UN's de Boer says investors tackling global warming while governments spar

The Associated Press
2/27/08

MONTE CARLO, Monaco:
Private companies will soon be investing more than governments in
cutting the production of greenhouse gases, the U.N.'s top climate
change official said Thursday.

Yvo de Boer said business efforts were good but also not enough —
and that only a binding international agreement on cutting carbon
emissions will make private sector efforts financially viable.

"Business is really beginning to take climate change into account,"
de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention for
Climate Change, told The Associated Press. "There's a momentum building
in the finance community."

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Grass Makes Better Ethanol than Corn Does

Midwestern farms prove switchgrass could be the right crop for producing ethanol to replace gasoline

By David Biello

Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally—and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.

Working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the farmers tracked the seed used to establish the plant, fertilizer used to boost its growth, fuel used to farm it, overall rainfall and the amount of grass ultimately harvested for five years on fields ranging from seven to 23 acres in size (three to nine hectares).

Once established, the fields yielded from 5.2 to 11.1 metric tons of grass bales per hectare, depending on rainfall, says USDA plant scientist Ken Vogel. "It fluctuates with the timing of the precipitation,'' he says. "Switchgrass needs most of its moisture in spring and midsummer. If you get fall rains, it's not going to do that year's crops much good."

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False Pretenses

Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

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Senate Takes Up Indian Health Care Measure Under Veto Threat

The Senate began its 2008 session Tuesday with legislation to reauthorize health care services for American Indians as the White House threatened a veto of the measure.

The White House, in a policy statement, demanded modifications to the bill, which would reauthorize funding for the Indian Health Service, and said President Bush would veto the bill if they were not made.

The veto threat could easily derail what was expected to be a noncontroversial bill. The administration’s main concern was a provision that would expand federal prevailing wage requirements to projects funded under the bill. The White House also objected to what it says are lax documentation requirements in the bill for enrolling patients in Medicaid and other government programs.

The bill would authorize spending for the Indian Health Service, which provides health care for 1.8 million American Indians and Alaska natives, through 2017. According to a Congressional Budget Office estimate, it would authorize discretionary spending of $16 billion over five years and $35 billion over 10 years.

Since a 1992 reauthorization expired in 2001, the health service has continued operating under old guidelines through annual appropriations. Spending in fiscal 2008 totaled $3 billion.

CQ TODAY MIDDAY UPDATE
Jan. 22, 2008

The lowdown on topsoil: It's disappearing

Disappearing dirt rivals global warming as an environmental threat

By TOM PAULSON
P-I REPORTER

The planet is getting skinned.

While many worry about the potential consequences of atmospheric warming, a few experts are trying to call attention to another global crisis quietly taking place under our feet.Call it the thin brown line. Dirt. On average, the planet is covered with little more than 3 feet of topsoil -- the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food and appears to play a critical role in supporting life on Earth.

"We're losing more and more of it every day," said David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington. "The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture."

"It's just crazy," fumed John Aeschliman, a fifth-generation farmer who grows wheat and other grains on the Palouse near the tiny town of Almota, just west of Pullman.

"We're tearing up the soil and watching tons of it wash away every year," Aeschliman said. He's one of a growing number of farmers trying to persuade others to adopt "no-till" methods, which involve not tilling the land between plantings, leaving crop stubble to reduce erosion and planting new seeds between the stubble rows.

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Petraeus Is Undecided About Deeper Troop Cuts

Army Chief Of Staff: "The Surge Has Sucked All Of The Flexibility Out Of The System"

By Gina Chon and Yochi J. Dreazen

Wall Street Journal | January 17, 2008 02:41 PM

WASIT PROVINCE, Iraq -- The top American commander in Iraq said that 30,000 American troops would leave the country by July but that he had yet to make up his mind about whether to recommend any additional reductions.

In an interview, Gen. David Petraeus said he was working to finalize an assessment of security conditions in Iraq and the wisdom of further military withdrawals in advance of a high-profile appearance before Congress in March.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said he hopes to see the U.S. military presence fall below 130,000 by the end of 2008, a position shared by many senior Pentagon commanders who worry the high troop levels in Iraq are causing growing manpower strains on the army.

