The current lack of information is frustrating consumers' desires to do the right thing and sheltering producers from the need to clean up their act. Most shoppers are not able to discriminate between products that required large amounts of water or massive greenhouse gas emissions and those that are better for the environment.
There is little or no pressure on producers to minimise their emissions or water usage.
Labelling laws would start the process of pushing producers to clean up their act.
Combined with a carbon pricing regime to send a better price signal and regulations to drive up efficiency of water and energy use, NSW consumers could reduce the embodied water and greenhouse gases in their shopping trolleys and daily lives.
"The Iemma government needs to get tough with industry and retailers. It needs to show leadership with other states and the Commonwealth and set the pace on helping households reduce their impact on the planet," Dr Kaye said.
Author: admin
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Greenhouse labelling proposed
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Downer offers Uranium to Russia
Mr Downer says there is no danger of the uranium exports being used to support Russia’s military programs.
"In the same way as we have nuclear safeguard agreements with other countries it would be a breach of international law if they were to try to do that," he said.
"I don’t [think] Russia would want to become a rogue state and break international law, it would lead to a collapse with their relations with Australia and probably with an awful lot more countries."
The Opposition’s foreign affairs spokesman Robert McClelland says Labor is open to the idea of the uranium deal with Russia.
"Because they’re a party to the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty)" he said.
"What I’m saying is, we can drive their commitment to do most things and specifically we can drive their commitment to disarmament.
"The broader issues here is how the international community, and we as one of the world’s major uranium suppliers, start to reinvigorate the nuclear disarmament debate."
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The Appeal of Animal Waste
According to the Wisconsin Public Service Corp., the cost of a digester depends on specific farm conditions and the return on investment can range from a few years to more than 10 years. Systems typically use about 30 percent of the biogas to heat the digesters with the balance being used to supply a farm’s electricity or heating needs. Typically, a minimum herd of 300 dairy cows or 2,000 swine is needed to make such a system feasible. The cycle time to turn the manure into heat and power is 20-30 days.
Illinois-based Ameren is now trying to determine the feasibility of using methane gas from hog manure. It is hopeful that it will be able to install an anaerobic digester and generator by year-end. The central idea is that a waste byproduct—manure—can be processed and converted to electricity.
Manure collected from a farm in Carlyle, Illinois would be stored in the digester. Methane gas would then be siphoned off and used to power the generator, which could produce between 200-400 kilowatts of electricity. The electricity would be used by the farm, which has a peak electric demand of over 700 kilowatts. The heat created by the generator would be used to heat the digester.
"The primary benefit would be renewable energy credits, or carbon dioxide (CO2) offset credits, that Ameren could obtain to use in responding to various future government initiatives," says Ameren Strategic Analyst Paul Pike. Pike notes for each one-ton emission of methane gas captured and converted to energy equals 21 tons of CO2 not released into the environment. Ameren is working with the Illinois EPA and the University of Chicago on the project.
The Upside
Pacific Gas and Electric is teaming with dairy farms throughout California to use their animal waste to create electricity. The San Francisco-based utility has already demonstrated a 60-kilowatt generator that uses cow manure as a fuel source. At least a couple dozen dairies in the state have received $6 million in federal and state grants to go forth with these kinds of projects. Similarly, Portland General Electric is partnering with dairy farms in Oregon to do the same.In the meantime, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Ohio Department of Development are spearheading the development of digesters in Ohio. The former will pay about $500,000 towards the cost of two separate contraptions, each of which will cost about $2 million. The state agency has set aside $1.5 million in 2008 and 2009 for a range of worthy projects. Most immediately, the Wenning Poultry and Bridgewater Dairy are working to capture methane from cow manure before it is converted to electricity. The separate projects could be operational by year-end.
And, New Hampshire-based Microgy Inc. is making electricity from cow waste in such places as California, Wisconsin and Texas. Huckabay Ridge in Texas, for example, will entail the construction of eight 916,000-gallon digesters, sufficient to process the manure from up to 10,000 cows. The company, which is considering a second plant in the state, says that all of the enterprises in which it is involved will be profitable as long as natural gas prices stay above $4 per million BTUs.
The Huckabay facility, which will end up costing $12 million to $18 million, is expected to produce an aggregate of one billion cubic feet of biogas per year with an energy content of 650,000 million BTUs. The gas will be treated and compressed before it is delivered via a natural gas pipeline to Austin. There, the Lower Colorado River Authority will use it as a power source.
"We’re absolutely the pioneers in this," says Pat Chase, a Microgy regional manager based in Sulphur Springs, Texas, in the Waco Tribune-Herald. "The fact that we can take manure and other materials and digest them and make viable natural gas means the market is really unlimited. It’s only limited by how many cows and hogs you have in feedlots."
