Hot Off The Press  

In global warming news (largely harvested from Energy Bulletin) Greenhouse gas emissions are up in Spain, Monaco, Portugal, Greece, Australia, New Zealand, the US ...

Australian greenhouse gas emissions have increased 23 per cent over the last 13 years, prompting environmental campaigners to call for urgent action.

A report prepared by the Bonn-based United Nations Climate Change secretariat and released this week ahead of the international climate conference in Montreal later this month warned that the western world was losing its grip on the climate change problem.

The report, covering the period between 1990 and 2003, found Australia's greenhouse gas emissions had risen 23.3 per cent on 1990 levels. The Australian Government's target is to limit emissions increases to 108 per cent of 1990 levels over the period 2008-2012.

A spokeswoman for Environment Minister Ian Campbell said the Australian emissions figure was misleading because it failed to take into account changes in land use. "The fact remains that Australia through the Government's $1.8 billion package of measures to address climate change is one of a handful of countries in the world on track to meet its Kyoto targets through domestic action alone," she said.

Australia has refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol. Greens senator Christine Milne said the figures showed there had been years of lost opportunity under the Howard Government. "Australia's greenhouse gas emissions are out of control. The Government which has belatedly acknowledged that climate change is a serious challenge for Australia has failed the community and should be condemned for its inaction," she said in a statement.

Senator Milne called on the Government to declare what position it would take at the Montreal talks and to declare whether it would finally ratify the Kyoto protocol as a sign of good faith.

Colin Brown, organiser of the Catholic Earthcare conference in Canberra this weekend, also said the figures revealed a decade of lost opportunity.

The Independent has a report on the melting of Greenland's glaciers - which notes "Global disaster will follow if the ice cap on Greenland melts - Now scientists say it is vanishing far faster than even they expected".

Greenland's glaciers have begun to race towards the ocean, leading scientists to predict that the vast island's ice cap is approaching irreversible meltdown, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

Research to be published in a few days' time shows how glaciers that have been stable for centuries have started to shrink dramatically as temperatures in the Arctic have soared with global warming. On top of this, record amounts of the ice cap's surface turned to water this summer.

The two developments - the most alarming manifestations of climate change to date - suggest that the ice cap is melting far more rapidly than scientists had thought, with immense consequences for civilisation and the planet. Its complete disappearance would raise the levels of the world's seas by 20 feet, spelling inundation for London and other coastal cities around the globe, along with much of low-lying countries such as Bangladesh.

More immediately, the vast amount of fresh water discharged into the ocean as the ice melts threatens to shut down the Gulf Stream, which protects Britain and the rest of northern Europe from a freezing climate like that of Labrador.

Glaciers are also rapidly disappearing in the Himalayas, with the Observer reporting that "Millions face glacier catastrophe - Global warming hits Himalayas".

Nawa Jigtar was working in the village of Ghat, in Nepal, when the sound of crashing sent him rushing out of his home. He emerged to see his herd of cattle being swept away by a wall of water.

Jigtar and his fellow villagers were able to scramble to safety. They were lucky: 'If it had come at night, none of us would have survived.'

Ghat was destroyed when a lake, high in the Himalayas, burst its banks. Swollen with glacier meltwaters, its walls of rock and ice had suddenly disintegrated. Several million cubic metres of water crashed down the mountain.

When Ghat was destroyed, in 1985, such incidents were rare - but not any more. Last week, scientists revealed that there has been a tenfold jump in such catastrophes in the past two decades, the result of global warming. Himalayan glacier lakes are filling up with more and more melted ice and 24 of them are now poised to burst their banks in Bhutan, with a similar number at risk in Nepal.

But that is just the beginning, a report in Nature said last week. Future disasters around the Himalayas will include 'floods, droughts, land erosion, biodiversity loss and changes in rainfall and the monsoon'.

The roof of the world is changing, as can be seen by Nepal's Khumbu glacier, where Hillary and Tenzing began their 1953 Everest expedition. It has retreated three miles since their ascent. Almost 95 per cent of Himalayan glaciers are also shrinking - and that kind of ice loss has profound implications, not just for Nepal and Bhutan, but for surrounding nations, including China, India and Pakistan.

