NYtimes: No Slowdown of Global Warming, Agency Says

Here is a shocker: Global warming is real, and an acceleration of our emissions is resulting in an acceleration of the warming. Dinosaurs also predate mankind, and the H1N1 vaccine doesn't kill you.

NYtimes:

COPENHAGEN — Despite recent fluctuations in global temperature year to year, which fueled claims of global cooling, a sustained global warming trend shows no signs of ending, according to new analysis by the World Meteorological Organization made public on Tuesday.

The decade of the 2000s is very likely the warmest decade in the modern record, dating back 150 years, according to a provisional summary of climate conditions near the end of 2009, the organization said.

The period from 2000 through 2009 has been “warmer than the 1990s, which were warmer than the 1980s and so on,” said Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the international weather agency, speaking at a news conference at the climate talks in Copenhagen.

The international assessment largely meshes with an interim analysis by the National Climatic Data Center and NASA in the United States, both of which independently estimate global and regional temperature and other weather trends.

Mr. Jarraud also said that 2009, with some uncertainty because several weeks remain, appears to be the fifth warmest year on record.

Addressing questions about the reliability of climate data after the unauthorized release of e-mail messages and files from a British climate research unit that provides data to the global weather group, he said there was no evidence that the various independent estimates showing a warming world were in doubt.

The news conference early Tuesday came after the European Commission reacted to a decision by the United States Environmental Protection Agency to pave the way for federal limits on emissions of carbon dioxide, saying it should give further weight to negotiations under way here aimed at crafting a new global agreement to curb greenhouse gases.

The so-called endangerment finding by the E.P.A. was “an important signal by the Obama administration that they are serious about tackling climate change and are demonstrating leadership,” a spokesman from the European Commission said. The finding “gives new momentum following their announcement of cuts,” he said.

Political leaders in Copenhagen welcomed the ruling, but they were quick to press the Obama administration to do more now to sweeten its offer.

Andreas Carlgren, the environment minister of Sweden, the country that currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, said in an e-mail message on Tuesday morning that the ruling “shows that the United States can do more than they have put on the table.”

Connie Hedegaard, the Danish politician who was elected on Monday as president of the conference, said in an e-mail message on Tuesday morning that the ruling in the United States “is a helpful step, as it could provide a larger degree of flexibility in the negotiations.” So far President Obama has signaled a cut emissions by about 17 percent by 2020 compared with 2005 levels. The White House also has indicated that the United States would contribute to a fund to tackle climate change.

The gathering of more than 190 nations in Copenhagen opened on Monday with appeals for urgent action from the United Nations and from officials of countries endangered by warmer temperatures, rising sea levels and other damage such as melting glaciers.

As the climate meeting got under way on Tuesday morning, inside the vast blocks that make up the conference center, environmental groups already were chanting in favor of preservation of forests and handing out symbolic cardboard cutouts labeled as carbon dioxide in the central area.

Representatives from governments said there would be further ceremonial events before the hard negotiating begins, later on Tuesday.

A major reason that hopes have risen in recent weeks is the expectation that Mr. Obama — who plans to attend closing days of the conference next week — will formally commit the United States to making cuts in greenhouse gases. The United States declined to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, a previous agreement on curbing greenhouse gases, because of strong opposition in the Senate and from the Bush administration.

The refusal to ratify the Kyoto protocol has left a lingering mistrust of the United States in other parts of the world. The finding by the E.P.A. is expected to allow President Obama to tell delegates in Copenhagen that the United States is moving aggressively to address the problem even while Congress remains stalled on broader legislation to curb global warming legislation.

Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said that in light of the ruling, “the president’s appearance in Copenhagen will carry even more weight, because it shows that America is taking this issue very seriously and is moving forward.”

Over the next two weeks, the nations gathered in Copenhagen will try to reach what has so far been elusive common ground on the issue of climate change.

Delegates will try to hammer out some of the most vexing details attending the pursuit of a global climate deal. These include broad cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from big polluters like the United States and China, and a commitment from wealthy nations to deliver what could ultimately be hundreds of billions of dollars in financing to poor countries, which argue that they are ill equipped to deal with a problem they did little to create.

Several countries announced new emissions goals in the days leading to the meeting here, including China, Brazil, the United States and more recently India and South Africa. But many conference participants have noted that these commitments remain far too low to keep rising temperatures in check over coming decades.

The pledges so far are “not going to get us as far we need to go, to really stay within the two-degree limit,” Koko Warner, an observer with the United Nations University in Bonn, Germany, said Monday, referring to scientists’ recommendations that temperature increases be capped at two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

“We don’t want to admit it, because the consequences are so bad,” she said.

Timeline of Global Warming

NYtimes: The Road to Copenhagen - Tree Harvester Offers to Save Indonesian Forest

Ok, so I admittedly have been slacking on posting updates from the whole "Road to Copenhagen" process but frankly there is just too much happening to really make sense of it and there are daily BREAKING NEWS that aren't that interesting, such as Obama setting emissions targets, the African delegation walking out of talks, the Chinese fucking around, etc.

Anyway, I'm gonna try to post more interesting snippets and MAJOR things happening in Copenhagen over the next few weeks. Hopefully we'll get a robust internationally binding treating, but it's a long shot. Till then, check out some of the international efforts to help mitigate climate change.

This article should highlight some of the difficulties of the climate negotiations, and accounting for what should be eligible and ineligible for carbon credits.

NYtimes:

TELUK MERANTI, Indonesia — From the air, the Kampar Peninsula in Indonesia stretches for mile after mile in dense scrub and trees. One of the world’s largest peat swamp forests, it is also one of its biggest vaults of carbon dioxide, a source of potentially lucrative currency as world governments struggle to hammer out a global climate treaty. The vault, though, is leaking.

Canals — used legally and illegally — extend from surrounding rivers nearly into the peninsula’s impenetrable core. By slowly draining and drying the peat land, they are releasing carbon dioxide, contributing to making Indonesia the world’s third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the United States.

The leaks were evident to a family of fishermen from this village, just south of the peninsula, as they paddled up a creek in a dugout canoe.

“I can tell the peat land’s leaking because the water here is getting browner and more acidic,” said Amiruddin, 31, who like many Indonesians uses only one name, as his wife, Delima, 29, scooped up the creek’s coffee-colored water to drink.

Forests like the one on the Kampar Peninsula are at the center of a growing battle over the shape of a new climate treaty and efforts to curb the destruction and degradation of forests. Though countries are expected to reach only a broad agreement at next month’s summit meeting in Copenhagen, governments, scientists, businesses and environmentalists are already arguing over what kinds of forests should qualify as carbon reducers and what kinds of projects should be rewarded financially.

The arguments over the Kampar have become particularly heated, not just because of its ecological importance, but because, so far, the most detailed plan to stop the leaks from the peat land comes from an unlikely source: a giant paper and pulp company that, according to its critics, has been one of the driving forces of deforestation in Indonesia. The company, Asia Pacific Resources International Limited, or April, says it wants to create a ring of industrial tree plantations around the peninsula’s core to preserve it.

What is more, it hopes to receive carbon credits for doing so under a United Nations program to reward nations for conserving forests and reforesting degraded ones. The program, Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD, is expected to be part of a new climate treaty. Unlike the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a new treaty is expected to tackle deforestation, which alone accounts for 20 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Halting deforestation in tropical forest nations like Indonesia and Brazil, the world’s fourth biggest emitter, is considered crucial to reining in global warming.

Developing nations that preserve forests would be paid with carbon credits that they could sell to industrialized nations seeking to meet emissions reduction targets. Though the program’s specifics will probably take months or years to be worked out, more than a dozen projects of the United Nations program are already under way in Indonesia, backed by such diverse entities as conservation groups, the Australian government and Merrill Lynch, in addition to paper and pulp companies.

Environmental groups say the paper and pulp companies, after years of despoiling Indonesia, should not be rewarded under the program.

“They are the ones that did the damage,” said Michael Stuewe, an expert on Indonesia at the World Wildlife Fund. “Now they’re saying: ‘We were bad boys. Now we’re good. So give us the money.’ ”

The companies argue that the United Nations program could provide them with the financial incentives to preserve forests even as they expand their operations, a goal supported by the Indonesian government, which sees the paper and pulp industry as a mainstay of the country’s economic development.

“We could perhaps reduce the annual Indonesian emissions by 5 percent with this one project,” said Jouko Virta, April’s president of global fiber supply, referring to the company’s plan to ring the peninsula’s core. “It’s so significant. One project.”

Everyone agrees, at least, on the importance of saving the Kampar Peninsula, a nearly one-million-acre peat bog on the equator inhabited by Sumatran tigers, bears, monkeys, crocodiles and other wildlife.

Most of the peninsula remains free of humans, though small fishing camps can be found up its creeks. More significantly, illegal loggers can be seen operating in bases set up along some canals and creeks. And east of here, near a village called Pulau Muda, more than a dozen houses flank a long canal jutting into the peninsula, in what appears to be the biggest human settlement on the Kampar.

