Archive for May, 2009
May 18th, 2009 | 
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LOS ANGELES, April 22 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Today Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT), as part of its commitment to accelerate and broaden its sustainability efforts, announced it is expanding its solar power program in California. The company plans to add solar panels on 10 to 20 additional Wal-Mart facilities within the next 18 months.
This commitment is in addition to the 18 solar arrays currently installed at Wal-Mart facilities in California. When combined, Wal-Mart’s total solar installations are expected to:
- Generate up to 32 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of renewable energy per year - the equivalent of powering more than 2,600 homes*;
- Avoid producing more than 22,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year – the equivalent of taking more than 4,000 cars off the road*;
- Provide 20 to 30 percent of each location’s total electric energy needs.
“Increasing the use of solar energy is the right thing to do for the environment and makes tremendous business sense, especially in these economic conditions,” said Kimberly Sentovich, Wal-Mart’s California regional general manager. “Thanks to Governor Schwarzenegger’s leadership, California is an excellent environment for us to grow our investment in renewable energy and help create more green jobs for America. Wal-Mart is excited to continue collaborating with our partner BP Solar on expanding our solar footprint.”
“All over the state we are harnessing the power of the famous California sun and creating energy that is pollution free,” said Governor Schwarzenegger. “This project is all about taking bold action so we can see solar panels on commercial rooftops all across California while putting people to work. Today’s action helps prove that even in an economic downturn, it is possible to get serious about clean, renewable energy.”
“Wal-Mart is a leader in implementing cost-effective clean energy solutions,” said Christopher Lau, World Resources Institute’s California Green Power Group manager. “With this commitment to expand the use of solar power, Wal-Mart demonstrates that businesses can pursue long-term sustainability goals during tough economic times to the benefit of the environment, customers, and bottom line.”
This latest series of projects is expected to create about 130 jobs, including engineering, design, and installer technician jobs. Smaller numbers of workers will be engaged during the periods leading up to and following peak construction.
Wal-Mart is committed to expanding its solar presence in California. As construction nears completion on this group of 10 to 20 sites, Wal-Mart will evaluate the feasibility of expanding the program to additional sites. The company will take into account a variety of factors, including available locations, economic conditions, energy prices, as well as local, state and federal renewable energy policies and programs.
Wal-Mart will continue learning from its renewable projects to find additional ways to achieve its goal of being supplied by 100 percent renewable energy. In November 2008, Wal-Mart announced a major purchase of wind energy that will supply up to 15 percent of the retailer’s total energy load in approximately 350 Texas stores and other facilities. In Puerto Rico, the company is planning to outfit up to five stores with solar panels this year, and expects the project to expand to 22 stores in the next five years. Additionally, Wal-Mart de Mexico will eliminate approximately 140 tons of CO2 emissions annually through the completed installation of more than 1000 solar panels on the roof of the Bodega Aurrera Aguascalientes.
Wal-Mart’s ongoing commitment to renewable energy projects is helping the retailer build a more diversified energy portfolio and create more opportunities for advancements in clean energy through research and innovations.
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Rainforests exist because it rains a lot and that makes the forests grow, right? Well, not so fast. What if it’s not the rain that makes the forests—what if it’s the forests that actually generate the rain? That’s the contention of a paper in BioScience Magazine called How Forests Attract Rain.
The article discusses a mostly overlooked hypothesis that, if right, would explain how big rainforests—like the Amazon—actually drive the entire global water cycle.
Here’s the idea. Forests pull in large amounts of water vapor from surrounding regions and from nearby bodies of water. As the vapor condenses into rain, the local atmospheric pressure drops. Which sucks in more water vapor from outside the forest. Which repeats the process. Creating a positive feedback loop. The whole rainforest-water vapor system is called a biotic pump, because the living forest matter is what’s moving the water.
If proven, the biotic-pump hypothesis could explain how big rainforests far from oceans stay so moist. The info would help climate models. And highlight the potential dangers of deforesting large parts of the pump.