In another sign of the business community starting to take the global warming problem seriously, the Rainforest Action Network has commended Goldman Sachs for its comprehensive environmental policy.

Scrutiny Hooligans has an update on the Amazon drought, and note that "Ecological implications of the Amazonian drought affect us all".

Sue Branford of THE GUARDIAN reports " Not far from the mouth of the Amazon, dead animals, including manatees -- mammals up to 3m long with flat, paddle-shaped fins -- and distinctive pink dolphins, line the banks of some tributaries. Normally, you would have to take a boat to cross these rivers but today, because of the Amazon basin's worst drought in memory, they are little more than mudflats with a trickle of water in the middle.

So far, the drought has had its most serious impact in the upper reaches of the river and its hundreds of tributaries in Brazil, Colombia and Peru. There, along many stretches, the water has fallen to the lowest levels ever recorded and has become impassable even for canoes. Some 600 Brazilian schools in Amazonas state have had to be closed and many hamlets, whose only contact with the outside world is by river, are running short of food and medicines. Several districts have been declared disaster areas and the army is having to bring emergency supplies to 900 towns and villages..."

I wonder if America will wake up to the reality of global warming and the multiple problems it is causing around the world. Its like the old adage about the pot of frogs cooking on the stove, who don't realize what is happening until the water is boiling. What gives with all the denial about it?

Wired has a look at the business opportunities presented by the need to mitigate global warming, called "Investors Bet on Global Warming" (also commented on at WorldChanging).

The Earth is warming up, and many people see this as a very serious threat to the planet and its inhabitants. Among the short list of side effects: melting glaciers, rising seas, scorching summer heat waves and a spike in severe storms. For investors -- particularly those fond of waterfront property and carbon-emitting fossil-fuel guzzlers -- climate change is also a factor worthy of weighty consideration in assembling a portfolio.

It's not just about averting risk. A good grasp on global warming could also offer benefits to savvy stock pickers. Businesses well-poised to meet mandates for reducing carbon emissions, developers of alternate energy sources and even forward-looking insurers could conceivably profit from climate-change concern, say analysts and institutional investors who follow climate change.

"(Global warming) started out as an environmental issue, but it crossed over to become a quite fundamental financial and economic issue," said Nick Robins, head of SRI (Socially Responsible Investment) Funds for Henderson Global Investors in London.

MonkeyGrinder has already demolished this parody of peak oil debunking ("Why $5 Gas Is Good for America") from the "bottomless well of stupidity" school in Wired today (along with associated collection of energy myths, "As Prices Rise, Technologies Emerge" - would someone teach this guy about EROEI and physical limits please), so I won't bother going into detail.

Instead, I will give the author some credit for writing an interesting (albeit hyped up) piece on solar power concentrators a few months ago, featuring Bill Gross of Idealab (not to be confused with Bill Gross of Pimco).

On a rainy Southern California morning, the venture that has Gross struggling to stay put in his Herman Miller chair is the one that planted the Sunflower in the Arizona desert. It's as much a personal cause as a business; for the first time in Idealab's tumultuous nine-year history, the Incubator himself has stepped in as CEO. He has taken a plywood-door desk right out in the bullpen with a cheerful crew of heat-transfer engineers, Jet Propulsion Lab veterans, CAD-CAM programmers, even a vending machine specialist hired for his expertise at building things reliable and maintenance-free. An 8-foot mirror-petalled prototype hangs from the high ceiling. A banner suspended overhead blares the company name: Energy innovations.

Gross talks the way the sun spews photons. During a 7 am breakfast in an empty local eatery that seems to be open early mainly for him, Radio Free Bill is broadcasting on all channels. The infomercial is pure energy - the kilowatt kind - and the pitch includes something for everyone.

For conspicuous consumers: "America's secret," he says, "is that each of us uses an average of 17 virtual horses' worth of electric power every day." He means that approvingly; no turn-the-lights-off Luddite, he.

For the no-blood-for-oil crowd: "The rest of the world needs cheap, reliable power too, if we're going to end the wars over energy and bring on a new age of global peace and toleration."

For investors: "Reinventing energy is a multitrillion-dollar opportunity. It's the next big disruption. It dwarfs any business opportunity in history."