Made up of decomposed trees and plants, sometimes as deep as 50 feet, the waterlogged land stores billions of tons of carbon dioxide. But once drained or cleared, the peat land releases many times more carbon dioxide than the deforestation of rain forests. Most experts believe that, as with rain forests, the protection of peat swamp forests will be eligible for carbon credits under the United Nations program.

The Kampar Peninsula is one of the last tracts of green left in central Sumatra, where forests have been cleared to make way for palm oil plantations and industrial tree plantations, especially those belonging to April and its chief rival, Asia Pulp and Paper, both owned by Indonesian conglomerates. According to the World Wildlife Fund, here in Riau, the province where the two companies have their main mills and plantations, two-thirds of the area’s forests have disappeared in the past quarter century.

Illegal loggers have also clear-cut vast chunks of forest. Migrants often slash and burn land for farming, sometimes inside national parks; like people elsewhere in Indonesia, they are often encouraged by local governments seeking to populate areas for economic or political reasons, in defiance of officials from the understaffed Forestry Ministry.

April, which, with its partners, has government-issued concessions across a third of Kampar, says its ring of acacia plantations around the core will block off any such encroachment, though it says it needs to acquire more land to complete the circle. On plantations already in operation, the company uses a sophisticated network of canals and dams that minimizes leakage from the peat land, environmental groups acknowledge.

If April acquired control over the core, it could be paid for protecting it. The company says it believes that it can be, at the very least, rewarded for the ring, about half of which would be turned into acacia plantations and half left as natural forests or what it calls “conservation areas.”

“The carbon we are storing in the conservation areas could be financed through REDD,” Mr. Virta said in an interview at April’s 4,300-acre mill, about two hours west of here by car.

Agus Purnomo, who leads the government’s National Council on Climate Change, said it would take months or years of negotiations after next month’s climate conference to determine whether April’s ring would be entitled to carbon credits.

Much will depend on whether an agreement includes stipulations against the conversion of natural forests into industrial tree plantations. Indonesia, like other countries with paper and pulp industries, counts industrial tree plantations as forests.

Environmental groups caution against any project of the United Nations program involving the conversion of natural forests into industrial tree plantations. Bill Barclay, policy director at the Rainforest Action Network, said the priority in Indonesia should be to “halt further conversion of natural forests” and “further draining of peat lands.”

But that kind of argument finds little traction in a nation with an economy that is still developing.

Mr. Purnomo, of the country’s climate change council, said government officials were worried that Indonesia’s ranking as the world’s third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases would increase pressure to reduce emissions.

“Are we going to remain underdeveloped because of that?” he asked.

Since starting operations on a new concession near here in September, April has brought jobs to Teluk Meranti. As part of its community outreach, it has brought a new generator to increase the supply of electricity and construction material to renovate two mosques. Still, Teluk Meranti had yet to buy April’s vision of the future. Villagers remained overwhelmingly opposed to the company’s presence here, opponents and supporters of the company said.

“We don’t know what we’ll get,” said Firdaus, a 39-year-old man operating a makeshift convenience store. “What rights do we have?”

He was unaware of April’s ring project. But, yes, he had heard of the importance of peat from environmental groups. “We were told,” he said, “to protect the peat for the climate.”

Krugman: The Politics of Spite

Op-ed by Paul Krugman in the NYtimes:

There was what President Obama likes to call a teachable moment last week, when the International Olympic Committee rejected Chicago’s bid to be host of the 2016 Summer Games.

“Cheers erupted” at the headquarters of the conservative Weekly Standard, according to a blog post by a member of the magazine’s staff, with the headline “Obama loses! Obama loses!” Rush Limbaugh declared himself “gleeful.” “World Rejects Obama,” gloated the Drudge Report. And so on.

So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.

But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for America.

To be sure, while celebrating America’s rebuff by the Olympic Committee was puerile, it didn’t do any real harm. But the same principle of spite has determined Republican positions on more serious matters, with potentially serious consequences — in particular, in the debate over health care reform.

Now, it’s understandable that many Republicans oppose Democratic plans to extend insurance coverage — just as most Democrats opposed President Bush’s attempt to convert Social Security into a sort of giant 401(k). The two parties do, after all, have different philosophies about the appropriate role of government.

But the tactics of the two parties have been different. In 2005, when Democrats campaigned against Social Security privatization, their arguments were consistent with their underlying ideology: they argued that replacing guaranteed benefits with private accounts would expose retirees to too much risk.

The Republican campaign against health care reform, by contrast, has shown no such consistency. For the main G.O.P. line of attack is the claim — based mainly on lies about death panels and so on — that reform will undermine Medicare. And this line of attack is utterly at odds both with the party’s traditions and with what conservatives claim to believe.

Think about just how bizarre it is for Republicans to position themselves as the defenders of unrestricted Medicare spending. First of all, the modern G.O.P. considers itself the party of Ronald Reagan — and Reagan was a fierce opponent of Medicare’s creation, warning that it would destroy American freedom. (Honest.) In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich tried to force drastic cuts in Medicare financing. And in recent years, Republicans have repeatedly decried the growth in entitlement spending — growth that is largely driven by rising health care costs.

But the Obama administration’s plan to expand coverage relies in part on savings from Medicare. And since the G.O.P. opposes anything that might be good for Mr. Obama, it has become the passionate defender of ineffective medical procedures and overpayments to insurance companies.

How did one of our great political parties become so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern?

The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.

Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years. Remember when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton was a party to murder? When Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those Medicare cuts? And let’s not even talk about the impeachment saga.

The only difference now is that the G.O.P. is in a weaker position, having lost control not just of Congress but, to a large extent, of the terms of debate. The public no longer buys conservative ideology the way it used to; the old attacks on Big Government and paeans to the magic of the marketplace have lost their resonance. Yet conservatives retain their belief that they, and only they, should govern.

The result has been a cynical, ends-justify-the-means approach. Hastening the day when the rightful governing party returns to power is all that matters, so the G.O.P. will seize any club at hand with which to beat the current administration.

It’s an ugly picture. But it’s the truth. And it’s a truth anyone trying to find solutions to America’s real problems has to understand.

Paul Krugman: It’s Easy Being Green

NYtimes:

So, have you enjoyed the debate over health care reform? Have you been impressed by the civility of the discussion and the intellectual honesty of reform opponents?

If so, you’ll love the next big debate: the fight over climate change.

The House has already passed a fairly strong cap-and-trade climate bill, the Waxman-Markey act, which if it becomes law would eventually lead to sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But on climate change, as on health care, the sticking point will be the Senate. And the usual suspects are doing their best to prevent action.

Some of them still claim that there’s no such thing as global warming, or at least that the evidence isn’t yet conclusive. But that argument is wearing thin — as thin as the Arctic pack ice, which has now diminished to the point that shipping companies are opening up new routes through the formerly impassable seas north of Siberia.

Even corporations are losing patience with the deniers: earlier this week Pacific Gas and Electric canceled its membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest over the chamber’s “disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort the reality” of climate change.

So the main argument against climate action probably won’t be the claim that global warming is a myth. It will, instead, be the argument that doing anything to limit global warming would destroy the economy. As the blog Climate Progress puts it, opponents of climate change legislation “keep raising their estimated cost of the clean energy and global warming pollution reduction programs like some out of control auctioneer.”

It’s important, then, to understand that claims of immense economic damage from climate legislation are as bogus, in their own way, as climate-change denial. Saving the planet won’t come free (although the early stages of conservation actually might). But it won’t cost all that much either.

How do we know this? First, the evidence suggests that we’re wasting a lot of energy right now. That is, we’re burning large amounts of coal, oil and gas in ways that don’t actually enhance our standard of living — a phenomenon known in the research literature as the “energy-efficiency gap.” The existence of this gap suggests that policies promoting energy conservation could, up to a point, actually make consumers richer.

Second, the best available economic analyses suggest that even deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would impose only modest costs on the average family. Earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office released an analysis of the effects of Waxman-Markey, concluding that in 2020 the bill would cost the average family only $160 a year, or 0.2 percent of income. That’s roughly the cost of a postage stamp a day.

By 2050, when the emissions limit would be much tighter, the burden would rise to 1.2 percent of income. But the budget office also predicts that real G.D.P. will be about two-and-a-half times larger in 2050 than it is today, so that G.D.P. per person will rise by about 80 percent. The cost of climate protection would barely make a dent in that growth. And all of this, of course, ignores the benefits of limiting global warming.

So where do the apocalyptic warnings about the cost of climate-change policy come from?

Are the opponents of cap-and-trade relying on different studies that reach fundamentally different conclusions? No, not really. It’s true that last spring the Heritage Foundation put out a report claiming that Waxman-Markey would lead to huge job losses, but the study seems to have been so obviously absurd that I’ve hardly seen anyone cite it.

Instead, the campaign against saving the planet rests mainly on lies.