Disposing of cow manure is literally a huge mess. And add to that the rising cost of energy and the ramifications of climate change. To help alleviate some of the problems, thousands of dairy and swine farms could play host to oxygen-free digesters. For now, the public sector is buying down some of the risks. If those first-of-their-kind projects perform, however, then the technologies and subsequent investments associated with extracting methane gas from animal waste would appear to hold lots of potential.
Ken Silverstein is an award-winning journalist who is the editor-in-chief of Energy Central’s publication, EnergyBiz Insider. With a background in economics and public policy, he has spent several years writing about the issues that touch the energy and financial sectors, and his work has been published in more than 100 periodicals.
Republished with permission from CyberTech, Inc. EnergyBiz Insider is published three days a week by Energy Central. For more information about Energy Central, or to subscribe to EnergyBiz Insider, other e-newsletters and EnergyBiz magazine, please go to http://www.energycentral.com/.
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Glaciers continue to speed up
Is this the date we have to look forward to?
The Greenland, Alaskan and West Antarctic ice sheets together hold about 25% of the fresh water on the planet. The effects of the collapse of either ice sheet would be huge. Once you lost one of these ice sheets, there’s no putting it back for thousands of years, if ever.
If they disintegrate, sea level could rise nearly 20 meters, possibly in only one decade. This would swamp most cities and ports, as well a much of the best agricultural land. Where now 6 billion people? See Footprints #3.
One reason is that Arctic temperatures are increasing at an average of 0.66°C per decade. If the global average is 2°C, then the arctic will be 4°C, and more over Greenland. The final deglaciation of Greenland will be triggered above 2.7°C local. In less than 30 years, there has been a 40% loss of arctic sea ice.
Similarly the western Antarctica’s mass is disappearing at about 240 cubic kilometers per year. Depletion of ozone is adding to this problem for it has encouraged hotter winds to flow across the Antarctic, and this is already impacting on the Larsen ice mass.
The global impact of 2°C rise in the graph shows a 55 meter rise. This is more than occurred in the Pliocene Era 3 million years ago when the northern hemisphere was up to 8 degrees hotter and the southern a couple of degrees colder.
The rate accelerated in 2004. It holds 70% of Earth’s freshwater.
The consequences of sea-level rise
If the seas rise a modest 400mm 22% of coastal wetlands will be lost, and more when we include the likely human reaction to that change. A one meter sea-level rise would affect 6 million people in Egypt, with some 15% of agricultural land lost, 13 million in Bangladesh with 16% of the national rice production lost, and 72 million in China with tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land. See Footnotes #2.
The anticipated 7 meter sea rise will be far worse, and will directly affect 300-1,000 million people, some 15% of the world’s population. The ricochet will be far-reaching and incalculable.
The decline of ice around the north pole seems to have sharply accelerated since 2003, raising fears that the region may have passed one of the major tipping points. As the warmer weather melts the ice it drives temperatures higher because the dark water absorbs nearly all the sun’s radiation. This could make global warming quickly run out of control.
And elsewhere… a few typical examples
As oceans warm so the area covered by nutrient-poor water increases, making the oceans less friendly for algae or plankton. This reduces the amount of carbon the seas can absorb. The threshold for the almost complete failure of algae is about 500 ppm of carbon. At our present rate of growth we will reach this level in about 40 years.
Reduction in Antarctic sea ice contributed to the 80% decline in krill since 1970. Krill is the foundation of the southern food chain. A temperature rise of 1.8°F would cause extensive coral bleaching. This will destroy critical fish nurseries in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia.
The glaciers of the Tibetan plateau are vanishing by 50% every decade. They contain a sixth of the world’s total ice and feed many of Asia’s greatest rivers – including the Yangtze, the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong and the Yellow River. Such ice loss has profound implications for China, India and Pakistan which are dependant on rivers fed by them that will turn into trickles. Drinking and irrigation water will disappear. A billion people will be affected from the drying up of the rivers, increased droughts and sandstorms.
In 1983 the five main glaciers in Columbia were expected to last at least 300 years. Recent measurements suggest they may disappear within 15, denying cities water and putting populations and food supplies at risk in these desert areas.
Snow and rainfall in South America and the Caribbean are becoming less predictable and more extreme. The 2005 drought in the Amazon basin was the worst since records began.
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World Bank censored climate change report
It was politics that prevented the publication of that paper, according to
one senior bank insider who spoke to the Los Angeles Times, and politics
that has been the principal obstacle to progress since. Only now, with the
Bush administration on the ropes politically and the scientific evidence for
global warming reaching such critical mass that even President George Bush
has been forced to acknowledge its reality, are those same bank officials
trying again to put the issue on the agenda. "Our biggest obstacle has been
that politically, [climate change] is very controversial," Kristalina
Georgieva, the bank’s strategy and operations director for sustainable
development, told the LA Times.She said that, even under the best of circumstances, it will be at least two
years before the bank starts measuring the impact of fossil fuel-related
projects on the planet’s health. "We are not moving fast enough," she added.
