does not require a catalyst.

Schulte treated chicken fat and tall oil with supercritical methanol and produced biodiesel yields in excess of 89 and 94 percent, respectively. With chicken fat, Schulte reached maximum yield at 325 degrees Celsius and a 40-to-1 molar ratio, which refers to the amount of methanol applied. The process also produced a respectable yield of 80 percent at 300 degrees Celsius and the same amount of methanol. At 275 degrees Celsius and the same amount of methanol, the process was ineffective. Ideal results using tall oil fatty acid were achieved at 325 degrees Celsius and a 10-to-1 molar ratio. At 300 degrees Celsius and the same amount of methanol, the conversion produced a yield of almost 80 percent. Again, at 275 degrees Celsius, the process was ineffective.

Previous efforts, including a study two years ago by another one of Babcock’s graduate students (see below), to make biodiesel out of low-cost feedstocks — as opposed to refined oils — have used one of two conventional methods, base-catalyzed or acid-catalyzed esterification. Although successful at producing biodiesel, these conventional methods struggle to be economically feasible due to long reaction times, excessive amounts of methanol required and/or undesired production of soaps during processing.

"The supercritical method hit the free fatty-acid problem head on," Babcock said. "Because it dissolves the feed material and eliminates the need for the base catalyst, we now do not have the problems with soap formation and loss of yield. The supercritical method actually prefers free fatty acid feedstocks."

Biodiesel is a nonpetroleum-based alternative diesel fuel that consists of alkyl esters derived from renewable feedstocks such as plant oils or animal fats. The fuel is made by converting these oils and fats into what are known as fatty acid alkyl esters. The conventional processes require the oils or fats be heated and mixed with a combination of methanol and sodium hydroxide as a catalyst. The conversion process is called transesterification.

Most biodiesel is produced from refined vegetable oils, such as soybean and rapeseed oil, which are expensive; they generally account for 60 to 80 percent of the total cost of biodiesel. Due to these high feedstock prices, biodiesel production struggles to be economically feasible. Currently, as Babcock alluded, biodiesel cannot compete with petroleum diesel unless the per-gallon price of diesel remains higher than $3. For these reasons, researchers recently have focused efforts on less refined and less-expensive feedstocks as a more viable competitor to conventional diesel.

Biodiesel has many benefits. In addition to reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, it is better for the environment than purely petroleum-based products. As a renewable, biodegradable and thus carbon-neutral material, biodiesel does not contribute to greenhouse gases. In fact, it decreases sulfur and particulate-matter emissions. It also provides lubrication for better-functioning mechanical parts and has excellent detergent properties.

"Biodiesel provides an effective, sustainable-use fuel with many desirable properties," Schulte said. "In addition to being a renewable, biodegradable and carbon-neutral fuel source, it can be formed in a matter of months from feedstocks produced locally, which promotes a more sustainable energy infrastructure. It also decreases dependence on foreign oil and creates new labor and market opportunities for domestic crops."

Schulte worked with Ed Clausen, professor of chemical engineering and holder of the Ray C. Adam Chair of Chemical Engineering, and Michael Popp, professor of agricultural economics, in addition to Babcock. Schulte’s study, which led to his master’s thesis and is available upon request, was supported by the University of Arkansas Mack-Blackwell Rural Transportation Center. His work was awarded first place at the inaugural Admiral Jack Buffington Poster Paper Contest sponsored by the transportation center at its annual advisory board meeting.