Thus, last week Glenn Beck — who seems to be challenging Rush Limbaugh for the role of de facto leader of the G.O.P. — informed his audience of a “buried” Obama administration study showing that Waxman-Markey would actually cost the average family $1,787 per year. Needless to say, no such study exists.

But we shouldn’t be too hard on Mr. Beck. Similar — and similarly false — claims about the cost of Waxman-Markey have been circulated by many supposed experts.

A year ago I would have been shocked by this behavior. But as we’ve already seen in the health care debate, the polarization of our political discourse has forced self-proclaimed “centrists” to choose sides — and many of them have apparently decided that partisan opposition to President Obama trumps any concerns about intellectual honesty.

So here’s the bottom line: The claim that climate legislation will kill the economy deserves the same disdain as the claim that global warming is a hoax. The truth about the economics of climate change is that it’s relatively easy being green.

NYtimes: White House Official Resigns After G.O.P. Criticism

NYtimes:

White House officials on Sunday tersely accepted the resignation of the administration’s special adviser for environmental jobs after a number of his past statements became fodder for conservative critics and Republican officials.

The adviser, Van Jones, a controversial and charismatic community organizer and “green jobs” advocate from the San Francisco Bay Area, signed a petition in 2004 questioning whether the Bush administration had allowed the terrorist attacks of September 2001 to provide a pretext for war in the Middle East.

He also used a vulgarity to refer to Republicans just before being appointed to his White House post early this year, and he has publicly supported Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is on death row for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer.

Mr. Jones was a relatively minor figure in the administration, in charge of a small White House program advocating for jobs in energy-efficient industries. But he threatened to become a significant distraction as President Obama is planning a prime-time address on health care to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night in an effort to regain traction on the issue.

The timing and manner of Mr. Jones’s departure were unusual, coming in a pair of written statements just after midnight Saturday on a holiday weekend after the controversy over him, fueled on conservative talk radio and television, seemed to catch the Obama administration by surprise.

Mr. Obama’s plan to speak to public school students on Tuesday has also drawn the ire of conservatives, and critics of his health care proposals have vocally expressed their opposition throughout the summer.

Mr. Jones’s hiring and departure again raised questions about the quality of the White House personnel vetting process and the proliferation of so-called policy czars who are not subject to Senate confirmation or legislative oversight.

The Obama administration entered office promising the most thorough scrutiny ever of candidates for senior jobs, including an extensive questionnaire and time-consuming background checks that have left many senior posts vacant for months. But the process seems to have missed Mr. Jones’s most inflammatory comments and associations, as well as the tax problems that scuttled the nominations of former Senator Tom Daschle to two top health policy posts and Nancy Killefer as chief performance officer.

A White House official suggested that Mr. Jones’s post was not seen as senior enough to warrant the full vetting given other officials. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the authorized White House account was delivered by administration officials in televised interviews on Sunday.

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said that Mr. Obama did not endorse Mr. Jones’s views and that he had quickly accepted Mr. Jones’s resignation so the controversy did not swamp the administration’s larger mission.

“Well, what Van Jones decided was that the agenda of this president was bigger than any one individual,” Mr. Gibbs said on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on ABC. “The president thanks Van Jones for his service in the first eight months, helping to coordinate renewable energy jobs and lay the foundation for our future economic growth.”

It was as cool a goodbye as is seen in Washington, intended to put an end to a week of intense criticism of Mr. Jones — who has been associated with a number of radical protest movements, including one rooted in Marxist theory — on television and radio talk shows and on the Internet.

Chief among those keeping the story alive was Glenn Beck, the conservative host of a Fox News Channel program. Mr. Beck began criticizing Mr. Jones in July, first in segments on his syndicated talk radio show and then, on July 23, on his Fox News program, said Christopher Balfe, the president of Mr. Beck’s production company.

Mr. Beck, who regularly draws almost three million viewers on Fox News, called Mr. Jones a “communist-anarchist radical.” A few days later, Mr. Beck called Mr. Obama a racist on a Fox News show, leading Color of Change, an activist group co-founded by Mr. Jones four years ago, to call on Mr. Beck’s advertisers to stop sponsoring his television program. Color of Change says Mr. Jones is no longer affiliated with the group.

Mr. Balfe emphasized that Mr. Beck had spoken about Mr. Jones’s background before Color of Change “began targeting Glenn.” In a statement Sunday, Mr. Beck said that Americans had demanded answers about Mr. Jones, but that “instead of providing them, the administration had Jones resign under cover of darkness.”

As the advertiser campaign heightened, Mr. Beck devoted more time to Mr. Jones’s past remarks. Dozens of advertisers issued statements to distance themselves from Mr. Beck’s show in the past month, but Fox said no revenue had been lost.

Though Mr. Jones, 40, had apologized twice during the week for earlier comments, he was combative in his resignation letter. “On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me,” Mr. Jones said. “They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.”

He said he had received numerous calls and notes from supporters urging him to stay and fight. But, he said, “I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for our future.”

Mr. Jones could not be reached for further comment.

Mr. Jones’s boss, Nancy Sutley, chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, unsentimentally accepted her aide’s departure. “Over the last six months, he has been a strong voice for creating 21st-century jobs that improve energy efficiency and utilize renewable resources,” Ms. Sutley said in a statement. “We appreciate his hard work and wish him the best moving forward.”

On Friday, Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, chairman of the House Republican conference, called on Mr. Jones to resign, and Senator Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri, called for a hearing on Mr. Jones’s appointment. Mr. Obama has appointed more than two dozen special advisers, or “czars,” who are not subject to the confirmation process.

Before joining the Obama administration, Mr. Jones wrote a book on environmental issues called “The Green Collar Economy” and co-founded several nonprofit groups, including the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which promotes alternatives to violence and prisons, and Green for All, which works to bring energy-related jobs to inner cities.

Former Vice President Al Gore and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, among others, endorsed his environmental work, and he has been a sought-after motivational speaker.

Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, defended Mr. Jones on Sunday, saying he was being penalized for not realizing what the petition he signed in 2004 was.

“This guy’s a Yale-educated lawyer,” Mr. Dean said on “Fox News Sunday.” “He’s a best-selling author about his specialty. I think he was brought down, and I think it’s too bad. Washington’s a tough place that way, and I think it’s a loss for the country.”

NYtimes: A Farm on Every Floor

NYTimes:
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A Farm on Every Floor

By DICKSON D. DESPOMMIER

IF climate change and population growth progress at their current pace, in roughly 50 years farming as we know it will no longer exist. This means that the majority of people could soon be without enough food or water. But there is a solution that is surprisingly within reach: Move most farming into cities, and grow crops in tall, specially constructed buildings. It’s called vertical farming.

The floods and droughts that have come with climate change are wreaking havoc on traditional farmland. Three recent floods (in 1993, 2007 and 2008) cost the United States billions of dollars in lost crops, with even more devastating losses in topsoil. Changes in rain patterns and temperature could diminish India’s agricultural output by 30 percent by the end of the century.

What’s more, population increases will soon cause our farmers to run out of land. The amount of arable land per person decreased from about an acre in 1970 to roughly half an acre in 2000 and is projected to decline to about a third of an acre by 2050, according to the United Nations. With billions more people on the way, before we know it the traditional soil-based farming model developed over the last 12,000 years will no longer be a sustainable option.

Irrigation now claims some 70 percent of the fresh water that we use. After applying this water to crops, the excess agricultural runoff, contaminated with silt, pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, is unfit for reuse. The developed world must find new agricultural approaches before the world’s hungriest come knocking on its door for a glass of clean water and a plate of disease-free rice and beans.

Imagine a farm right in the middle of a major city. Food production would take advantage of hydroponic and aeroponic technologies. Both methods are soil-free. Hydroponics allows us to grow plants in a water-and-nutrient solution, while aeroponics grows them in a nutrient-laden mist. These methods use far less water than conventional cultivation techniques, in some cases as much as 90 percent less.

Now apply the vertical farm concept to countries that are water-challenged — the Middle East readily comes to mind — and suddenly things look less hopeless. For this reason the world’s very first vertical farm may be established there, although the idea has garnered considerable interest from architects and governments all over the world.

Vertical farms are now feasible, in large part because of a robust global greenhouse initiative that has enjoyed considerable commercial success over the last 10 years. (Disclosure: I’ve started a business to build vertical farms.) There is a rising consumer demand for locally grown vegetables and fruits, as well as intense urban-farming activity in cities throughout the United States. Vertical farms would not only revolutionize and improve urban life but also revitalize land that was damaged by traditional farming. For every indoor acre farmed, some 10 to 20 outdoor acres of farmland could be allowed to return to their original ecological state (mostly hardwood forest). Abandoned farms do this free of charge, with no human help required.

A vertical farm would behave like a functional ecosystem, in which waste was recycled and the water used in hydroponics and aeroponics was recaptured by dehumidification and used over and over again. The technologies needed to create a vertical farm are currently being used in controlled-environment agriculture facilities but have not been integrated into a seamless source of food production in urban high-rise buildings.

