12 Degrees of Freedom

It’s all in the yaw

2012-02-14T09:15:00.004-05:00

So I simply ask, just for the sake of argument: would you rather have a hurricane bearing down on an array of wind turbines or zeroing in on a field of oil platforms? (GW)

Betting the farm: new model shows offshore wind farms at risk from hurricanes

By Kyle Niemeyer
ars technica
February 14, 2012

If we want to obtain 20 percent of our electricity from wind power by 2030, the US is going to need at least 50 gigawatts from offshore wind farms, according to the US Department of Energy. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimated that this wouldn’t be a problem—we could provide four times our 2010 electricity generation capacity with offshore wind power alone. The US hasn’t actually built any offshore wind farms yet, although there are at least 20 in the planning stages.

As part of that planning, the Interior Department recently performed a review, concluding there would be no significant environmental or socioeconomic impacts from wind farms off the mid-Atlantic Coast. However, according to a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, we should be worrying the converse: the impact of the environment on the wind farms, from hurricanes in particular. In certain risky offshore regions off the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, there is a high probability that at least one turbine would be destroyed by hurricanes within 20 years, and a smaller chance that half the turbines in a farm would be wiped out.

The authors of the paper, a group from Carnegie Mellon, used a probabilistic model to estimate the number of turbines destroyed by a hurricane. They performed this analysis for four locations where either farm leases have already been signed or projects have been proposed: Galveston County, TX; Dare County, NC; Atlantic County, NJ; and Dukes County, MA. The differences in location affect the probability of hurricane occurrence and the maximum wind speed, which were obtained using historical data.

Turbines are at risk from hurricanes due to the high maximum wind speeds, which exceed the design limits and can cause blade loss and tower buckling. In 2003, two typhoons (Maemi and Dujuan) destroyed turbines in Japan and China.

It’s all in the yaw

In the current study, the researchers only considered buckling, since blades can be more easily replaced. The buckling is much more likely when the turbines cannot yaw, or turn into the direction of the wind. Most modern turbines have this ability, since it allows them to generate more power. Somewhat ironically, however, hurricanes usually knock out the external power necessary for yaw motors. Even with power, winds in a hurricane can change direction faster than the turbine can yaw.

Initially, the team looked at a 50 turbine farm and calculated how many turbines would be destroyed if the farm was hit by a single hurricane, assuming the turbines couldn’t yaw. If the farm encountered a Category 3 hurricane, meaning wind speeds at least 45 meters per second, up to 6 percent of the turbines could buckle. A Category 4 hurricane, with wind speeds at least 50 m/s, could buckle nearly half of the farm. For some perspective, every state on the Gulf of Mexico and nine of the 14 on the Atlantic coast has been hit by Category 3 or higher hurricanes since 1856.

Next, they calculated the probability of turbine buckling in the four specific locations over a period of 20 years. In this case, they performed separate analyses of turbines that could and could not yaw.

The team found that Galveston and Dare Counties are the riskiest locations (of the four considered) for offshore wind farms. In Galveston County, without the ability to yaw, there is a 60 percent probability that at least one turbine tower would buckle in 20 years, and 30 percent chance that half the farm would be destroyed. Dare County is little better, with the same 60 percent chance for one turbine and 9 percent for more than half.

Atlantic and Dukes counties, on the other hand, were much safer. Without the ability to yaw, there was a 15 percent probability in Atlantic and 10 percent probability in Dukes that at least one turbine would buckle in the 20 year period. In both locations, there was a less than one percent probability that more than half the farm would buckle.

Giving turbines the ability to yaw significantly decreases the probability of buckling. The chances of a single turbine buckling in Galveston and Dare Counties drop to 25 percent and 15 percent, and the probabilities of more than half the farm being destroyed drop to 10 percent and less than one percent, respectively.

If the turbines in Atlantic and Dukes Counties can yaw, there is little chance that even a single turbine would be destroyed in the 20 year period.

Further emphasizing the importance of yaw, the researchers found that without yaw, there is a one in ten chance that an entire 50 turbine farm could be destroyed in Galveston County.

What can we do?

The authors suggest three reasonable ways to avoid hurricane damage: 1) increase the maximum wind speed that designs can handle; 2) make sure the turbine can quickly turn into the direction of rapidly changing winds; and 3) build most offshore wind farms in areas with lower risk.

Most modern turbines are rated to withstand maximum wind speeds of around 42 m/s. These designs are typically based on conditions in northern Europe and the North Sea, the location of most existing offshore wind farms. Some estimates put the cost of increasing the safety factor at 20-30 percent for turbines on land, but the fraction would likely be smaller for offshore turbines. Most of the cost there goes into transportation, installation, and maintenance, rather than the construction of the turbine itself.

Adding battery backups for yaw motors could add up to $40,000 to the turbine cost and a metric ton (literally) to the weight. But allowing a turbine to yaw during a hurricane significantly reduces the probability of buckling. In the safer locations, this risk is practically eliminated when the turbines can yaw. Batteries could potentially buffer the farm’s power output when the weather isn’t threatening.

There are a couple limitations of this study. The authors emphasize that the results in their paper do not represent all possible offshore wind farm locations—hurricane occurrence and intensity vary wildly from location to location. In addition, the entire analysis is based on historic data. Any predictions would be thrown off if climate change affects hurricane behavior, and the relationship here is unclear at best.

In fact, there is a good chance the probabilities presented here are underestimates. The model only considered tower buckling, but falling blades can also destroy the turbine. In addition, the buckling analysis didn’t account for the forces of heavy waves, another common occurrence during hurricanes.

This type of analysis could potentially be performed as part of a potential offshore wind site evaluation. Even without redesigning turbines to withstand higher winds, simply avoiding more dangerous locations could reduce the risk of turbine damage significantly.

The Midas Formula

2012-02-13T08:22:00.007-05:00

Greed knows no limits -- even when they're clearly defined. (GW)

The mathematical equation that caused the banks to crash

The Black-Scholes equation was the mathematical justification for the trading that plunged the world's banks into catastrophe

Ian Stewart

The Observer,

11 February 2012

In the Black-Scholes equation, the symbols represent these variables: σ = volatility of returns of the underlying asset/commodity; S = its spot (current) price; δ = rate of change; V = price of financial derivative; r = risk-free interest rate; t = time. Photograph: Asif Hassan/AFP/Getty Images

It was the holy grail of investors. The Black-Scholes equation, brainchild of economists Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, provided a rational way to price a financial contract when it still had time to run. It was like buying or selling a bet on a horse, halfway through the race. It opened up a new world of ever more complex investments, blossoming into a gigantic global industry. But when the sub-prime mortgage market turned sour, the darling of the financial markets became the Black Hole equation, sucking money out of the universe in an unending stream.

Anyone who has followed the crisis will understand that the real economy of businesses and commodities is being upstaged by complicated financial instruments known as derivatives. These are not money or goods. They are investments in investments, bets about bets. Derivatives created a booming global economy, but they also led to turbulent markets, the credit crunch, the near collapse of the banking system and the economic slump. And it was the Black-Scholes equation that opened up the world of derivatives.

The equation itself wasn't the real problem. It was useful, it was precise, and its limitations were clearly stated. It provided an industry-standard method to assess the likely value of a financial derivative. So derivatives could be traded before they matured. The formula was fine if you used it sensibly and abandoned it when market conditions weren't appropriate. The trouble was its potential for abuse. It allowed derivatives to become commodities that could be traded in their own right. The financial sector called it the Midas Formula and saw it as a recipe for making everything turn to gold. But the markets forgot how the story of King Midas ended.

Black-Scholes underpinned massive economic growth. By 2007, the international financial system was trading derivatives valued at one quadrillion dollars per year. This is 10 times the total worth, adjusted for inflation, of all products made by the world's manufacturing industries over the last century. The downside was the invention of ever-more complex financial instruments whose value and risk were increasingly opaque. So companies hired mathematically talented analysts to develop similar formulas, telling them how much those new instruments were worth and how risky they were. Then, disastrously, they forgot to ask how reliable the answers would be if market conditions changed.

Black and Scholes invented their equation in 1973; Robert Merton supplied extra justification soon after. It applies to the simplest and oldest derivatives: options. There are two main kinds. A put option gives its buyer the right to sell a commodity at a specified time for an agreed price. A call option is similar, but it confers the right to buy instead of sell. The equation provides a systematic way to calculate the value of an option before it matures. Then the option can be sold at any time. The equation was so effective that it won Merton and Scholes the 1997 Nobel prize in economics. (Black had died by then, so he was ineligible.)

If everyone knows the correct value of a derivative and they all agree, how can anyone make money? The formula requires the user to estimate several numerical quantities. But the main way to make money on derivatives is to win your bet – to buy a derivative that can later be sold at a higher price, or matures with a higher value than predicted. The winners get their profit from the losers. In any given year, between 75% and 90% of all options traders lose money. The world's banks lost hundreds of billions when the sub-prime mortgage bubble burst. In the ensuing panic, taxpayers were forced to pick up the bill, but that was politics, not mathematical economics.

The Black-Scholes equation relates the recommended price of the option to four other quantities. Three can be measured directly: time, the price of the asset upon which the option is secured and the risk-free interest rate. This is the theoretical interest that could be earned by an investment with zero risk, such as government bonds. The fourth quantity is the volatility of the asset. This is a measure of how erratically its market value changes. The equation assumes that the asset's volatility remains the same for the lifetime of the option, which need not be correct. Volatility can be estimated by statistical analysis of price movements but it can't be measured in a precise, foolproof way, and estimates may not match reality.

The idea behind many financial models goes back to Louis Bachelier in 1900, who suggested that fluctuations of the stock market can be modelled by a random process known as Brownian motion. At each instant, the price of a stock either increases or decreases, and the model assumes fixed probabilities for these events. They may be equally likely, or one may be more probable than the other. It's like someone standing on a street and repeatedly tossing a coin to decide whether to move a small step forwards or backwards, so they zigzag back and forth erratically. Their position corresponds to the price of the stock, moving up or down at random. The most important statistical features of Brownian motion are its mean and its standard deviation. The mean is the short-term average price, which typically drifts in a specific direction, up or down depending on where the market thinks the stock is going. The standard deviation can be thought of as the average amount by which the price differs from the mean, calculated using a standard statistical formula. For stock prices this is called volatility, and it measures how erratically the price fluctuates. On a graph of price against time, volatility corresponds to how jagged the zigzag movements look.

Black-Scholes implements Bachelier's vision. It does not give the value of the option (the price at which it should be sold or bought) directly. It is what mathematicians call a partial differential equation, expressing the rate of change of the price in terms of the rates at which various other quantities are changing. Fortunately, the equation can be solved to provide a specific formula for the value of a put option, with a similar formula for call options.

The early success of Black-Scholes encouraged the financial sector to develop a host of related equations aimed at different financial instruments. Conventional banks could use these equations to justify loans and trades and assess the likely profits, always keeping an eye open for potential trouble. But less conventional businesses weren't so cautious. Soon, the banks followed them into increasingly speculative ventures.

Any mathematical model of reality relies on simplifications and assumptions. The Black-Scholes equation was based on arbitrage pricing theory, in which both drift and volatility are constant. This assumption is common in financial theory, but it is often false for real markets. The equation also assumes that there are no transaction costs, no limits on short-selling and that money can always be lent and borrowed at a known, fixed, risk-free interest rate. Again, reality is often very different.

When these assumptions are valid, risk is usually low, because large stock market fluctuations should be extremely rare. But on 19 October 1987, Black Monday, the world's stock markets lost more than 20% of their value within a few hours. An event this extreme is virtually impossible under the model's assumptions. In his bestseller The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an expert in mathematical finance, calls extreme events of this kind black swans. In ancient times, all known swans were white and "black swan" was widely used in the same way we now refer to a flying pig. But in 1697, the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh found masses of black swans on what became known as the Swan River in Australia. So the phrase now refers to an assumption that appears to be grounded in fact, but might at any moment turn out to be wildly mistaken.

Large fluctuations in the stock market are far more common than Brownian motion predicts. The reason is unrealistic assumptions – ignoring potential black swans. But usually the model performed very well, so as time passed and confidence grew, many bankers and traders forgot the model had limitations. They used the equation as a kind of talisman, a bit of mathematical magic to protect them against criticism if anything went wrong.

Banks, hedge funds, and other speculators were soon trading complicated derivatives such as credit default swaps – likened to insuring your neighbour's house against fire – in eye-watering quantities. They were priced and considered to be assets in their own right. That meant they could be used as security for other purchases. As everything got more complicated, the models used to assess value and risk deviated ever further from reality. Somewhere underneath it all was real property, and the markets assumed that property values would keep rising for ever, making these investments risk-free.

The Black-Scholes equation has its roots in mathematical physics, where quantities are infinitely divisible, time flows continuously and variables change smoothly. Such models may not be appropriate to the world of finance. Traditional mathematical economics doesn't always match reality, either, and when it fails, it fails badly. Physicists, mathematicians and economists are therefore looking for better models.

At the forefront of these efforts is complexity science, a new branch of mathematics that models the market as a collection of individuals interacting according to specified rules. These models reveal the damaging effects of the herd instinct: market traders copy other market traders. Virtually every financial crisis in the last century has been pushed over the edge by the herd instinct. It makes everything go belly-up at the same time. If engineers took that attitude, and one bridge in the world fell down, so would all the others.

By studying ecological systems, it can be shown that instability is common in economic models, mainly because of the poor design of the financial system. The facility to transfer billions at the click of a mouse may allow ever-quicker profits, but it also makes shocks propagate faster.

Was an equation to blame for the financial crash, then? Yes and no. Black-Scholes may have contributed to the crash, but only because it was abused. In any case, the equation was just one ingredient in a rich stew of financial irresponsibility, political ineptitude, perverse incentives and lax regulation.

Despite its supposed expertise, the financial sector performs no better than random guesswork. The stock market has spent 20 years going nowhere. The system is too complex to be run on error-strewn hunches and gut feelings, but current mathematical models don't represent reality adequately. The entire system is poorly understood and dangerously unstable. The world economy desperately needs a radical overhaul and that requires more mathematics, not less. It may be rocket science, but magic it's not.

Ian Stewart is emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Warwick. His new book 17 Equations That Changed the World is published by Profile (£15.99)

Social enterprise entrepreneur and neophyte farmer

2012-02-12T07:52:00.005-05:00

Back in the 1970s, a group called the Boston Urban Gardeners approached the city of Boston's Redevelopment Authority with a proposal to buy small parcels of city land that were unsuitable for development. The goal was to package these together into an urban agricultural land trust -- preserving their use for food production.

At about the same time, the New Alchemy Institute was demonstrating the efficacy of intensive organic agricultural techniques on their 12-acre research site on Cape Cod.

Looks like a synthesis of these two strategies may be taking root (pun shamelessly intended) in British Columbia thanks to a visionary social entrepreneur. (GW)

Agricultural entrepreneur sees future in micro-farms

Cultivating small unused parcels of land could lead to intensive food production

By Randy Shore
Canada.com
February 11, 2012

Nicole Huska is more than a neophyte farmer; she's a brand.

Huska is breaking ground on a two-acre micro-farm on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast, a region northwest of Vancouver, what she hopes is the first of dozens of tiny, profitable biointensive organic farms dotted all over the region on unused parcels of land and forgotten fields.

"This is going to be the proof-of-concept farm," said Huska, wearing a ball cap with her Nicole's Farm logo. "The goal is to produce sustainable fruits and vegetables and sell them to local grocery stores, and once we've developed viable business relationships we are looking to expand the model."

Her common-law partner, Adam Hammond, is clearing forest and moving earth with heavy equipment on their four-acre parcel north of Sechelt. She hopes to have half an acre of spinach in the ground within weeks, crops that will find a place in local grocery stores.

That accomplished, Huska will begin to clone her operation.

She is soliciting underutilized one-acre plots of land through her website, promising landowners the substantial tax benefit of farmland status and a share of the profit from the sale of produce. A recent article in the community newspaper has started a buzz locally among people who have land lying fallow.

