Archive for the ‘The Perfect Storm’ Category

Dark water: coastal China on the brink

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

– This is a two part story about pollution along the Chinese coastline and rivers. If I lived in China, I’d be angry as hell and profoundly frightened.

– It is a story of what happens when everyone involved goes for the short-term gains with no thought of the long-term consequences of their individual or joint actions. Me, me, me, mine, mine, mine, now, now, now. Get the money and run.

– If the eastern idea of Karma resonates for you, here we have it in spades. Or, if you prefer, how about the western idea of “we reap what we sow“?

– Just today, here in my home town, a letter to the editor was printed by a local knuckle-dragger calling down ridicule on the idea that there’s any Global Warming or any of the other “crackpot ideas being jammed down the throats of people in Seattle and Berkeley”. I wish we could buy some of these folks a vacation along China’s coast, or up in the melting permafrost, or in a dozen other places around the world where the signs of deep problems are becoming unmistakable.

– But as long as the sun comes up tomorrow and their hair’s not on fire, they will steadfastly maintain that every thing’s fine. Yeah, right!

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Ports are being deserted, schools closed and jobs lost as pollution ravages Jiangsu and Shandong. In the first of two reports, the Southern Metropolis Daily describes the death of the local fishing industry.

To part I:

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Marine pollution is creating an ecological tragedy and may even poison our food. In the second of two reports, the Southern Metropolis Daily sees a chain of industrial zones threatening the life of China’s east coast

To part II:

Inner Mongolia: reign of sand

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

A vast Chinese grassland – and a way of life – are turning to dust in an ancient land of breathtaking scenery. W Chad Futrell reports from a battleground in the fight between China’s development and its resource management.

An Asian Sahara of sand is moving closer every year to Beijing, blackening the sky, and producing environmental refugees and social unrest in Inner Mongolia and throughout China.

“Desertification is not a natural function,” said John D Liu, an American-born journalist, researcher and director of the Environmental Education Media Project (EEMP) for China, a 10-year-old environmental organisation based in Beijing. “Scientifically what’s happening is that the grasslands are losing natural infiltration and retention of water, which is altering respiration and evaporation rates. That affects relative humidity, and potentially precipitation in other regions.”

“Socially and politically, what you are talking about are policy decisions made in earlier eras — from the 1950s to the 1990s — and now those mistakes are really biting them,” added Liu, who’s lived and worked in China since 1979. “They have to deal with the decisions made in those years. And in Inner Mongolia those decisions have produced some horrific consequences. Large areas of the region have been massively devegetated.”

More…

Rice jumps as Africa joins race for supplies

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

Rice prices rose more than 10 per cent on Friday to a fresh all-time high as African countries joined south-east Asian importers in the race to head off social unrest by securing supplies from the handful of exporters still selling the grain in the international market.

The rise in prices – 50 per cent in two weeks – threatens upheaval and has resulted in riots and soldiers overseeing supplies in some emerging countries, where the grain is a staple food for about 3bn people.

The increase also risks stoking further inflation in emerging countries, which have been suffering the impact of record oil prices and the rise in price of other agricultural commodities – including wheat, maize and vegetable oil – in the last year.

Kamal Nath, India’s trade minister, said the government would crack down on hoarding of essential commodities to keep a lid on food prices. “We will not hesitate to take the strongest possible measures, including using some of the legal provisions that we have against hoarding,’’ he said on Friday.

Thai medium-quality rice, a global benchmark, traded at about $850 a tonne on Friday, up from $760 a tonne last week, while the price of less representative top-quality aromatic rice broke the $1,000-a-tonne level for the first time, traders said. They added that the grain was being sold to African destinations.

In Chicago, US rice futures hit an all-time high of $20.45 per 100 pounds.

More…

Warning on plastic’s toxic threat

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Plastic waste challenge on Pacific island

Plastic waste in the oceans poses a potentially devastating long-term toxic threat to the food chain, according to marine scientists.

Studies suggest billions of microscopic plastic fragments drifting underwater are concentrating pollutants like DDT.

Most attention has focused on dangers that visible items of plastic waste pose to seabirds and other wildlife.

But researchers are warning that the risk of hidden contamination could be more serious.

Dr Richard Thompson of the University of Plymouth has investigated how plastic degrades in the water and how tiny marine organisms, such as barnacles and sand-hoppers, respond.

He told the BBC: “We know that plastics in the marine environment will accumulate and concentrate toxic chemicals from the surrounding seawater and you can get concentrations several thousand times greater than in the surrounding water on the surface of the plastic.

“Now there’s the potential for those chemicals to be released to those marine organisms if they then eat the plastic.”

More… (there’s a great little video here as well)

– research thanks to John K.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR COAL

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

A Long Year in the Life of the U.S. Coal Industry

Lester R. Brown and Jonathan G. Dorn

With concerns about climate change mounting, the era of coal-fired electricity generation in the United States may be coming to a close. In early 2007, a U.S. Department of Energy report listed 151 coal-fired power plants in the planning stages in the United States. But during 2007, 59 proposed plants were either refused licenses by state governments or quietly abandoned. In addition, close to 50 coal plants are being contested in the courts, and the remaining plants will likely be challenged when they reach the permitting stage.