Such buildings, by the way, are not the only structures that could house vertical farms. Farms of various dimensions and crop yields could be built into a variety of urban settings — from schools, restaurants and hospitals to the upper floors of apartment complexes. By supplying a continuous quantity of fresh vegetables and fruits to city dwellers, these farms would help combat health problems, like Type II diabetes and obesity, that arise in part from the lack of quality produce in our diet.

The list of benefits is long. Vertical farms would produce crops year-round that contain no agro-chemicals. Fish and poultry could also be raised indoors. The farms would greatly reduce fossil-fuel use and greenhouse-gas emissions, since they would eliminate the need for heavy farm machinery and trucks that deliver food from farm to fork. (Wouldn’t it be great if everything on your plate came from around the corner, rather than from hundreds to thousands of miles away?)

Vertical farming could finally put an end to agricultural runoff, a major source of water pollution. Crops would never again be destroyed by floods or droughts. New employment opportunities for vertical farm managers and workers would abound, and abandoned city properties would become productive once again.

Vertical farms would also make cities more pleasant places to live. The structures themselves would be things of beauty and grace. In order to allow plants to capture passive sunlight, walls and ceilings would be completely transparent. So from a distance, it would look as if there were gardens suspended in space.

City dwellers would also be able to breathe easier — quite literally. Vertical farms would bring a great concentration of plants into cities. These plants would absorb carbon dioxide produced by automobile emissions and give off oxygen in return. So imagine you wanted to build the first vertical farm and put it in New York City. What would it take? We have the technology — now we need money, political will and, of course, proof that this concept can work. That’s why a prototype would be a good place to start. I estimate that constructing a five-story farm, taking up one-eighth of a square city block, would cost $20 million to $30 million. Part of the financing should come from the city government, as a vertical farm would go a long way toward achieving Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s goal of a green New York City by 2030. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has already expressed interest in having a vertical farm in the city. City officials should be interested. If a farm is located where the public can easily visit it, the iconic building could generate significant tourist dollars, on top of revenue from the sales of its produce.

But most of the financing should come from private sources, including groups controlling venture-capital funds. The real money would flow once entrepreneurs and clean-tech investors realize how much profit there is to be made in urban farming. Imagine a farm in which crop production is not limited by seasons or adverse weather events. Sales could be made in advance because crop-production levels could be guaranteed, thanks to the predictable nature of indoor agriculture. An actual indoor farm developed at Cornell University growing hydroponic lettuce was able to produce as many as 68 heads per square foot per year. At a retail price in New York of up to $2.50 a head for hydroponic lettuce, you can easily do the math and project profitability for other similar crops.

When people ask me why the world still does not have a single vertical farm, I just raise my eyebrows and shrug my shoulders. Perhaps people just need to see proof that farms can grow several stories high. As soon as the first city takes that leap of faith, the world’s first vertical farm could be less than a year away from coming to the aid of a hungry, thirsty world. Not a moment too soon.

Dickson D. Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, is writing a book about vertical farms.

ClimateWire: How the World Bank Let 'Deal Making' Torch the Rainforests

Been working on this stuff for the past few weeks.

NYtimes:

The World Bank ignored its own environmental and social protection standards when it approved nearly $200 million in loan guarantees for palm oil production in Indonesia, a stinging internal audit has found.

The report, detailing five years of funding from the International Finance Corp. (IFC), the private-sector arm of the World Bank, lambastes the agency for allowing commercial pressures to influence four separate loans aimed at developing the industry.

"The IFC was aware for more than 20 years that there were significant environmental and social issues and risks inherent in the oil palm sector in Indonesia," auditors wrote. "Despite awareness of the significant issues facing it, IFC did not develop a strategy for engaging in the oil palm sector. In the absence of a tailored strategy, deal making prevailed."

The report(pdf) from the office of the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman comes as Indonesia prepares to enter the carbon markets by protecting its tropical forests. Working in partnership with Australia, the Indonesian government currently is working to design a national carbon accounting system. Australia is building a satellite to monitor deforestation in the Southeast Asian country, according to new U.N. submissions.

Indonesia is home to the world's second-largest reserves of natural forests and peat swamps, which naturally trap carbon dioxide -- the main greenhouse gas that causes climate change. But rampant destruction of the forests to make way for palm oil plantations has caused giant releases of CO2 into the atmosphere, making Indonesia the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet.

The audit does not address climate change or how lending for palm oil -- an ingredient in foods and a biofuel added to diesel for cars -- fits into the World Bank's new "strategic framework" for development and climate change. It also does not examine any of the specific charges or environmental accusations lodged against the firm to which the World Bank loaned money.

Rather, the report confines itself to whether the IFC abided by its own standards. On that front, the multilateral bank came up short.

IFC saw burning the trees as having 'no impact'

Specifically, auditors said, when loaning to Wilmar International Ltd. and other firms between 2003 and 2008, the IFC did not check out concerns about the companies' supply chain plantations. The Forest Peoples Programme, a U.K.-based nonprofit group that originally brought the complaint, charged that the companies illegally used fire to clear forestland, cleared primary forests, and seized lands belonging to indigenous people without due process.

The IFC, auditors noted, labeled the initial loan as a "category C" -- a listing signifying that a project has little or no adverse environmental or social impacts, and which is typically given to financial intermediaries. But by failing to examine the subsidiaries that source the raw materials, IFC ignored issues like the absence of publicly available environmental impact assessments for the subsidiary companies.

"For each investment, commercial pressures were allowed to prevail," auditors wrote. "Commercial pressures dominated."

In a written response to auditors, the IFC acknowledged shortcomings in the review process. But the lender also defended investment in palm oil production as a way to alleviate poverty in Indonesia.

"IFC believes that production of palm oil, when carried out in an environmentally and socially sustainable fashion, can provide core support for a strong rural economy, providing employment and improved quality of life for millions of the rural poor in tropical areas," it said.

Hunting for a 'sustainable' strategy

The agency vowed to develop a new strategy to guide its future palm oil investments, to be completed in about three months, and to put "renewed emphasis" on assessing a company's supply chain before lending.

Marcus Colchester, director of the Forest Peoples Programme, called that response "inadequate."

In a letter to World Bank President Robert Zoellick and the board, Colchester and leaders of other nonprofit groups called on the World Bank to freeze palm oil lending, charging that IFC suffers a "systemic problem whereby the pressure to lend and to support business interests overcomes prudence, due diligence and concern for social and environmental outcomes."

They noted that the management response included no actions to address the problem of climate change being exacerbated by planting on peatlands and burning forests, and advised no discipline for staff that failed to comply with standards.

Barbara Bramble, a senior program adviser for international affairs at the National Wildlife Federation, said she believes the World Bank should help the Indonesian government at all levels change incentives for palm oil planting and refuse to invest in any company whose primary plantation is primary rainforest.

She, Colchester and even IMF officials widely agreed that there is in Indonesia an abundant amount of already degraded land that could be used for palm oil productuon. The challenge, Bramble said, is shifting national and local laws to encourage more sustainable production.

Meanwhile, the IFC indicated in a statement to E&E that the agency does not plan to give up palm oil investment anytime soon.

"IFC is aware of the environmental and social concerns associated with the palm oil sector in Indonesia. We also believe that the sector has considerable potential for job creation and economic growth," agency officials wrote. "We believe it is imperative to promote sustainable practices in the sector that will benefit the poor and preserve biodiversity."

Krugman in NYTimes: Republican Death Trip

Paul Krugman:

“I am in this race because I don’t want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don’t want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America.” So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past.

Some of us were skeptical. A couple of months after Mr. Obama gave that speech, I warned that his vision of a “different kind of politics” was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face “an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.”

So, how’s it going?

Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.

This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.

Right now, the charge that’s gaining the most traction is the claim that health care reform will create “death panels” (in Sarah Palin’s words) that will shuffle the elderly and others off to an early grave. It’s a complete fabrication, of course. The provision requiring that Medicare pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling was introduced by Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican — yes, Republican — of Georgia, who says that it’s “nuts” to claim that it has anything to do with euthanasia.

And not long ago, some of the most enthusiastic peddlers of the euthanasia smear, including Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, and Mrs. Palin herself, were all for “advance directives” for medical care in the event that you are incapacitated or comatose. That’s exactly what was being proposed — and has now, in the face of all the hysteria, been dropped from the bill.

Yet the smear continues to spread. And as the example of Mr. Gingrich shows, it’s not a fringe phenomenon: Senior G.O.P. figures, including so-called moderates, have endorsed the lie.

Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is one of these supposed moderates. I’m not sure where his centrist reputation comes from — he did, after all, compare critics of the Bush tax cuts to Hitler. But in any case, his role in the health care debate has been flat-out despicable.

Last week, Mr. Grassley claimed that his colleague Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor wouldn’t have been treated properly in other countries because they prefer to “spend money on people who can contribute more to the economy.” This week, he told an audience that “you have every right to fear,” that we “should not have a government-run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.”

Again, that’s what a supposedly centrist Republican, a member of the Gang of Six trying to devise a bipartisan health plan, sounds like.

