Current Savers Blog

We’re told that President Obama is getting ready to propose a tripling of government loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors to the tune of more than $54 billion.

The move is likely to win over Republicans who want to see nuclear power playing a larger role in a climate bill for the country. Another group of Senators earlier this week said they would support a comprehensive climate bill based on Obama’s State of the Union speech that opened the possibilities of nuclear expansion.

Certainly, the Nuclear Energy Institute would agree the technology is the United States’ largest source of clean-air, carbon-free electricity, producing no greenhouse gases or air pollutants.

The problem, of course, there’s no such thing as a small nuclear accident, and what are we supposed to do with all that radioactive waste, argue opponents.

More than two decades following the accident at Chernobyl, discoveries are still being made of horrific carcinogenic aftereffects.

And many Americans still remember the Three Mile Island accident of 1979, in Goldsboro, Pennsylvania, with memories awakened just last year with a non-threatening leak of radiation.

Staunch opponents of nuclear technology, including Greenpeace, say it is an expensive diversion from the task of developing and deploying renewable energy.  They point to geothermal as one safe and viable alternative required for a low carbon future.

Friends of the Earth president Erich Pica said it’s disheartening. “President Obama’s support for all these dirty energy sources was a big win for corporate polluters and their Washington lobbyists, but it was a kick in the gut to environmentalists across the country.”

What do you think? Is this the way to go?

File photo shows a view of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant from Goldsboro, Pennsylvania, March 22, 1999. REUTERS/

This commentary by Stephan Faris originally appeared in GlobalPost. The views expressed are his own.

Most people wouldn’t consider an earthquake to be an environmental issue. But while the tremors that shattered Haiti early this month have nothing to do with the island’s degradation, the extent of the suffering they unleashed is a direct result of the country’s ecological woes.

The reason can be seen from the sky. The devastated nation shares its island with the Dominican Republic, but misfortune always seems to strike on its side of a border that is demarcated by an abrupt shift from lush green to bare brown. While the Dominican Republic has largely managed to preserve its trees, Haiti has lost 98 percent of its forest cover.

In 2004, Hurricane Jeanne struck the Dominican Republic, and killed 18 people. In Haiti, where the storm didn’t even make landfall, more than 3,000 lives were lost under floodwater and mudslides. Deforestation had left the slopes too weak to be able to retain the downpour. But while some of the extra body count can be attributed to barren hillsides giving way, the true cause goes deeper. The country’s environmental troubles have become entangled in its economic and political problems, making all of them harder to fix.

It’s no coincidence that Haiti is both the poorest country in the western hemisphere and the most environmentally devastated. Decades of poverty, population growth and near anarchy have stripped the countryside of its forests and split farms into small, infertile plots. “What you see in Port-au-Prince — the concentration of people in the slums, which creates violence, which creates disease — it’s because the people cannot produce more in the countryside,” Max Antoine, executive director of Haiti’s Presidential Commission on Border Development, told me when I visited the country in 2007.

If deforestation has made the country poor, the resulting destitution exasperates the environmental degradation. Forests disappear. The slopes lose their soil. Farm land slips away. Entire villages disappear under mudslides. Roads and bridges are wiped away. The slums continue to swell. The country sinks deeper into poverty. Pressed to survive, another farmer chops down another tree to sell in the city as charcoal. “It’s not a vicious circle,” said Philippe Mathieu, the Haiti director for the Canadian charity Oxfam-Quebec. “It is a spiral. Each time you make a turn, you have less space.”

This month’s tragedy showed how tight that space has become. On Sunday, the official death toll climbed to 150,000, and the government suspects the figure could double. Many lost lives could have been avoided if buildings in the capital had been built to withstand earthquakes. Many others could have been saved if systems for emergency response and medical care had been in place. As a point of comparison: In 1989, an earthquake of exactly the same strength struck San Francisco at almost exactly the same time of day. The death toll was 63.

But unlike San Francisco, Port-au-Prince doesn’t have building codes. And if it did, its residents couldn’t afford to comply; most concrete blocks in the capital are handmade, with cheap, light materials. Even the buildings built by the United Nations couldn’t withstand the quake. As for coordinating an emergency response, Haiti wasn’t able to maintain much of a police force — never mind staffing a system of first responders or supporting a strong medical infrastructure. So when the earthquake struck, the residents of the capital were left pretty much on their own.