"Drive along the highway and you can see all kinds of unused pieces of land," she said. "Ideally the landowner doesn't have to invest anything; we put in the infrastructure and help do the paperwork (to change the land's property tax status)."

Less a farmer, more a social enterprise entrepreneur, Huska plans to hire and train farmers for each new farm, complete with the systems knowledge required to grow, harvest, package and deliver fruits and vegetables ready for store shelves and direct buyers.

Bob Hoy, who owns an IGA grocery store in Gibsons, about two hours by car and ferry from Vancouver, is keen to give Nicole's Farm a chance, even after some local suppliers faltered last year.

"We've carried produce from local people that supply us sporadically," said Hoy. "But anything local that comes out sells like crazy."

I f Huska can produce highquality spinach consistently, Hoy is ready to put in on store shelves.

To finance the Nicole's Farm prototype, Huska has created a pitch video and business plan on the social enterprise fundraising website Indie GoGo (www. indiegogo.com/Nicoles-Farm) to try to raise some of her estimated $50,000 start-up costs.

Huska has also approached the non-profit agriculture business accelerator BioEnterprise to help her organize a venture capital campaign to grow Nicole's Farm into a land-management company - if she can prove her revenue projections.

The model farm is meant to act as a regional hub for collection, distribution and shipping of produce from the satellite farms. Huska - who bills herself chief executive of Nicole's Farm - believes her model is scalable, with hub farms anchoring networks of small farms in any size community, and portable, easy to transplant anywhere in the world. Each one-acre farm could produce two full-time "living wage" jobs, said Huska.

Huska plans to grow vegetables on her farm - and her clone farms if and when they materialize - using organic principles, borrowing heavily from the increasingly popular permaculture and Small Plot Intensive farming methods. Both systems emphasize human-scale production and sustainable farming.

Once the excavation is complete, Huska hopes to disturb her soil as little as possible, as the slope of her land creates the risk of erosion. Hoping to leave no potential advantage untapped, Huska is planning to install bat houses to attract the natural insect predators and has cut a deal with a local beekeeper to bring two honeybee hives to the property. Bee pollination dramatically increases the yield of many vegetables and fruits.

Rules for Radicals

2012-02-11T10:32:00.004-05:00

Effective community organizers are among those whom the powers that be fear the most. That's because real community organizing is about empowerment. "Power to the people" is not just a catchy slogan to organizers, it is their reason for being.

Saul Alinsky developed an approach to organizing that brought results. For a number of years I worked at the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (an organization dedicated to community organizing located in the heart of Boston's most culturally diverse and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods). We were frequently asked if we were adherents to the "Alinsky School" of organizing. Although we were not strict adherents (we sought to collaborate as well as confront), we acknowledged his contribution to organizing. He was a true pioneer. (GW)

Saul Alinsky, Who?

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Common Dreams
February 6, 2012

And now, a word about a good American being demonized, despite being long dead. Saul Alinsky is not around to defend himself, but that hasn’t kept Newt Gingrich from using his name to whip up the froth and frenzy of his followers, whose ignorance of the man is no deterrence to their eagerness, at Gingrich’s behest, to tar and feather him posthumously.

In his speeches, Gingrich pounds away at variations on the theme like the piano player in a cheap Western saloon. He declares, “The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky,” or, “I believe in the Constitution, I believe in the Federalist Papers. Obama believes in Saul Alinsky and secular European socialist bureaucracy.”

It’s all quite clever and insidious, a classic lesson in how to slander someone who cannot answer from the grave, reminiscent of the tactics Gingrich used in those GOPAC memos back in 1996, when he suggested buzz words and phrases to demonize opponents: corrupt, decay, pathetic, permissive attitude, self-serving, and, of course, radical.

In the case of Saul Alinsky, most of the crowd knows nothing about the target except that they’re supposed to hate him. And why not? There’s the strange foreign name – obviously an alien. One of them. And a socialist at that. What’s a socialist? Don’t know — but Obama’s one, isn’t he? Barack Hussein Obama, Saul Alinsky – bingo! Two peas in a pod, and a sinister, subversive pod at that.

But just who was Alinsky, really? Born in 1909, in the ghetto of Chicago’s South Side, he saw the worst of poverty and felt the ethnic prejudices that fester, then blast into violence when people are crowded into tenements and have too little to eat. He came to believe that working people, poor people, put down and stepped upon, had to organize if they were going to clean up the slums, fight the corruption that exploited them, and get a handhold on the first rung of the ladder up and out.

He became a protégé of labor leader John L. Lewis and took the principles of organizing into the streets, first in his hometown of Chicago, then across the country, showing citizens how to band together and non-violently fight for their rights, then training others to follow in his shoes. Along the way, Alinsky faced down the hatred of establishment politicians, attacks both verbal and physical, and jail time.

He was a gutsy guy. Outspoken, confrontational, profane with a caustic wit, one journalist said he looked like an accountant and talked like a stevedore. He had a flair for the dramatic, once sending a neighborhood to dump its trash on the front step of an alderman who was allowing the garbage to pile up. Or immobilizing city hall, a department store or a stockholders meeting with a flood of demonstrators demanding justice.

One thing Newt has right — Saul Alinsky was a proud, self-professed radical. Just look at the titles of two of his books – Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals. But a communist or socialist he was not. He worked with them on behalf of social justice, just as he worked alongside the Catholic archdiocese in Chicago. When he went to Rochester, NY, to help organize the African American community there after a fatal race riot, he was first invited by the local Council of Churches. It was conscience they all had in common, not ideology.

As far as his connection with Barack Obama, the president was just a kid in Hawaii when Alinsky died, something you would expect a good historian, as Gingrich claims to be, to know. The two men never met, although when Obama arrived on the South Side of Chicago as a community organizer, some of his grass roots work with the poor was with an Alinsky-affiliated organization.

But that’s how it goes in the fight for basic human rights. Alinsky’s influence crops up all across the spectrum, even in the Tea Party. Get this: according to The Wall Street Journal, the conservative holy of holies, the one-time Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, Dick Armey, whose FreedomWorks organization helps bankroll the Tea Party, gives copies of Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” to Tea Party leaders.

Watch out Dick – you could be next on Newt’s list, although, curiously, in his fight against the wealthy Mitt Romney, Gingrich himself has stolen a page from Alinsky’s populist playbook. After Romney beat him in the Florida primary, Newt insisted he would continue the fight for the nomination and shouted, “We’re going to have people power defeat money power,” a sentiment that was Saul Alinsky through and through.

Alinsky died, suddenly, in1972. At the time, he was planning to mount a campaign to organize white, middle class Americans into a national movement for progressive change, a movement he vowed to take into the halls of Congress and – his words — “the boardrooms of the mega-corporations.”

Maybe that’s why Newt Gingrich has been slandering Alinsky’s name. Maybe he’s afraid, afraid that the very white folks he’s been rousing to frenzy will discover who Saul Alinsky was – a patriot in a long line of patriots, who scorned the malignant narcissism of duplicitous politicians and taught everyday Americans to think for themselves and fight together for a better life. That’s the American way, and any good historian would know it.

Driven by renewable energy

2012-02-10T09:04:00.006-05:00

The European Union is demonstrating both vision and courage by firmly committing to the development of renewable energy. EU countries are investing in an infrastructure based on a 10-year plan that prioritizes the integration of renewables into the transmission system.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is touting the growth of its domestic oil, gas and coal industries. (GW)

EU's 10-year power grid plan 'driven by renewables'

EurActiv
February 10, 2012

In March, the European Network of Transmission Systems Operators (ENTSO-E) will submit a comprehensive 10-year plan for public consultation which shows that most of the continent’s investments in electricity infrastructure will be “driven directly or indirectly by renewable integration concerns,” ENTSO-E told EurActiv.

Background

The EU's third legislative energy package in 2009 tasked ENTSO-E with adopting a non-binding, EU-wide 10-Year Network Development Plan (TYNDP) to be updated every two years.

On 1 March 2009, ENTSO-E presented a proposal for consultation with a view to adopting a pilot TYNDP in June ahead of the entry into force of the third energy package in March 2011.

The plan is non-binding legally-speaking, but is intended to serve as guidance for member states when adopting national plans. In March 2012, ENTSO-E will present its second TYNDP.

One official familiar with the proposal said renewable energies would be a driving force behind the proposed 10-year network development plan that will be tabled in March.

The plan will present highly detailed proposals on infrastructure that contribute to the EU's energy goals and supply security, including projects to connect renewable energy sources to transmission networks within and between countries.

This would be done using bi-directional energy flows from regions which may be, for example, rich in wind power. Energy will be transported to European hubs and nodes, with power potentially also being sent back the other way, to compensate for times when winds are not blowing.

Unlike ENTSO-E’s last, the new 10-year network development plan will look at projects from a "big picture" perspective that takes into account consumption growth, grid reinforcements and bulk power flows, ENTSO-E said.

About one fourth of the infrastructure will relate to projects that are delayed most due to lengthy permitting processes. “This is why the new 'Regulation on guidelines for trans-European energy infrastructure' is such a big step forward, as it provides for solutions to accelerate the building of new infrastructure,” an ENTSO-E source told EurActiv.

Cost-benefit analyses

The plan will also include criteria and indicators required under EU legislation as a way to help policymakers select the projects that best contribute to the EU's energy goals.

“Interpretation of these indicators in the context of a cost-benefit analysis should be done prudently as it is very difficult to quantify and monetise in precise figures all factors that play a role in a project assessment”, ENTSO-E said. "Only then the cost-benefit analyses can be a useful starting point for decision making".

However, doubts have emerged about the usefulness of the cost-benefit analyses that ENTSO-E has been asked to carry out for individual projects.

These relate to the cost allocation and ranking of infrastructure projects between countries that could bring electricity from southern Europe to the north or vice versa.

António Correia de Campos, the European Parliament’s rapporteur on the energy infrastructure package, said cost-benefit analyses “help the decision-maker but they don’t dictate a decision.”

He said he expected that the ENTSO-E cost analysis would “bring a common measure, monetisation of cost benefits, societal analysis, sometimes alternative proposals, and it may give light to parts of the proposals that are not fully clear.”

But one informed EU source said that, because of a lack of clarity in the legislation, Europe’s political echelons seemed to be “looking for a black box in which you push a button and you get precise numbers and, at least with projects of common interest it doesn’t work like that.”

“Not everything can be quantified and monetised,” the source said.

Grid interconnectors

Arthouros Zervos, president of the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA), said evaluating the benefits of grid interconnections to both parties in any situation was a highly difficult call to make.

“If you have two neighbouring countries and one has a market which is more expensive, the benefit will look different from one side or the other,” he told EurActiv, “so how do you calculate the benefit?”

“It is not going to be an easy exercise because the politicians are throwing the ball to the technical people (ENTSO-E) when it is also a political decision,” he said.

Zervos is also a special advisor to the Greek environment ministry, and was for five years a science officer in the European Commission’s Renewable Energy Unit.

One compromise solution could involve regional groups that the EU is planning to set up to validate the cost parameters for infrastructure projects.

“But we won’t provide the ranking,” an ENTSO-E source said. “It is not our task to say that ‘this project is more important than the other’. The devil is always in the detail and our task is to assess the projects based on a set of criteria.”

Next Steps

28 February: Deadline for draft report of the European Parliament on the energy infrastructure package
22 March: Deadline for tabling amendments to the draft report
March: ENTSO-E to launch first formal 10-year network development plan
31 May: Vote on the draft report by the Parliament industry Committee (ITRE)

The politics of scientific publishing

2012-02-09T08:16:00.006-05:00

The world of scientific research is embedded in its own political system that creates an environment that is as competitive and potentially ripe for exploitation as those on Capitol Hill or in our state capitols. Evidently it even extends into the realm of publishing. (GW)

THE SCIENTIFIC community finds itself at the beginning of its own Arab Spring. At stake are values that all Americans hold dear: the free flow of information and the continued betterment of human life. Success is by no means guaranteed, but it’s an important protest movement in which Boston should play a special role.

The central character in this emerging drama may seem an unlikely villain: Elsevier, an Amsterdam-based publisher of scientific journals, including the prestigious titles Cell and Lancet, which give researchers a platform to share their most important advances.

But Elsevier has settled on a business strategy of exploitation, aligning itself against the interests of the scientific community. Most of the intellectual work that goes into Elsevier’s journals is provided for free, by scientists whose salaries are largely paid for by taxpayers. Then Elsevier charges exorbitant rates for its journals, with many titles running in the thousands of dollars a year. This sharply curtails the sharing of results - the fuel of scientific discovery - and makes it prohibitively expensive for the public to read what appears in its pages. Yet for Elsevier, this looks like success: In 2010 Elsevier reported revenues of about $3.2 billion, of which a whopping 36 percent were profit.

Now Elsevier is supporting an odious bit of legislation known as the Research Works Act. Currently, the National Institutes of Health has a rule: If the American people pay for research, then they should be able to see the results without paying again. This is simple fairness. Yet the legislation would end that policy, further boosting Elsevier’s profits by locking important biomedical research, the stuff of life and death, behind paywalls.

There has been grumbling about Elsevier for years, but a British scientist recently started an international protest. Timothy Gowers, winner of the Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize of mathematics, wrote a blog post declaring that he would have nothing to do with Elsevier and invited others to join his boycott. A volunteer then set up a Web page - thecostofknowledge.com - to gather signatures. More than 4,600 scientists, including some at MIT and Harvard, have signed on.

These scientists are brave because joining the boycott is not without some risk. The academic world places a great emphasis on publishing. Scientists can work for years to put together a single paper, and if it is taken by a prestigious journal, it can make a career. Publicly defying a big publisher means ruling out options. The editors of the journals, and their editorial boards, also tend to be powerful people in the community. Nobody wants to make enemies.

What is crucial to understand is that academic publishing is not a free market. Researchers send papers to journals for free, because their jobs depend on it. Senior scientists don’t charge journals to review potential articles, thereby helping the editors to identify the best work, because that is a part of being an academic. Libraries have to subscribe, because the researchers they serve cannot work without access to the scholarly record. Academic publishers thus have a captive work force and a captive audience. They can choose to make a decent profit, or they can choose to extract from the system as much money as they think they can get away with.

“We are pouring a lot of money down the drain,’’ Gowers says. “If we didn’t do that, then that money could be used for science.’’

Elsevier is not the only academic publisher making unseemly profits, but it has led the way in taking unfair advantage. Elsevier’s rapaciousness was on display in 2009, for example, when it was forced to admit to publishing several sham “journals’’ paid for by pharmaceutical clients, filled with glowing descriptions of their work.

Elsevier has also enthusiastically pushed the Research Works Act on Capitol Hill, making generous contributions to one of the bill’s two sponsors. It has given New York Democrat Carolyn Maloney $41,050 in contributions since 2004, according to the nonprofit Maplight. (It gave the other co-sponsor, California Republican Darrell Issa, $5,000 over the same period.) The publishers of both Science and Nature, the two most influential scientific journals, have meanwhile publicly opposed the legislation. (Full disclosure: I edit a blog for Scientific American, which is owned by the Nature Publishing Group.) Academic publisher John Wiley & Sons opposes it. Another important publisher, Springer, released a statement which neither endorses nor opposes the legislation, and a company spokesperson refused to clarify its position.

The budding protest movement could benefit from a clear set of demands. One should be opposition to the Research Works Act. Another should be to insist on an end to publishers’ practice of cloaking contracts with libraries in confidentiality agreements, which hides the costs from public scrutiny.

The scientific community also clearly needs to work harder on building effective alternative models for sharing the results of their work. The nonprofit Public Library of Science publishes high-quality journals which are freely available to anyone, and there are other types of efforts underway. Or the editorial boards of overpriced journals can simply resign en masse to start up new, more reasonably priced journals. In 2006, the editorial board of the Elsevier journal Topology, infuriated with the company’s behavior, did exactly that.