Source: Scientific American
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The environmental case for ethanol from corn continues to weaken. Turning the food crop into ethanol would not be the best use of the energy embedded in the kernels’ carbohydrates, according to a new study in Science. That’s because fermenting corn into ethanol delivers less liquid fuel energy for internal combustion engines than does burning the kernels to generate power for electric motors.
“We had been studying the area of land that would be available to grow crops for energy and we were curious to discover the most efficient use of these crops,” explains environmental engineer Elliott Campbell of the University of California, Merced, who led the study. “We found that with a given amount of biomass you could produce more transportation and greenhouse gas offsets with electricity than with ethanol.”
The new study shows that burning biomass to produce electricity rather than converting it to ethanol (made from corn kernels or the other parts of the plant, so-called cellulosic ethanol) delivers 81 percent more miles per acre of transportation in electric vehicles than ethanol burned in internal combustion, even taking into account the lifetime costs of the expensive batteries available today. “The input energy to produce an electric vehicle was 1.5 times the energy to produce an [internal combustion vehicle],” Campbell says. “The batteries currently require large energy inputs in the vehicle production component of our life cycle assessment.”
On average, looking at a wide variety of source crops (corn kernels to switchgrass), ways to convert plants to energy, and vehicle sizes (ranging from compact cars to SUVs), bioelectricity delivered 56 percent more energy for transportation per acre, even including the fact that making ethanol produces other useful products, such as cattle feed. To take just one example: a small truck powered by bioelectricity could travel almost 15,000 city and highway miles (24,000 kilometers) compared with just 8,000 comparable miles (13,000 kilometers) for an internal combustion equivalent.
From the atmosphere’s point of view, growing biomass to burn in a power plant and using the electricity to move a car avoids 10 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per acre, or 108 percent more emission offsets than ethanol. “One other aspect of the electricity pathway is that most emissions are concentrated in one location, which provides perhaps an opportunity for more control of the emissions,” Campbell notes. “It also perhaps locates [other air pollution] emissions in a place where impacts might not be as harmful as where cars are driven today.”
Of course, such a bioelectricity future for transportation would also rely on widespread availability of cars and trucks with batteries and electric motors. “A great deal of innovation must happen in vehicle and power transmission technologies to make that a reality,” argues Renewable Fuels Association spokesman Matt Hartwig, an ethanol trade association that owns an ethanol-electric hybrid car. “In the meantime, Americans still need liquid transportation fuels. If the goal is to have more of those gallons come from renewable sources rather than imported oil, fuels like ethanol are the only technologies that are having an impact today.”
He adds: “In theory, you could have a plug-in hybrid with a renewable fuel powered [internal combustion engine] and eliminate the need for petroleum all together.”
The Obama administration seems to agree, granting $786 million in 2009 for biofuels research and setting up the Biofuels Interagency Working Group to study how best to meet the renewable fuel standard mandated by Congress that will require increasing the amount of renewable fuels, such as ethanol, to 36 billion gallons by 2022.
But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (and the California Air Resources Board) have noted that turning corn into ethanol can actually be a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions and other unintended environmental effects, largely by driving the expansion of agriculture and its attendant pollution—as evidenced by previous studies published in Science.
All use of biomass—whether for ethanol or electricity—runs the risk of displacing food crops, however, as well as the need for large amounts of water. “Both pathways could be totally disastrous if these types of impacts can’t be avoided,” Campbell admits. “This is going to be a constrained area of land and amount of biomass, so how much transportation and greenhouse gas offsets can we milk out of this constrained land? It looks like the electricity pathway might get us more bang for the buck.”
And burning biomass for electricity while capturing the CO2 emissions from such a power plant can actually result in carbon-negative power generation—taking CO2 out of the atmosphere. “By sequestering the flue gas CO2 at the power plant, the bioelectricity pathway could result in a net removal of CO2 from the air,” the researchers wrote, and that could help with the problem of ever-rising levels of the greenhouse gases causing climate change.
