Photo: © Liang Qiang / World Bank

China may still be overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels for power (especially coal) but the country’s rapid economic boom and consequent insatiable hunger for energy is causing it to explore and exploit all avenues, including massive wind and solar projects.

While the US is going natural gas crazy and despite plenty of solar possibilities, Australia is still in the thrall of cheap coal, China is embracing greener energy sources. Bear in mind China is still the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses and has a less-than-stellar record when it comes to toxic pollution.

But the market is driving this still centrally controlled, nominally communist state of over 1.3 billion inhabitants. And international companies don’t have to wait for the often time consuming policy changes that exist in most Western countries.

From the Canberra Times:

China is now the world’s single largest market for clean technology products and services. As a new report by California renewable energy consultancy Dallas Kachan points out, international business co-operation with China is nothing new, and has been growing rapidly for 30 years. But its status as a global clean-tech power is a new phenomenon, and countries like Australia risk being left behind in the race to identify and participate in rapidly emerging renewable energy markets across the world.

According to some China’s solar energy will outcompete coal by the end of the decade. And India is not far behind.

Check out the following video report from the Guardian on solar and wind power development in China’s desert province of Gansu:

See also:

Reuters – Vestas says gets 50 MW turbines order from China

photo by Joaomorgado (Wikimedia Commons)

When I go shopping for groceries in Portugal I have the choice between two major supermarkets plus several bakeries and fruit and veg places. When I hit the big supermarkets I can either buy flimsy biodegradable bags at one or stand in the exclusive eco queue at the other. Since I’m a dedicated eco-fascist I like the eco queue, which doesn’t provide any cheap plastic bags and only sells large reusable ones. As it is the lines are always short and using it makes me feel smug. Maybe people will start to catch on and it will have a longer line than the regular checkout, which will cause them to open more eco-queues. If environmental apartheid doesn’t work, I don’t know what will.

The two-mile walk to both supermarkets is paved with sights: a beautiful aquamarine ocean, incredible mansions in various states of disrepair and later examples of architecture ranging from the concrete futurism of the totalitarian Estado Novo to the far out, down right science fictiony designs of some new landmark projects.

Imagine if the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation became property developers. They would build something exactly like the new, ultra-exclusive Estoril Sol Residence. Many people hate this overbearing collection of black glass cubes because it dominates the skyline and contains flats with a starting price of one million euros. I call it the Death Star and I actually like it. It replaced a really fugly hotel of the same name, which was falling apart and besides a few squatters and an electric car sales lot, looked like it hadn’t been a going concern for years. Admittedly, I kind of liked the old Estoril Sol too. It had a “They’ve finally done it!” Planet of the Apes bleak ugliness that I find fascinating.

As you can tell from the starting price, the new Estoril Sol is beyond exclusive. Rumor has it that the daughter of the president of Angola has bought an entire floor. I think I saw her on the promenade one day with a minder. She was cute as a button and had two designer, gold-plated razor mobile phones. Actually I just googled the Angolan president’s daughter and that wasn’t her, but you get the idea about the kind of moneyed people who live in the Death Star, besides your northern European tycoons with champagne taste and money to burn.

Luckily, it’s got a lovely garden with reflecting pools and a big tiled tunnel to the beach, which are both open to the public. It also leads to a nice forest park. But you just can’t keep the riffraff out. Drunks are occasionally seen stumbling through the echoing passage and some dummy has already painted some graffiti (sorry, “street art”) on its entrance. It’s just a tag with a picture of one of the ghosts from Pacman – Inky or Blinky, I’m assuming. It made me laugh at least.

And Portugal is suffering. Wages are being cut, working hours lengthened and pensions slashed, supposedly to pay off debt on a €78bn international financial bailout. And sure, a Chinese corporation may be buying Portuguese public utilities, but they can never own the waves… can they?

Photo by tinatinatinatinatina (Flickr CC)

This is not an ad for a sleek new hand dryer. Probably no one reading this website is in the market for the newest, most eco-friendly public restroom hand drying technology on the market.

But according to a new report from MIT on the environmental impact of different methods of hand drying, the Dyson Airblade (you know you love it, anyway) comes tops in all categories; global warming potential, human health, ecosystem quality, cumulative energy demand, water consumption and land occupation. *To be clear – the plastic model comes first across the board, with the aluminum trailing a bit in water consumption.

