Current Savers Blog

A U.S. anti-coal campaign has gone Hollywood with a new TV spot directed by Academy Award-winning filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen of “No Country for Old Men” and “Fargo” fame.

The Reality Coalition, a project backed by environmental groups Alliance for Climate Protection, Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the League of Conservation Voters, launched the ad this week.

Entitled “Air Freshener,” it features a product pitchman entering a family’s home with a spray can labeled “Clean Coal” that spews black, cough-inducing fumes.

“Is regular clean, clean enough for your family? Not when you can have Clean Coal
clean,” he says.

The ad, designed and produced by ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, is designed as a response to a series of coal industry-backed television spots and other ads promoting “clean coal,” or technology to capture and store the global warming emissions from coal-fired power plants. Environmentalists argue that the industry’s ads are misleading because clean coal does not exist yet on a commercial scale. The industry, however, says coal is an abundant and cheap resource that the U.S. cannot do without.

Despite U.S. President Barack Obama’s green leanings, however, he has been a supporter of research into clean coal technology. Earlier this week, his budget proposal included $15 billion for technologies, including clean coal, that keep carbon out of the atmosphere.

Check it out the Coen brothers’ ad below. It is the first of a series directed by the famous duo.

Ice cream seller Haagen-Dazs is investing a half-million dollars to save the honeybees – and to save us from a future of feeding on gruel. 

Honeybees, which 60 Minutes called the “unsung heroes of the food chain,” are threatened in many parts of the world, putting food supplies in danger.

Bees pollenate one-third of all of the natural foods we eat. Just imagine a world without nuts, fruits, vegetables, flowers and even meat and milk from cattle that eat bee-pollenated alfalfa.

“Without bees and other pollinators, the things we that would be left with are corn, rice and wheat,” Diana Cox-Foster, an entomology professor at Pennsylvania State University, said in this video created for Haagen-Dazs.

“If we don’t have them, we’re going to be eating gruel,” said Maryann Frazier, a senior extension associate in Penn State’s entomology department.

Billions of bees in the United States and Europe have disappeared. Scientists in the United States say that colony collapse disorder, a mysterious syndrome , has wiped out more than a third of American hives in 2008 on top of similar losses in 2007.

Haagen-Dazs just gave a second $250,000 donation to honeybee researchers at Penn State and the University of California, Davis.

The company is running a public information campaign at helpthehoneybees.com and says federal funding is needed to tackle the issue.  

Part of the donation from the company, which sells ”bee-built” flavors like Vanilla Honey Bee, will be used to create Haagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven - a one-half acre bee-friendly demonstration garden coordinated by the California Center for Urban Horticulture.

(Photo: Provided by Haagen-Dazs)

“The south has plenty of water and the north lacks it, so if possible why not borrow some?” China’s revolutionary communist leader Mao Zedong said in 1952.

That probably seemed a great idea at the time.

But it is causing pollution as well as discontent among farmers facing forced resettlement to make way for a mammoth construction to help the parched north — the South-to-North Transfer Project. Much of the system, of dams, canals and tunnels, is due for completion in 2013-14.

Read my colleague Chris Buckley’s fascinating feature about the project as well as a related story and a factbox. The photo above left, by David Gray, shows a fisherman near the village of Shizigang, located on the Danjiangkou Dam that is part of the project in Henan province.

Among the statistics — about 12.5 million Chinese have been moved to make way for 86,000 dams since 1949, according to one study.  (12.5 million people is more than the entire population of countries such as Greece, Cuba, Belgium or Tunisia). And the “dam migrants” (as they are known) have long fanned unrest.   

“We have eaten too much suffering already,” farmer Zhao Jingzhou said in Shizigang, using a common Chinese saying. He is among the survivors of an exodus to the high northwest from 1959 — thousands of others, lured by the promise of a more secure life in the arid highlands of the northwest province next to Tibet, died from hunger.

The picture above right shows work on the Danjiangkou Dam in 2008.

So what should China do?

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial page occupies a uniquely obnoxious place in commentary on global warming. Over the many years that I have read with trepidation what they write, I have yet to see accurate presentation of the science issues. 

They have fed their readers so much misinformation and confusion one can only conclude they consider complete fabrication fair play in the discussion.