The way that Haiti’s challenges have interlocked has made them particularly difficult to overcome. The country has tree-planting programs, but they haven’t been able to keep up with the rate of deforestation; nor are they likely to as long as the poor depend on the charcoal trade for their income. Even before the earthquake, Haiti’s government was unable even to keep order on the streets of the capital. It’s no surprise that it couldn’t solve two seemingly intractable problems at once.

As the rescue effort in Port-au-Prince wraps up, the focus is turning to rebuilding the country. There’s talk of reconstructing its agriculture, its educational system, its housing, its infrastructure. The effort is expected to cost billions of dollars. It’s also expected to take decades. That’s enough time to grow some trees.

Stephan Faris is GlobalPost’s environmental columnist. This article is based, in part, on his book, “Forecast: The Surprising — and Immediate — Consequences of Climate Change,” which was published in paperback in September.

More from GlobalPost:

Haiti’s earthquake creates long-lasting environmental issues

Opinion: Haiti’s cycle of disaster

Haiti: Help with money, not stuff

Haiti’s roller-coaster public image

Haiti: A long survival story

(People stand next to a tent at a makeshift camp in Port-au-Prince January 26, 2010.  REUTERS/Carlos Barria)

U.S. billionaire Ted Turner is taking a shine to solar power — again.

Back in 2007, Turner sold solar developer Turner Renewable Energy to solar panel maker First Solar for $34.4 million — which has since ramped up its push into developing its own solar power projects.

Now Turner is teaming up with Atlanta-based utility Southern Company to develop renewable energy in the United States. To start, they will focus on large-scale solar farms in the U.S. Southwest, where solar development is already heating up in states like California and Arizona.

Some of the projects could end up on Turner’s land. He is the largest individual land owner in North America with more than two million acres.  

The move could expand the reach of Southern Company, which serves customers in Georgia, Mississippi and Florida and has more than 42 gigawatts of generating capacity.

(Photo: Philanthropist Ted Turner speaks during a panel discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York in September 2009. Photo credit: Chip East / Reuters)

Supporters of a climate bill to cap and price greenhouse gases are losing hope that it will make it into law. But for many, the fight is far from over.

Topping the list of supporters of some form of the bill is President Obama. In his first State of the Union address, he focused on the bill’s potential to fuel a domestic clean tech industry lush with jobs, and said he still supported the bipartisan effort on the climate and energy bill, which would incorporate energy policies favored by Republicans.

(See also: Obama sticks to climate before divided Congress and Obama supports climate bill, but how clean will it be? )

On Thursday, echoes of commitment came from a group of senators including John Kerry, who  said they were looking at possible alternatives to the cap-and-trade plan for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. “People need to relax and look at all the ways you might price carbon. We’re not pinned down to one approach,” Kerry told Reuters.

Senator Lindsey Graham supplied Climate Progress with their quote of the week: “The idea of not pricing carbon, in my view, means you’re not serious about energy independence. The odd thing is you’ll never have energy independence until you clean up the air, and you’ll never clean up the air until you price carbon.”

And the New York Times last week published their editorial on the case for a climate bill, weighing in favor of the cap and trade system. “The only sure way to unlock the investments required to transform the way the country produces and delivers energy is to put a price on carbon.”

Of course, there are vocal opponents .

Business executives and policy officials at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said a U.S. cap and trade scheme must give way to a clean energy law. Tom Donahue, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said: “We are in search of a solid domestic bill, whether its cap and trade or cap and carbon tax or however these things are put together. We just don’t want a bill like the one that came out of the House.”

Just last week, Senator Byron Dorgan, told reporters in a telephone conference call he doubted the Senate would pass climate change legislation this year after going through the contentious health care debate.

What do you think? Does the bill in its current format stand a chance?

Photo shows a couple walking on the snow in Central Park in New York, February 22, 2008. REUTERS/Keith Bedford

Failure to agree a successor to the Kyoto protocol would lead to countries pursuing their own objectives and expose world economies to protectionism, CEO of business software company SAP Léo Apotheker said while in Davos to attend the World Economic Forum.

“Copenhagen was supposed to be the big successor of Kyoto but, as we all know, it was not a big success,” Apotheker said. “I felt already at Copenhagen that this was midnight. Now it is probably already a minute past midnight and we cannot afford yet another failure.”

“The danger of not coming to an agreement is that many countries will go on a unilateral path to achieve their own objectives at which point in time we might fall into protectionism,” Apotheker added. This situation, combined with the effects of climate change, would be a “double whammy disaster.”