"It’s not possible to be moving fast enough."The GAP has uncovered evidence of one striking instance of Bush
administration censorship. In 2006, the bank’s vice presidents responded to
a request from the Group of Eight industrialised countries and commissioned
a draft report entitled Climate Change, Energy and Sustainable Development:
Towards an Investment Framework. They endorsed the report, according to the
minutes of a meeting obtained by the GAP.Subsequently, however, Mr Wolfowitz’s office put out a memo asking the team
to rework the paper, "shifting from a climate lens mainly to a clean-energy
lens". The edited paper issued a few months later was eventually called
Clean Energy and Development: Towards an Investment Framework.The World Bank has come under fire from environmental groups for a number of
decisions, including a recent grant to develop lignite mining and power
plants in Kosovo. Lignite — or brown coal — pollutes the air heavily when
burnt and is generally regarded as one of the dirtiest fuel sources on the
planet.The investment appears to go against the bank’s own policy, from 2001,
whereby it decided to try to phase out oil and gas investments by 2008 and
to extend an existing moratorium on investments in coal mining.The GAP put out a report in March detailing similar problems at other
agencies, most notably the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
which, among other duties, tracks hurricanes and other extreme weather
phenomena. The report cited "objectionable and possibly illegal restrictions
on the communication of scientific information to the media" — including
censorship of interviews and press releases.More recently, the GAP has reported the Bush administration’s refusal to
consider climate change as it prepares to expand the national air transport
system threefold over the next 20 years. A multi-agency group called the
Next Generation Air Transportation System has simply ignored global warming
in its past two annual reports.Mr Wolfowitz was forced to step down in June after it emerged that he had
given a lucrative sinecure to his girlfriend and offered her excessive pay
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Arctic metldown will release greenhouse gas
For thousands of years, the fossil fuel deposits lay locked under the ice
and inaccessible. Ironically, the very process of burning fossil fuels
releases massive amounts of carbon dioxide, or CO2, and forces an increase
in the Earth’s temperature, which in turn melts the Arctic ice, making
available even more oil and gas for energy. Burning these potential oil and
gas finds would further increase CO2 emissions in coming decades, depleting
the Arctic ice even more quickly.But there is an even more dangerous aspect to the unfolding drama in the
Arctic. While governments and oil giants are hoping the melting ice will
allow them access to the world’s last treasure trove of oil and gas,
climatologists are deeply worried about something else buried under the ice
that, if unearthed, could wreak havoc on the biosphere, with dire
consequences for human life.Much of the Siberian sub-Arctic region, an area the size of France and
Germany combined, is a vast, frozen peat bog. Before the most recent Ice
Age, the area was mostly grassland, teeming with wildlife. The coming of the
glaciers entombed the organic matter below the permafrost, where it has
remained ever since. Although the surface of Siberia is largely barren,
there is as much organic matter buried underneath the permafrost as there is
in all of the world’s tropical rain forests.Now the permafrost is thawing on land and along the seabeds. If it occurs in
the presence of oxygen on land, the decomposing of organic matter leads to
the production of CO2. If the permafrost thaws along lake shelves, in the
absence of oxygen, the decomposing matter releases methane. Methane is the
most potent of the greenhouse gases, with a greenhouse effect 23 times that
of CO2.Katey Walter of the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska
in Fairbanks wrote in the journal Nature last year, and in Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society in May, that the melting of the permafrost
and subsequent release of methane is a "ticking time bomb."Walter and her researchers warned of a tipping point sometime within this
century, when the release of methane could create an uncontrollable feedback
effect, dramatically warming the atmosphere, which would in turn warm the
land, lakes and seabed, further melting the permafrost and releasing more
methane. Once that threshold is reached, there will be nothing humans can
do. Scientists suspect that similar events have occurred in the ancient
past, between glacial periods.Scientists are particularly concerned that the thawing permafrost is also
creating shadow lakes across the Siberian sub-Arctic landscape. The lake
waters have a higher ambient temperature than the surrounding permafrost. As
a result, the permafrost near the lakes thaws more quickly, forcing the
ground surfaces to collapse into the lakes. The stored organic carbon then
decomposes into the lake bottoms. Methane from that decomposition bubbles to
the surface and escapes into the atmosphere. Scientists calculate that
thousands of tons of methane will be released from Arctic lakes as the
permafrost thaws.A global tragedy of monumental proportions is unfolding at the top of the
world, and the human race is all but oblivious to what’s happening.When U.S. astronauts stepped onto the moon in 1969, Neil Armstrong’s first
words were, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." The
Russian aquanauts, landing on the Arctic seabed, might just as well have
said, "One small dive for man, one giant leap backward for life on Earth."…………
Jeremy Rifkin is the author of "The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the
World Wide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth."