Could It Bee A Fungus ?  

A relatively short post tonight - I haven't had time to do much of a scan of my normal feeds.

The LA Times has a new suspect in the bee colony murder case - this time the bony finger of blame is being pointed hesitantly at a fungus that is afflicting bee hives. The guilty party or just another red herring ? Who knows...

A fungus that caused widespread loss of bee colonies in Europe and Asia may be playing a crucial role in the mysterious phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder that is wiping out bees across the United States, UC San Francisco researchers said Wednesday.

Researchers have been struggling for months to explain the disorder, and the new findings provide the first solid evidence pointing to a potential cause. But the results are "highly preliminary" and are from only a few hives from Le Grand in Merced County, UCSF biochemist Joe DeRisi said. "We don't want to give anybody the impression that this thing has been solved."

Other researchers said Wednesday that they too had found the fungus, a single-celled parasite called Nosema ceranae, in affected hives from around the country — as well as in some hives where bees had survived. Those researchers have also found two other fungi and half a dozen viruses in the dead bees.

N. ceranae is "one of many pathogens" in the bees, said entomologist Diana Cox-Foster of Pennsylvania State University. "By itself, it is probably not the culprit … but it may be one of the key players." Cox-Foster was one of the organizers of a meeting in Washington, D.C., on Monday and Tuesday where about 60 bee researchers gathered to discuss Colony Collapse Disorder. "We still haven't ruled out other factors, such as pesticides or inadequate food resources following a drought," she said. "There are lots of stresses that these bees are experiencing," and it may be a combination of factors that is responsible.

Historically, bee losses are not unusual. Weather, pesticide exposures and infestations by pests, such as the Varroa mite, have wiped out significant numbers of colonies in the past, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. But the current loss appears unprecedented. Beekeepers in 28 states, Canada and Britain have reported large losses. About a quarter of the estimated 2.4 million commercial colonies across the United States have been lost since fall, said Jerry Hayes of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services in Gainesville. "These are remarkable and dramatic losses," said Hayes, who is also president of the Apiary Inspectors of America.

Besides producing honey, commercial beehives are used to pollinate a third of the country's agricultural crops, including apples, peaches, pears, nectarines, cherries, strawberries and pumpkins. Ninety percent of California's almond crop is dependent on bees, and a loss of commercial hives could be devastating. ...

If N. ceranae does play a role in Colony Collapse Disorder, there may be some hope for beekeepers. A closely related parasite called Nosema apis, which also affects bees, can be controlled by the antibiotic fumagillin, and there is some evidence that it will work on N. ceranae as well.

Alan Kohler has an interview with AGL Energy's Paul Anthony ("AGL plans to get bigger and greener") at Inside Business which shows many encouraging signs from the head of one of our biggest energy companies - no nuclear, dubious of cleaning coal and enthusiastic about renewables playing a large role.

ALAN KOHLER: With electricity, I suppose the challenge is similar to the challenge for everybody and that is to find base-load power that isn't coal, and what do you think the answer is in relation to that, not just for AGL but for society generally?

PAUL ANTHONY: Look, I don't think overnight we're going to displace coal. Coal is a very predominant feature in the electricity market in Australia but over time, we have to phase that out as a primary fuel unless we can find ways to abate the carbon emission, and it's my particular view that we're a little way off there. We're probably 10, 15 years away before we can find a reasonable low-cost means, technical means, of either abating or capturing CO2, so in the meantime, something has to fill that gap. With the energy demand growing at 2 to 3 per cent per annum in Australia compound, that means new capacity has to be brought online. I don't believe that coal will get there so gas has to be the substitute fuel of choice for generation.

ALAN KOHLER: For base load?

PAUL ANTHONY: Yeah, base load. If we stretch our minds forward to a carbon-constrained environment where producers of generation from brown or black coal are penalised for their carbon output, that'll reduce the output of coal-fired power stations. They may invest in flue gas clean up, like flue gas desulphurisation or other ways of scrubbing the emissions from power stations. That's expensive, it's capital intensive, it reduces the output of power stations as well, so in an increasing profile of demand, when you're reducing the output of coal, something has to fill the gap and I believe new gas fire generation will be the ideal solution to fill that.

ALAN KOHLER: What about nuclear?

PAUL ANTHONY: I think in nuclear, it's a difficult debate for Australia to use nuclear. One, nuclear power stations are uninsurable, so the insurer of last resort in all countries has to be the government, so the government have to take a deep intake of breath and say, ‘We're going to underpin the uninsurable risk of the nuclear sector’. Two, nuclear power stations generally work on a much larger scale of economy so you’re talking of thousands of megawatts of generation. It's a long-term investment and nobody really has effectively sorted out the long-term tail-end costs of holding redundant nuclear stations for the next 300 years.

ALAN KOHLER: So, do you think you'll live long enough to see a nuclear power station in Australia?

PAUL ANTHONY: No, I don't, personally. That doesn't mean to say I project a short life by the way.

ALAN KOHLER: I should hope so. And the other technology that's had a bit of attention lately is hot rocks in South Australia. What do you think of that?

PAUL ANTHONY: I think there's a whole basket of renewable technologies that are starting to emerge.

ALAN KOHLER: But that in particular looks, you know, quite interesting.

PAUL ANTHONY: It does look interesting. I mean the one thing with hot rocks, it has to - you know, electricity is like good wine, it doesn't travel very well, so generation has to be generated reasonably close to demand sources, so you need hot rocks which are close to major load centres. But in a portfolio of renewable generation which includes solar, it includes wind, it includes biomass, which I think is going to be an important sector, and it includes geothermal energy, potentially wave, even if it's submersible tidal wave form, you look at that as a whole and there's plenty of technologies that can meet a good proportion of the energy projections - maybe 15 to 20 percent of Australia’s demand.