But what is most urgently needed now is the equivalent of a mass uprising in Tahrir Square. And that’s where the research community in the Boston area can play a role. Researchers should sign the boycott petition and encourage colleagues to sign. Those on an Elsevier editorial board should resign - and take fellow board members with them. This will not just send a message to Elsevier, but to an industry that needs to change.

More than two centuries ago, another group of Bostonians decided that they had had enough. They joined together in resistance, and it was the shot heard round the world.

"This deal here is like winning the lottery"

2012-02-08T07:19:00.009-05:00

I always envisioned a 21st-century U.S. industrial revolution as a sustainable one -- both spurred and powered by renewable energy. Alas, we continue to suffer from short-term myopic thinking. We have opted to focus our efforts on developing technologies (and yes, jobs) that squeeze every last bit of our energy capital from the Earth. And all the while, we are jeopardizing our society's - perhaps all of humanity's (but not Earth's) - long-term viability. (GW)

Oil and Gas Boom Lifts U.S. Economy

By Russell Gold
Wall Street Journal
February 8, 2012

The Fleetwood Homes factory in Nampa, Idaho, is building more manufactured homes for oil-field workers.

NAMPA, Idaho—The staccato of nail guns echoes across a cavernous building here as workers piece together manufactured houses with easy-to-clean linoleum floors and rugged interiors for muddy oil-field workers.

There is no oil and gas production in Idaho, but that doesn't mean the U.S. energy boom has bypassed this bedroom community west of Boise. Fleetwood Homes of Idaho, a subsidiary of Cavco Industries Inc., has increased production by 25% since last fall at its Nampa factory, hiring 40 workers and adding hours for employees. It is building the extra-insulated "Dakota" model for shipment 1,000 miles east to the Bakken oil field in North Dakota.

Were it not for the new demand for oil-field housing, factory manager Jeff Chrisman says he would be handing out furloughs, not overtime. Instead, "We've been able to bring back people that we hated losing a couple of years ago," he says.

An energy boom is revving up the U.S. economy. The use of new drilling techniques to tap oil and gas in shale rocks far underground helped add about 158,500 new oil and gas jobs over the past five years, and economists think it has created even more jobs in companies supplying the energy industry and in the broader service industry. U.S. oil production is rising for the first time in decades. Natural gas has become so plentiful that prices recently plunged to a 10-year low.

The economic benefits of rising energy production are spreading far beyond the traditional oil patch, to Ohio and Pennsylvania, Nebraska and New York, North Carolina and Idaho. Truck drivers from pretty much anywhere can find work related to the surging energy business. Private-equity firms completed $24.8 billion of energy deals of all types last year, up from $8.5 billion in 2010, according to data tracker Preqin. Manufacturing plants are returning to the U.S. to take advantage of cheap natural gas, spurring major investments in petrochemical and steel production in the Gulf Coast and Midwest.

Landowners in huge swaths of the country where shale is found are raking in money for leasing their mineral rights. Consumers throughout the U.S. are paying lower bills for heating and electricity because of cheap natural gas. Even the U.S. balance of payments with other countries is improving because of the new energy economy.

"This is probably the biggest stimulus we have going," says Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research, a consultant based in Amherst, Mass. Some $145 billion will be spent drilling and completing U.S. wells this year, up from $13 billion in 2000, estimates Spears & Associates Inc., an oil-field market research firm.

Though the energy boom looks like a road to prosperity, it may be a bumpy one. Drilling is disrupting communities in ways that are still unfolding, creating concerns about the costs to local governments for things like road damage. It is also raising fears about potential water contamination, air pollution and even earthquakes from the effects of drilling thousands of new deep wells.

Skeptics warn that individual shale communities could experience an employment boom, followed by a painful bust. Rosy economic models "tell us nothing about what will happen when drilling ends," warns a May 2011 paper published by Cornell University's City and Regional Planning Department and funded in part by a foundation opposed to shale drilling.

Indeed, lower prices already have slowed new drilling for natural gas, causing jobs and investment to shrink in some communities. But energy companies have shifted their spending to shale wells that will provide oil, leading to rapid growth elsewhere. Even if gas prices stay low, overall employment is expected to continue rising, says John Larson, an economist with IHS Consulting.

Government officials are highlighting rising energy production as a bright spot in a still fragile economy. During his State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama said, "The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper." He cited an industry study finding that development of shale gas will create more than 100,000 jobs by the end of the decade. For every new job working in the oil and gas sector, another four are supported by the energy supply chain and by workers spending more money on goods and services, says Timothy Considine, an independent economist who has worked on estimating job creation in the natural resources sector.

Even state officials in New York, which has blocked shale-gas development until an environmental review is completed, say the economic boost would be considerable. "There is potentially a very significant economic upside," says Joe Martens, the state's environmental commissioner. "There's an enormous job impact."

The growth in energy exploration and production is due to the widespread use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Horizontal drilling allows energy companies to extract gas and oil up to a mile away from the actual well. Meanwhile, fracking—which involves pumping millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals to break open dense rocks and release hydrocarbons—has enabled the industry to tap into energy-rich shale formations once overlooked by petroleum geologists.

Beyond simply adding jobs, communities from Pennsylvania and Ohio to Colorado and Texas that are home to this energy boom are experiencing a new emotion: optimism. Jeff Dahl, chief executive of MTR Gaming Group Inc., which operates a casino and resort in Wheeling, W.Va., says he is seeing consumer confidence rising as landowners get leasing bonuses of thousands of dollars and companies compete for workers.

"People are beginning to believe this is a game changer for the region," says Mr. Dahl. The result is more spending on dining out and entertainment.

Exactly how much money has been flowing from energy companies into landowners' bank accounts is unknown; the Internal Revenue Service doesn't track royalties or payments for leasing land for energy exploration. But the industry says it paid out $6 billion from 2008 to 2010 just in Pennsylvania, home to much of the Marcellus Shale, a formation of gas-bearing rock.

Scott Kingsley, chief financial officer of Community Bank Systems Inc., which operates 170 bank branches in rural New York and Pennsylvania, says it has seen a 20% growth in deposits in regions where there is shale drilling, versus about 5% elsewhere. Mr. Kingsley says the bank is adding monthly wealth-management seminars to advise customers unused to a sudden influx of money.

The increase in oil and gas well drilling is boosting Nance County, Neb., a rural area west of Omaha that has traditionally produced cattle, corn and hogs.

Now the energy industry is tapping another Nance County resource: two giant sand dunes. Decades of dredging the Loup River has created these dunes, each about a mile long and 60 feet tall. Sand is a critical ingredient in fracking operations because it props open cracks in the shale, allowing oil and gas to flow out.

In 2007, Preferred Sands LLC bought a struggling sand company that had supplied glass foundries, and began to target oil-field companies instead. Now the largest private employer in the county, it has expanded the local work force to 134 from 15 and plans to add another 10 workers by midyear.

"This deal here is like winning the lottery," says Clair Jones, a member of the county board of supervisors. The only downside is that the wages paid at the sand mine have made it tougher for local companies to compete for labor, he says. "It has raised the bar for everyone."

In rural western Wisconsin, state officials are losing count of all the new sand mines popping up. "We've created way over 1,000 jobs in this industry in the last four months," says Tom Woletz, who works for the state's Department of Natural Resources.

The energy industry has discovered so much new natural gas, causing gas prices to drop 39% over the past year, that it is breathing new life into energy-intensive manufacturing such as steel and plastics.

"We think lower natural gas prices are creating a structural economic advantage for the U.S.," says Chat Reynders, chairman and chief executive of Boston-based Reynders McVeigh Capital Management. "It's a new competitive strength for U.S. manufacturers." He points out that people who purchase energy supplies for companies in Asia pay up to six times as much for natural gas as their counterparts in Texas and Louisiana.

Steelmaker Nucor Corp. is among the companies investing in new U.S. manufacturing plants to take advantage of the abundant gas. In 2004, Nucor closed a facility located along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that enriched iron for use in steel mills. The company dismantled the facility and shipped it to Trinidad, where an offshore gas field offered a low-cost, long-term supply.

Last year, Nucor began construction on a new iron upgrader, just a few hundred feet away from the old facility in St. James Parish, La. It will cost $750 million to build and create 150 permanent jobs, which the company says will pay an average of $75,000 a year.

What changed? "Shale gas allows that natural gas to be more competitive, and more competitive natural gas enabled us to build this facility in Louisiana instead of building a second facility in Trinidad," says John Ferriola, Nucor's president.

Petrochemical makers are also adding capacity because of the low-cost energy. Several companies, including Dow Chemical Co., have announced plans to either restart or build new facilities along the Gulf Coast that will churn out basic ingredients for plastic packaging and car bumpers. Royal Dutch Shell PLC has plans for a similar facility near Pittsburgh.

Other parts of the country are looking for ways to take advantage of the cheap gas. In Maine, Kennebec Valley Gas Company LLC is seeking financing to build a gas pipeline into Augusta. The $85 million pipeline, which will create an estimated 500 construction jobs, will allow companies and consumers to switch to lower-cost gas from expensive heating oil—and, backers say, knock $1,200 off the average Augusta homeowner's $4,400 winter home-heating bill.

"That is money people can put in their pocket," says Rich Silkman, a company principal.

The gas will lower fuel costs and help three local paper mills, which employ 1,700 people, stay competitive, says John Williams, head of the Maine Pulp & Paper Association.

Gas now fuels about one-quarter of U.S. electricity production, a figure expected to rise as proposed environment regulations force more coal-fired power plants to close. Last year, Siemens AG opened a $350 million facility in Charlotte, N.C., to build giant turbines that generate electricity from natural gas that has hired 700 workers so far.

Randy Zwirn, global head of Siemens's energy service business, says it made the investment because it predicts a growing demand for gas-powered electricity. "Shale provides almost an insurance, a hedge, to keep gas prices low," he says.

At Fleetwood Home's factory in Idaho, Mr. Chrisman, the plant manager, had no clue about the energy boom until he received a call from a planned 300-unit housing development in Williston, N.D. He traveled there in 2010 and saw well-paid workers sleeping in their cars in a local Wal-Mart parking lot during winter because of the lack of housing.

As the factory's pace of production began picking up last summer, Mr. Chrisman rehired workers he had let go amid the housing downturn. Shannon Smith returned to her job caulking tiles and cleaning up the houses before they are loaded onto trucks.

"In the two years I was laid off, we lost our house" and racked up a lot of credit-card debt, says Ms. Smith, a mother of two. "There was no money and nothing to do. This is chance to buy groceries again and keep paying the bills."

Though she has never seen an oil well, Ms. Smith says, "I hope it keeps coming."

—Ryan Dezember and Gregory Zuckerman contributed
to this article.

Design intervention from the bottom outward

2012-02-07T08:22:00.005-05:00

There is no greater need for some serious "design intervention" than in the rebuilding of our nation's infrastructure. We don't usually use the words innovation and infrastructure in the same sentence. Hopefully, that will change in a big way - right away. (GW)

A Bridge Built to Sway When the Earth Shakes

By Henry Fountain
New York Times
February 6, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO — Venture deep inside the new skyway of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and it becomes clear that the bridge’s engineers have planned for the long term.

At intervals inside the elevated roadway’s box girders — which have the closed-in feel of a submarine, if a submarine were made of concrete — are anchor blocks, called deadmen, cast into the structure. They are meant to be used decades from now, perhaps in the next century, when in their old age the concrete girders will start to sag. By running cables from deadman to deadman and tightening them, workers will be able to restore the girders to their original alignment.

The deadmen are one sign that the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge, which includes the skyway and a unique suspension bridge, is meant to last at least 150 years after its expected opening in 2013. (The existing eastern bridge, which is still in use, will then be torn down.)

But to make it to the 22nd century, the new span may at some point have to survive a major earthquake, like the one that destroyed much of San Francisco in 1906 or the one that partly severed the Bay Bridge in 1989. With two faults nearby that are capable of producing such large quakes, survival is no simple matter.

Say what you want about the project — and as the construction timeline has lengthened past a decade and costs have soared over $6 billion, plenty has been said — keeping the bridge intact in an earthquake has always been the engineers’ chief goal.

And to meet that goal, they are going with the flow: designing flexible structures in which any potential damage would be limited to specific elements.

“We wanted to make this bridge flexible so that when the earthquake comes in, the flexibility of the system is such that it basically rides the earthquake,” said its lead designer, Marwan Nader, a vice president at the engineering firm T. Y. Lin International.

That contrasts with another potential approach: making the bridge structures large enough, and rigid enough, to resist movement. “Massive and stiff structures would look absolutely ugly and be very, very expensive,” said Frieder Seible, dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, who tested many elements of the bridge design.

That design includes a 525-foot-tall suspension bridge tower made up of four steel shafts that should sway in a major earthquake, up to about five feet at the top. But the brunt of the force would be absorbed by connecting plates between the shafts, called shear links.

The bridge’s concrete piers are designed to sway as well, limiting damage to areas with extra steel reinforcing. And at joints along the entire span there are 60-foot sliding steel tubes, called hinge pipe beams, with sacrificial sections of weaker steel that should help spare the rest of the structure as it moves in a quake.

“At the seismic displacement that we anticipate, there will be damage,” Mr. Nader said. “But the damage is repairable and the bridge can be serviceable with no problems.”

Emergency vehicles and personnel, at the least, should be able to use the bridge within hours of a major earthquake, after crews inspect the structure and make temporary fixes, like placing steel plates over certain joints. Given that the Bay Area’s two major airports would be expected to be out of service after such a disaster, this bridge and the Benicia-Martinez Bridge, another seismically secure span about 20 miles to the northeast, would be “lifeline” structures to bring assistance to the stricken region from an Air Force base inland, said Bart Ney, a spokesman for the California Department of Transportation.

It was an earthquake that made this replacement span, which runs for 2.2 miles between Oakland and Yerba Buena Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, necessary. The Loma Prieta quake of 1989, the first to occur along the San Andreas fault zone since the 1906 disaster, caused part of the existing steel-truss span to collapse, killing a motorist. The bridge was closed for a month. That quake, with a magnitude of 6.9, caused strong shaking that lasted about 15 seconds and movement far greater than the 1930s-vintage bridge had been designed to handle.

“When the bridge was subjected to those earthquake motions in 1989, it literally was stretched and, basically, one of the spans fell off,” Mr. Nader said. Most experts agree that a stronger quake, most likely along the San Andreas or the Hayward fault, in the East Bay, could cause a total collapse of the old span.

There is a strong likelihood of a large earthquake in the Bay Area — about a 2-in-3 chance of magnitude 6.7 or larger before 2036, according to the United States Geological Survey and other institutions. But Mr. Nader and his colleagues were not so much concerned with magnitude measured at the epicenter as they were with ground motions at the bridge site. They planned for the largest motions expected to occur within 1,500 years.

After the 1989 quake, engineers determined that the bridge’s western span — a double suspension bridge between San Francisco and Yerba Buena Island — could be made seismically safe, with some modifications. But the eastern truss bridge and causeway would eventually have to come down. (The Golden Gate Bridge was undamaged in the quake, but has been retrofitted to prepare it for a larger one.)

Among the eastern span’s problems were that the foundations of the piers were sitting not on rock, but in mud that could shake like jelly in a quake, magnifying the motion.

The planning for the bridge’s replacement was delayed by squabbles over the path the new bridge would take across the bay and the “look” of the span, with East Bay residents especially vocal about their desires.

“Folks would say that they feel that all the glamorous signature spans tend to be on the San Francisco side of the bay and that the East Bay gets the simple and utilitarian type of bridge,” said Mr. Nader, who earned his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, and experienced the 1989 quake firsthand. “So they wanted a signature span.”

They got one. Unlike more conventional suspension bridges, in which parallel cables are slung over towers and anchored at both ends in rock or concrete, the 2,047-foot suspension bridge has only a single tower and a single cable that is anchored to the road deck itself, looping from the eastern end to the western end and back again. (With a conventional design it would have been extremely difficult to create an anchorage on the eastern end, in the middle of the bay.)