Apotheker went on to say that regulation within a global framework was needed before the Kyoto agreement runs out. Watch the video clip at the top of the page for more.

Apotheker also said that SAP had reduced its carbon footprint by 15 percent by adopting responsible business practices and embracing the need to adapt. “This, by the way, saved us 80 million euros so it’s good for business and it’s easy to do,” he said.

In the video clip below Apotheker calls for businesses to move their agenda forward and do what world leaders were not able to do in Copenhagen — “take their responsibilities seriously.”

In the next video clip Apotheker talks about the carbon targets he has set for SAP.

In this final clip, Apotheker discusses the need to agree a price on carbon and why a cap and trade system is an effective way to control emissions.

It may have contributed less than any other continent to CO2 emissions, but Africa is on the front line when it comes to the impact of climate change.

Just ask Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete.

“It is a threat for us,” he told a panel at the World Economic Forum.  “On Kilimanjaro the snow is fast disappearing, sea levels are rising — we have one island that has already been submerged — and we’ve towns around the coast where we have to incur huge costs of adaptation to erect walls.”

In theory, Africa is also in a strong position, given its virgin forests that represent one of the world’s great carbon sinks. But setting up workable offset-trading schemes is easier said than done.  “I can assure you, it is so difficult to access these facilities,” Kikwete said.

Reuters photo: A truck passes Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania’s Hie district

(Reuters) – Several countries have introduced subsidies or incentives to encourage clean energy production, such as feed-in tariffs or green certificates. Listed below are countries which have established renewable energy targets from 2013 to 2020.

Source: Reuters, Renewable Energy Policy network (www.ren21.net)
(1) See individual EU member state targets here
http://ec.europa.eu/energy/renewables/ta rgets_en.htm)
(2) The Japan target may be subject to change as the Japanese government
plans to submit Climate Change Law to parliament in coming months
(3) In pending climate change legislation, the United States has proposed a
target of 15 pct by 2020. Twenty-nine out of 50 U.S. states have set targets for
minimum amounts of electricity generation from renewable sources, while another
five states have voluntary goals.
(Compiled by Nina Chestney; Editing by Sara Ledwith)

In January 1912, Sir Douglas Mawson finally made his way back to Cape Denison, missing his ship, the Aurora, by about three hours.

Some of his colleagues had waited at the hut hoping he would arrive back safely. When he appeared, they sent a radio message to the ship asking them to turn around, as they could see it lying offshore in Commonwealth Bay.

However, the winds were too strong to risk coming back, so they were stranded at Cape Denison for another 12 months of hardship.

I don’t remember what the book “Home of the Blizzard” says about it, but I came close the other day to understanding how they must have felt, as a few days ago I feared that our team, the Mawson’s Huts Foundation Expedition would face the same fate.

We received a radio call to say our ship L’Astrolabe would collect us within hours. In record time we pulled down our tents, packed our bags, emptied the toilets, disposed of food, tidied our base, the Sorensen Hut, and brought our baggage to an open space to prepare for a helicopter landing to airlift us out to the ship.

Just as we were finishing, we received radio contact from the ship to say bad weather had rolled in at Dumont D’Urville making it unsafe for the helicopter to make the 200 kilometre journey up the coast.

We could see the ship lying in the bay just waiting to collect us, so close yet so far without the support of a helicopter. No one said anything. We just unpacked some of the equipment and quietly settled back in.

Over the course of the next four days, bad weather rolled in over Commonwealth Bay. We experienced wind speeds of 130 kilometres per hour (65 knots), heavy snow falls and even rain (they say it never rains in Antarctica).

Seeing L’Astrolabe bobbing up and down on the ocean waiting on us was a reminder of how remote and totally isolated we were here in this tiny little spot in East Antarctica.

Captain Stan and the crew of L’Astrolabe were very kind, keeping us regularly informed of the weather conditions and checking if we had enough food supplies. We were all very grateful. We had one more false start and then finally in the evening of the fourth day they made a decision to send an inflatable boat into Boat Harbour to bring us home.

This is the first time a boat has been sent in for a Mawson’s Huts Foundation Expedition party and where weather conditions have made it too dangerous for a helicopter to fly.

Boat Harbour is about a kilometre from our base. We had to haul all our luggage over rocks, at times knee deep in snow, before hitting ice and finally slush.