"The surge has sucked all of the flexibility out of the system," Army Chief of Staff George Casey said in an interview this week. "And we need to find a way of getting back into balance."

But President Bush made clear this week that additional troop withdrawals were far from a sure thing. After a meeting in Kuwait with Gen. Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Mr. Bush said he was open to slowing or stopping the withdrawal of troops to avoid jeopardizing recent security gains in Iraq. "My attitude is, if he didn't want to continue the drawdown, that's fine with me in order to make sure we succeed," Mr. Bush said, referring to Gen. Petraeus.


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'Darkest ever' material created

by Helen Briggs
BBC News science reporter

The "darkest ever" substance known to science has been made in a US laboratory.

The material was created from carbon nanotubes - sheets of carbon just one atom thick rolled up into cylinders.

Researchers say it is the closest thing yet to the ideal black material, which absorbs light perfectly at all angles and over all wavelengths.

The discovery is expected to have applications in the fields of electronics and solar energy.

Theoretical clues

An ideal black object absorbs all the colours of light and reflects none of them. In theory, it should be possible to make something that approaches the "perfect absorber".

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World moves into the ecological red

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - The world moved into 'ecological overdraft' on
Saturday, the point at which human consumption exceeds the ability of
the earth to sustain it in any year and goes into the red, the New
Economics Foundation think-tank said.

Ecological Debt Day this year is three days earlier than in 2006
which itself was three days earlier than in 2005. NEF said the date had
moved steadily backwards every year since humanity began living beyond
its environmental means in the 1980s.

"As the world creeps closer to irreversible global warming and goes
deeper into ecological debt, why on earth, say, would the UK export 20
tonnes of mineral water to Australia and then re-import 21 tonnes,"
said NEF director Andrew Simms.

"And why would that wasteful trade be more the rule than the exception," he added.

Not only was there a massive gulf between rich and poor but there
were deep variations in environmental profligacy between the rich
countries, NEF said.

If everyone in the world had the same consumption rates as in the
United States it would take 5.3 planet earths to support them, NEF
said, noting that the figure was 3.1 for France and Britain, 3.0 for
Spain, 2.5 for Germany and 2.4 for Japan.

But if everyone emulated China, which is building a coal-fired power
station every five days to feed its booming economy, it would take only
0.9 of a planet.

The NEF report comes as diplomatic momentum builds for UN
environment ministers meeting in December on the Indonesian island of
Bali to agree to start talks on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol on
curbing climate change that expires in 2012.

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Rising Seas Likely to Flood U.S. History

SETH BORENSTEIN | September 22, 2007 10:32 PM EST |

Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American
settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that
sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are
predicting.

In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.

Global warming _ through a combination of melting glaciers,
disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding _ is expected to
cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen
regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several
leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.

Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street
and the new money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the
locations of big city airports and major interstate highways.

Storm surges worsened by sea level rise will flood the waterfront
getaways of rich politicians _ the Bushes' Kennebunkport and John
Edwards' place on the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches
in Texas and Florida favored by budget-conscious students on Spring
Break.

That's the troubling outlook projected by coastal maps reviewed by
The Associated Press. The maps, created by scientists at the University
of Arizona, are based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Few of the more than two dozen climate experts interviewed disagree
with the one-meter projection. Some believe it could happen in 50
years, others say 100, and still others say 150.

Sea level rise is "the thing that I'm most concerned about as a
scientist," says Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California.

"We're going to get a meter and there's nothing we can do about it,"
said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author
of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change in Paris. "It's going to happen no matter what _ the question is
when."

Sea level rise "has consequences about where people live and what
they care about," said Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland
scientist who has studied the issue. "We're going to be into this big
national debate about what we protect and at what cost."

This week, beginning with a meeting at the United Nations on Monday,
world leaders will convene to talk about fighting global warming. At
week's end, leaders will gather in Washington with President Bush.

Experts say that protecting America's coastlines would run well into the billions and not all spots could be saved.