Paper towels and warm hand dryers – like vacuum bags – are from a byegone era. Technology has moved on. People want to dry their hands quickly, comp[l]etely and without damaging the environment.

–Sir James Dyson, inventor of the bagless vaccuum cleaner

Old-fashioned hot air hand dryers – you know, the ones that get vandalized to make the instructions read ‘press butt’ instead of ‘press button’ along with a variety of other razor sharp witticisms – and paper towels, whether virgin or recycled, suck in terms of eco-friendliness.

Anyone who has used an Airblade knows it rules in terms of efficacy and cool, futuristic experience. Now you can feel smug and green about using one. If you want to be greener still, just don’t dry your hands. Let them dry off naturally in the cool breezes of the natural world or the hermetically sealed environment of your office, gym or fine dining establishment.

Read more on the results of the MIT study in the Guardian.

photo by Gerard Stolk vers la Toussaint (Flickr CC)

The London 2012 Olympics is being touted as the “greenest games ever” – though I imagine a more accurate label would be the “greenest Olympics of the last few, relatively speaking”, which is just not as catchy.

The London Olympic project is on the cutting edge of green innovation, however. Carbon emissions have been cut by 100,000 tons, wetlands restored and construction of largest urban park built in Europe for the last 150 years is underway.

One green (or green-ish) project of London 2012 is an entire new neighborhood, called Strand East, being built by Swedish furniture empire IKEA. It will feature water transport and a system of suction-powered tubes to remove rubbish.

From the Independent:

Strand East will include 1,200 houses, nearly half of which will be family homes, as well as shops, cafés and a 350-room hotel – all linked by car-free walkways.

But what of IKEA’s over-all environmental and ethical standards?

On the one hand they are a paragon of consumerism: cheap, disposable, imported, mass-produced furniture that uses an astounding amount of natural resources.

On the other hand they do have a pretty strict environmental and ethical code. IKEA is increasing its use of renewable energy, improving energy efficiency and has rules on where its wood is sourced as well as a policy to prevent child labor.

On the plus side, the company is doing pretty much everything it can to make its products, and stores, as energy-efficient and sustainably produced as possible as part of its programme of ‘neverending improvements’.

–The Ecologist

The problem is of course consumerism and uncontrolled capitalism. It is a model that is inherently unsustainable. So IKEA, for all its efforts (and it is probably the best option – economically, ethically and environmentally – in many cases) is fundamentally not all that green. But neither is the global economic system it operates in.

Read all about IKEA’s environmental credentials in The Ecologist.

Read more about the sustainability of the London 2012 Olympics on BBC News.

photo by Paul Stein ( _PaulS_ on Flickr CC)

(And why it’s just plain right.)

The protesters at Occupy Wall Street have been criticized for being a scruffy bunch of hippies with no clear central message. Indeed, if interviewed they usually preface their answers by explaining how their movement is a broad tent: grass roots, without leaders and based on a variety of premises and complaints. In short, there is no one key demand that functions in the way that anti-Vietnam War sentiments galvanized the protest movements of the 1960s.

So what.

The US is entrenched in two wars, neither, of which have a definitive end in sight. There is increasing class inequality on a global scale due to a succession of financial and political policies designed to increase and consolidate wealth in the hands of the richest. That small wealthiest percent in turn possess an inordinate amount of political power, which they may use to progressively enhance their riches and thereby gain more power in a sort of preposterously greedy positive feedback loop.

Republicans to the rescue: Ironically, the best sound bite to encapsulate the goals of Occupy Wall Street has come from one of its detractors, GOP Congressman Peter King of New York, who stated during a radio talk show:

I remember what happened in the 1960s when the Left wing took to the streets, and somehow the media glorified them and it ended up shaping policy. We can’t allow that to happen.

To resurrect an erstwhile and oft-mocked political slogan of America’s neo-liberal (or ‘Stalinist’ if you know absolutely nothing about politics or history) president: Yes we can!

That result of the Left ‘shaping policy’ would be great compared to the undemocratic, irresponsible, ecologically destructive, soul-sapping trend of deregulation and income gap widening that’s been going on since 1980.

Here’s a nice quote from a piece in Earth Times:

The belief that higher corporate profits will somehow create jobs has proven itself a pipe dream. Wall Street profits rose 720% between 2007 and 2009 (yes, you’re reading that correctly) while unemployment rose by 102%. Are we to believe that we just need to wait a few more years, and these jobs will magically appear? Furthermore, are we to accept that our environmental crisis will halt until corporations decide to take on that challenge at some unspecified point in the future?

That’s right: the same ideology that gives corporations more rights than human beings also encourages those corporations to destroy the environment with unprecedented vigor, and then tells them that they aren’t doing any such thing, i.e., climate change is a scam orchestrated by a socialist world government plot. [Strange, somehow the governments of the world almost unanimously swing to the Right, yet we’re meant to believe the global Left controls all scientific bodies on Earth.]

Lest I dither further, here’s what some prominent Greens are saying about Occupy Wall Street, which it turns out isn’t just a noble picnic of so-called hippies and anarchists, but is rather proving to be the big tent it always said it was.

Matt Petersen of Global Green, USA writes in the Huffington Post:

photo by Paul Stein ( _PaulS_ on Flickr CC)

What is heartening about OWS is we are beginning to see the environmental movement join in, but it still seems to remain truly grass-roots. Our friends Bill McKibben and May Boeve at 350.org, who lead a global grassroots movement to fight climate change, have been at the forefront. McKibben conducted a climate teach-in this weekend for the protesters.

An article from Treehugger from way back near the start of OWS, puts some substantial Green pro-protest arguments forward:

[…] pervasive joblessness is a byproduct of the systematic dismantling of the American manufacturing base under the ideological pretext of free market absolutism and neoliberal globalization, an economic system disconnected from place and person. Re-localizing, re-regionalizing our economies, focusing on domestic needs first and export needs second, whether in so-called developing or developed nations (both inadequate words) is key factor in making our communities more environmentally resilient, more climate resilient, and in supporting local economies and jobs.

And then there’s the oily elephant in the room, covered in oil and blowing crude from its gas pump-shaped trunk, shaping policies, fueling wars, polluting the land and sea, and changing the climate. (It’s oil).

In closing, leave it to Naomi Klein, that sassy pin-up of the anti-globalization Left, to really bring it home:

The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And we are trashing the natural world. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. The atmosphere can’t absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological.

Read Naomi Klein’s entire piece in the Guardian.

Thank you, Naomi. And thank you, hippies, anarchists, Adbusters and Republican Congressmen for your fantastic work. Tomorrow I will post something about the protests in Europe.

Image by Ari Levinson (source: Wikimedia Commons)

It’s been in the news for weeks, polls flying around our ears, so much even that I started wondering if Democrats would vote Republican after such a heavy media brainwash fest. But today I will know. We will all know if President Obama has lost the House of Representatives to the Republicans.

In a way I kind of like mid-term elections. To us Europeans it’s a very strange concept, switching gears in the middle of a 4-year term. But as strange as is sounds; it looks pretty democratic to me, at least at first glance. But when I look again, and especially when I take a much longer and closer look, I have to admit I’m pretty certain democracy can’t prevail in a society that is so heavily sedated by the media.

I hear that the Republican leaders are already getting ready to investigate President Obama’s environmental agenda, from the smallest green issue, over climate science and even the Democratic responsibility in reaction to the BP oil spill from earlier this year. No wonder of course, when you consider that only a mere 16% of Republicans believe global warming is a result of human activity, while 53% of Democrats are certain of it.

One of the main Republican targets will most certainly be the EPA, considering Republicans are usually against government regulations and too much governance in general, and are already accusing the EPA of wasting taxpayers money and pushing the unemployment figures up in the agency’s effort to regulate carbon emissions.

So you see, a lot is at stake today. If the Republicans outnumber the Democrats after today’s mid-term elections, the green movement might take a big blow to the head and together with it a green ice age might start, a long period of climate change denial, democratic regression, questioning of basic science and costly investigation.

Additional resources:
Article from The Guardian

Lead image by Jonathunder (source: Wikimedia Commons)

image credit: Bente Stachowske/Greenpeace

Germany’s cabinet has voted to extend nuclear power use in the country by an average of 12 years.

According to legislation passed in 2002 by the Social Democratic-Green Party coalition, all nuclear power stations in Germany were to be decommissioned by 2022.