The new bridge is the longest self-anchored suspension bridge in the world, and it is asymmetrical, with one side of the span longer than the other. (Mr. Nader says it looks like half a conventional suspension bridge.) The choice of such a design raised the cost of the project significantly. In a conventional suspension bridge, the road deck is added last, hung from suspender cables attached to the main cables. In a self-anchored design, the deck has to be built first.

“You have a kind of chicken-and-egg situation,” Mr. Nader said. “You need the deck to carry the compression so that the cable anchors into it, but the deck can’t carry itself until the cable is there to carry it. So you have to build a temporary system.”

That system, called falsework, is basically a bridge to hold up the road deck until the cable is in place — an operation that began in late December and was expected to take up to six months. The falsework needs to be seismically secure as well, adding to the cost.

In all the discussions over a signature span, Mr. Nader said, there was deep interest in having only a single tower. But that created design problems. “In a single tower, there is a lack of redundancy,” he said. “Just like a pole. If you have a pole and the pole starts shaking, all the damage will occur at the bottom.”

The solution, fleshed out in conversations with the bridge’s architects, was to split the tower into four shafts and tie them together with the shear links, which Mr. Nader had become familiar with during his Berkeley years through a professor who had tested them in certain kinds of building frames.

The links are of a special grade of steel that deforms more easily than other grades, and they are placed at specific points along the length of the tower, which affects how the shafts will move in a quake. “Based on where you place the shear links, you can tune the dynamic response of your tower,” said Dr. Seible, of the University of California, San Diego.

Under normal conditions, the shear links help to stiffen the four shafts against wind and other loads. “But when you come to larger earthquake loads, these links start yielding,” Mr. Nader said. “It’s taking the energy that’s being pumped into the tower.”

Mr. Nader said he already knew which shear links would be most damaged in a major earthquake — those that are about two-thirds of the way up the tower. But the tower would still be structurally sound, he said, and the links would not even have to be replaced immediately.

It’s like what happens after a fender bender, he said. “Your car is perfectly drivable, and it’s designed that way, with a bumper that can take the shock.

“So you basically stop, just to make sure,” he went on. “You see everything’s O.K., and you can come in anytime you want to repair your bumper.”

Wind o'er water everywhere but nary a kilowatt...yet

2012-02-06T08:06:00.007-05:00

Representatives from the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) were in Massachusetts last Friday to announce that they will be accepting nominations for offshore wind farm projects proposed within a 1,300 square mile area south of Martha's Vineyard. Just as Professor William Heronemus predicted more than 40 years ago, there is enough potential wind roaring just off the coastline to virtually meet Massachusetts' entire electricity demand.

It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to envision a scenario wherein wind, solar, hydro and energy efficiency are combined to successfully wean the state and perhaps all of New England from fossil fuels. (GW)

Vast new wind farm site proposed off Martha’s Vineyard

14 miles off Martha’s Vineyard; could yield 10 times the power of Cape Wind

By David Abel
Boston Globe
February 3, 2012

Federal officials designated a large swath of ocean about 14 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard yesterday as the potential site for a massive wind farmthat would dwarf Cape Wind, the long-stalled project that is planned for Nantucket Sound.

After two years of meetings with local and state officials, environmental groups, and others, including local tribes, officials at the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said they are launching an environmental assessment of about 1,300 square miles that could give rise to hundreds of soaring wind turbines within several years.

They said the area could produce as much as 4,000 megawatts, 10 times as much electricity as the proposed Cape Wind project, which is slated to sprawl over 25 square miles. That is enough, they said, to power up to 70 percent of homes in Massachusetts.

“There is great potential here, because there is a lot of wind,’’ Tommy P. Beaudreau, the bureau’s director, said at a press conference at the state’s Wind Technology Testing Center in Charlestown.

Beaudreau said meetings since late 2009 resulted in the agency’s decision to reduce the size of the original proposed area by 50 percent. He said the meetings also helped air concerns about the effects of the turbines on wildlife such as migrating whales and birds, and other factors, such as the routes fishermen use to trawl for scallops and other fish.

“Our efforts to identify promising wind energy areas . . . and address conflicts will pay enormous dividends in the future,’’ he said. “The heavy lifting by the task force to get us to today will minimize the conflicts that can threaten to derail or delay projects like these.’’

He expects an environmental review to be finished within a year and said the agency would probably seek bids on potential projects shortly afterward. The area could be developed by several companies, which would lease the submerged land from the federal government. Federal officials said Massachusetts would be ineligible for royalties, because the land is beyond 3 nautical miles.

The proposed wind farm, one of a host of similar offshore renewable energy projects the Obama administration is promoting around the country, has already begun to spark concerns similar to those of Cape Wind, which is still fighting lawsuits and looking for utilities to buy its power more than a decade after it proposed becoming the nation’s first major offshore wind project. Among the concerns is the potential impact on pristine coastal views.

“Obviously, our main concern with this project is the distance and the viewshed, how our fishing grounds are going to be affected, and any impact on archeological artifacts,’’ said Bettina Washington, historic preservation officer for the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah).

The tribe has asked the federal government to ensure that any wind farm be built more than 20 miles offshore, which is about where it is no longer visible from land.

Opponents of Cape Wind, which would be built about 5 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, have long urged state and federal officials to build wind farms farther out to sea.

“We’ve always promoted deep-water projects as a better alternative,’’ said Audra Parker, president of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound. “But the devil here remains in the details. There are concerns to any offshore wind project. We need to avoid huge costs to ratepayers.’’

Critics of wind projects argue that they are more expensive than traditional energy sources, such as oil and natural gas.

But proponents say the projects make environmental and economic sense, because they reduce the spread of pollutants that contribute to global warming while providing locally developed energy at a fixed cost. They say the price of oil and gas is volatile and likely to rise in coming years.

Offshore wind farms are providing increasing amounts of energy elsewhere in the world, particularly in Asia and Europe, where some wind farms produce as much as 300 megawatts of energy, or about 100 megawatts less than the energy that would be produced by Cape Wind.

Mark Rodgers, a spokesman for Cape Wind, said the potential energy that could be generated from the site south of Martha’s Vineyard would be huge. Cape Wind is one of about 10 companies that have expressed interest in bidding on a contract to build at least a part of the proposed wind farm.

“If this site were built at capacity, it would greatly surpass any other source of power in New England from a single site,’’ he said.

While there may be less opposition if the wind turbines cannot be seen from land, there would be other challenges, such as larger waves and greater maintenance expenses, Rodgers said.

“Some parts make this very exciting,’’ he said, “and some make it more difficult.’’

At yesterday’s press conference in Charlestown, officials from environmental groups said they want to ensure that the project does not affect migration patterns of whales or birds’ flight paths. But they said offshore wind projects like those proposed off the coast of Massachusetts are the way of the future.

“This is a battle we must win,’’ said Sue Reid, director of the Conservation Law Foundation in Boston. “This is the best way to reduce dirty air.’’

Jack Clarke, a spokesman for the Mass Audubon, called the waters where the wind farm would be built “the Saudi Arabia of wind.’’

“We have our concerns, and we need more information,’’ he said. “But we see this as important for the environment.’’

Solar sense

2012-02-05T10:27:00.004-05:00

The truth is that solar and other renewable energy technologies are cheaper than fossil fuels everywhere in the world. It's just that corporate greed and power have been successful in hiding the real costs of burning fossil fuels from the general public. They've been doing it forever. Their public trashing of climate change is just the latest chapter of their ongoing campaign. (GW)

In the Developing World, Solar Is Cheaper than Fossil Fuels

Advances are opening solar to the 1.3 billion people who don't have access to grid electricity.

By Kevin Bullis
Technology Review
January 27, 2012

The falling cost of LED lighting, batteries, and solar panels, together with innovative business plans, are allowing millions of households in Africa and elsewhere to switch from crude kerosene lamps to cleaner and safer electric lighting. For many, this offers a means to charge their mobile phones, which are becoming ubiquitous in Africa, instead of having to rent a charger.

Technology advances are opening up a huge new market for solar power: the approximately 1.3 billion people around the world who don't have access to grid electricity. Even though they are typically very poor, these people have to pay far more for lighting than people in rich countries because they use inefficient kerosene lamps. While in most parts of the world solar power typically costs far more than electricity from conventional power plants—especially when including battery costs—for some people, solar power makes economic sense because it costs half as much as lighting with kerosene.

Hundreds of companies are swooping in to grab a piece of this market.

"This sector has exploded," says Richenda Van Leeuwen, senior director for the Energy and Climate team at the United Nations Foundation. "There's been a sea change in the last five years."

The sudden interest is fueled by the advent of relatively low-cost LEDs, she says. Not long ago, powering lightbulbs required a solar panel that could generate 20 to 30 watts, since only incandescent lightbulbs were affordable. LEDs are far more efficient. Now people can have bright lighting using a panel that only generates a couple of watts of power, Van Leeuwen says.

But such technological improvements aren't quite enough to open up the market. High-quality LED systems, with a pair of lamps and enough battery storage for several hours of lighting, cost less than $50. The systems can pay for themselves in less than two years, but the upfront cost is still too steep for many people.

Eight19, a company based in Cambridge, U.K., is one of several companies offering some type of payment plan to make the systems affordable. Customers pay $10 for the solar lighting system, which includes a 2.5-watt solar panel, two LED overhead lamps, and a lithium-iron phosphate battery pack. Then they pay a weekly fee for the power it generates.

Each week, users buy a scratch card for about $1 from a local vendor. It gives them a number that they text to Eight19 for verification. The company sends them a verification code that they enter into a keypad on the battery pack. The code electronically unlocks the device for a week, allowing the battery to supply power to the LEDs or to a phone charger.

Several other companies, including major telecoms, are trying variants on this pay-as-you-go approach. One thing that sets Eight19 apart is that after a customer has covered the cost of the device—typically in about 18 months—he or she can trade up for a bigger one with a larger solar panel, a bigger battery, and more lights, and the capacity to power a small radio. In this way, using only the money they would have been spending on kerosene or for renting phone chargers, they can gradually get to the point where they have enough power for, say, a refrigerator, or a money-making appliance such as a sewing machine, says Simon Bransfield-Garth, CEO of Eight19.

Eight19 has tested the system with several hundred customers, and it is starting a project to sell 4,000 systems in cooperation with the NGO Solar Aid, which will help with distribution.

But Eight19 is a relatively small player so far. More established companies such as D.light have sold over one million solar lighting systems. Bransfield-Garth sees a lot of room for growth. "The poorest people are paying disproportionately high prices for their needs," he says. "Solar power works well in this market."

Parallel Political Universe

2012-02-04T07:29:00.005-05:00

Anyone who doesn't believe that two physically similar yet very distinct (in virtually every other way) worlds can co-exist in the same space and the same time should read today's post.

This is weirder and scarier than my favorite show, Fringe. (GW)

Activists Fight Green Projects, Seeing U.N. Plot

By Leslie Kaufman and Kate Zernike
New York Times
February 3, 2012

Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.

They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances — efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights.

“Down the road, this data will be used against you,” warned one speaker at a recent Roanoke County, Va., Board of Supervisors meeting who turned out with dozens of people opposed to the county’s paying $1,200 in dues to a nonprofit that consults on sustainability issues.

Local officials say they would dismiss such notions except that the growing and often heated protests are having an effect.

In Maine, the Tea Party-backed Republican governor canceled a project to ease congestion along the Route 1 corridor after protesters complained it was part of the United Nations plot. Similar opposition helped doom a high-speed train line in Florida. And more than a dozen cities, towns and counties, under new pressure, have cut off financing for a program that offers expertise on how to measure and cut carbon emissions.

“It sounds a little on the weird side, but we’ve found we ignore it at our own peril,” said George Homewood, a vice president of the American Planning Association’s chapter in Virginia.

The protests date to 1992 when the United Nations passed a sweeping, but nonbinding, 100-plus-page resolution called Agenda 21 that was designed to encourage nations to use fewer resources and conserve open land by steering development to already dense areas. They have gained momentum in the past two years because of the emergence of the Tea Party movement, harnessing its suspicion about government power and belief that man-made global warming is a hoax.

In January, the Republican Party adopted its own resolution against what it called “the destructive and insidious nature” of Agenda 21. And Newt Gingrich took aim at it during a Republican debate in November.

Tom DeWeese, the founder of the American Policy Center, a Warrenton, Va.-based foundation that advocates limited government, says he has been a leader in the opposition to Agenda 21 since 1992. Until a few years ago, he had few followers beyond a handful of farmers and ranchers in rural areas. Now, he is a regular speaker at Tea Party events.

Membership is rising, Mr. DeWeese said, because what he sees as tangible Agenda 21-inspired controls on water and energy use are intruding into everyday life. “People may be acting out at some of these meetings, and I do not condone that. But their elected representatives are not listening and they are frustrated.”

Fox News has also helped spread the message. In June, after President Obama signed an executive order creating a White House Rural Council to “enhance federal engagement with rural communities,” Fox programs linked the order to Agenda 21. A Fox commentator, Eric Bolling, said the council sounded “eerily similar to a U.N. plan called Agenda 21, where a centralized planning agency would be responsible for oversight into all areas of our lives. A one world order.”

The movement has been particularly effective in Tea Party strongholds like Virginia, Florida and Texas, but the police have been called in to contain protests in states including Maryland and California, where opponents are fighting laws passed in recent years to encourage development around public transportation hubs and dense areas in an effort to save money and preserve rural communities.

One group has become a particular target. Iclei — Local Governments for Sustainability USA, an Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit, sells software and offers advice to communities looking to reduce their carbon footprints. A City Council meeting in Missoula, Mont., in December got out of hand and required police intervention over $1,200 in dues to Iclei.

At a Board of Supervisors meeting in Roanoke in late January, Cher McCoy, a Tea Party member from nearby Lexington, Va., generated sustained applause when she warned: “They get you hooked, and then Agenda 21 takes over. Your rights are stripped one by one.”

Echoing other protesters, Ms. McCoy identified smart meters, devices being installed by utility companies to collect information on energy use, as part of the conspiracy. “The real job of smart meters is to spy on you and control you — when you can and cannot use electrical appliances,” she said.

Ilana Preuss, vice president of Smart Growth America, a national coalition of nonprofits that supports economic development while conserving open spaces and farmland, said, “The real danger is not that they will get rid of some piece of software from Iclei” but that “people will be too scared to have a conversation about local development. And that is an important conversation to be having.”

In some cases, the protests have not been large, but they are powerful because officials are concerned about the Tea Party.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Gingrich has called Agenda 21 an important issue and has said, “I would explicitly repudiate what Obama has done on Agenda 21.”

The Republican National Committee resolution, passed without fanfare on Jan. 13, declared, “The United Nations Agenda 21 plan of radical so-called ‘sustainable development’ views the American way of life of private property ownership, single family homes, private car ownership and individual travel choices, and privately owned farms; all as destructive to the environment.”

Other conservatives have welcomed the scrutiny of land-use issues, but they do not agree with the emphasis on Agenda 21.

Jeremy Rabkin, a professor of law at George Mason University specializing in sovereignty issues, said there were “entirely legitimate concerns about international standards that come into American law without formal ratification by the Senate.”

But some local officials argue that the programs that protesters see as part of the conspiracy are entirely created by local governments with the express intent of saving money — the central goal of the Tea Party movement.

Planning groups, several of which said they had never heard of Agenda 21 until protesters burst in, are counterorganizing.

Summer Frederick, the project manager for the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission in Charlottesville, Va., which withdrew its dues to Iclei and its support from a national mayors’ agreement on climate change late last year after a campaign by protesters, now conducts seminars on how to deal with Agenda 21 critics. (Among her tips: remove the podium and microphones, which can make it “very easy for a critic to hijack a meeting.”)

Roanoke’s Board of Supervisors voted 3 to 2 to renew its Iclei financing after many residents voiced their support.

“The Tea Party people say they want nonpolluted air and clean water and everything we promote and support, but they also say it’s a communist movement,” said Charlotte Moore, a supervisor who voted yes. “I really don’t understand what they want.”