My equipment consists of a Satellite phone and laptop in one pelican case, an entire set of television equipment (camera, mikes, tapes, batteries, headphones etc) in a second case; a stills camera (i.e. heavy beast), charger, back up hard disks and laptop batteries, as well as a second laptop, recorder, lots of written material plus other equipment, as well as my polar gear and smaller items.

Other members of the team have much more.  All of us made several trips over the hill to ensure every item was brought along.

The boat crew were excellent — helping us lift our heavy equipment into the inflatable dinghy, doing several runs back to the ship with luggage and two team members each trip.

I couldn’t help notice how low it was in the frigid water, but never felt in any danger as we had life jackets and were in the hands of very experienced seamen.

We were grateful the water wasn’t too rough, though it seemed visibility was pretty low. When we ran alongside the ship we were literally dragged up and out of the boat. Imagine an inflatable boat up against an ice breaker, and the Antarctic waves rolling around us.

Some of the crew were there to strap us to a rope and drag us into the boat. We were all exhausted,
relieved to have been lifted off the ice and very grateful to the crew of L’Astrolabe. Thankfully we didn’t get left behind for another 12 months like Mawson and his men.

And so my life on the ice, living in a tent and running a makeshift Reuters East Antarctic Bureau, came to a close much faster than I anticipated, leaving no room for sentimentality. We are bound for the French Scientific Base of Dumont D’Urville, so stay tuned for the last blog.

(More posts by Pauline Askin here)

Apple apparently has applied for a patent that would allow its megapopular iPods to run on solar power.

The patent drawings suggest the entire surface of the iPod would be covered in solar paneling, save the display screen and click wheel, Geeksmack.net and GreenBeat report.

And before you point out how annoying it would be to have to pull out your iPod for some sunbathing, it doesn’t need direct rays — the technology enables it to function even when covered by your hand. (The jury is still out on if it works when it’s buried in the inside pocket of your windbreaker or backpack, but whatever.)

Nothing worse than when your iPod runs out of juice right in the middle of your favorite song or exercise routine so this could be a nice backup power source to keep it (and you?) running.

What do you think? Would you buy it?

(Image  shows patent application diagram of entire surface of the iPod, except for the screen and click wheel, covered in solar panelling, from Geeksmack.net)

By Professor Danny Harvey

- Danny Harvey is a geography professor and energy policy expert at the University of Toronto. He is author of A Handbook on Low-Energy Buildings and District Energy Systems: Fundamentals, Techniques and Examples, and  the forthcoming Energy and the New Reality, Volume 2: C-free Energy, now available in preprint form here.

The world is facing the prospect of massive climatic change during the coming decades, and we’re already seeing the beginnings of this all around us and much faster than predicted – dramatic melting of sea ice, thawing of permafrost, increased loss of ice from Greenland, and drier conditions in many parts of the world.

Climate scientists are nearly unanimous in saying that dramatic and strong action is needed to replace fossil fuels with renewable sources of energy as rapidly as possible.

Small, gradual changes are not good enough. We need large, transformational change – and it will occur sooner or later, and throughout the world.

Thursday it was announced that C$7 billion will be invested to build 2000 MW of new wind turbines and 500 MW of solar PV panels by a consortium headed by Samsung C&T Corp. The total new capacity is about 8 percent of the existing power capacity in the Canadian province of Ontario.

This investment is of the magnitude that is needed if we need are going to seriously address the climatic change issue and also create the critical mass to build a thriving green energy industry with strong exports, but we will need many more such investments.

Both wind and especially solar electricity cost more than the market price of coal or other alternatives, but the market prices do not include the full cost.

More importantly, investments now in emerging technologies helps to bring their costs down through learning-by-doing and begin to build the skilled workforce that will be needed as the pace of development accelerates, leading to yet further price declines.

In the long, we will need many dispersed large wind farms and solar power facilities, linked to each other and to hydro-electric resources in order to provide a reliable and controllable electricity system based entirely on renewable energy resources.

This will cost modestly more than we pay at present, but it is a small price to pay in order to avert near-certain climate disaster.

Higher electricity costs can be offset by more efficient use of electricity and by curbing our often-times very wasteful use of electricity – all of which will be good for us both economically and environmentally.

Note: More detailed analysis can be found in Professor Danny Harvey’s forthcoming book, “Energy and the New Reality, Volume 2: C-free energy”, available in preprint form here .

(Photo: A wind turbine turns round at a wind power plant on top of a mountain in Pyeongchang, about 210 km (130 miles) east of Seoul, May 4, 2007.)