Not any more.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel of the Christian Democratic Party, which rules as part of a center right coalition, sees the extension as a way to generate tax income, while meeting greenhouse gas emission reduction goals and transitioning to renewable energy sources.

But nuclear energy is not popular in Germany and the decision to extend the use of nuclear power plants is highly controversial. It has been met by protests and added to the Green Party’s power base.

Some polls put the Greens on a par in popularity with the Social Democrats at around 20% — that’s unprecedented in German history. Older, experienced activists from the 1970s and ’80s have joined younger protesters and grassroots networks. There’s a tough and united opposition to nuclear power and Chancellor Merkel may pay a high political price.

–Dieter Rucht, professor of sociology, Social Science Research Centre, Berlin (via Time Magazine)

On Tuesday several hundred protesters demonstrated outside of Chancellor Merkel’s office, including activists from Greenpeace. According to the Telegraph, Greenpeace also projected anti nuclear power slogans onto 12 atomic energy reactors in the country.

For more on the story, see the following piece in Time Magazine:

Germany: Greens See Red Over Nuclear Power Extension

photo by Donna Belk (Undertaken With Love on Flickr CC)

Since the human species has more or less successfully extricated itself from the food chain, death just isn’t eco-friendly anymore. The old ‘food for worms’ adage is no longer apt, since worms apparently don’t really fancy formaldehyde. Humans don’t like it in their drinking water either, oddly enough.

It seems that these days dying green can be even harder than living green. The modern funeral involves deforestation (in the form of expensive hardwood coffins), chemical pollution of groundwater and both toxic and greenhouse gas emissions from cremation.

According to an article in The Economist, an Australian study found that cremation produces about 160 kilos (350 lbs) of CO2. A 2008 paper published in the Journal of Environmental Health states that cremations account for as much as one fifth of the UK’s mercury emissions.

Standard burial procedures aren’t any better. In the long term, when factors such as plot care and land use are factored in, a burial produces even more CO2 than a cremation.

In contrast to many technology-fuelled environmental solutions of the day, the way to make funerals greener may lie with a return to the olden days. The logic is simple: let the body biodegrade in a casing that is similarly biodegradable.

Yet in societies accustomed to viewing embalmed, made-up bodies in expensive mahogany caskets, such solutions may be less than welcome. Thankfully there are already plenty of people who want to go out the natural way and their numbers are growing. In the UK there will soon be as many natural-burial grounds as there are crematoria. Other alterative methods include so-called ‘water cremation’, in which the body is dissolved in liquid and can later be used as fertilizer. A Swedish firm has even developed a method of freeze-drying your loved one’s remains and then shaking them into a powder. It’s called the ‘Swedish Shake’. Just kidding.

All this business of green funerals sounds a bit complicated, but in a world with increasingly less space and more people, perhaps radical solutions to the funeral dilemma will soon not seem so extreme.

When I go, feel free to use my corpse as biofuel or toss it in your compost heap. Just be sure to remove my fillings first.

photo by GRÜNE Baden-Württemberg

Stuttgart, Germany is a prosperous European industrial city, home to Daimler-Benz and Porsche, among others. It is also the center of a political conflict over the partial demolition of the city’s old railway system in favor of an underground rails and the construction of ‘carbon neutral’ neighborhoods.

Sounds like something the Green Party would support, right?

It isn’t, though Germany’s other principle political parties do back the project, as well as business groups. A large majority of Stuttgart’s population, however, does not.

The project, dubbed Stuttgart 21, is not as environmentally friendly as it might sound. According to campaigners opposing Stuttgart 21, it will require the destruction of old – and beloved – forestland and disturb the city’s underground water springs. They also believe the new expensive tunnel system won’t even discourage road traffic.

Last week an anti Stuttgart 21 protest drew thousands of participants.

From a report by Euronews:

It was largely peaceful but late in the evening 27 demonstrators were arrested, accused of blocking a road.

According to an article entitled ‘Green shooters’ in the The Economist, this kind of disconnect between Germany’s people and its two large traditional political parties – the CDU and Social Democrats – could provide inroads for the Greens in the coming elections. The Green Party has already seen its popularity rise significantly over the past year and their support of popular positions like the opposition of the railway project in Stuttgart may increasingly cast them as Germany’s ‘people’s party’.

photo by José Cartaxo (zt.viagens on Flickr CC)

Back in August I wrote about ‘Portugal’s green energy revolution’ as detailed by a New York Times article on the sunny, windy and relatively unspoiled coastal European nation.