So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.

The question now is how Mr. Obama will deal with the death of his postpartisan dream.

So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.

What, then, should Mr. Obama do? It would certainly help if he gave clearer and more concise explanations of his health care plan. To be fair, he’s gotten much better at that over the past couple of weeks.

What’s still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage — passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.

So can Mr. Obama, who can be so eloquent when delivering a message of uplift, rise to the challenge of unreasoning, unappeasable opposition? Only time will tell.

NYTimes: Disillusioned Environmentalists Turn on Obama as Compromiser

I hate to say it but..................

NYtimes:

For environmental activists like Jessica Miller, 31, the passage of a major climate bill by the House last month should have been cause for euphoria. Instead she felt cheated.

Ms. Miller, an activist with Greenpeace, had worked hard on her own time to elect Barack Obama because he directly and urgently addressed the issue nearest her heart: climate change.

But over the last few months, as the ambitious climate legislation was watered down in the House without criticism from the president, Ms. Miller became disillusioned. She worried that the bill had been rendered meaningless — or had even undermined some goals Greenpeace had fought for. And she felt that the man she had thought of as her champion seemed oddly prone to compromise.

“I voted for the president, I canvassed for him, but we just haven’t seen leadership from him,” said Ms. Miller, who rappelled down Mount Rushmore on Wednesday with colleagues to unfurl a banner protesting what they called President Obama’s acquiescence to the compromises. (They were arrested and charged with trespassing.)

While most environmental groups formally supported the House bill, the road to passage proved unsettling for the movement. Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Public Citizen opposed the bill; members of some other groups privately berated their leaders for going along with it. And some, like Ms. Miller, have shifted to open protest.

Few politicians make the transition from campaign trail to White House without sacrificing a few starry-eyed supporters along the way, of course.

And Mr. Obama’s early record on environmental issues suggests that he is more aggressive than any of his predecessors in supporting causes like combating global warming and shifting to renewable energy sources.

In an interview last month, Mr. Obama defended the House bill as “a good start.”

Referring to European leaders and others who said the bill was not strong enough, Mr. Obama said, “We don’t want to make the best the enemy of the good.”

He went on: “By putting a framework in place that is realistic, that is commonsensical, that protects consumers from huge spikes in electricity costs while setting real, meaningful targets — what we are doing is changing the political conversation and the incentive structures for businesses in this country.”

Still, the compromises that were made to win House approval by a 219-to-212 vote have left the president’s “green” base in some disarray.

For some environmental groups and individuals, the bill’s perceived shortcomings — like generous pollution allowances to coal utilities and the usurping of the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory authority over carbon emissions — were more than mere setbacks.

“This bill was worse than what we were expecting, even knowing we wouldn’t get the best bill,” said Nick Berning, a spokesman for the group Friends of the Earth.

The overriding of the E.P.A.’s regulatory authority over carbon emissions was particularly startling, Mr. Berning said.

The president clearly shares the blame, he said, adding, “He is not engaged enough.”

On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama used forceful and direct language on climate change, calling carbon emissions from human activity an “immediate threat” to the climate. His environmental critics say they miss that urgent tone.

“He was far too quiet during the House debate,” said Jessy Tolkan, the executive director of the Energy Action Coalition, a youth group in Washington that campaigns for clean energy. “He needs to live up to the promises he made to us when we poured our heart and soul into electing him.”

Ms. Tolkan said that her organization was hoping to take that point home to the Democratic Party before the midterm elections. “Those who played a leadership role in weakening this bill will feel the wrath of youth political power across the country,” she said. “2010 is not that far away.”

Democratic lawmakers have also drawn fire. Jill Stein, co-founder of the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities, which usually lobbies on local environmental issues, said she felt “betrayed” by the Democratic-controlled House. “If this is a political reality, we have to change our political leaders,” Ms. Stein said.

In a statement, Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and an architect of the bill, defended the legislation. “We worked hard to craft legislation that would achieve our environmental goals while addressing the regional concerns of members of Congress,” he said. Politicians are not the only targets of dejected environmentalists.

The Clean, a collaborative grass-roots groups that encourages the use of renewable fuels, posted a critique of the climate bill on its Web site that asked at one point: “Why has this energy legislation become so bad?”

It blames “corporate polluters” for spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbying, but environmental groups, too.

“Several of the national ‘green’ groups decided to cooperate with industry and members of Congress in getting a bill through,” the Web site reads. “N.R.D.C., the Environmental Defense Fund and Pew all sat at the table and, whether or not it was their intent to do so, provided ‘cover’ for these bad policies.”

Daniel A. Lashof, director of the climate center for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group in Washington, said that if his group had not come to the table, there might not have been any climate-change legislation at all. And he pointed out that Congressional support for environmental action was at a record high.

“We are not saying this is perfect,” Mr. Lashof said, “but we cannot hope for stronger environmental champions in Congress. If not now, when?”

Bono: Rebranding Africa

Rebranding Africa

By BONO in NYtimes:

DATELINE: Imminent. About now, actually.

Soon, Air Force One will touch down in Accra, Ghana; Africans will be welcoming the first African-American president. Press coverage on the continent is placing equal weight on both sides of the hyphen.

And we thought it was big when President Kennedy visited Ireland in 1963. (It was big, though I was small. Where I come from, J.F.K. is remembered as a local boy made very, very good.)

But President Obama’s African-ness is only part (a thrilling part) of the story today. Cable news may think it’s all about him — but my guess is that he doesn’t. If he was in it for a sentimental journey he’d have gone to Kenya, chased down some of those dreams from his father.

He’s made a different choice, and he’s been quite straight about the reason. Despite Kenya’s unspeakable beauty and its recent victories against the anopheles mosquito, the country’s still-stinging corruption and political unrest confirms too many of the headlines we in the West read about Africa. Ghana confounds them.

Not defiantly or angrily, but in that cool, offhand Ghanaian way. This is a country whose music of choice is jazz; a country that long ago invented a genre called highlife that spread across Africa — and, more recently, hiplife, which is what happens when hip-hop meets reggaetón meets rhythm and blues meets Ghanaian melody, if you’re keeping track (and you really should be). On a visit there, I met the minister for tourism and pitched the idea of marketing the country as the “birthplace of cool.” (Just think, the music of Miles, the conversation of Kofi.) He demurred ... too cool, I guess.

Quietly, modestly — but also heroically — Ghana’s going about the business of rebranding a continent. New face of America, meet the new face of Africa.

Ghana is well governed. After a close election, power changed hands peacefully. Civil society is becoming stronger. The country’s economy was growing at a good clip even before oil was found off the coast a few years ago. Though it has been a little battered by the global economic meltdown, Ghana appears to be weathering the storm. I don’t normally give investment tips — sound the alarm at Times headquarters — but here is one: buy Ghanaian.

So it’s not a coincidence that Ghana’s making steady progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Right now it’s one of the few African nations that has a shot at getting there by 2015.

No one’s leaked me a copy of the president’s speech in Ghana, but it’s pretty clear he’s going to focus not on the problems that afflict the continent but on the opportunities of an Africa on the rise. If that’s what he does, the biggest cheers will come from members of the growing African middle class, who are fed up with being patronized and hearing the song of their majestic continent in a minor key.

I’ve played that tune. I’ve talked of tragedy, of emergency. And it is an emergency when almost 2,000 children in Africa a day die of a mosquito bite; this kind of hemorrhaging of human capital is not something we can accept as normal.

But as the example of Ghana makes clear, that’s only one chord. Amid poverty and disease are opportunities for investment and growth — investment and growth that won’t eliminate overnight the need for assistance, much as we and Africans yearn for it to end, but that in time can build roads, schools and power grids and propel commerce to the point where aid is replaced by trade pacts, business deals and home-grown income.

President Obama can hasten that day. He knows change won’t come easily. Corruption stalks Africa’s reformers. “If you fight corruption, it fights you back,” a former Nigerian anti-corruption official has said.

From his bully pulpit, the president can take aim at the bullies. Without accountability — no opportunity. If that’s not a maxim, it ought to be. It’s a truism, anyway. The work of the American government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation is founded on that principle, even if it doesn’t put it that bluntly. United States aid dollars increasingly go to countries that use them and don’t blow them. Ghana is one. There’s a growing number of others.

That’s thanks to Africans like John Githongo, the former anticorruption chief of Kenya — a hero of mine who is pioneering a new brand of bottom-up accountability. Efforts like his, which are taking place across the continent, deserve more support. The presidential kind. Then there’s Nigeria’s moral and financial fist — Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a managing director of the World Bank and the country’s former finance minister — who is on a quest to help African countries recover stolen assets looted by corrupt officials. And the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which is helping countries like Ghana clean up the oil, gas and mining business, to make sure that profits don’t wind up in the hands of kleptocrats.

Presidential attention would be a shot in the arm for these efforts — an infusion of moral and political amino acids that, by the way, will make aid dollars go further. That should be welcome news to the Group of 8 leaders gathered in Italy to whom Mr. Obama bids a Hawaii-via-Chicago-inflected “arrivederci,” as he leaves for Africa.