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Tackling climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions could save millions of lives because of the cleaner air that would result, according to a recent study.
Researchers predict that, by 2050, about 100 million premature deaths caused by respiratory health problems linked to air pollution could be avoided through measures such as low emission cars. The economic benefits of saving those lives in developing countries such as China and India could also strengthen the negotiating hand of the UK and Europe at a crucial UN climate summit in Copenhagen this December.
Johannes Bollen, one of the authors of the report for the Netherlands Environment Agency, said the 100 million early deaths could be prevented by cutting global emissions by 50% by 2050, a target consistent with those being considered internationally.
The reports warns that if governments continue with business-as-usual energy use, then population growth, ageing demographics and increased urbanisation will cause premature deaths from pollution to increase by 30% in OECD countries, and 100% outside the OECD.
The study also has implications for which technologies are chosen to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gases. The study points out that while carbon capture and storage technology can capture CO2, it does not usually trap other air pollutants. Last month, the energy and climate minister, Ed Miliband, put “clean coal” at the centre of UK energy policy by pledging no new coal-fired power stations would be built without at least partial CCS.
In contrast, the report said, reducing car emissions and the number of vehicles on the road would lead to both lower greenhouse gases and fewer local air pollutants from exhausts. Jim Storey, air quality policy adviser at the UK’s Environment Agency, said he wanted climate policies that account for their effect on air pollution: “There are win-wins for climate change and air quality that should be pursued with all haste, such as improving energy efficiency in houses, and reducing emissions from transport. Transport remains the largest cause of air pollution in the UK, and accounts for around 20% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.”
The report also said the economic gains of cleaner air could be attractive for developing countries during climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen later this year. By not losing people of working age to pollution, India and China, for example, stand to gain 4-5% in GDP in 2050 as a result of cleaner air, compared with around 1% of GDP in OECD countries such as the UK. “The local air pollution benefits of climate mitigation policies provide an additional economic incentive for countries to participate in a global agreement to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions,” said Bollen.
The health threat of air pollution is well known. Recent research from the American Lung Association revealed that 186 million US residents live in areas with dangerous levels of air pollution. “Despite almost 40 years since the Clean Air Act passed in 1970, six in 10 Americans still live in dirty air areas, areas where the air is unhealthful to breathe,” said the ALA’s Paul Billings. As well as citing dirty diesel vehicles and coal power plants as significant contributors to US air pollution, the Association’s report called for a clean-up of cruise ships, container ships and tankers, which it said will be responsible for approximately 45% of US particulate emissions by 2030. Confidential data released last month from the shipping industry suggested 15 of the world’s biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world’s 760m cars.
In the UK, a report published this month by the London Assembly Environment Committee claimed that poor air quality in London may have contributed to 3,000 premature deaths in the capital in 2005. London has the worst air quality in the UK and among the worst in Europe for small, sooty particles known as PM10s and nitrogen dioxide.
The key air pollutants that can harm human health include nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, volatile organic compounds, ammonia and particulate matter and are produced by burning fossil fuels in power plants and vehicles. Children and the elderly, plus people with respiratory conditions such as asthma, are particularly at risk.
Source: Guardian – on line
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Senior doctors today published a report warning that climate change is the biggest threat to global health of the 21st century.
Rising global temperatures would have a catastrophic effect on human health, the doctors said, and patterns of infection would change, with insect-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever spreading more easily.
Heatwaves such as occurred in Europe in 2003, which caused up to 70,000 “excess” deaths, will become more common, as will hurricanes, cyclones and storms, causing flooding and injuries.
“We have not just underestimated but completely neglected and ignored this issue,” said Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, which published the report commissioned from University College London. “This has not been an issue on the agenda of any professional body in health in the last 10 years in any significant way. This report is one of the stepping stones in changing that culture within the health sector. It is the biggest employer in Britain and it should be a leading voice in the debate.”