John A. Montgomery contributed reporting from Roanoke, Va.

Important step for U.S. offshore wind

2012-02-03T08:14:00.007-05:00

For those of us who have been watching and monitoring the roller coaster ride of Cape Wind over the past 11 years, news that the United States is "Fast-Tracking" offshore wind farms has to be taken with a glass of salt water. Having said that, any step forward is appreciated. Let's just hope that our clocks are in sync with Nature's and we're moving fast enough to mitigate the worst-case climate change scenarios. (GW)

Administration Fast-Tracks Offshore Wind Farms

By Ryan Tracy
Wall Street Journal
February 3, 2012

The Obama administration said it planned to make areas off the coasts of Maryland and New Jersey available to wind-energy developers by year's end, paving the way for the first leases under a program designed to fast-track offshore wind farms.

While President Barack Obama has said he favors an "all of the above" approach to energy development, Thursday's announcement highlighted the stronger emphasis he places on wind and solar power compared with Republicans. A House committee on Wednesday approved three bills promoting oil-and-gas exploration, an issue also stressed by the GOP's presidential candidates.

Republicans also have criticized the White House for backing renewable-energy companies such as solar-panel maker Solyndra LLC, which filed for bankruptcy protection after getting $527 million in public funds. In his State of the Union address last week, Mr. Obama responded by saying "some companies fail" and pledging to "double down" on clean energy.

The U.S. gets about 3% of its electricity from land-based wind turbines, but doesn't yet have any turbines offshore.

Announcing the wind plan, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said his department found there would be "no significant impact" on the environment from issuing the leases and allowing developers to test whether the areas are viable.

The decision eliminates a step from the environmental-review process, shortening it by as much as two years, said Jim Lanard, president of the Offshore Wind Development Coalition. "This is a critical step," he said.

Environmental reviews will still be needed for individual project plans, and wind farms in the designated areas are still years away from coming online.

"There's a whole lot more work ahead of us to get the project in the water," said Jeffrey Grybowski, chief administrative officer for Deepwater Wind, which is backing a wind farm off New Jersey's coast with Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. The goal is to bring the wind farm online by 2017, Mr. Grybowski said.

Under the only offshore lease executed so far by the U.S.—for a 46-square-mile parcel in Nantucket Sound, off the coast of Massachusetts—project owner Cape Wind Associates would pay the government about $88,000 in annual rent for 33 years, plus 2% to 7% of electricity sales.

The push to expedite offshore wind permits has drawn criticism for being too friendly to the wind-energy industry. Maryland lawmakers have raised concerns about higher electricity costs as a result of state mandates to buy renewable power, while local groups in New Jersey have said conflicts with the fishing, tourism, and shipping industries haven't been adequately examined. Clean Ocean Action, an advocacy group which doesn't oppose offshore wind power, is seeking a more thorough review of the New Jersey lease proposal. "There has been no input from stakeholders in a comprehensive way," said Cindy Zipf, the group's executive director.

A spokeswoman for the Interior Department said the leasing review process has involved significant public comments and would continue to do so.

The Interior Department is also targeting areas off the Delaware and Virginia coastlines for future leases. "We will be able to see one day the harnessing of the tremendous amount of energy we have off the Atlantic coast," Mr. Salazar said.

Wind tends to blow harder and more consistently over the ocean than over land, providing a potentially significant energy resource. Atlantic Wind Connection, a project backed by Google Inc. that wants to build an offshore wind power transmission line between New Jersey and Virginia, says it could link up enough capacity to power about 1.9 million homes.

Developers and policy makers are facing bumps in the road as they try to build the first turbines in U.S. waters.

A proposal in Delaware ground nearly to a halt in December after backer NRG Energy Inc. said it couldn't find an investment partner without a federal loan guarantee and tax credits, both of which it didn't expect to get unless policy changed. A company spokesman said Thursday that NRG was still pursuing its federal lease for the project, but has dropped work on other parts of the proposal.

The Cape Wind project already holds a federal lease, but lawsuits by local authorities and uncertain financing have delayed construction.

Mr. Grybowski, the developer working on a New Jersey offshore-wind deal, said he was concerned the Interior Department would move forward with its leasing program before the state awarded its own offshore wind-power incentives. In that case, a company could win a federal lease only to see a competitor secure backing from the state.

At an event in Baltimore highlighting Thursday's announcement, Mr. Salazar stood with Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, in an effort to show the administration is working with states to eliminate hurdles for the industry.

What is "fast reactor" technology?

2012-02-02T08:40:00.006-05:00

The concept of nuclear reactors that consume their own waste as fuel was being touted by Bill Gates a while back when he decided to tackle the energy issue. I'm not sure how seriously he was taken back then. Then came the tsunami disaster in Japan and talk about nukes in general quieted down.

Well, it's clear that the nuclear energy is not going to totally disappear from the scene -- especially since they know that climate change is real and that the longer we procrastinate and delay taking decisive action to mitigate it by deploying renewable energy technologies like offshore wind, the more attractive their option will become. (GW)

New generation of nuclear reactors could consume radioactive waste as fuel

The new 'fast' plants could provide enough low-carbon electricity to power the UK for more than 500 years

By Duncan Clark
Guardian
2 February 2012

A new generation of "fast" nuclear reactors could consume Britain's radioactive waste stockpile as fuel, providing enough low-carbon electricity to power the country for more than 500 years, according to figures confirmed by the chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc).

Britain's large stockpile of nuclear waste includes more than 100 tonnes of plutonium and 35,000 tonnes of depleted uranium. The plutonium in particular presents a security risk as a potential target for terrorists and will cost billions to dispose of safely. The government is currently considering options for disposing of or managing it.

Decc's preferred option is to build a plant to combine the plutonium with other materials in so-called mixed-oxide fuel (Mox), which is less dangerous than the current plutonium-oxide powder. However, there is currently no large-scale capacity for consuming Mox fuel, and the previous Mox plant at Sellafield has been shut after being beset by operating and financial problems. In addition, Mox fuel allows only a tiny proportion of the energy in the waste to be converted into electricity.

The engineering firm GE Hitachi has submitted an alternative proposal based on their Prism fast reactor, which could consume the plutonium as fuel while generating electricity.

"It's a very elegant idea that we should try and use [the waste] as efficiently as possible. I definitely find it an attractive idea", said Prof David MacKay, Decc's chief scientific adviser.

Recent news reports have suggested this proposal has been rejected by the government and Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) on the grounds of being too far from commercial viability.

However, the Guardian has confirmed that talks between GE Hitachi, Decc and the NDA are continuing. MacKay told the Guardian: "My position as chief scientific adviser at Decc is that I think Prism is an interesting design and I'd like to see [details about its credibility] worked out."

A spokesperson for the NDA said: "The statement that the NDA has rejected the GE Hitachi Prism reactor is completely without foundation." He added that the current round of discussions "might last about six months".

Fast reactor technology was developed by the US government over many decades until 1994 when President Clinton terminated all nuclear power research. GE Hitachi's Prism reactor is a commercial offshoot of that government-funded research. No Prism reactors have yet been sold, but GE believes it could construct one in just a few years plus the time taken to license the technology.

The reactor is a fixed small size, producing around 311MW of power – equivalent to 100 large wind turbines running non-stop or a quarter of a conventional nuclear plant. The reactor core is submerged in a pool of liquid sodium, which acts as a coolant, transferring the heat to the turbines where electricity is generated. Designers say that passive safety features ensure that the reactor won't go into meltdown if its power source is cut off, which is what happened in last year's accident at Fukushima, Japan.

In the proposal currently under discussion, a pair of Prism reactors would be installed at Sellafield and optimised to consume the plutonium stockpile as quickly as possible. If, however, the government decided to prioritise low-carbon power generation rather than rapid waste disposal, a larger number of Prism reactors could theoretically be combined with a fuel recycling system to extract as much electricity as possible from the plutonium and depleted uranium.

According to new figures calculated for the Guardian by the American writer and fast reactor advocate Tom Blees, this alternative approach could – given a large enough number of reactors – produce enough low-carbon electricity from Britain's waste stockpile to supply the UK at current rates of demand for more than 500 years.

MacKay confirmed this figure. "As an upper bound on what you could get from those resources in fast reactors I think it's a very reasonable estimate. In reality you'd get all kinds of issues so you wouldn't achieve the upper bound but I still think it's a reasonable starting point."

However, he added that free or low-cost fuel wasn't in itself sufficient to make inexpensive nuclear energy. "When you think about the economics of the low-carbon transition, it isn't the nuclear fuel that's the expensive bit – it's the power stations and the other facilities that go with them."

The cost of any Prism installation would depend on unknown quantities including the details of the licensing requirements. However, Eric Loewen, chief engineer at GE Hitachi nuclear, claims that the technology should be economically competitive due to its small and fixed-size modular design, which allows it to be produced in an off-site factory.

MacKay said, "I think it's credible that it could be cheaper [than Mox] but it's up to GE to tell us the price tag". He added that the alternative option of making Mox would not be easy either. "

You have to make a big facility to make the Mox fuel and you need to have a load of reactors that can accept the Mox fuel, and we don't have either of those in place yet."

MacKay also said that he supported "long-term research and development" into new reactor technologies that could be safer and more efficient than current designs. He argued that such research should not be seen as a threat to renewable technologies such as wind and solar, which were crucial but not sufficient on their own to meet the UK's ambitious carbon targets.

"If you've seriously looked at ways of making plans that add up you come to the conclusion that you need almost everything and you need it very fast – right now. You need all the credible technologies that can develop at scale … I don't think anyone serious would say that we only need nuclear … but similarly I think it's unrealistic to say we could get there solely with renewables."

Another next-generation nuclear technology that convert nuclear waste into plentiful electricity is the molten salt reactor (MSR), also know as the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR).

MacKay said the MSR is "another design that looks very interesting and I think the first prototype will probably get built in the USA in the next few years, if the thorium advocates over there are successful – and I'm going to be very interested to see how it works. On paper, that kind of reactor could burn up plutonium as well, but we'd need detailed designs that are costed before we can seriously consider that option."

2011: 9th warmest year since 1880

2012-02-01T08:24:00.006-05:00

I used to think of our country as the frog sitting in a pan of water on the stove where the flame is being turned up every so gradually that the frog doesn't notice things are getting hot until it's too late. Now I simply consider us to be the ostrich with it's head stuck .... I'll let you finish the sentence. (GW)

Nasa's global temperatures in 2011 – big picture

Researchers at Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies have released their annual analysis of global temperatures.

Researchers at Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have released their annual analysis of global temperatures, noting that Earth’s land and ocean surfaces continue to experience higher temperatures than several decades ago. Nine of the top 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000. Last year was another one of them, coming in at 9th warmest since 1880. The map below shows temperature anomalies, or changes, by region in 2011.

The world is getting warmer. Whether the cause is human activity or natural variability—and the preponderance of evidence says it’s likely humans—thermometer readings all around the world have risen steadily since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. (Click on dates above to step through the decades.)

According to an ongoing temperature analysis conducted by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and shown in this series of maps, the average global temperature on Earth has increased by about 0.8°Celsius (1.4°Fahrenheit) since 1880. Two-thirds of the warming has occurred since 1975, at a rate of roughly 0.15-0.20°C per decade.

But why should we care about one degree of warming? After all, the temperature fluctuates by many degrees every day where we live.

The global temperature record represents an average over the entire surface of the planet. The temperatures we experience locally and in short periods can fluctuate significantly due to predictable cyclical events (night and day, summer and winter) and hard-to-predict wind and precipitation patterns. But the global temperature mainly depends on how much energy the planet receives from the Sun and how much it radiates back into space—quantities that change very little. The amount of energy radiated by the Earth depends significantly on the chemical composition of the atmosphere, particularly the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

A one-degree global change is significant because it takes a vast amount of heat to warm all the oceans, atmosphere, and land by that much. In the past, a one- to two-degree drop was all it took to plunge the Earth into the Little Ice Age. A five-degree drop was enough to bury a large part of North America under a towering mass of ice 20,000 years ago.

The maps above show temperature anomalies, or changes, not absolute temperature. They depict how much various regions of the world have warmed or cooled when compared with a base period of 1951-1980. (The global mean surface air temperature for that period was estimated to be 14°C (57°F), with an uncertainty of several tenths of a degree.) In other words, the maps show how much warmer or colder a region is compared to the norm for that region from 1951-1980.

The data set begins in 1880 because observations did not have sufficient global coverage prior to that time. The period of 1951-1980 was chosen largely because the U.S. National Weather Service uses a three-decade period to define “normal” or average temperature. The GISS temperature analysis effort began around 1980, so the most recent 30 years was 1951-1980. It is also a period when many of today’s adults grew up, so it is a common reference that many people can remember.

To conduct its analysis, GISS uses publicly available data from 6,300 meteorological stations around the world; ship-based and satellite observations of sea surface temperature; and Antarctic research station measurements. These three data sets are loaded into a computer analysis program—available for public download from the GISS web site—that calculates trends in temperature anomalies relative to the average temperature for the same month during 1951-1980.

The objective, according to GISS scientists, is to provide an estimate of temperature change that could be compared with predictions of global climate change in response to atmospheric carbon dioxide, aerosols, and changes in solar activity.

As the maps show, global warming doesn’t mean temperatures rose everywhere at every time by one degree. Temperatures in a given year or decade might rise 5 degrees in one region and drop 2 degrees in another. Exceptionally cold winters in one region might be followed by exceptionally warm summers. Or a cold winter in one area might be balanced by an extremely warm winter in another part of the globe.

Generally, warming is greater over land than over the oceans because water is slower to absorb and release heat (thermal inertia). Warming may also differ substantially within specific land masses and ocean basins.

In the past decade (2000-2009), land temperature changes are 50 percent greater in the United States than ocean temperature changes; two to three times greater in Eurasia; and three to four times greater in the Arctic and the Antarctic Peninsula. Warming of the ocean surface has been largest over the Arctic Ocean, second largest over the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans, and third largest over most of the Atlantic Ocean.

In the analysis, the years from 1880 to 1950 tend to appear cooler (more blues than reds), growing less cool as we move toward the 1950s. Decades within the base period do not appear particularly warm or cold because they are the standard against which all decades are measured. The leveling off between the 1940s and 1970s may be explained by natural variability and possibly by cooling effects of aerosols generated by the rapid economic growth after World War II.

Fossil fuel use also increased in the post-War era (5 percent per year), boosting greenhouse gases. But aerosol cooling is more immediate, while greenhouse gases accumulate slowly and take much longer to leave the atmosphere. The strong warming trend of the past three decades likely reflects a shift from comparable aerosol and greenhouse gas effects to a predominance of greenhouse gases, as aerosols were curbed by pollution controls, according to GISS director Jim Hansen.

References
Hansen, J., R. Ruedy, M. Sato, and K. Lo (2010). Global surface temperature change. Reviews of Geophysics, doi:10.1029/2010RG000345, in press.
National Academy of Sciences (2010). Advancing the Science of Climate Change. Accessed December 1, 2010.
National Academy of Sciences (2006, July 27). Testimony to U.S. House of Representatives -- Climate Change: Evidence and Future Projections. Accessed November 30, 2010.
NASA (2010, January 21). 2009: Second Warmest Year on Record; End of Warmest Decade. Accessed November 30, 2010.
NASA (2010, January 21). NASA Climatologist Gavin Schmidt Discusses the Surface Temperature Record. Accessed November 30, 2010.
NASA Earth Observatory (2010, June 3) Fact Sheet: Global Warming. November 30, 2010.
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (n.d.). GISS Surface Temperature Analysis. Accessed November 30, 2010.
NOAA National Climatic Data Center (n.d.). Global Warming Frequently Asked Questions. Accessed December 1, 2010.
NOAA Paleoclimatology. (n.d.) Climate Timeline Tool: Climate Resources for 1000 Years. Accessed December 1, 2010.
NOAA Satellite and Information Service (2010, July) State of the Climate in 2009. Accessed December 1, 2010.