For Energy Innovations' crew of 35 solar geeks: "We've been looking for a big problem to get our hands around, and we think we've got an answer."

...

There's just one problem: Covering large expanses of real estate with painstakingly processed silicon is expensive. Without what the industry coyly calls "incentives" - government subsidies, rebates, tax credits, and the like - photovoltaic panels wouldn't have much of a market. Even in sunny places like California, the pre-rebate cost of PV-generated electricity is roughly 21 cents per kilowatt-hour. Coal (from 4.74 cents per kilowatt-hour), natural gas (5.15 cents), nukes (5.92 cents), even windmills (5.15 cents) offer cheaper ways to keep the lights on.

But PV's price differential isn't quite as bad as it seems, thanks to one huge advantage: Solar panels are small enough to fit on rooftops, which is darn close to the electricity user. By bringing energy production and consumption together - something coal, nukes, and gas can't do - solar has the potential to cut out the middleman, along with his markup. That is, instead of competing with wholesale power from distant power plants, rooftop solar competes with retail kilowatt-hours delivered by the local electric company, which often are marked up as much as 1,000 percent over their original generating cost. What's more, retail prices typically peak on hot, sunny summer days, when air conditioners suck every last electron from the grid - precisely when solar panels are most productive. Add a final boost from government handouts, and solar can get over the hump, especially with homeowners and other customers whose motives might not be purely economic.

Hence the mainstream solar industry's strategy: Be patient. Keep priming the pump with government money. Eventually - say, 20 years from now - mass production and technological improvements will make solar power fully competitive with coal, gas, and nuclear. And then the market will explode.

WorldChanging has a look at Australian wave power company Energetech (who I've mentioned quite a few times) and their desalination project powered by the wave power generator in "Clean Power, Drinkable Water".

Australian company Energetech is one of the growing number of companies building systems to turn the motion of the ocean into usable energy -- something we've taken to calling "hydrokinetic power." Waves, tides even undersea currents can, in principle, be tapped to generate electricity; the technology is in transition from real-world experiments to early adoption, and the preliminary signs are that the systems can indeed produce usable amounts of power at competitive prices.

Energetech has taken their system a step beyond power generation, however. Working with a company called H2AU, Energetech added a small desalination system to a test deployment of a wave energy system at Port Kembla in Australia. Happily, the combination works splendidly.

The Energy Blog takes a look at a different type of fusion research (hydrogen boron instead the convential hydrogen-hydrogen mode) in "Focus Fusion".

More news on batteries from MIT Technology Review - "The Lithium Economy". Tom Whipple's latest piece in the Falls Church News Press also talks about the future being batteries.

Finally, WorldChanging has a post on cellulosic ethanol called "Jungle Rot: the Future of Ethanol ?".

Researchers at the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy lab (EERE) and National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) have been working for years on making ethanol out of cellulose--straw, corn stalks, and other agricultural waste leftover from growing food crops. This would mean ethanol would finally make sense as a fuel, because its Energy Return On Energy Invested would be positive (since the cellulose would be waste from food, it would be "free" in terms of energy), it could be produced in large quantities (since it would not compete with food for land), and it would be cheap.

The main obstacle to making ethanol from cellulose is that cellulose doesn't break down easily or quickly. But some years ago, people found that jungle rot (the fungus Trichoderma reesei) did it quite well. Since then, NREL, EERE, and many universities and companies have been trying to make it even more effective.

Iogen Corporation, in Canada, was the first company to have a cellulose ethanol manufacturing plant--in 2004 they opened a "demonstration-scale facility", and are working to scale to mass-manufacturing. Last month they told the New York Times that they plan to produce cellulosic ethanol at the equivalent of US$1.08 a gallon; but right now they're still working out some kinks. They're using straw as the feedstock, which costs about 50¢ per gallon of ethanol you can get from it, and according to EERE, the T. Reesi enzyme still costs about 50¢ per gallon of ethanol. However, EERE thinks they can bring down the cost of T. reesi tenfold, and Iogen has been smart-breeding more effective strains of it. Costs will also become less of an issue as oil prices rise.

This isn't going to sweep the world tomorrow, but eventually the threshold will be crossed where cellulose ethanol becomes cheaper and more eco-friendly than gas.