This week’s summit meeting looks as if it will yield some welcome new G-8 promises on agriculture. (So far, new money: America. Old money: everyone else.) This is the good news that President Obama will bring from Europe to Ghana.

The not-so-good news — that countries like Italy and France are not meeting their Africa commitments — makes the president’s visit all the more essential. The United States is one of the countries on track to keep its promises, and Mr. Obama has already said he’ll more than build on the impressive Bush legacy.

President Obama plans to return to Africa for the World Cup in 2010. Between now and then he’s got the chance to lead others in building — from the bottom up — on the successes of recent efforts within Africa and to learn from the failures. There’s been plenty of both. We’ve witnessed the good, the bad and the ugly in our fraught relationship with this dynamic continent.

The president can facilitate the new, the fresh and the different. Many existing promises are expiring in 2010, some of old age and others of chronic neglect. New promises from usual and unusual partners, from the G-8 to the G-20, need to be made — and this time kept. If more African nations (not just Ghana) are going to meet the millennium goals, they are going to need smart partners in business and development. That’s Smart as in sustainable, measurable, accountable, responsive and transparent.

Africa is not just Barack Obama’s homeland. It’s ours, too. The birthplace of humanity. Wherever our journeys have taken us, they all began there. The word Desmond Tutu uses is “ubuntu”: I am because we are. As he says, until we accept and appreciate this we cannot be fully whole.

Could it be that all Americans are, in that sense, African-Americans?

Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE and (Product)RED, is a contributing columnist for The Times.

NYtimes: Refugees Join List of Climate-Change Issues

NYTimes:

With their boundless vistas of turquoise water framed by swaying coconut palms, the Carteret Islands northeast of the Papua New Guinea mainland might seem the idyllic spot to be a castaway.

But sea levels have risen so much that during the annual king tide season, November to March, the roiling ocean blocks the view from one island to the next, and residents stash their possessions in fishing nets strung between the palm trees.

“It gives you the scary feeling that you don’t know what is going to happen to you, that any minute you will be floating,” Ursula Rakova, the head of a program to relocate residents, said by telephone. The chain could well be uninhabitable by 2015, locals believe, but two previous attempts to abandon it ended badly, when residents were chased back after clashing with their new neighbors on larger islands.

This dark situation underlies the thorny debate over the world’s responsibilities to the millions of people likely to be displaced by climate change.

There could be 200 million of these climate refugees by 2050, according to a new policy paper by the International Organization for Migration, depending on the degree of climate disturbances. Aside from the South Pacific, low-lying areas likely to be battered first include Bangladesh and nations in the Indian Ocean, where the leader of the Maldives has begun seeking a safe haven for his 300,000 people. Landlocked areas may also be affected; some experts call the Darfur region of Sudan, where nomads battle villagers in a war over shrinking natural resources, the first significant conflict linked to climate change.

In the coming days, the United Nations General Assembly is expected to adopt the first resolution linking climate change to international peace and security. The hard-fought resolution, brought by 12 Pacific island states, says that climate change warrants greater attention from the United Nations as a possible source of upheaval worldwide and calls for more intense efforts to combat it. While all Pacific island states are expected to lose land, some made up entirely of atolls, like Tuvalu and Kiribati, face possible extinction.

“For the first time in history, you could actually lose countries off the face of the globe,” said Stuart Beck, the permanent representative for Palau at the United Nations. “It is a security threat to them and their populations, which will have to be relocated, which is the security threat to the places where they go, among other consequences.”

The issue has inspired intense wrangling, with some nations accusing the islanders of both exaggerating the still murky consequences of climate change and trying to expand the mandate of the Security Council by asking it to take action.

“We don’t consider climate change is an issue of security that properly belongs in the Security Council; rather, it is a development issue that has some security aspects,” said Maged A. Abdelaziz, the Egyptian ambassador. “It is an issue of how to prevent certain lands, or certain countries, from being flooded.”

The island states are seeking a response akin to the effort against terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks. “The whole system bent itself to the task, and that is what we want,” Mr. Beck said, adding that the Council should even impose sanctions on countries that fail to act. “If you really buy into the notion that the Suburban you are driving is causing these islands to go under, there ought to be a cop.”

As it is, the compromise resolution does not mention such specific steps, one of the reasons it is expected to pass. Britain, which introduced climate change as a Security Council discussion topic two years ago, supports it along with most of Europe, while other permanent Council members — namely, the United States, China and Russia — generally backed the measure once it no longer explicitly demanded Council action.

Scientific studies distributed by the United Nations or affiliated agencies generally paint rising seas as a threat. A 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, detailing shifts expected in the South Pacific, said rising seas would worsen flooding and erosion and threaten towns as well as infrastructure. Some fresh water will turn salty, and fishing and agriculture will wither, it said.

The small island states are not alone in considering the looming threat already on the doorstep. A policy paper released this month by Australia’s Defense Ministry suggests possible violent outcomes in the Pacific. While Australia should try to mitigate the humanitarian suffering caused by global warming, if that failed and conflict erupted, the country should use its military “as an instrument to deal with any threats,” said the paper.

Australia’s previous prime minister, John Howard, was generally dismissive of the problem, saying his country was plagued with “doomsayers.” But a policy paper called “Our Drowning Neighbors,” by the now governing Labor Party, said Australia should help meld an international coalition to address it. Political debates have erupted there and in New Zealand over the idea of immigration quotas for climate refugees. New Zealand established a “Pacific Access Category” with guidelines that mirror the rules for any émigré, opening its borders to a limited annual quota of some 400 able-bodied adults between the ages of 18 and 45 who have no criminal records.

But its position has attracted criticism for leaving out the young and the old, who have the least ability to relocate. Australia’s policy, by contrast, is to try to mitigate the circumstances for the victims where they are, rather than serving as their lifeboat.

The sentiment among Pacific Islanders suggests that they do not want to abandon their homelands or be absorbed into cultures where indigenous people already struggle for acceptance.

“It is about much more than just finding food and shelter,” said Tarita Holm, an analyst with the Palauan Ministry of Resources and Development. “It is about your identity.”

Ms. Rakova, on the Carteret Islands, echoes that sentiment. A year ago, her proposed relocation effort attracted just three families out of a population of around 2,000 people. But after last season’s king tides — the highest of the year — she is scrounging for about $1.5 million to help some 750 people relocate before the tides come again.

Jennifer Redfearn, a documentary maker, has been filming the gradual disappearance of the Carterets for a work called “Sun Come Up.” One clan chief told her he would rather sink with the islands than leave. It now takes only about 15 minutes to walk the length of the largest island, with food and water supplies shrinking all the time.

“It destroys our food gardens, it uproots coconut trees, it even washes over the sea walls that we have built,” Ms. Rakova says on the film. “Most of our culture will have to live in memory.”

NYtimes: Leading Africans to Responsible Recycling

NYtimes Special Report:

Backyard recyclers of electronics waste in developing countries use open fires and chemicals to extract precious metals, then dump the hazardous byproducts. Using no safety precautions, they expose themselves, their neighbors and their local environment to lead, mercury, cadmium and brominated flame retardants that can damage almost every organ and system in the human body.

That may be about to change. In February, the electronic products manufacturer Hewlett-Packard announced preliminary findings of a study on responsible electronic waste processing in African countries, based in part on a pilot facility it helped build in Cape Town.

Inspired by the work in India of Empa, the Swiss federal laboratory for materials testing and research, which is a partner of H.P. in the Cape Town project, the study looked at e-waste management in South Africa, Morocco and Kenya, including local legislation, awareness and behavior, infrastructure needs, and the amount of waste generated. Another partner in the project is the Global Digital Solidarity Fund, a Swiss philanthropy that works to bridge the digital divide.

From February to November 2008, the Cape Town facility processed approximately 60 tons of electronic equipment, generated about $14,000, and employed 19 people. The plant treats computers, monitors, printers, and mobile phones from any manufacturer, not just H.P. Other products considered e-waste by activists, like televisions and DVD and MP3 players, are not accepted.

Workers refurbished and resold some products and dismantled others to sell the raw materials to businesses that recycle metals and plastics. “They also make nice jewelry out of some of the processors and boards,” said Klaus Hieronymi, environment manager for H.P. in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

A similar plant has since been set up in Durban, without subsidies from either H.P. or the government. “We hope this idea will spread around South Africa,” Mr. Hieronymi said.

As much as 50 million tons of electronic waste is generated worldwide annually. People in developing countries are using — and discarding — more electronics every year, a waste management challenge that is complicated by the vast quantities of electronics trash that developed countries also dump on them in a bid to externalize costs.

Efforts by one environmentalist organization, the Basel Action Network, or BAN, to curtail that practice led to the 1995 BAN Amendment to the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal — a treaty banning the export of hazardous waste from developed to developing countries. The European Union’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive, meanwhile, makes E.U. manufacturers responsible for products at the end of their life span. But the United States is not a signatory to the BAN Amendment, and both the United States and Europe allow the export of materials categorized as reusable.