The lead author of the report, Prof Anthony Costello, a paediatrician who works on maternal and newborn health in the developing world, said his own views had changed. “I thought there were other priorities 18 months ago,” he said. Now he believed that mitigating the impact of rising temperatures was urgent. “Every year we delay, the costs go up. We are setting up a world for our children and grandchildren that may be extremely turbulent.”
The biggest impact could be in food and water shortages, which in the past have led to war and mass migration.
Prof Hugh Montgomery, of UCL’s institute for human health and performance, who was one of the report’s authors, noted that Mikhael Gorbachev had linked 21 recent conflicts to water instability.
The report says that the poorest people in the world will be worst affected. Although the carbon footprint of the poorest billion people is about 3% of the world’s total footprint, loss of life is expected to be 500 times greater in Africa than in the wealthy countries.
Despite improvements in health, 10 million children still die every year, more than 200 million children under five are not developing as well as they should, 800 million people are hungry, and 1,500 million people do not have clean drinking water. All those things could worsen very significantly, the report says.
The impact of heatwaves, flooding and global food shortages will be felt in Britain too, the authors warned. “This is an immediate danger. It is going to affect you and it will certainly affect your children. While there is the injustice that the poorest will be worst affected, you will be affected too,” said Montgomery.
The report says evidence on greenhouse gas emissions, temperature and sea-level rises, the melting of ice-sheets, ocean acidification and extreme climatic events suggests the forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 might be too conservative. The UK target, to limit global warming to two degrees more, is unlikely to be achieved.
Costello, however, said the message from the report was not entirely negative. “There is an awful lot we can do,” he said. Reducing carbon emissions would encourage people to cut use of vehicles, and if that led to more walking and cycling it would tend to lower stress levels, reduce obesity, and lessen heart disease, lung disease and stroke risks.
Source: Guardian – on line
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The soy industry has long been the bugbear of critics of the destruction of the Brazilian Amazon. But a recent study jointly carried out by the soy industry and local NGOs, including Greenpeace, suggests that crops aren’t the worst offenders: Instead, the report levies the blame on cattle.
Beef production is big business in Brazil.
Between 2002 and 2003, Brazil overtook Australia and the United States to become the world’s largest exporter of beef. By now, its exports total well over 2.5 million tons annually, over 65 percent more than Australia, the next-largest exporter.
It would be one thing if that beef were produced on already-existing pasture. But it’s not.
Increasingly, cows are pastured in the Amazon. According to a 2009 Greenpeace study, 90 percent of the land deforested between 1996 and 2006 is now being used for cattle-ranching.
Over 60 percent of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation and land-use change, sectors that directly implicate beef-production. Even in 2000, this totaled close to 400 million carbon-ton equivalents per annum, second only to Indonesia, where land-use change and deforestation account for about 700 million carbon-tons annually.
Between 1996 and 2006, over 10 million hectares were cleared for cattle ranching. While the pace has abated in recent years, it’s still a severe problem. Even if the recent slower pace were to continue, 40 percent of the Amazon would be gone by 2050. Brazil’s plan to effect emissions reductions assumes that Amazonian deforestation will cease completely by 2015.
That’s where soy comes in. Soy’s small and diminishing contribution to Amazonian deforestation isn’t the result of lucky happenstance. It’s a result of a 2006 moratorium, which appears to have significantly reduced direct soy-related forest destruction.
The 2006 accord was made between soy producers and NGOs, and it prohibited the purchase of soy from newly-cleared areas. The agreement followed a 2006 study, Eating up the Amazon, which found that existing rates of deforestation were devastating.
It’s not all roses, however. The 2009 joint study probably undercounts the amount of land deforested for soy cultivation, since the parcels randomly selected for observation were all larger than 100 hectares. This was a reasonable methodological choice in 2002, when 55 percent of the deforested land was in swathes larger than 100 hectares, and only 25 percent of the afflicted land was in plots of 25 hectares or less.
But since 2008, patches larger than 100 ha have comprised 22 percent of the deforested land, while those smaller than 25 ha now represent 47 percent of the affected forest.