Portugal’s evolving energy policies continue to garner international attention from investors, industry, politicians and the media. Industrial market research firm SBI Energy has much to say about Portugal’s ‘sweeping clean energy initiatives’, including this:

The country is quickly emerging as a “green” trendsetter due to its determination to reduce its dependence on imported fossil fuels by channeling its wind, solar, and hydropower resources and by improving smart grid capabilities and exploring the use of electric vehicles—even though such clean energy transitions have come at substantial financial costs.

As a sometimes resident of both London and Lisbon – more couchsurfer than cosmopolitan expat – one can see the differences in both infrastructure and public consciousness. But regardless of differences in size and climate between the countries, political action on renewable energy measures are going in different directions in the UK and Portugal, as Syma Tariq’s opinion piece in the Observer points out:

But, even if the weather is bad most of the time, the UK also has its own favourable conditions. It has 10 times more coastline and benefits from plenty of wind throughout the year. If Portugal can increase its reliance on green electricity from 17% to 45% in just five years, our own leaders have little excuse for our measly 3%.

Back on Old Blighty, energy bills have gone up 14% when compared to Portugal’s rise of 16%, but with far less of an investment in – and transition to – renewable sources.

Some people hate feed-in-tariffs. George Monbiot severely criticized the UK’s FIT scheme last winter as rewarding the moneyed and giving little concrete results. The policy, launched in April by Labour, is being reviewed by Britain’s current Tory/Lib Dem government.

Perhaps the devil is in the details. Besides feed-in-tariffs, Portugal’s government took the bull by the horns, bought up the country’s privately owned power lines and has successfully modernized its energy infrastructure. Rather than relying on imported fossil fuels – it has none of its own – Portugal is becoming self sufficient in power by using what it does have: plenty of wind, hydro and solar.

photo by Tasa_M (Flickr CC)

The top cities in England for green transport include Nottingham, London, Brighton, Hove and Manchester.

Nottingham came out top in a study of UK cities that gauged the East Midlands town to be the least dependent on cars and have the best public transport.

The CBT, a green lobby group, judged the cities on accessibility and planning; quality and availability of public transport; and how pedestrian and cyclist friendly they are.

From a report by the Press Association:

The findings showed that in many cities people have little choice but to drive cars. Campaign for Better Transport (CBT) used a Car Dependency Scorecard to look at how much people rely on cars, using data from 17 sources to rank 19 cities in England.

Over the past decade, Nottingham council has invested heavily in public transport, including a tramline. The results have been that more people now use public transport than cars.

From an article in the Guardian:

Nottingham topped the survey ahead of London despite a multi-billion pound taxpayer investment in the capital’s tube and bus services that is the envy of sister cities across the UK. Brighton came third, reflecting its much-admired bus network, its umbilical rail links with London and a size perfectly pitched for commuting cyclists and walkers. Manchester won fourth place despite tarnishing its progressive transport credentials two years ago by rejecting a congestion charge scheme.

The heavily car-dependent towns of Luton, Peterborough and Milton Keynes rounded out the bottom of the list. Milton Keynes, a ‘new town’ located 45 miles or 72 km northwest of London and established in 1967, was planned as a green or ‘garden city’ in the sense that it contains many parks, trees and wide open spaces, and is less dense than most towns. But the bus system is poor and the road traffic isn’t busy, so most everyone drives.

The rankings juxtapose modern city planning based on car travel against more dense, traditional cityscapes that have been adapted for cycling and collective transportation.

Additional resources:

This is Nottingham – New research reveals Nottingham to be the least car dependent city in the UK

The municipality is going to give each household two different garbage cans: one for rubbish, one for recyclables. Each will have a micro-chip inside.

This is all part of a new automated trash collection system. Micro-chips will be placed in both your recycling bin and your waste bin. Each chip generates a report that tells the city how efficient their waste collection services are. But it will also tell them if you’re using your recycling bin.

Click here to read more about it on the City of Cleveland’s official website.

photo by mrehan (Flickr CC)

There has been a lot of controversy about a much-publicized anti-Islam protest by a certain nutty preacher in the US, which was scheduled to take place today, on the anniversary of 9/11.