The connected car has finally arrived

2012-01-31T08:59:00.003-05:00

It is time to completely re-think our notion of transportation. We need an automotive Steve Jobs. Lacking that, our friends at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are pretty good at tackling these kind of challenges. For example, take a peek at "Reinventing the Automobile".

Beyond the Personal Automobile

Information technology means we can rethink transportation

By Dan Sturges
Technology Review
January 31, 2012

The connected car has finally arrived. Our smart phones sync up with our dashboards, and soon vehicle-to-vehicle communication could make car crashes a thing of the past. Ford recently announced it's working on a "smart seat" that will detect when a driver is having a heart attack. What could be better?

How about using technology to allow millions of us to move beyond car ownership? You won't hear large automobile companies talk about it, but information technology gives society the greatest chance in decades to rethink transportation. Instead of cars equipped with medical sensors, I would like to see fewer cars and more room for bike paths. A little exercise will make our hearts stronger.

In America, nearly all of us has a personal automobile, available at our doorstep at all times. This is immensely convenient. It provides access to work and opportunity. But it brings familiar problems: billions of dollars sent each year to the Middle East, growing carbon dioxide emissions, traffic, noise pollution, and paving over of green space. Only a quarter of us can get to work using public transportation in 90 minutes or less. About 50 percent of urban land is dedicated to transportation. In Denver, where I live, the average car has 1.1 occupants. When I see someone driving with nothing but a hat on the passenger seat, I feel as though I am looking backward in time at an early steam engine or some other immensely inefficient contraption.

Urban density is an important consideration when thinking about what a different transportation system could look like. New York City, Boston, and downtown Chicago have a high urban density and can be considered "thick" cities, while most of Phoenix, Atlanta, and Denver have lower densities, making them "thin" cities. It's our thick cities where it is easiest to live without a car. In these cities, "multimodal" transportation is already a reality. It's easy to swing from one mode to another like Tarzan swinging across a jungle by vines. People walk, take the subway, grab a cab, and walk some more.

Now we're seeing the beginning of what's called intelligent multimodal transportation. Smart phones allow us to instantly rent a bike, carpool with someone just a mile up the road, find a bus, and even "ping a ride" with a car service or cab to get where we are going. Car-sharing services like Zipcar are viable businesses today in our thickest cities, because users can easily reach a shared car on foot after pulling up its location on their phone. In thick cities, technology is rapidly making it even more convenient to live without owning a car.

In our thin cities and suburban areas, it is far more difficult to reach transit, and so most people still own their own automobile. There's not much of a jungle yet. Can we move beyond the personal automobile in such areas?

I think any transition would have to start with the roughly 70 million commuters in the United States. The recipe for making car ownership less necessary for them requires three main ingredients. First, we need express "trunk line" transit services (trains, buses, vans, or carpools) from residential neighborhoods to areas where people work. Next, people will need local, short-distance transportation in the form of a bike, low-cost taxi, shuttle, or small personal vehicle to get to and from the trunk line service. Finally, car-sharing services—like Zipcar or peer-to-peer services like Getaround or RelayRides—need to be available near both work and home so people can have access to a car when they need one.

I call the transfer points where local transportation meets the trunk line services "GoPoints." These points would be located every three or four miles across the suburban area surrounding a metropolitan region. Our current train, light rail, and bus rapid transit stations are already GoPoints, but we would need many more (a flag in a shopping mall's parking lot could serve as one). And we would need thriving regional and local transportation services connecting to them.

The system would be similar to our national airport network. It would require users to have both easy access to their local GoPoint and a convenient "last mile" service to let them reach their final destination. Who would want to fly to an airport in another city that did not offer car rental, taxis, or shuttles for that purpose? Technologies like GPS and smart phones are critical in organizing our movement around such hubs and finding the fastest, most convenient transportation home.

Beyond helping commuters, the GoPoint system would enable millions of seniors and youth to get where they need to go across their city or region without needing to own a car. We have an opportunity to integrate piecemeal mobility innovations into meaningful solutions for consumers in both thick and thin cities. Seizing that opportunity will reduce the footprint of our transportation system and allow us to convert a portion of our roadways and parking areas into bike and pedestrian paths.

Dan Sturges is former GM car designer, inventor of the GEM neighborhood vehicle, and a member of the Transportation Research Board. His work on sustainable mobility reform can be found at www.wheelchange.us.

Pesticides: subtle and malicious

2012-01-30T08:16:00.005-05:00

Pesticides are big business. Companies like Monsanto that produce them and other agri-chemicals are joined at the hip with industrial farms whose unsustainable "pharming" practices have resulted in their chemical addiction (see the graphic at the bottom of this post for a depiction of the products produced by Monsanto).

Similar to their fossil fuel counterparts, pesticide manufacturers are not responsible for the"externalities" their products cause. You and I pay for that. Now it would appear, so are the bees. (GW)

Pesticides blamed for bee decline

New formulas make colonies more prone to disease, research finds. Jonathan Owen reports

By Jonathan Owen
The Independent
29 January 2012

Compelling new evidence from the US government's top bee expert that modern pesticides may be a major cause of collapsing bee populations led to calls yesterday for the chemicals to be banned.

A study published in the current issue of the German science journal Naturwissenschaften, reveals how bees given minute doses of the widely used pesticide imidacloprid became more vulnerable to infections from a deadly parasite, nosema.

Bee experts described this as clear evidence of the role pesticides play in the plight of bees. Although research into the furry insects may seem like a very academic exercise, bees are vital to human survival. More than 70 of the 100 crops that provide 90 per cent of the world's food are pollinated by bees, and Albert Einstein once predicted that if bees died out, "man would have no more than four years to live."

The study, led by Dr Jeffrey Pettis, the head of the US Department of Agriculture's Bee Research Laboratory, says: "We believe that subtle interactions between pesticides and pathogens, such as demonstrated here, could be a major contributor to increased mortality of honey bee colonies worldwide."

Researchers found that bees deliberately exposed to minute amounts of the pesticide were, on average, three times as likely to become infected when exposed to a parasite called nosema as those that had not. The findings, which have taken more than three years to be published, add weight to concern that a new group of insecticides called neonicotinoids are behind a worldwide decline in honey bees, along with habitat and food loss, by making them more susceptible to disease.

Buglife, the invertebrate conservation charity, is calling for a ban on the controversial pesticides. Its director, Matt Shardlow, said yesterday: "The science is now clear, bees poisoned by neonicotinoid pesticides are much more likely to die from disease, gather less food and produce fewer new bees." He added: "Buglife's 2009 review of the science of environmental impacts from neonicotinoid pesticides showed that there was serious cause for concern. We called for a ban then, and as subsequent research has only added to concerns, including the revelation that neonicotinoids make bees prone to a diseased death, we are repeating our call for these toxins to be banned."

The Government needs to take urgent action, said Tim Lovett, of the British Beekeepers Association. He backs the findings of the new research: "Their conclusions are right ... here is some data that would appear to suggest links between widely used pesticides and pathogens."

Imidacloprid is the bestselling neonicotinoid made by Bayer CropScience, earning the company hundreds of millions of pounds a year. Neonicotinoids are "systemic" pesticides. Instead of spraying plants they are used to treat seeds – effectively becoming part of the plant, including the pollen and nectar that bees and other pollinating insects carry away. Concern over their effects on bees has led to restrictions on their use in Germany, Italy, France, and Slovenia.

Dr Julian Little, a spokesman for Bayer CropScience, sought to dismiss the new findings yesterday: "The key issue here is that Jeff Pettis's studies were carried out in the laboratory and not the open air." He added: "Bee health is really important, but focusing on pesticides diverts attention away from the very real issues of bee parasites and diseases – that is where Bayer is focusing its effort."

But Professor Simon Potts, of the Centre for Agri-Environmental Research at the University of Reading, disagrees: "Most reports of direct impacts of pesticides on bee mortality are usually due to the incorrect application of pesticides on farmland,," he said. "However, the Pettis study should be taken as a warning that we may need to look much more carefully at the indirect effect of pesticides."

What Monsanto Makes (click on image to enlarge)

What, me worry?

2012-01-29T08:15:00.005-05:00

Within weeks of the Environmental Protection Agency's report that identifies fossil fuel-burning power plants as the major source of greenhouse gas emissions, the Wall Street Journal rounds up a group of climate change deniers and absolves the Koch brothers and their cronies of doing anything that even borders on being irresponsible. (GW)

No Need to Panic About Global Warming

There's no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy.

Wall Street Journal
January 27, 2012

Editor's Note: The following has been signed by the 16 scientists listed at the end of the article:

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about "global warming." Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"

In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word "incontrovertible" from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question "cui bono?" Or the modern update, "Follow the money."

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.

Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

If elected officials feel compelled to "do something" about climate, we recommend supporting the excellent scientists who are increasing our understanding of climate with well-designed instruments on satellites, in the oceans and on land, and in the analysis of observational data. The better we understand climate, the better we can cope with its ever-changing nature, which has complicated human life throughout history. However, much of the huge private and government investment in climate is badly in need of critical review.

Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of "incontrovertible" evidence.

Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.

“Landscape of Slavery"

2012-01-28T07:41:00.009-05:00

We live in a world of contradictions. More often than not there are disconnects between our intellectual beliefs and the way we actually live our lives. Climate change presents us with such a dilemma today. Many of our nation's "Founding Fathers" lived with a major contradiction. Was Thomas Jefferson conflicted or was he a hypocrite? (GW)

Life, Liberty and the Fact of Slavery

By Edward Rothstein
New York Times
January 26, 2012

WASHINGTON — The astounding thing about American slavery is not that it existed — the enslavement of one people by another may be one of history’s universals — but that it persisted. It lasted into an era when its absence could be imagined and its presence could become an outrage.

That was one of the chilling peculiarities of slavery in the United States: As revolutionary ideas of human rights and liberty were being formulated, slavery was so widely accepted that contradictions between the evolving ideals and the brutish reality of enslavement were overlooked or tolerated.

We look back now, shocked at the cognitive and moral perversity. And that is one reason why a prevalent reaction has been to assert that the champions of those revolutionary ideals were hypocrites, including 12 of the first 18 American presidents, who were slave owners.

But that too-familiar judgment brings us to the most challenging example of all: Thomas Jefferson. And two new exhibitions come to a far more subtle and illuminating assessment of the past. Jefferson’s relationship to slavery is the subject of an important exhibition opening on Friday at the National Museum of American History here, “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty.” It was created by the nascent National Museum of African American History and Culture in conjunction with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Jefferson’s extraordinary plantation, Monticello, as a historical home and museum in Charlottesville, Va.

The Washington exhibition will have a permanent counterpart opening next month at Monticello itself, where Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of Independence, kept as many as 130 slaves. Expanding the already significant examination of slavery at the estate, “Landscape of Slavery: Mulberry Row at Monticello,” will consist of outdoor displays mounted alongside sites of labor uncovered through archeological digs.

Such research has been going on for two generations, disclosing the material lives of both hired and enslaved workers: their demolished dwellings and work houses are revealed through Jefferson’s notes, stone foundations, kitchen utensils, shattered pottery, belt buckles and other artifacts. Monticello’s outdoor exhibition is also part of a major transformation over the past two generations; once a sacral architectural monument to Jefferson’s genius, Monticello has evolved into a more complex reflection of the man and the 5,000-acre plantation that he owned.

These projects are difficult and ambitious, not just for Monticello but also for the African-American museum, which is scheduled to open in 2015. Lonnie G. Bunch III, the museum’s director, emphasized in a conversation that the Washington show is part of the institution’s attempt to explore how slavery might ultimately be presented.

Could any example pose a greater challenge? Jefferson didn’t just embrace the new nation’s ideals; he gave voice to our conception of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” What does it mean that such a man not only held slaves but also devoted considerable attention to their status, their mode of life and, yes, their profitability? What was the connection between his ideals and the blunt reality? These are not just biographical questions; they are national ones.

It is to the credit of the Washington exhibition’s creators — Rex Ellis, associate director of the African-American museum and Elizabeth Chew, a curator at Monticello — that we are not given the answers but are given enough information and perspective to begin to think about the issues, helped along by objects from Monticello as well as the new museum’s growing collection.

We enter the show’s 3,000-square-foot space seeing a life-size statue of Jefferson (created by StudioEIS in Brooklyn), standing in front of a red panel on which are inscribed the names (when known) of some 600 slaves who worked on his estates during his lifetime. In front of the display is the lap desk on which Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, a desk that was probably constructed by John Hemmings, Jefferson’s enslaved cabinetmaker (who used that spelling of his name), part of the now-renowned Hemings family (one of whom, Sally, is thought by many historians to have had a special relationship with Jefferson and borne him children).

The contradictions in notions of liberty could not be more graphically presented. The intention is not to turn a great man into a villain but rather to examine just how those contradictions expressed themselves. Jefferson called slavery an “abominable crime,” we are told, but also felt unable to extricate himself from what he called its “deplorable entanglement.”

We learn of his practical efforts to restrict slavery, including his introduction of a Virginia law in 1778 prohibiting the importation of slaves, and signing, as president, a national version of that law in 1807, just weeks before Britain outlawed the slave trade. We read too that in 1788, he wrote, “Nobody will be more willing to encounter every sacrifice” in order to abolish slavery.

Clearly, though, he was not so willing. He also harbored some condescending racial views (partly contradicted by other writings). And Jefferson inherited his father’s plantation and slaves; at one point he was one of the wealthiest men in Virginia (though to pay his enormous debts after his death, Monticello and “130 valuable negroes” — as the advertisement put it — were auctioned).

As the exhibition also emphasizes, he was a man of the Enlightenment represented by his books (Homer, Livy, Shakespeare), his scientific apparatus (including a telescope) and his devotion to the powers of reason and the value of skepticism (his inkwell here is in the shape of Voltaire’s head).

But we do not learn of these passions in order to have them dismissed. Gradually, as we work through the central gallery, we see them haltingly, falteringly applied, affecting the enslaved communities at Monticello. Displays are organized around a series of slave families, many of whom were at the estate for generations — the Hemingses, of course (as many as 70 family members were at Monticello), but also the Fossett family, the Grangers and the Hubbard brothers. (Perhaps no other plantation has such extensive documentation of its slaves.)

As the historian Lucia Stanton points out in an invaluable new companion book (“ ‘Those Who Labor for My Happiness’: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello”), Jefferson paternalistically referred to the slave community as part of his family. He encouraged marriages within the Monticello world and tried to keep families together; the exhibition points out that “slave marriage was illegal in Virginia,” but that at Monticello “enduring unions were the norm.” Some slaves were also taught to read and write by the Jeffersons.

There is no idealization here of course. Each family became associated with particular kinds of labor, represented here by archeological artifacts. We see the products, for example, of the “nailery” that Jefferson had set up in order to turn a profit on the manufacture of nails. There is acknowledgment too of cruelty, of overseers who overstepped, of ideals put aside.

But there is also a growing sense that within a system of corrupting ideas and Jefferson’s crippling self-interest a struggle was going on for some other vision of humanity, not just within Jefferson but also among the enslaved.

The most remarkable phenomenon is evident in the last gallery: Many descendants of Monticello slaves became community leaders. A project interviewing them began at Monticello in 1993; it discovered, we are told, a tradition of dedication to education, faith, family and freedom.

Peter Fossett, a descendant of the blacksmith Joseph Fossett , for example, became a minister active in the Underground Railroad and founded the First Baptist Church in Cumminsville, Ohio, in 1870. Another Fossett descendant, William Monroe Trotter, founded the Niagara Movement with W. E. B. Dubois in 1905, declaring that “all men were created free and equal, with certain inalienable rights.” One of the Hemings descendants, Frederick Madison Roberts, became the first black member of the California legislature.

This suggests that there was something distinctive about this community, but also that Jefferson’s own ideals must have had an impact, surviving even the debilitating and humiliating institution of slavery.