What began as a few local ripples of resistance to coal-fired power plants is quickly evolving into a national tidal wave of opposition from environmental, health, farm, and community organizations as well as leading climate scientists and state governments. Growing concern over pending legislation to regulate carbon emissions is creating uncertainty in financial markets.  Leading financial groups are now downgrading coal stocks and requiring utilities seeking funding for coal plants to include a cost for carbon emissions when proving economic viability.

More…

 

Corn Prices Jump to Record $6 a Bushel, Driving Up Costs for Food, Alternative Energy

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

NEW YORK (AP) — Corn prices jumped to a record $6 a bushel Thursday, driven up by an expected supply shortfall that will only add to Americans’ growing grocery bill and further squeeze struggling ethanol producers.

Corn prices have shot up nearly 30 percent this year amid dwindling stockpiles and surging demand for the grain used to feed livestock and make alternative fuels including ethanol. Prices are poised to go even higher after the U.S. government this week predicted that American farmers — the world’s biggest corn producers — will plant sharply less of the crop in 2008 compared to last year.

“It’s a demand-driven market and we may not be planting enough acres to supply demand, so that adds to the bullishness of corn,” said Elaine Kub, a grains analyst with DTN in Omaha, Neb.

Corn for the most actively traded May contract rose 4.25 cents to settle at $6 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade, after earlier rising to $6.025 a bushel — a new all-time high.

Worldwide demand for corn to feed livestock and to make biofuel is putting enormous pressure on global supply. And with the U.S. expected to plant less corn, the supply shortage will only worsen. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projected that farmers will plant 86 million acres of corn in 2008, an 8 percent drop from last year.

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Melting Mountain Glaciers Will Shrink Grain Harvests in China and India

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Lester R. Brown

The world is now facing a climate-driven shrinkage of river-based irrigation water supplies. Mountain glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau are melting and could soon deprive the major rivers of India and China of the ice melt needed to sustain them during the dry season. In the Ganges, the Yellow, and the Yangtze river basins, where irrigated agriculture depends heavily on rivers, this loss of dry-season flow will shrink harvests.

The world has never faced such a predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia. China and India are the world’s leading producers of both wheat and rice—humanity’s food staples. China’s wheat harvest is nearly double that of the United States, which ranks third after India. With rice, these two countries are far and away the leading producers, together accounting for over half of the world harvest.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that Himalayan glaciers are receding rapidly and that many could melt entirely by 2035. If the giant Gangotri Glacier that supplies 70 percent of the Ganges flow during the dry season disappears, the Ganges could become a seasonal river, flowing during the rainy season but not during the summer dry season when irrigation water needs are greatest.

More…

 

Colombia says it found uranium linked to FARC

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

The seizure of up to 66 pounds of low-grade uranium linked to the FARC rebels adds weight to the evidence found in a captured rebel laptop that the guerrillas were interested in buying and selling the material, according to the Colombian Defense Ministry.

But the 30 kilos of uranium found Wednesday in plastic bags dug up about three feet from a road in southern Bogotá was “impoverished,” the ministry said, and in that state could not have been used to make a radioactive bomb.

Authorities were waiting for further analysis to determine how dangerous the material found really is, armed forces commander Freddy Padilla said at a press conference late Wednesday.

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Empty bowls, stomachs and pockets

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

– Can you hear the writing on the wall?

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Disquiet over the soaring rice price

THE soaring price of rice and dwindling stockpiles of Asia’s staple food are causing anxiety across the continent. In particular the Philippines, a big, hungry country which cannot grow enough to feed itself, could be in trouble. The front pages of Manila’s newspapers scream about a “rice crisis”, as politicians float drastic solutions, such as forcing the country’s top 100 companies to take up rice farming. Farmers in Thailand, the world’s largest rice exporter, are delighted with the price surge, although some were this week said to be hiring guards to protect their valuable crops against “rice bandits”.

The president of the Philippines, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, last month pleaded publicly with neighbouring Vietnam, the second-largest exporter, to guarantee supplies. The two countries signed an agreement on Wednesday March 26th apparently to do just that. But the various escape clauses that Vietnam insisted upon suggest it was more of a face-saving measure than a firm pledge. Vietnam and India, another big rice exporter, have recently announced export restrictions to try to curb soaring food prices at home. This will make it tough for poor, rice-importing countries, in Africa as well as Asia, to secure supplies.

More…

Biofuels drive running out of gas

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

– From the New Zealand Herald - 

Growing concern about the merit of biofuels is threatening to derail a Government push to get the new fuels flowing out of petrol pumps in little more than three months.

The biofuel bill, now before a select committee, proposes to make oil companies begin selling a small but progressively higher amount of biofuels each year from July 1.

But while the bill passed its first reading comfortably, widespread political support is no longer as assured because of worries that the legislation does not deal strongly enough with questions about whether biofuels will come from sustainable sources.

Global debate about biofuels has shifted in recent months and in Britain – where the fuels are set to begin flowing on April 1 – a dispute is raging about whether biofuels will do more harm than good by leading to rainforest destruction and food shortages.

National MP Nick Smith yesterday said his party would not back the biofuel bill unless the issue was sorted out and it was made clear that the fuels coming into New Zealand would be from sustainable sources.

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