And there’s another, larger problem. The moratorium only affects the Amazon. The neighboring Cerrado region, a vast savanna ecological zone, is being converted to soy production, setting off a vicious ripple effect. As environmental writer Rhett Butler observes:
As soy and sugar cane — the source of Brazil’s ethanol — expand their acreage into the Cerrado, they compete with cattle ranching, the dominant form of agricultural land use in the region. Low-intensity ranching, which yields significantly less revenue per hectare than industrial agriculture, is then displaced to frontier areas, increasing deforestation. Ranchers who sell their land to soy and cane growers can buy 10 times as much land on the frontier.
This doesn’t mean the soy moratorium was a bad idea. But it does mean it needs to be broadened.
It’s also a good reminder: When agro-industry makes pacts, it doesn’t do so in order to hobble itself. So the moratorium offers a powerful lesson for whoever next occupies the Brazilian presidential seat.
The successor to President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva in Brasilia plainly will have to confront the powerful beef and soy industries head-on, because there’s simply no other way of meeting the obligation to bring Amazonian deforestation to a full-stop by 2015.
We’ll see how it plays out.
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Looking through New Zealand’s older building stock, operable office windows and other passive techniques may lead you to believe the country was poised to adopt the sustainable-design movement quickly, and with gusto. Not exactly, according to Wade Jennings, a senior architect at Auckland-based Peddle Thorp Architects. “The higher kind of technological systems were not really apparent here, and few subcontractors had used them,” he says. Gemma Collins, a building services manager with the Fletcher Construction Company, also based in Auckland, proposes that lack of exposure to contemporary sustainability principles worked in concert with “the feeling that whatever we do isn’t going to make a big difference” to quell enthusiasm.
We found this article entitled “Eskom Keen to pass price hike” By Fred Kockott and Reuters, where they get it wrong is that Eskom HAS to pass a price hike, in order to survive.
South Africans have only 16 days to comment on Eskom’s application to increase electricity tariffs across the country by 34 percent.
If approved, the tariff increase will be effective from July 1 to the end of March next year.
The state-owned Eskom, which provides 95 percent of the country’s power, says it needs significant more income to build new plants, and argues that until a new funding model and agreement has been approved by the government, it will have to get this through billing customers more.
“The implementation of an interim price increase is a short-term intervention.
“It can’t be sustained for a prolonged period and requires timely intervention of a longer-term solution,” Eskom states in its application.
The National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) said on Friday that a final decision on Eskom’s application would have to be made no later than June 25.
Nersa said a decision later than that would have “dire consequences for municipalities” as they would then be unable, by law, to put the increases into effect until the next financial year, 2010/11.
Adverts have been placed in major newspapers across the country, inviting public comment. Further reasons and motivations for the proposed 34 percent interim price increase are detailed in Eskom’s application and on Nersa’s website (www.nersa.org.za).
The deadline for written submissions is June 2. People who want to attend a public hearing on the proposed tariff increases on June 8 and 9 must also register by June 2.
Cosatu is “totally opposed” to Eskom’s application, and has urged Nersa to reject it, warning of possible mass action if the proposed increase was implemented.
But economists said Eskom would probably get its way, given the priority to boost South Africa’s generation capacity after power shortages brought the mining and industrial sectors to a standstill for five days in January last year.
“We need to catch up to the tariffs required for Eskom to be able to sustain a bigger and more structurally sound infrastructure, which we don’t have at this stage,” said George Glynos, an economist at market analysts ETM.
Eskom also plans to spend R385-billion in building new power plants over the next five years.
Fani Zulu, the spokesperson for Eskom, said that although most stakeholders, including the government, agreed that this expansion programme was critical to economic development of the country, the current funding model was “silent” on how it would be funded.”
We keep warning people, power is going to cost much, much more in the future. Added to that is the fact that our power generation is one of the most polluting in the world.
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Legacy Hotels and Resorts used our vacuum tube systems with solar geysers, to deliver 2000litres of hot water to there Kitchen and Laundry Areas.
Go here to get someone to contact you.
Keep it Green