This is something that comes through at Monticello as well. Its senior curator Susan R. Stein has made it clear that in Jefferson’s day, Monticello wasn’t a temple on a hill (though it is so beautiful, one warms to worship) but a miniature city in the countryside with its central home just yards from Mulberry Row, where the sounds of small industry — textile making, blacksmithing, woodworking — must have mixed with voices of laborers in the fields and where the lives of the enslaved were enmeshed with the life of their master. But this does not undercut our sense of Jefferson’s genius.

Yes, there are times when the balance teeters a bit. Just as Monticello must be seen whole so too must Jefferson’s achievements, and right now the exhibitions need a more deliberate elaboration of his ideas and life. There are times when the Washington exhibition also seems to push too far; it begins by observing that Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence “did not extend ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’ to African-Americans, Native Americans, indentured servants, or women.” This is political boilerplate; each of those cases needs different qualifications and examinations. They distract from the subject.

But the fates of Monticello descendants suggest that alongside the tragic consequences of American slavery there is something else: a growing belief in clearly defined rights and promised possibilities. If slavery was, throughout global history, the rule, the exception was the last 200 years of gradual worldwide abolition. And Jefferson, for all his “deplorable entanglement,” helped make it possible.

De-evolution

2012-01-27T08:12:00.005-05:00

"Just over 5 years ago, the scientific community turned its attention to a courtroom in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Eleven parents sued their Dover, Pennsylvania, school board to overturn a policy explicitly legitimizing intelligent design creationism. The case, Kitzmiller v. Dover, followed a familiar script: Local citizens wanted their religious values validated by the science curriculum; prominent academics testified to the scientific consensus on evolution; and creationists lost decisively. Intelligent design was not science, held the court, but rather an effort to advance a religious view via public schools, a violation of the U.S. Constitution's Establishment Clause (1). Many scientists cheered the decision, agreeing with the court that the school board displayed “breathtaking inanity” [p. 765 (1)]. We suggest that the cheering was premature and the victory incomplete."

From "Defeating Creationism in the Courtroom, But Not in the Classroom"

Oklahoma bill attacks evolution and climate change

National Center for Science Education News

January 20th, 2012

SB 1742 is evidently modeled in part on the so-called Louisiana Science Education Act, passed and enacted in 2008 as Louisiana Revised Louisiana Revised Statutes 17:285.1; indeed, the bill itself declares, "This act is modeled on a Louisiana law which has not been invalidated by the highest court of the State of Louisiana or a federal district court," adding, "Legal challenges to academic freedom bills have historically alleged that such bills are intended to allow the teaching of creationism or intelligent design. This bill does not propose that schools teach creationism or intelligent design, rather, it is the intent to foster an environment of critical thinking in schools including a scientific critique of the theory of evolution."

The sole sponsor of SB 1742 is Josh Brecheen (R-District 6). In 2011, Brecheen introduced Senate Bill 554, which combined a different version of the "academic freedom language" — referring to "the scientific strengths [and] scientific weaknesses of controversial topics ... [which] include but are not limited to biological origins of life and biological evolution" — with a directive for the state board of education to adopt "standards and curricula" that echo the flawed portions of the state science standards adopted in Texas in 2009 with respect to the nature of science and evolution. SB 554 apparently died in committee on February 28, 2011, when a deadline for senate bills to be reported from committee passed.

Before Brecheen filed SB 554, he announced his intention to file antievolution legislation in a column in the Durant Daily Democrat (December 19, 2010): "Renowned scientists now asserting that evolution is laden with errors are being ignored. ... Using your tax dollars to teach the unknown, without disclosing the entire scientific findings[,] is incomplete and unacceptable." In a subsequent column in the newspaper (December 24, 2010), he indicated that his intention was to have creationism presented as scientifically credible, writing, "I have introduced legislation requiring every publically funded Oklahoma school to teach the debate of creation vs. evolution using the known science, even that which conflicts with Darwin's religion."

Oklahomans concerned about SB 1742 are urged to get in touch with Eric Meikle at NCSE and the grassroots organization Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education.

SENATE BILL 1742 By: Brecheen

AS INTRODUCED

An Act relating to school curriculum; creating the Oklahoma Science Education Act; providing short title; providing legislative intent; providing for the assistance of teachers in teaching scientific curriculum; promoting critical thinking; allowing for open discussion of scientific theories; directing teachers to teach certain material; allowing supplemental material to be taught; prohibiting the promotion of a particular belief system; directing the State Board of Education to adopt rules; providing for codification; providing for noncodification; providing an effective date; and declaring an emergency.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF OKLAHOMA:

SECTION 1. NEW LAW A new section of law to be codified in the Oklahoma Statutes as Section 11-103.12 of Title 70, unless there is created a duplication in numbering, reads as follows:

This act shall be known and may be cited as the "Oklahoma Science Education Act".

SECTION 2. NEW LAW A new section of law not to be codified in the Oklahoma Statutes reads as follows:.

Recognizing the importance of critical thinking, logical analysis and objective discussion in education it is the intent of the Legislature to foster an environment in public schools where such learning occurs. This act is modeled on a Louisiana law which has not been invalidated by the highest court of the State of Louisiana or a federal district court. Legal challenges to academic freedom bills have historically alleged that such bills are intended to allow the teaching of creationism or intelligent design. This bill does not propose that schools teach creationism or intelligent design, rather, it is the intent to foster an environment of critical thinking in schools including a scientific critique of the theory of evolution.

SECTION 3. NEW LAW A new section of law to be codified in the Oklahoma Statutes as Section 11-103.13 of Title 70, unless there is created a duplication in numbering, reads as follows:

A. The State Board of Education, upon the request of a school district board of education, shall allow and assist teachers, principals, and school administrators in creating an environment within the public school system that promotes critical thinking, logical analysis, open and objective discussion of scientific theories including, but not limited to, evolution, the origin of life, global warming, and human cloning. Assistance shall include support and guidance for teachers regarding effective ways to help students understand, analyze, critique, and objectively review scientific theories being studied, including those enumerated in this subsection.

B. A teacher shall teach the material presented in the standard science textbook and may use supplemental textbooks and instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner.

C. This act shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine or set of religious beliefs.

D. The State Board of Education shall adopt rules to implement the provisions of this act.

SECTION 4. This act shall become effective July 1, 2012.

SECTION 5. It being immediately necessary for the preservation of the public peace, health and safety, an emergency is hereby declared to exist, by reason whereof this act shall take effect and be in full force from and after its passage and approval.

"climatic debt"

2012-01-26T08:38:00.004-05:00

OK, I promise to resume posting more positive stories soon. For now, I am on a mission to convey a sense of urgency around climate change. The subtle and not-so-subtle signs that something very serious is happening are all around us.

Some species are already finding it difficult to keep up with changing environments and habitats. What will happen if the system "hiccups" and flips to a new regime? The answer is that humans will likely be added to that list. (GW)

Animals can't keep up with climate change

Study of 11,000 bird and butterfly species shows many are at risk

By Paul Bignell
The Independent
January 22, 2012

Animal and insect species in Europe are losing the fight to keep up with rapid changes in climate in a new phenomenon dubbed "climatic debt", according to an international study.

More than 11,000 bird and butterfly species were analysed over 20 years by scientists in the largest study of its kind. Releasing some of the data for the first time, scientists reveal how species are failing to keep up as warmer temperatures move north. The findings saw birds lag behind their normal climate zones, on average by 212 kilometres and butterflies by 135km.

Some birds, such as the black and white pied flycatcher, are unable to adapt to the encroaching warmth and are not naturally moving north to cooler areas, according to experts writing in the journal Nature.

Numbers of the pied flycatcher have halved in the UK since 1995 – researchers believe the birds are not breeding as prolifically as they used to because of rising temperatures. Others, like the golden plover, are in danger of extinction as traditional food sources disappear. The plover's main food source – the cranefly – cannot survive in warmer temperatures.

Experts believe the species at risk are just the tip of the iceberg. Some 9,400 bird and 2,100 butterfly species were monitored. Birds and butterflies were selected because of the vast amount of data that already exists on them – British butterfly records have been kept since the 15th century. The scientists believe other animal species are suffering in similar ways.

Scientists also found a growing gap between birds and butterflies which is having an adverse affect on birds' food supplies because many bird species depend on caterpillars as a staple food.

It was previously thought that bird and butterfly species would swiftly react to changes in climate because of their ability to fly large distances. It is not yet known how the phenomenon will affect the greater ecosystem.

Tom Brereton, head of monitoring at Butterfly Conservation, said: "All animals live in a space in which the climate is suitable. That is moving north at the moment. What we're finding is we're losing species that are associated with cooler temperatures from our butterfly communities."

Experts are now suggesting some threatened species should be moved to new climate spaces, before they become extinct.

"It's something that's never been an issue before," said Mr Brereton. "Do we let the species become extinct or could we play God a bit and move them into places they've never occurred before?"

James Pearce-Higgins, principal ecologist for climate change at the British Ornithological Society, said: "There are species which can suffer when the temperatures are warm, particularly some of the species that may suffer from drought. Some insects can suffer if winters are too mild – for example, if they're hibernators as adults. If it's cold and damp they can get mouldy and die. It varies very much from species to species. What this work does is very much look at a broad, overall pattern. This is the first time it has been done across Europe."

"climate-smart" agriculture

2012-01-25T07:58:00.003-05:00

It seems as if everyone is getting 'smarter' about climate change with the exception of Congress. Agriculture may very well be the sector most vulnerable to climate change. That should worry us all. It should also be a call to action. (GW)

Scientists urge countries to adopt ‘climate-smart’ agriculture

By Jenny Marusiak
Eco-Business
January 23,2012

Agricultural experts, frustrated with the slow progress on food security issues in climate talks, have called on scientists to aggressively promote rapid, global action on sustainable agriculture.

In the wake of limited success on international agriculture-related climate policy at December’s United Nations climate talks in Durban, scientists writing in the 20 January issue of Science magazine urged their peers to give policy-makers the scientific evidence needed to implement effective policies on agriculture and food security.

The scientists argued for policies that would not only ensure more efficient and environmentally friendly agricultural methods, but also stop the large-scale food wastage that occurs in both developing and wealthy countries.

Such policies would include convincing wealthier countries to reduce food waste and improve health at the same time by promoting healthier, less wasteful purchasing and eating habits. The policies would also entail an overhaul of inefficient distribution systems to reduce food spoilage and unnecessary carbon emissions.

“Scientists have a responsibility to show decision makers what we mean by ‘climate-smart agriculture’ and ‘sustainable intensification,’ and how these strategies are crucial to the success of any global climate change adaptation and mitigation effort,” said Dr Adrián Fernández Bremauntz in a statement. Dr Fernandez is sustainability advisor at the Metropolitan University in Mexico and one of the writers of the article, entitled “What Next for Agriculture After Durban?”

Agriculture has been identified by scientists as both a significant contributor to global warming and a sector that is likely to experience severe impacts from climate change. Those impacts include increased floods and droughts, soil degradation, water shortages and possible increases in destructive pests and diseases.

Dr Fernández and several other authors of the article served on the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change, which presented a set of seven policy recommendations in Durban at an event on agriculture and rural development.

The recommendations from the commission included integrating food security and sustainable agriculture into global and national policies, a substantial increase in global investment in sustainable agriculture and a rapid rise in production levels with reduced negative environmental impacts.

The commission also advised policy-makers to target the people and places most vulnerable to climate change and food insecurity through initiatives such as funds for disaster-stricken areas.

To help policy-makers implement effective policies, the commission called for the establishment of transparent global systems for sharing information on sustainable agriculture and food systems.

While the Science article’s authors acknowledged some progress at the Durban talks – such as the gathering of evidence for evaluation by UN scientists by March, they note that the pace is not nearly fast enough to cope with the rising threats of food insecurity.

“The window of opportunity to avert a humanitarian, environmental and climate crisis is rapidly closing and we need better information and tools for managing tradeoffs in how we grow our food and use our resources,” said Professor Molly Jahn of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who also contributed to the article.

This improved information will begin with the scientists targeted by the Science article, who have been urged to ‘lay the groundwork for more decisive action’ when the world’s leaders meet at the United Nations Rio+20 environment summit in Brazil in June.

Another signatory of the article, Professor Bob Scholes of South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, said, “There are clearly major opportunities this year for scientists to provide the evidence required to rapidly generate new investments and policies.”

He added that those investments and policies can ensure that the agricultural sector both adapts to climate change impacts and reduces the greenhouse gas emissions it produces.

The agricultural sector is threatened by more than climate change, note scientists.

In recent months, researchers have been warning that farming suffers from what Sir John identified in his Durban presentation as ‘three lost decades of agricultural research’, which have led to unsustainable farming practices that threaten global food security and natural resources.

He noted that in less than 15 years the global food system will be expected to feed an additional one billion people.

But scientists are warning that not only will the agricultural sector struggle to increase the amount of food it produces; it may face a decline due to widespread degradation of farmland.

According to the commission, the world loses an estimated 12 million hectares of agricultural and to degradation each year.

A study ^[1] published last August by the UN Environment Programme found that current agricultural trends are destroying the world’s natural resources, particularly its water supplies. Reversing this trend would require integrated land-use planning that coordinates decision-making for farming, biodiversity, water management and air pollution, according to the study.

Another report from the UN – its latest World Economic and Social Survey, found that to stop deteriorating land conditions and depleting natural resources, the world would have to move away from large-scale, intensive agricultural systems as they exist today. Instead, smaller scale farms in developing countries should be improved and expanded using ‘green’ technology that minimised the use of water, energy and chemicals, noted the report.

Asia’s developing countries have a number of projects underway to address sustainable agriculture.

Online news provider Manila Bulletin reported earlier this month that the secretary of the Philippines Department of Agriculture, Proceso J. Alcala, had ordered that climate change adaptation measures be integrated into all departmental programmes and projects this year.

And in Vietnam, where according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation more than half of the labour force works in agriculture, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Planning is drafting a new national agricultural strategy. The strategy is aimed at reducing emissions from agriculture by two per cent, as well as improving agricultural productivity and its economic benefits for the rural poor.

The Commission on Sustainable Agriculture had advocated for initiatives such as these to be supported and informed by internationally integrated efforts and policies.

“Policy makers and scientists need to work together, quickly, to chart a course toward a sustainable global food system,” said the UK’s Sir John Beddington.

Will a smart grid make us smarter?

2012-01-23T06:21:00.008-05:00

The smart grid is a concept whose time has definitely come. It would represent a real commitment to dramatically increase society's efforts to use electricity more efficiently - saving resources, money while enhancing environmental quality.

But the real unanswered question is, will the existence of a smart grid automatically make us more responsible consumers? Will relatively small individual savings be enough to create a significant collective impact? (GW)

ComEd’s Smart Grid Begins With a Promise for the Future
by Bridget O'Shea and James O'Shea
Chicago News Cooperative
January 23, 2012

Substation No. 505 in Oak Park, with its nondescript cluster of bulky transformers and web of power lines, seems an unlikely place for Commonwealth Edison to start the $2.6 billion smart grid it says will prepare the region’s antiquated power system for the digital age.

Arguments raged over legislation, approved last year over Gov. Pat Quinn’s veto, that authorizes ComEd’s 10-year investment in the grid. ComEd says that the project will ultimately save customers more than it costs them. Quinn said he felt the legislation allowed power companies to circumvent a century-old process of setting rates, and thereby weaken oversight by the Illinois Commerce Commission.

Often lost amid the disagreements, however, is the question of how the grid should work and whether it will improve how consumers use electricity. The legislation places Illinois and ComEd squarely in the evolving national movement toward a smart grid.

The Oak Park substation is a pilot project approved in 2009 and is meant to test new technology and the savings it can generate. As ComEd’s first “intelligent” substation, No. 505 is outfitted with scores of state-of-the-art electronic sensors that monitor the flow of electricity. The sensors can analyze up to 1,500 pieces of information every two seconds and alert ComEd managers when — or even before — a problem happens.

Microprocessors can almost instantly switch a troubled line to an alternative power source and minimize outages, said Rich Gordus Jr., a smart grid manager at ComEd.