And it's not just a rising ocean that is the problem. With it comes
an even greater danger of storm surge, from hurricanes, winter storms
and regular coastal storms, Boesch said. Sea level rise means higher
and more frequent flooding from these extreme events, he said.

All told, one meter of sea level rise in just the lower 48 states
would put about 25,000 square miles under water, according to Jonathan
Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at
the University of Arizona. That's an area the size of West Virginia.

The amount of lost land is even greater when Hawaii and Alaska are included, Overpeck said.

The Environmental Protection Agency's calculation projects a land
loss of about 22,000 square miles. The EPA, which studied only the
Eastern and Gulf coasts, found that Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina,
Texas and South Carolina would lose the most land. But even inland
areas like Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia also have slivers
of at-risk land, according to the EPA.

This past summer's flooding of subways in New York could become far
more regular, even an everyday occurrence, with the projected sea rise,
other scientists said. And New Orleans' Katrina experience and the
daily loss of Louisiana wetlands _ which serve as a barrier that
weakens hurricanes _ are previews of what's to come there.

Florida faces a serious public health risk from rising salt water
tainting drinking water wells, said Joel Scheraga, the EPA's director
of global change research. And the farm-rich San Joaquin Delta in
California faces serious salt water flooding problems, other experts
said.

"Sea level rise is going to have more general impact to the
population and the infrastructure than almost anything else that I can
think of," said S. Jeffress Williams, a U.S. Geological Survey coastal
geologist in Woods Hole, Mass.

Even John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a
scientist often quoted by global warming skeptics, said he figures the
seas will rise at least 16 inches by the end of the century. But he
tells people to prepare for a rise of about three feet just in case.

Williams says it's "not unreasonable at all" to expect that much in
100 years. "We've had a third of a meter in the last century."

The change will be a gradual process, one that is so slow it will be easy to ignore for a while.

"It's like sticking your finger in a pot of water on a burner and
you turn the heat on, Williams said. "You kind of get used to it."

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Could Time Travel Actually Be Possible?

Scientists claim to have broken the ultimate speed record - by making photons travel faster than light.

Exceeding the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, is supposed to be completely impossible.

According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would take
an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object through the light
barrier.

Travelling faster than light also turns back time with bizarre consequences.

An astronaut moving beyond light speed would theoretically arrive at his destination before leaving.

But
two German physicists now claim to have forced light to overcome its
own speed limit using the strange phenomenon known as quantum
tunnelling.

The research, published in the new Scientist
magazine, involved an experiment in which microwave photons, energetic
packets of light, appeared to travel "instantaneously" between two
prisms forming the halves of a cube placed a metre apart.

When the prisms were placed together, photons fired at one edge passed straight through them, as expected.

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Oil report's conclusion: Broad effort needed to satiate energy demand

Original Source
 
WASHINGTON: It started with a simple question by
Samuel Bodman, the energy secretary: "What does the future hold for oil
and natural gas supply?"

The query was made in October 2005 in a one-page letter sent to Lee
Raymond, the former chairman of Exxon Mobil and head of the National
Petroleum Council, a federal advisory group representing the oil
industry.

After nearly two years, Raymond has finally delivered his answer.
The result is a colossal 476-page study entitled "Facing the Hard
Truths About Energy" that involved 350 participants, suggestions from
over 1,000 people, submissions by 19 foreign governments from Australia
to Saudi Arabia, and dozens of subcommittees.

The report, which was made public in Washington on Wednesday, was
billed as one of the most comprehensive analysis of the global energy
challenge.

In answering Bodman's question, it also provides a sobering picture
of the energy problem facing the United States and the world. Most
strikingly, some of the recommendations adopted by the petroleum
council also probably far exceed what Bodman had in mind, or what the
Bush administration is prepared to endorse.

Because the world's population is growing and living standards are
rising worldwide, energy consumption globally is expected to jump by
more than 50 percent over the next 25 years. But finding supplies to
match that growth is going to be increasingly tough, and will require
massive new investments in coming decades.

The council's report warns of "accumulating risks" to energy
production, including rising geopolitical barriers, inflation in costs,
dwindling petroleum engineers and growing constraints on carbon dioxide
emissions. Although it does not say so explicitly, the subtext of the
council's study suggests that high energy prices might be here to stay.