In theory, reuse is desirable because it extends product life and allows access to information technology for people who can not afford new products.

But a BAN study found that up to 75 percent of “reusable” electronic goods are obsolete, do not work or are destroyed in transit: and even products that can be repaired generate waste because technicians usually replace broken parts rather than fixing them.

West African countries like Nigeria have a larger problem with dumping than countries in southern Africa, Mr. Hieronymi said.

But even in South Africa, projects like the Cape Town facility trouble some activists, who fear that they will attract even more shipments from exporters who think their electronic trash will be processed using best practices.

The reality is that you can not just “plop down” a high-tech facility in a developing country and expect it to operate safely, said Jim Puckett, executive director of BAN. Safe operation requires worker training; laws regulating waste management, worker safety and whistle-blower protections; law enforcement and monitoring; downstream residue management; and additional infrastructure, including smelters and hazardous waste facilities.

“You do not get that in a developing country,” Mr. Puckett said. “If you had that, it wouldn’t be a developing country.”

H.P.’s study has borne that out, particularly in Morocco and Kenya, which have “almost nonexistent” safety regulations and no enforcement, said Mr. Hieronymi. South Africa has some worker safety laws but little enforcement.

“Even if you had laws and enforcement, those people need the dollar today,” he said, referring to the individuals and small businesses typically involved in waste processing. “They don’t care about long-term health and environmental effects.”

Disposing of electronic waste involves a series of processes, including shredding, grinding, smelting and burning — the last two being toxic processes that call for special pollution-containing plants.

There are several hazardous waste incinerators in Africa, but they are designed primarily for chemical industry waste. Because the amount of electronic waste is relatively small, H.P. has no plans to build its own incinerators, Mr. Hieronymi said.

In any event, “even the most well-intended effort is still going to have hazardous byproducts, whether it’s in the form of emissions or some kind of a slag after you’ve incinerated it,” said Barbara B. Kyle, national coordinator for the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, of which BAN is a member.

“These toxic residual wastes need to be managed,” she said, “and most developing countries don’t have safe facilities for where that can go.”

Infrastructure and social systems, moreover, vary greatly across Africa. “You cannot take a solution for South Africa and implant it in Morocco,” Mr. Hieronymi said. “The industrialization of that country is completely different, plus in Morocco you have a clan structure of families who are already treating waste.”

One aim of H.P.’s initiative is to provide safer jobs for people who are already working in the informal recycling business. But that can be challenging.

In many countries where informal recyclers are active, H.P.’s free take-back programs go unused. “If you put a perfect recycling facility in South Africa or Nigeria, it’s there, it’s not used, it’s rotting, because the people who are collecting the PCs on the road and can make a dollar on it by processing it in the backyard will not give that PC to the recycling industry,” Mr. Hieronymi said.

One answer is to pay informal collectors for waste — as Empa does in India. Still, it is unclear whether this model can provide as many jobs as the informal economy currently offers. With that in mind, H.P. is trying not to innovate too far. “In Cape Town, we didn’t put a fully automated recycling facility that needs just two engineers and a secretary to run it,” Mr. Hieronymi said. “We have instead 19 people.” Those 19 handle just the processing side at the facility, he added. Far more people can be engaged in waste collection.

Ms. Kyle lauded these efforts but said the number of jobs should not be the chief consideration; reducing pollution is paramount.

“You have to recognize that the people who are doing this work are poisoning themselves and others,” she said. “It’s not right to just put the economic filter of potential wages lost if there are fewer jobs available from a plant.”

Ultimately, the solution to the problem of electronic waste is to design better, cleaner products with fewer hazardous materials and less waste generally. H.P. has recognized that, Mr. Hieronymi said. “It’s quite easy for people like me to convince our design engineers that they should invest maybe a $1 or $2 into the manufacturing or design of the product because we can save $3 to $4 on the recycling side,” he said.

Designs are already cleaner than they once were. For example, cathode ray tubes in old computer monitors contained leaded glass, and even older laptops used fluorescent lighting, which contain mercury. New models are made with light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, which are less hazardous to recycle.

E.U. regulations have restricted the amounts of hazardous material that can be incorporated in electronics for the European market — a development that has pushed manufacturers to clean up their products.

“We are also creating demand for recycled material,” Mr. Hieronymi said. “We have printers that contain up to 80 percent recycled plastics. Most of our ink cartridges have a recycling content of more than 75 percent.”

Paul Krugman Op-Ed in NYtimes: The Perfect, the Good, the Planet

Oh Krugman....

NYtimes:

In a way, it was easy to take stands during the Bush years: the Bushies and their allies in Congress were so determined to move the nation in the wrong direction that one could, with a clear conscience, oppose all the administration’s initiatives.

Now, however, a somewhat uneasy coalition of progressives and centrists rules Washington, and staking out a position has become much trickier. Policy tends to move things in a desirable direction, yet to fall short of what you’d hoped to see. And the question becomes how many compromises, how much watering down, one is willing to accept.

There will be a lot of soul-searching later this year for advocates of health care reform. (For me the make-or-break issue is whether the legislation includes a public plan.) But right now it’s the environmental community that has to decide how much it’s willing to bend.

If we’re going to get real action on climate change any time soon, it will be via some version of legislation proposed by Representatives Henry Waxman and Edward Markey. Their bill would limit greenhouse gases by requiring polluters to receive or buy emission permits, with the number of available permits — the “cap” in “cap and trade” — gradually falling over time.

It goes without saying that the usual suspects on the right have denounced Waxman-Markey: global warming isn’t real, emission limits will destroy the economy, yada yada. But the bill also faces opposition from some environmentalists, who are balking at the compromises the sponsors made to gain political support.

So is Waxman-Markey — whose language was released last week — good enough?

Well, Al Gore has praised the bill, and plans to organize a grass-roots campaign on its behalf. A number of environmental organizations, ranging from the League of Conservation Voters to the Environmental Defense Fund, have also come out in strong support.

But Greenpeace has declared that it “cannot support this bill in its current state.” And some influential environmental figures — most notably James Hansen, the NASA scientist who first drew the public’s attention to global warming — oppose the whole idea of cap and trade, arguing for a carbon tax instead.

I’m with Mr. Gore. The legislation now on the table isn’t the bill we’d ideally want, but it’s the bill we can get — and it’s vastly better than no bill at all.

One objection — the claim that carbon taxes are better than cap and trade — is, in my view, just wrong. In principle, emission taxes and tradable emission permits are equally effective at limiting pollution. In practice, cap and trade has some major advantages, especially for achieving effective international cooperation.

Not to put too fine a point on it, think about how hard it would be to verify whether China was really implementing a promise to tax carbon emissions, as opposed to letting factory owners with the right connections off the hook. By contrast, it would be fairly easy to determine whether China was holding its total emissions below agreed-upon levels.

The more serious objection to Waxman-Markey is that it sets up a system under which many polluters wouldn’t have to pay for the right to emit greenhouse gases — they’d get their permits free. In particular, in the first years of the program’s operation more than a third of the allocation of emission permits would be handed over at no charge to the power industry.

Now, these handouts wouldn’t undermine the policy’s effectiveness. Even when polluters get free permits, they still have an incentive to reduce their emissions, so that they can sell their excess permits to someone else. That’s not just theory: allowances for sulfur dioxide emissions are allocated to electric utilities free of charge, yet the cap-and-trade system for SO2 has been highly successful at controlling acid rain.

But handing out emission permits does, in effect, transfer wealth from taxpayers to industry. So if you had your heart set on a clean program, without major political payoffs, Waxman-Markey is a disappointment.

Still, the bill represents major action to limit climate change. As the Center for American Progress has pointed out, by 2020 the legislation would have the same effect on global warming as taking 500 million cars off the road. And by all accounts, this bill has a real chance of becoming law in the near future.

So opponents of the proposed legislation have to ask themselves whether they’re making the perfect the enemy of the good. I think they are.

After all the years of denial, after all the years of inaction, we finally have a chance to do something major about climate change. Waxman-Markey is imperfect, it’s disappointing in some respects, but it’s action we can take now. And the planet won’t wait.

NYtimes: In Ecuador, Resentment of an Oil Company Oozes

MORE Chevron in Ecuador! NYtimes:

Mention to Anita Ruíz the name of the giant oil company Chevron, and she trembles with rage. At her wooden hut here in the Amazon forest, where oil-project flares illuminate the night sky, she points to a portrait of her youngest son, who died seven years ago of leukemia at age 16.

“We believe the American oilmen created the pollution that killed my son,” said Ms. Ruíz, 58, who lives in a clearing where Texaco, the American oil company that Chevron acquired in 2001, once poured oil waste into pits used decades ago for drilling wells.

Texaco’s roughnecks are long gone, but black gunk from the pits seeps to the topsoil here and in dozens of other spots in Ecuador’s northeastern jungle. These days the only Chevron employees who visit the former oil fields, in a region where resentment against the company runs high, do so escorted by bodyguards toting guns.