But has anyone stopped to think about the CO2 that would be released if Terry Jones were to burn the Koran?

What? It’s no dumber than everything else surrounding the planned burning of the Muslim holy book. And since everyone else has already said their piece, isn’t it time for a Green perspective?

Sorry, it’s no laughing matter. Someone has actually already died in counter protests leading up to the aborted provocation.

It did get me wondering, however – and bear with me this is a tenuous connection – what some influential Muslims are saying and doing regarding environmental issues – specifically in the name of Islam.

Is there an ‘ecological’ Islam?

Most religions to some extent preach anti materialism, are against waste and wanton destruction of ‘God’s green Earth’, etc., but I’m curious about the here and now. As environmentalism has made – at least superficial – inroads into modern culture, how is the ancient tradition of Islam responding to this current shift in consciousness?

Here is a small sampling of what can be gleaned on the subject:

In the Philippines, Muslim and Christian clergy have held meetings on climate change, which included Muslim scientists, intellectuals and environmentalists.

From CathNews Asia:

The Muslim Association for Climate Change Action (MACCA) was also launched during the conference. MACCA, according to organizers, was an offshoot of the Muslim Seven-Year Action Plan on Climate Change crafted in Istanbul, Turkey in June 2009.

Some of the places considered most vulnerable to climate change are located in South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.

According to some Muslims, the holy month of Ramadan is a time to emphasize traditional moderation, respect and conservation of resources. The connection to environmentalism manifests both consciously and unconsciously in different parts of the Muslim world:

Our lives are becoming full of excesses and indulgences. We use fasting in Ramadan to cap our eating, our drinking and our impulses, so why do we not use it to protect our planet?

–Zaher Sahloul, chairperson of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago

Read more on this topic in the NewsOK article ‘Muslims go “green” for Ramadan’

An article on Islam and environmentalism from the Jakarta Post focused on leading British Muslim environmentalist Fazlun Khalid, founding director of the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences (IFEES). Khalid makes strong connections between faith and environmental stewardship. He sees environmental problems as ‘rooted in economics and politics’:

Khalid said the environmental crisis we faced was rooted in our “competing nation state” model locked into a capitalistic economic paradigm, which encourages a consumer culture and in turn sets no limits on growth.

Pretty good stuff.

Finally, check out the article ‘Islam and Ecology’ from the interfaith magazine CrossCurrents, which contains an interview with Muslim philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Nasr holds that Abrahamic religions are inherently more ecological than secularism, Darwinism and Westernized Christianity and contends that traditional Islam stresses cooperation and harmony with nature as opposed to the competitive, mechanistic and materialistic model of western science.

This argument is less substantial to me – it is made by a philosopher, of course – but makes legitimate points, nonetheless.

Additional resources:

Manila Bulletin – ARMM Areas Vulnerable to Sea Level Rise — PCID

Philippine Daily Inquirer – Muslim clerics urged to include environment in sermons

photo by London Permaculture (Flickr CC)

From the sublime to the ridiculous, but mostly somewhere in between, France24 reports on ‘extreme greens’, i.e. those who go that extra mile for the environment.

Sometimes its silly, like throwing seed bombs so that illegal vegetation grows in Europe’s concrete-covered cities, at other times it’s couples making a serious lifetime commitment to not have children – but it’s all for the sake of the planet.

Check out the following video report from France24:

Extreme Green

photo by Ian Sanderson (iansand on Flickr Creative Commons)

A new study explores the relationship between tropical storms and the color of the ocean.

Areas of ocean with more chlorophyll-rich phytoplankton have a green tint. Chlorophyll prevents sunlight from penetrating deep into the ocean meaning surface temperatures remain higher. Warmer surface temperatures mean more tropical storms, such as cyclones or hurricanes.

From an AFP report:

Cold water in turn causes changes in air circulation patterns, forcing strong winds aloft, “which tend to prevent thunderstorms from developing the necessary superstructure that allows them to grow into hurricanes,” the researchers said.

Massive spiraling ocean currents called gyres are areas with less phytoplankton and therefore little marine life. According to biogeochemist Manfredi Manizza, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, climate change will probably make the oceans’ gyres even less productive.

The study, led by oceanographer Anand Gnanadesikan of the U.S. Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, models how hurricanes might respond to a change in ocean color. When the computer model ‘drained’ the North Pacific Gyre of green color and heat, 2/3 less storms left the tropics than usual on their path from equatorial Southeast Asia towards Japan and China.