The study's release comes as frustrations grow over high energy
costs and questions are raised over the security of U.S. energy
supplies. Congress is currently considering a new law to bolster the
development of alternative fuels and increase vehicle fuel efficiency.

Unlike the Bush administration's energy task force, which was led by
Vice President Dick Cheney in 2001 and fought efforts to disclose whom
it met with, the petroleum council's study makes no secret of who
participated in its mammoth effort.

The list of contributors to the report is a roster of top industry
leaders and consultants, including senior executives from Exxon and
Chevron. But the council also enlisted the help of private think tanks,
academic institutions, banks, governmental agencies and a handful of
nongovernmental groups, including the Alliance to Save Energy and
Resources for the Future.

"It really reflects the zeitgeist of the times," said Daniel Yergin,
the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and an energy
consultant who participated in the council's study.

Given that the report reflects the views of the oil industry, some
of its conclusions would seem hardly surprising, for example in
dismissing predictions from so-called peak oil theorists that the
world's oil deposits are on the decline. Quite the contrary, the
industry's view is that the world's resources remain abundant.

"Fortunately, the world is not running out of energy resources," the
report says in a 40-page summary. "Coal, oil and natural gas will
remain indispensable to meeting total projected energy demand growth."

But while the council calls for expanding and diversifying
traditional energy supplies - oil and gas, coal and nuclear power - it
is also backs the development of alternative fuels, including biofuels
like ethanol or gas-to-liquids.

"There is no quick fix" to the energy challenge, Raymond said at a
press conference Wednesday. "To assume that we have the option of not
pursuing one of the sources of energy is a fake choice."

There were other surprises. The petroleum council said that the U.S.
government should take steps to reduce oil consumption. In fact, the
report's first recommendation is a call for the U.S. government to
moderate energy demand by increasing vehicle fuel economy standards,
the main sources of growth in oil demand around the world, and improve
energy efficiency at buildings and homes.

"The world will need better energy efficiency and all economic,
environmentally responsible energy sources available to support and
sustain future growth," the petroleum council's report says.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that Raymond, who was well known for
his skepticism of the causes of global warming when he was chairman of
Exxon Mobil, has given his backing to a report addressing how oil
companies should deal with carbon emissions on a global level. The
report said oil companies and governments need to address carbon
emissions and offers some suggestions for how the industry can help
trapping carbon dioxide in underground reservoirs.

"It is a hard truth that policies aimed at curbing carbon emissions
will alter the energy mix, increase energy-related costs and require
reductions in demand growth," the report said. It said the U.S.
government should establish a regulatory framework for managing carbon
emissions, but did not recommend any specific policy.

Still, the bias toward the industry's view is not a surprise given
the history of the council. It was created by President Harry S. Truman
in 1946 to represent the position of the oil and gas industry to the
federal government and recommend policy options, after their successful
wartime collaboration.

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U.S. leg of Live Earth hits key notes

Go to Original

BY GLENN GAMBOA


glenn.gamboa@newsday.com

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. - The American leg of Live Earth: The Concerts
for a Climate in Crisis, like the other concerts on all seven
continents, proved to be as complex as the issue it is trying to solve.

...for organizers, the solution will come with raised awareness.
"Today, more than 2 billion of us have come together in more than 130
countries on all seven continents," said former Vice President Al Gore,
the event's organizer. "Times like these demand action," he added,
after announcing the 7-Point Pledge that he hoped millions would sign
while watching the concert.

...it was
nonmusicians at this concert who made the most passionate pleas about
demanding action for the environment. "Get rid of all these rotten
politicians that we have in Washington, who are nothing more than
corporate toadies," said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist
author, president of Waterkeeper Alliance and Robert F. Kennedy's son,
who grew hoarse from shouting. "This is treason. And we need to start
treating them as traitors."

Primatologist Jane Goodall offered
a greeting in chimpanzee language, before saying, "Up in the North the
ice is melting, what will it take to melt the ice in the human heart?"

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