They represent one side in a bitter fight that is developing into the world’s largest environmental lawsuit, with $27 billion in potential damages.

Chevron is preparing for a ruling by a lone judge in a tiny courtroom on the top floor of a shopping center in Lago Agrio, a town rife with slums that Texaco founded in the 1960s as its base camp in the Amazon.

Chevron faces claims for an era when oil companies were less purposeful about protecting the environment than they are today. It also faces potentially huge damages in a country where American corporations once wielded strong influence but are now treated with discourtesy, if not contempt.

The sympathies of the judge, a former military officer named Juan Nuñez, are not hard to discern, and he appears likely to rule against Chevron this year. “This is a fight between a Goliath and people who cannot even pay their bills,” Mr. Nuñez, 57, said in an interview in his office, where more than 100,000 pages of evidence were stacked to the ceiling.

But his ruling is not likely to end the case. Already, the dispute is the subject of intense lobbying in Washington, which could apply pressure to Ecuador on Chevron’s behalf. If the company loses, it is ready to pursue appeals in Ecuador and, if necessary, to seek international arbitration.

Texaco laid down stakes here in the 1960s, and began producing oil in the early 1970s when Ecuador was still under military rule. Before the oil began to flow, the region was inhabited by forest tribes, including the Cofán and the Siona-Secoya.

Political tension permeated Texaco’s presence in Ecuador much of the time it operated here in a partnership with the government, and by the time it was prepared to leave, in the early 1990s, a cleanup of its operations was needed.

So Texaco reached a $40 million agreement with Ecuador to clean a portion of the well sites and waste pits in its concession area, absolving it of future liability. But that cleanup, carried out in the 1990s, was far from the bookend Texaco hoped to achieve.

Instead, villagers in Ecuador became convinced they were getting sick from the pollution left behind. They filed suit in 1993 in the United States, and later claimed that their grievances were not covered by Texaco’s settlement agreement.

As the case snaked its way through American courts, Ecuador seemed to fall to pieces, going through 10 presidents in a decade by 2006. The American lawsuit was eventually thrown out, on grounds the case should not be tried in the United States, and the plaintiffs reformulated it and filed it here.

Today, Chevron has absorbed Texaco, and Ecuador has gone through a metamorphosis under the leftist President Rafael Correa. He has repeatedly sided with the plaintiffs, calling Chevron’s Ecuadorean past “a crime against humanity.”

Such sentiment holds strong appeal to those who claim that people here, like Ms. Ruíz’s 16-year-old son, are dying from the pollution that Texaco spawned. Citing scientific studies, the plaintiffs claim that toxic chemicals from Texaco’s waste pits, including benzene, which is known to induce leukemia, have leached for decades into soil, groundwater and streams. A report last year by Richard Cabrera, a geologist and court-appointed expert, estimated that 1,400 people in this jungle region — perhaps more — had died of cancer because of oil contamination.

Chevron rejected the claims, contending that Mr. Cabrera had no medical evidence to back up his conclusion that the company should pay $2.9 billion just to compensate for excess cancer deaths.
Continues.....

NYtimes: China Outpaces U.S. in Cleaner Coal-Fired Plants

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Coal-fired power plants, even when built to be "ultra-supercritical," still put out a great deal of CO2. Yes, it is better than having a less efficient technology because you are putting out more kWh per ton of CO2 emitted, but it is still emitted a shitload of pollution. AND when you build a new plant, which will have a lifespan of around 50 years, you are also making that 50 year commitment to mining coal for that plant, which has a great deal of environmental degradation related to it as well. "Ultra-supercritical" sounds awesome and would have been a great 80s hair band, but it also requires more energy to keep the process going, so while is more efficient than other coal plants, it isn't that much more efficient. Financing new plants, like Tianjin which is in the study we did on public financing for coal-fired power plants, is committed to a constant new source of CO2 emissions for the next 50 years. Bottom line, DON'T FUCK WITH COAL.

NYtimes:

China’s frenetic construction of coal-fired power plants has raised worries around the world about the effect on climate change. China now uses more coal than the United States, Europe and Japan combined, making it the world’s largest emitter of gases that are warming the planet.

But largely missing in the hand-wringing is this: China has emerged in the past two years as the world’s leading builder of more efficient, less polluting coal power plants, mastering the technology and driving down the cost.

While the United States is still debating whether to build a more efficient kind of coal-fired power plant that uses extremely hot steam, China has begun building such plants at a rate of one a month.

Construction has stalled in the United States on a new generation of low-pollution power plants that turn coal into a gas before burning it, although Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Thursday that the Obama administration might revive one power plant of this type. But China has already approved equipment purchases for just such a power plant, to be assembled soon in a muddy field here in Tianjin.

“The steps they’ve taken are probably as fast and as serious as anywhere in power-generation history,” said Hal Harvey, president of ClimateWorks, a group in San Francisco that helps finance projects to limit global warming.

Western countries continue to rely heavily on coal-fired power plants built decades ago with outdated, inefficient technology that burn a lot of coal and emit considerable amounts of carbon dioxide. China has begun requiring power companies to retire an older, more polluting power plant for each new one they build.

Cao Peixi, the president of the China Huaneng Group, the country’s biggest state-owned electric utility and the majority partner in the joint venture building the Tianjin plant, said his company was committed to the project even though it would cost more than conventional plants.

“We shouldn’t look at this project from a purely financial perspective,” he said. “It represents the future.”

Without doubt, China’s coal-fired power sector still has many problems, and global warming gases from the country are expected to continue increasing. China’s aim is to use the newest technologies to limit the rate of increase.

Only half the country’s coal-fired power plants have the emissions control equipment to remove sulfur compounds that cause acid rain, and even power plants with that technology do not always use it. China has not begun regulating some of the emissions that lead to heavy smog in big cities.

Even among China’s newly built plants, not all are modern. Only about 60 percent of the new plants are being built using newer technology that is highly efficient, but more expensive.

With greater efficiency, a power plant burns less coal and emits less carbon dioxide for each unit of electricity it generates. Experts say the least efficient plants in China today convert 27 to 36 percent of the energy in coal into electricity. The most efficient plants achieve an efficiency as high as 44 percent, meaning they can cut global warming emissions by more than a third compared with the weakest plants.

In the United States, the most efficient plants achieve around 40 percent efficiency, because they do not use the highest steam temperatures being adopted in China. The average efficiency of American coal-fired plants is still higher than the average efficiency of Chinese power plants, because China built so many inefficient plants over the past decade. But China is rapidly closing the gap by using some of the world’s most advanced designs.

After relying until recently on older technology, “China has since become the major world market for advanced coal-fired power plants with high-specification emission control systems,” the International Energy Agency said in a report on April 20.

China’s improvements are starting to have an effect on climate models. In its latest annual report last November, the I.E.A. cut its forecast of the annual increase in Chinese emissions of global warming gases, to 3 percent from 3.2 percent, in response to technological gains, particularly in the coal sector, even as the agency raised slightly its forecast for Chinese economic growth. “It’s definitely changing the baseline, and that’s being taken into account,” said Jonathan Sinton, a China specialist at the energy agency.

But by continuing to rely heavily on coal, which supplies 80 percent of its electricity, China ensures that it will keep emitting a lot of carbon dioxide; even an efficient coal-fired power plant emits twice the carbon dioxide of a natural gas-fired plant.

Perhaps the biggest question now is how much further China can go beyond the recent steps. In particular, how fast will it move toward power plants that capture their emissions and store them underground or under the seafloor?

That technology could, in theory, create power plants that contribute virtually nothing to global warming. Many countries hope to develop such plants, though progress has been halting; Energy Secretary Chu has promised steps to speed up the technology in the United States.

China has just built a small, experimental facility near Beijing to remove carbon dioxide from power station emissions and use it to provide carbonation for beverages, and the government has a short list of possible locations for a large experiment to capture and store carbon dioxide. But so far, it has no plans to make this a national policy.

China is making other efforts to reduce its global warming emissions. It has doubled its total wind energy capacity in each of the past four years, and is poised to pass the United States as soon as this year as the world’s largest market for wind power equipment. China is building considerably more nuclear power plants than the rest of the world combined, and these do not emit carbon dioxide after they are built.

But coal remains the cheapest energy source in China by a wide margin. China has the world’s third-largest coal reserves, after the United States and Russia.

“No matter how much renewable or nuclear is in the mix, coal will remain the dominant power source,” said Ashok Bhargava, a China energy expert at the Asian Development Bank in Manila.

Another problem is that China has finally developed the ability to build high-technology power plants only at the end of a national binge of building lower-tech coal-fired plants. Construction is now slowing because of the economic slump.

By adopting “ultra-supercritical” technology, which uses extremely hot steam to achieve the highest efficiency, and by building many identical power plants at the same time, China has cut costs dramatically through economies of scale. It now can cost a third less to build an ultra-supercritical power plant in China than to build a less efficient coal-fired plant in the United States.