Read more in the following article in National Geographic:

Ocean Color Can Deflect Hurricanes, Study Suggests

photo by Somerset Bob (Flickr Creative Commons)

During a trip last month from the Portuguese capital of Lisbon to its second largest city Porto, in the north of the country, I noticed a lot of wind turbines dotting the landscape. I’m not the only one either.

The New York Times published a piece yesterday on Portugal’s green makeover. Wind, hydro, solar and wave power are fueling the small Iberian republic’s move from fossil fuels to renewable energy – and they’ve got the resources to do it.

Few countries in Europe have these key ingredients: lots of wind and sun, suitable rivers and a coastline complete with powerful waves and ocean currents. These clean sources of energy will provide 45% of Portugal’s electricity this year. By 2025, other European nations – Denmark, Ireland and the UK – are expected to source at least 40% of their power from renewables.

That’s double of what is expected of the US.

Land-based wind power — this year deemed “potentially competitive” with fossil fuels by the International Energy Agency in Paris — has expanded sevenfold in that time. And Portugal expects in 2011 to become the first country to inaugurate a national network of charging stations for electric cars.

–New York Times

Since Portugal is low in fossil fuel deposits, but high in renewable resources, this transition hasn’t required a raise in taxes or public debt. What it has or currently imports in the form of gas, coal and oil are replaced by domestic clean power. It even exports a small amount of electricity to Spain.

Read more in the following two articles in New York Times by Elisabeth Rosenthal:

Portugal Gives Itself a Clean-Energy Makeover

Beyond Fossil Fuels: Costs and Benefits

photo by Tom Chance (telex4 on Flickr Creative Commons)

Britain’s energy secretary Chris Huhne has lifted the ban on local authorities selling back surplus electricity into the national power grid.

The plan is to encourage local councils to generate their own renewable energy by installing solar panels and wind turbines on council owned property, including both homes and public buildings. Any extra electricity can be sold back to the grid and provide much needed income to local authorities.

From an article in the Guardian:

At present only 0.01% of electricity in England is generated by local authority-owned renewables. In Germany the equivalent figure is 100 times higher.

The hope is that the scheme would also help the UK meet EU commitments to produce 15% of its energy from renewable sources.

Renewable sources that local British governments might benefit from are not limited to just wind and solar.

From a piece in the Telegraph:

Councils that invest in anaerobic digesters or incinerators, that generate energy from waste, will not only reduce the amount of waste going to landfill but make money. Local authorities in coastal areas could even install wave machines or tidal power in the future.

In related news, the UK government also plans to have all new homes powered by a renewable energy plant starting in 2016.

Developers whose properties fail to meet new zero carbon standards will pay into a fund to help build green power plants to meet the energy needs of the new homes.

The British housing minister is quoted in an article in the Independent:

We are committed to being the greenest government ever, and an essential part of that is to ensure that all homes in the future will be built without emitting any carbon. This announcement is an important and very significant step in that direction because for the first time we have described in detail how developers might be expected to achieve zero carbon, by connecting developments to local energy schemes.

The conservation charity WWF has praised the planned levy against developers.

photo by DECCgovuk (Flickr Creative Commons)

You might think you can do a better job than the UK government at cutting CO2, becoming more energy efficient and deciding how Britain should move towards a low carbon economy.

Well the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change let’s you try it out – in a computer simulation, of course.

The Independent’s environment editor loves it, as he explains in a recent article:

Doing it yourself gives an unusual and vivid insight into the difficulties faced by real policymakers in grappling with our energy future. The software tool that makes it possible is called the 2050 Pathways Calculator and it is the brainchild of the blue-skies thinker at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), the chief scientist, Professor David Mackay.

Granted, tweaking things like ‘commercial light and appliance demand’ isn’t as exciting to me as it is to Michael McCarthy, author of the Independent article, but it does shed some light on the many complex factors involved in energy policy and cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

For example, there’s no point in increasing green power sources like wind and solar beyond a certain point, unless you get rid of all fossil fuel-based power. And even that only goes so far in cutting emissions – max 42%, according to McCarthy. To go further you need to have plentiful low-carbon travel, and consider factors such as land use, waste, freight, etc.