The Director of the Columbia University Earth Institute, Jeff Sachs, has in the past invited the WSJ editorial board, along with any scientists they wish to bring, to discuss the science at the University — an invitation they assuredly have not accepted even though it’s a short subway ride away.

In response to President Obama’s revolutionary new efforts to cap CO2 emissions, WSJ editorial member Holman Jenkins Jr. tells us to “…Put away the global warming panic…” and writes an impressive number of fictions in two sentences:

“… Mankind’s contribution to rising CO2 levels raises serious questions, but the tens of billions poured into climate science have, by now, added up only to a negative finding. We don’t really have the slightest idea how an increase in the atmosphere’s component of CO2 is impacting our climate, though the most plausible indication is that the impact is too small to untangle from natural variability…”

What does “… contribution to rising CO2 levels …” mean — implying as it does that natural sources are raising CO2 levels? Does not Mr. Jenkins know that mankind’s activities are wholly responsible for the increasing CO2 emissions? This can be seen in many ways such as looking at the ice core records of stable CO2 concentrations since the end of the last ice age or from carbon isotope data for fossil fuel carbon for example.

What does it mean to write all “ … climate science has added up to a negative finding …”? Even if you have never seen an IPCC report, do you really believe that all the news you have been hearing for decades about global warming and IPCC has been due to a single “negative finding”? What is this so-called bottom line negative finding among the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of findings?

What does it mean to write “ …We don’t really have the slightest idea how an increase in [atmospheric] CO2 is impacting our climate …” Really? Scientists studying atmospheric physics don’t have the slightest idea how CO2 affects heat radiation and the Earth’s energy balance, not to mention the gazillion other facts we know about CO2 and climate? 

Then, remarkably, in the same sentence that claims science knows nothing about CO2, somehow he (or science?) knows enough about it to conclude that “ …the impact is too small to untangle from natural variability …” Which one is it? Science knows nothing or science has actually demonstrated something very technically precise: “…the impact [of CO2] is too small to untangle from natural variability …”

By the way, the last statement is a flat out contradiction to current research which concluded with 90%  confidence that current warming is due to human activities. But what the heck. This is the world of the Wall Street Journal of Atmospheric Sciences.

Norfolk Southern says it is working hard to reduce the rail operator’s carbon footprint. CEO Wick Moorman says the company is in the midst of a 2-year, $10 million project to change the lighting in it’s facilities…he says he’s even changed the lightbulbs in his office. Click here to listen to how much money Norfolk is saving and what else it’s doing to be more “green.”
Wick from Tony Johansson on Vimeo.

It looks more like an Ice Age than global warming.

There is so much snow in Oslo, where I live, that the city authorities are resorting to dumping truckloads of it in the sea because the usual storage sites on land are full.

That is angering environmentalists who say the snow is far too dirty – scraped up from polluted roads — to be added to the fjord. The story even made it to the front page of the local paper (’Dumpes i sjøen’: ‘Dumped in the sea’).

In many places around the capital there’s about a metre of snow, the most since 2006 when it was last dumped in the sea. Extra snow usually gets trucked to sites on land, where most of the polluted dirt is left after the thaw. Those stores are now full — in some the snow isn’t expected to melt before September.

But are these mountains of snow a sign that global warming isn’t happening?

Unfortunately, more snow might fit projections by the U.N. Climate Panel, which says that northern Europe is likely to get wetter and the south drier as temperatures rise this century.

“By the 2070s, hydropower potential for the whole of Europe is expected to decline by 6 percent, with strong regional variations from a 20 to 50 percent decrease in the Mediterranean region to a 15 to 30 increase in northern and eastern Europe.” it said in a 2007 report (page 60 of this link).

So people in northern Europe may have to buy more snow shovels than parasols to cope with global warming?

How about where you live?

Last week, we paid a visit to startup car company Aptera at its headquarters in Vista, California, just north of San Diego. Aside from talking to company executives, we also got to take a ride in the ultra-efficient, spaceage vehicle. Check out our complete coverage of Aptera here.

To say that the egg-shaped car, which the company will begin shipping to customers later this year, stands out on the road is a major understatement. Take a look for yourself in the video below, and let us know what you think.

Would you buy a car like this? The final price for the two-seater is expected to run between $25,000 and $40,000, and the all-electric version gets a 100 mile range per charge.