The Seattle Times has an article on a large Chinese oil discovery in Bohai Bay. WHile this might sound like a large number its worth noting this is less than one year's worth of Chinese oil consumption.

For 15 years, China's oil companies have scoured its territory for new oil sources, drilling in Central Asian deserts and the floor of the Pacific, hoping to reduce rising dependence on imports. After years of disappointment, PetroChina Ltd. announced it has found an offshore field that could become China's biggest new domestic-petroleum source in a decade, with reserves of 2.2 billion barrels, the official Xinhua News Agency said Wednesday. ...

Economists say Chinese oil demand, driven by blistering economic growth that reached 10.7 percent in 2006, has strained world supplies and pushed up prices. China became a net oil importer in the late 1990s and now is the world's No. 2 consumer after the United States, and consumption last year rose another 9.3 percent to 2.4 billion barrels. Imports in 2006 surged by 16.9 percent and accounted for 47 percent of consumption, while domestic production edged up just 1.7 percent. China has some 16 billion barrels of proven reserves, according to British oil company BP PLC.

China's leaders see reliance on imported energy, a large share of it from the politically volatile Middle East, as a strategic weakness. ... Chinese drillers have found several big gas fields, but no major oil sources since the mid-1990s, when blocks were found in Bohai Bay and in the Tarim Basin of the northwest's searing Taklamakan Desert.

A few interesting snippets from PR Watch - Spin Doctor Claims Greenwashing Is Dying, Just What Iraq Needs: More U.S. Propaganda, Jim Sims Flacks for "Clean Coal", Nuclear Industry Pins Hopes on Subsidies and A True History of Fake News.

At the "Utah Energy Summit," Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer called for more federal money to develop "clean coal" as an alternative to petroleum and a solution to global warming. As David Roberts notes, the summit organizer is Jim Sims of Policy Communications, "a long-time lobbyist for extractive industries" and the head of front groups such as Partnership for the West and the Save Our Species Alliance, "an astroturf organization created for the purpose of convincing the public to accept the gutting of the Endangered Species Act. ... Remember: despite the new moniker, clean coal is coal, a fossil fuel backed by a fossil fuel industry. It's the same Big Coal with deep ties in state and federal government and a long history of corruption. It's an industry that's spent practically a century entrenching itself and fighting off competitors. It founded the 20-year campaign of obfuscation and denial on global warming. Now it's selling 'alternative energy.'"

Paul Hawken's WiserEarth site is now up and running.

WiserEarth is a community directory and networking forum for organizations addressing the central issues of our day: climate change, poverty, the environment, peace, water, hunger, social justice, conservation, human rights, and more. Content is created by people like you from around the world. ...

Energy


Alternative Fuels (271 organizations) (57 users) (8 resources) (1 job) (8 events)
Electric Power (15 organizations) (14 users) (7 resources) (1 job) (6 events)
Energy Efficiency and Conservation (1101 organizations) (54 users) (16 resources) (2 jobs) (6 events)
Energy Flow in Ecosystems (14 organizations) (10 users) (1 resource) (1 job)
Energy Policy (460 organizations) (19 users) (5 resources) (1 job) (9 events)
Energy Security and Sustainability (100 organizations) (31 users) (4 resources) (1 job) (5 events)
Nuclear Power (182 organizations) (7 users) (5 resources) (2 events)
Renewable Energy (1105 organizations) (78 users) (16 resources) (1 job) (17 events)
Sustainable Energy Development (347 organizations) (77 users) (15 resources) (1 job) (14 events)

InsideGreentech has a post on a group called GridNet NOW that aims to make the US power grid smarter.

Today in Washington, D.C., five companies announced a strategic alliance aimed at helping bring small grid operators modernize their power systems. GridNet NOW, as the alliance calls itself, is to focus on the smart grid requirements of municipal and cooperative utilities. The new alliance claims to offer a suite of services helping utilities plan, develop, implement and manage a successful path to electric transmission and distribution grid modernization.

The group believes it's addressing a market largely ignored by the large information technology and business transformation consulting firms. Services are to include:

* Wireless broadband communications infrastructure for transmission and distribution automation
* Advanced metering designed for needs defined by utilities
* Advanced monitoring and control schemes required by a move to a more intelligent grid
* Smart grid strategies and projects enabling improvements in reliability, asset utilization and penetration and integration of renewable resources

“This is not just another alliance doing research, scoping and selling transmission and distribution system hardware,” said Erich Gunther of GridNet NOW. “We are focusing on ensuring that the smaller utilities can also realize the benefits of the next generation smart grid.”

With 30 percent of consumers, and more than 50 percent of the electric services across the nation, cooperative and municipal utilities have different challenges than large investor-owned and public power companies. Rural cooperatives, and state and municipal utilities face the greatest operational and management challenges from aging infrastructure and years of sub-standard capital investment in technology. GridNet NOW said it's focused on these specific challenges, with solutions specifically designed for the municipal and cooperative utilities.

Each company in the GridNet NOW alliance has contributed to leading smart grid projects across the country. And each of the founding firms has participated in leading industry organizations such as GridWise, IntelliGrid and Galvin over the past two years. ...

For those of you in the Bay Area, Dutch photographer Frans Lanting is doing a "Long Now" seminar called "Life's Journey Through Time" tonight (presumably promoting his new book). Frans has won the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest a few times and produces some awesome photos, so go and check him out.

Acclaimed nature photographer Lanting has created the most graphic timeline ever, at its best as a live performance. This is the "long now" in glowing imagery.

Doors open 7:00pm, talk at 7:30pm (duration ~1.5 hours)
Location: UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center