Of course, no one can be a dictator when it comes to energy policy – unless you’re the premier of China – but the DECC’s 2050 calculator tool lets you pretend and experiment with ways that Britain might meet its proposed 80% carbon cuts by the year 2050.

Another bit of environmental having your say is provided by the Guardian in the form of an interactive map of UK green government schemes, many of which are under threat from the Tory-Lib Dem coalition’s severe spending cuts.

You can move your mouse over 9 green schemes and see what Guardian readers had to say regarding the government’s environmental initiatives that they would like to be saved. It’s actually a bit sad, because based on what readers have written, all the departments clearly have merit.

Check it out below:

The green government schemes you want protected

David Cameron and Chris Huhne, photo by DECCgovuk (Flickr Creative Commons)

Former UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband thinks the new coalition government’s energy policies are a ‘huge disappointment’ to industry and to the country.

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? He’s in the shadow cabinet and that’s sort of their job. Yet it seems Miliband is indeed more pro-active in terms of helping green industry than his replacement, current Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne.

From BBC News:

On a range of issues such as wind power, renewable heat and the green investment bank the government was going “backwards not forwards” compared to the Labour administration, Mr Miliband claimed.

Besides all the big cuts they are making, the coalition government is throwing its green eggs into three baskets: cutting energy use and investing in electricity and carbon markets.

The Telegraph’s environment editor Geoffrey Lean is not convinced. He details the almost across the board cuts the Tory-Lib Dem coalition has made, though fairly acknowledges their commitment to combat climate change (how can they do both?) as well as their plans to help households become more energy efficient. The government has also confirmed that it is renewing the commitment to subsidize biogas.

Across Whitehall the Business Secretary,Vince Cable, has axed a key body dealing with electronic waste. And Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, has withdrawn funding from the Sustainable Development Commission, scrapped the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (thus showing what she thinks of ministers’ two sources of independent, non-political scrutiny and advice) and abolished the Commission for Rural Communities, which tackled deprivation in the countryside. The savings were minuscule.

Read Geoffrey Lean’s entire piece in the Telegraph:

David Cameron runs the greenest government ever? Tell it to the birds

photo by elycefeliz (Flickr Creative Commons)

By now many of you have probably heard of ‘greenwashing’, the practice by which businesses or organizations present an environmentally friendly image without backing it up with concrete green credentials. BP’s green flower logo and ‘Beyond Petroleum’ slogan are blatant examples of greenwashing. Perhaps even more bewildering and maddening is the fact that the production of certain types of so-called biofuels can result in more greenhouse gas emissions and environmental destruction than that of fossil fuels.

But what about actual green washing – as in cleaning our homes, clothes and bodies in environmentally friendly ways?

According to a piece in the Independent, what’s green or environmentally friendly, in terms of household cleaning products, isn’t always that simple.

Mick Bremans, chief executive of Ecover – the king of green cleaning – suggests that it’s actually their intent and effort to make products with the least amount of negative impact on the environment as possible that gives them credibility:

In fact, Bremans is making the point that no product, be it a lavatory cleaner, a hybrid car or a locally sourced punnet of strawberries, is technically environmentally friendly. Everything we make takes its toll on the planet in production and leaves its mark when disposed of. Instead, Ecover describes its products as “ecological”, to communicate that they are kinder to the environment than comparable products.

–Independent

Those are pretty fair statements, though I wonder how much we actually need strong cleaners in the home anyway.

From another article in the Independent:

For completely toxin-free and natural cleaning products, websites such as World Watch advocate making solutions out of common household items such as vinegar.

That’s right – regular, natural, inexpensive vinegar (white, not balsamic). It absorbs odors, is an effective glass cleaner, fights mold and mildew, and is a great fabric-softener. Baking soda is another good household cleaner.

No one is claiming (I hope) that you can disinfect surgical equipment with lemon juice, but rather that the need for potentially harmful, industrial strength cleaners and deodorizers in the home – such as bleach and chemical air fresheners – has been highly overstated by the companies selling these products.

For more tips on greener and safer products for everyday cleaning see this article from EmaxHealth:

Green Home Cleaners Can Replace Cancer Causing Chemicals

Additional resources:

Worldwatch Institute – Cleaning Products: What’s Behind the Shine?

Tennessee journalist – Five easy ways to help the Gulf