By Terry Wade in Lima:

 It’s summer in Peru and the mudslides are back, eroding barren hillsides on the western slopes of the Andes. The huaicos, as they are known in Peru, create rivers of mud and carry giant boulders with them that knock down everything in their path, from houses to bridges.

On Sunday, on the eastern fringe of Lima, Peru’s capital, three mudslides tore through the towns of Chosica and Chaclacayo. A 15-year-old teenager, Johani Lucero Vasquez, dared to wade across a slide and was swept away. Her body was found 9 kilometers downstream. Debris washed onto the country’s main highway that crosses the Andes, shutting it for six hours in both directions.

For most of the year, almost no precipitation falls on the barren landscape of steep, wrinkled canyons in the rain shadow of the Andes. But in the summer rains arrive and, because there is too little vegetation to absorb them, the hills come tumbling down.

People have been living in areas prone to huaicos, from the Quechua wayq’u, for thousands of years and towns in the Andes have escape routes showing where to run for higher ground in case they hit.

But there are signs the dangers are getting worse. The U.N. Climate Panel said in a 2007 report about the impacts of global warming that “many cities of Latin America, which are already vulnerable to landslides and mudflows, are very likely to suffer the exacerbation of extreme events”.

And shantytowns grow on the eastern edges of Lima, where the cheapest land sits in narrow canyons smack dab in the path of the huaicos.

If you thought that “cold-blooded” meant creatures like snakes, toads and crocodiles (or people you dislike), think again.

This Antarctic ice fish, formally called Chionodraco hamatus ”can withstand temperatures that freeze the blood of all other types of fish”, according to a report by the Census of Marine Life.

A special anti-freeze helps keep it alive in chill waters around the frozen continent. (This finger-length juvenile was photographed by Russ Hopcroft of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.)

The fish is among thousands of creatures found to be teeming in Antarctic and Arctic waters by the Census — an international project to map life in the oceans.

Scientists have counted 7,500 species of animals in the Antarctic and 5,500 in the Arctic — and at least 235 of them live at both ends of the earth. For a story, click here.

Scientists are trying to work out how the cold-loving creatures manage to live in both places, separated by a barrier of thousands of miles of warm waters. Polar bears, after all, only live in the Arctic while penguins are confined to the south.

Among theories are that chilly deep ocean currents carry larvae north from Antarctica. Scientists say that’s more likely than that got carried by a long-distance migrating bird or whale, or even by a ship (… few ships make such trips and only in recent years).

What do you think?

Should the world celebrate the 200th anniversary today of the birth of English naturalist Charles Darwin by working to limit the number of tourists visiting the Galapagos Islands or Antarctica to protect their spectacular wildlife?

Would that help elephant seals like this one above on the Antarctic Peninsula slumber more peacefully? And would it cause less disruption for marine iguanas, below right, on Santa Cruz island in the Galapagos?

The Galapagos in the Pacific Ocean gave Darwin insights into evolution on his famed voyage around the world aboard The Beagle. Many species — from mockingbirds to tortoises – differ from those on the South American mainland. For a story, click here.

And Antarctica, which wasn’t even discovered when Darwin was born on Feb. 12, 1809, is the world’s last big wilderness.

About 39,000 tourists are likely to visit Antarctica this current summer season, down from a record 46,000 a year ago and interrupting a fast-rising trend in the past couple of decades, according to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators. For a story, click here. Recession has hit bookings of trips that cost thousands of dollars.

IAATO says the numbers are tiny — enough people to fill a football stadium across a continent bigger than the United States.

But a group of environmentalists, the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, wants the numbers capped — it hasn’t proposed an exact figure, but says it shouldn’t be too far above current levels.

Among nightmare scenarios for Antarctica, first sighted in 1820, penguins might get bird flu. Or new seeds unwittingly brought by tourists might thrive and displace lichens and mosses found nowhere else on earth. A big cruise liner might run aground, spilling oil and coating beaches used by seals.

And the unique wildlife is of the Galapagos is similarly under threat from people with both tourism and immigration from the South American mainland. See a BBC report here, for instance, saying that tourism rose to more than 173,000 last year.

The United Nations in 2007 added the Galapagos to its list of world heritage sites in danger.

So should there be caps on visitors? If so, how many?

If not, how do we protect these unique places?