Val Jensen, a vice president at ComEd, said the current grid was “relatively dumb, meaning that we put power into the grid at the plant and then it flows according to the law of physics through all of those wires.”

The system, he said, “can’t tell when a power line goes down, when you lose power at your house, when a substation is overloaded or overheated.” ComEd investigates outages only after customers call to complain.

Smart-grid technology, Jensen said, can tell operators whether a fan has malfunctioned, if the system is losing coolants or why a substation is overheating. “Otherwise,” he said, “the only way we could tell is if we sent a person out there to check and then went in and started looking at a bunch of gauges.”

The electric grid extends from the power plant to the meter on individual houses. Bill Kautz, a smart grid expert and petroleum marketing manager at Tellabs, a telecommunications company in Naperville, said upgrading the system into a smart grid typically involved two elements.

The first, he said, is updating transformers, substations and transmission lines. “Anything with power being carried over some form of copper cables degrades over time. The insulators degrade over time so upgrading them is one of the key factors in this.”

Anne Pramaggiore, ComEd’s chief executive officer, estimated that about half of the $2.6 billion cost of the project involved these upgrades. Officials say the upgrades will make the system more efficient and reliable.

Kautz said the second element involves installation of communication systems — technology added to the upgraded system that can alert a network control center of problems over fiber optic cables. Pramaggiore estimated the communication improvements would cost $1.3 billion.

ComEd says that the bill approved last year contains a rate-setting process that protects consumers. The legislation, which ComEd says will initially add about $3 a month to the average utility bill, imposes financial penalties on the company if it fails to deliver on promised savings in the future.

Smart grid advocates say they hope to achieve savings by giving consumers the ability to buy more power at off-peak hours, when electricity costs ComEd less and therefore costs its customers less. Skeptics say there is not much evidence that consumers will take advantage of the technology.

Smart grid advocates often talk of so-called smart meters attached to houses, which are capable of automatically monitoring power usage. They also say appliances outfitted with computer chips can be programmed to run at a time of day when power costs less.

“Now, when you want to dry a load of clothes, you turn on the clothes dryer in your basement and you’re probably not that concerned about when your clothes will be dry,” said David M. Nicol, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “But suppose that dryer was smart enough — and dryers are a high-energy user — that you put your load in and it was programmed to say, well I want this done within 12 hours but choose a time when energy is cheaper, and so you just leave it to the computer.”

Nicol said smart dryers were not yet on the market, but he said the technology exists. Unfortunately, he said, no one really knows how widely consumers will use smart appliances or use power when it is less expensive.

Nicol cited studies that showed consumers did not capitalize on the technology because the relative cost of energy was not high enough. The studies suggest people do not behave different to save only $2 a day.

“People just don’t do that,” Nicol said. “So the way to take advantage of this stuff is to automate if possible but that gets you into a whole raft of other issues. So if you ask me, the jury’s still out.”

Nicol said that if smart devices changed consumer behavior, electric power markets might change as well, and that could affect the price. Power markets are now relatively static — they know how power will be used based on historical yardsticks maintained by utility companies.

But if new devices automatically tell your dryer when it’s cheapest to dry the clothes, he said, then the price of electricity could start to change dynamically according to the time of the day it is used. And that, in turn, would change equations on power markets.

Under this logic, if a utility company knows that it must supply a certain level of power at a certain time of day, it can acquire the electrical capacity on auction markets to make sure that it can supply its customers’ power needs. If, however, the need is constantly changing, demand for power will be less predictable and the utility company will have to adjust its buying patterns, thereby affecting the price.

“When you change the way energy is going to be used by consumers,” Nicol said, “that’s going to affect the markets and it’s going to affect the way people buy and sell power.” The question remains whether those changes will save consumers money or cost them more.

Some watching the nascent development of the smart grid think the industry should push ahead regardless of doubts or challenges. The potential for energy efficiency and environmental benefits, they say, is simply too great.

AARP Illinois backed Quinn’s veto of the smart grid legislation, but Scott Musser, the group’s associate director, said the organization was not completely opposed to the new technology. “It’s who pays for it and what’s the benefit and how is it done,” he said. “Those are things that the legislation didn’t answer. We just know the consumers will be paying for it in the next decade.”

The AARP, he said, will be watching.

Who Will Control the Green Economy?

2012-01-22T08:14:00.006-05:00

I've had numerous conversations with friends who suggest that the best way to establish renewable energy technologies, sustainable agriculture and other "green" industries is to make them more attractive to corporations. However, the problem with a strict, linear interpretation/implementation of "green capitalism" is that you end up trying to force the proverbial square peg in a round hole.

For a variety of reasons, a truly green economy is not compatible with capitalism. Among the biggest fundamental discrepancies are capitalism's dependence on growth and consumption and the existence of an "underclass". Consequently attempts at a synthesis runs the risk of providing an opening for the green economy being co-opted by the powers that be. (GW)

The Green Economy, Boon or Menace?

By Emilio Godoy
Nation of Change
January 21, 2012

The development of the green economy is the subject of pitched debate among specialists. While some believe it will deepen social inequalities and increase corporate control over natural and biological resources, others highlight its potential role in protecting the environment and creating employment.

"The green economy does not challenge current systems of production, such as the agro-alimentary industry, nor does it aim in any way to change patterns of consumption," stressed Silvia Ribeiro, the Latin America director of the non-governmental Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group).

Ribeiro told Tierramérica that some of the most troubling aspects of the green economy include "the massive use of biomass for fuel production, and the use of new technologies like synthetic biology, which can generate high levels of toxicity."

In its study "Who Will Control the Green Economy?", published Dec. 15, 2011, the ETC Group argues that the development of a green economy will primarily benefit large corporations, unless changes are made to the current models of production and consumption of goods and services and international governance.

It reveals that large transnational corporations in the energy, pharmaceutical, food and chemical industries are already forming alliances to exploit biomass and grab control of natural resources like land and water.

The study takes a specific look at a range of different sectors, including synthetic biology, bioinformatics and genome data generation, marine and other aquatic biomass, seeds and pesticides, plant gene banks, fertilizer and mining industries, forestry and paper, the animal pharmaceutical industry and livestock genetics.

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) defines the green economy as "a system of economic activities related to the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services that result in improved human wellbeing over the long term, while not exposing future generations to significant environmental risks and ecological scarcities."

The green economy will be a central theme at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), taking place Jun. 20- 22 in the southern Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, 20 years after the first Earth Summit held in the same city in 1992.

The objective of the conference is to secure renewed political commitment for sustainable development, assess the progress to date and the remaining gaps in the implementation of the outcomes of the major summits on sustainable development, and address new and emerging challenges.

Rio+20 will focus specifically on two themes: a green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication, and the institutional framework for sustainable development.

UNEP has actively promoted the green economy since 2008, although it acknowledges the validity of some of the concerns raised around it.

"The green economy is an imperative. One of its goals is social equity and human wellbeing. The environment is recognized as a source of wealth," U.S. economist Steven Stone, chief of UNEP's Geneva-based Economics and Trade Branch, told Tierramérica.

Stone visited Mexico last week for the presentation of a national prospective study on the green economy, co-produced by the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT) andTecnológico de Monterrey, a private university.

"The real question is whether those who do the greatest damage to the environment are truly contributing to what needs to be done," commented the director of the School of Economics at the public National Autonomous University of Mexico, Roberto Escalante.

"That is why there is a risk that greening the economy will deepen existing inequalities, so that those who have the least will bear the greatest costs of the environmental impacts," he told Tierramérica.

Escalante is conducting a research study, which he expects to complete during the first quarter of this year, on the effects of agriculture and deforestation on the environment, commissioned by SEMARNAT.

In the run-up to Rio+20, civil society organizations in Latin America are promoting a reworking of sustainable development with an emphasis on social and ecological aspects and a new economy to confront poverty and the concentration of wealth.

The World Economic and Social Survey 2011, published by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, recommends the investment of 1.9 billion dollars annually in green technologies over the next 40 years to combat the effects of climate change.

UNEP believes green investment should contribute to reducing the energy and water demands and carbon footprint of the production of goods and services.

"There are many alternatives, and the most convincing is the peasant farming economy, which already accounts for 70 percent of world food production," noted Ribero, whose organization focuses on the environmental, social and economic impacts of new technologies.

The ETC Group study calls for the establishment of antitrust regimes to prevent monopoly control over resources and highlights the central importance of agriculture and food sovereignty.

It also emphasizes the need for greater international awareness around the proposed "techno fixes" which "are not capable of addressing systemic problems of poverty, hunger and environmental crises."

"One of the key issues is the value of nature, which is not taken into account," said Stone. "It is not included in economic calculations. These services need to be valued with limits and regulations."

For his part, Escalante, whose research aims at offering alternatives for low-carbon agricultural production, advocates the use of new technologies, the participation of university institutions, and the formulation of integrated public policies.

"Environmental issues are essentially financial issues. This will be a key subject of discussion at Rio+20. A new vision should prevail, incorporating the prices of the environment in the world of the economy and establishing a scheme that guarantees equity," he stressed.

The Greatest Pirates

2012-01-21T07:59:00.007-05:00

The greatest pirates in the history of the world have been given free reign to undermine democracy and the Earth's ecological integrity by the U.S. Supreme Court. (GW)

We must stop this corporate takeover of American democracy

Unless we can reverse the supreme court's dreadful Citizens United decision, US politics will become a plutocrats' plaything

By Bernie Sanders

Guardian

January 20, 2012

David Koch and Charles G Koch: the US supreme court's Citizens United decision has enabled the industrialists to fund conservative groups to the tune of $200m already in this electoral cycle.

The corporate barbarians are through the gate of American democracy. Not satisfied with their all-pervasive influence on our culture, economy and legislative processes, they want more. They want it all.

Two years ago, the United States supreme court betrayed our Constitution and those who fought to ensure that its protections are enjoyed equally by all persons regardless of religion, race or gender by engaging in an unabashed power-grab on behalf of corporate America. In its now infamous decision in the Citizens United case, five justices declared that corporations must be treated as if they are actual people under the Constitution when it comes to spending money to influence our elections, allowing them for the first time to draw on the corporate checkbook – in any amount and at any time – to run ads explicitly for or against specific candidates.

What's next … a corporate right to vote?

Don't laugh. Just this month, the Republican National Committee filed an amicus brief in a US appeals court contending that the natural extension of the Citizens United rationale is that the century-old ban on corporate contributions directly to candidates and political parties is similarly unconstitutional. They want corporations to be able to sponsor candidates and parties directly while claiming with a straight face this would not result in any sort of corruption. And while, this month, they take no issue with corporations being subject to the existing contribution limits, anyone paying attention knows that eliminating such caps will be corporate America's next prize in its brazen ambition for absolute control over our elections.

The US Constitution has served us very well, but when the supreme court says, for purposes of the first amendment, that corporations are people, that writing checks from the company's bank account is constitutionally-protected speech and that attempts by the federal government and states to impose reasonable restrictions on campaign ads are unconstitutional, our democracy is in grave danger.

I am a proud sponsor of a number of bills that would respond to Citizens United and begin to get a handle on the problem. But something more needs to be done – something more fundamental and indisputable, something that cannot be turned on its head by a rightwing supreme court.

That is why I have introduced a resolution in the Senate (introduced by Representative Ted Deutch in the House) calling for an amendment to the US Constitution that says simply and straightforwardly what everyone – except five members of the United States supreme court – understands: corporations are not people with constitutional rights equal to flesh-and-blood human beings.

Corporations are subject to regulation by the people. Corporations may not make campaign contributions – the law of the land for the last century – or dump unlimited sums of money into our elections. And Congress and states have broad power to regulate all election spending.

I did not introduce this lightly. In fact, I have never sought to amend the Constitution before. The US Constitution is an extraordinary document that, in my view, should not be amended often. In light of the supreme court's Citizens United decision, however, I see no alternative. The ruling has radically changed the nature of our democracy. It has further tilted the balance of power toward the rich and the powerful at a time when the wealthiest people in this country have never had it so good.

At a time when corporations have more than $2tn in cash in their bank accounts, make record-breaking profits and swarm Washington with their lobbyists 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the highest court in the land to suggest that there is just not enough corporate "speech" in our system defies the bounds of reason and sanity. The ruling already has led to plans, for example, by industrialist brothers David and Charles Koch to steer more than $200m – potentially much more – to conservative groups ahead of election day 2012. Karl Rove has similar designs.

Does anybody really believe that that is what American democracy is supposed to be about?

I believe that the Citizens United decision will go down as one of the worst in our country's history – and one that demands an amendment to our Constitution in order to restore sovereign power to the people, as our nation's founders intended.

If we do not reverse it and the culture of corporate dominance over our elections that it has exacerbated, there will be no end to the impact that corporate interests have on our campaigns and our democracy.

Whole lotta shakin' goin' on

2012-01-20T08:37:00.003-05:00

The closer you look at our options for reducing our dependency on foreign sources for energy , the better wind looks. Factor environmental concerns (including, but not limited to climate change) into your considerations and you end up scratching your head and wondering: "What the frack are we doing?"

Fracking Quakes Shake the Shale Gas Industry

Well shutdowns prompted by fracking-induced seismicity may inspire technology tweaks.

By Peter Fairley
Technology Review
January 20, 2012

Geophysicists are increasingly certain that expanding production of shale gas is responsible for a spate of minor earthquakes that have upset some communities and prompted authorities in Arkansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, and the U.K. to shut down some natural-gas operations. The question now, say the experts, is whether the underground operations causing the trouble should be scaled back or more closely monitored to minimize future quakes—and whether the relatively small quakes may yet have the potential trigger truly destructive ones.

At least one shale gas producer is already talking change: U.K.-based Cuadrilla Resources, whose first project set off quakes near Blackpool last year.

Shale gas operations generate microseismicity in two ways. One is through hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," the underground blasts of water, sand, and chemicals used to release the natural gas trapped within shale deposits. Fracking is how Cuadrilla caused a quake that measured 2.3 on the Richter scale last April, according to an analysis by the firm's geophysical consultants.

Similarly, a fracking operation that injected 2.4 million gallons of fluid into an Oklahoma well over six days last January is a likely cause of the 43 earthquakes that followed, according to a state geologist's report. The 1.0-to-2.8-magnitude quakes began on the second day of injection, and most were centered within 3.5 kilometers of the well. These small quakes were felt on the surface and disturbed nearby residents, but they caused no structural damage.

A second source of shaking from shale gas operations is common to many oil and gas fields: the subsurface disposal of wastewater and of naturally occurring brines that surface with the desired hydrocarbons. Deep-injection disposal wells were probably behind a string of quakes in Arkansas that began in 2010, as well as more recent tremors around Youngstown, Ohio, that culminated in a magnitude 4.0 shake this New Year's Eve. "There's no doubt that those Youngstown earthquakes are directly associated with the disposal well there," says Arthur McGarr, a geophysicist and induced-seismicity expert with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Fracking and disposal wells create quakes that can be felt at the surface when shock waves or fluids release strain on a preëxisting fault. For example, high-pressure fluid can squeeze into and push apart a planar fault, freeing adjacent rock formations to slide past one another.

Such induced fault slips probably occurred at Youngstown, says Thomas Stewart, executive vice president of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association. But Stewart says induced quakes are rare events because well operators deliberately avoid drilling near known faults. Ohio's other 180 oil and gas wastewater wells have prompted few complaints, he notes. He adds that the Youngstown shakes hurt no one other than local gas producer D&L Energy, whose well was shut down by state regulators. "This guy's probably going to lose a $3-4 million investment," says Stewart.

Cuadrilla Resources' geomechanical consultants also downplay the risk that its operations could induce damaging quakes greater than magnitude 3.0. Nevertheless, their report, authored by senior researchers at German geophysical consultancy Q-con and Dutch consultancy StrataGen Delft, recommends that Cuadrilla initiate fracking operations with less fluid than it employed at Blackpool. In addition, they call for underground seismometers to identify any problems early. Cuadrilla says it plans to implement the proposals.

McGarr at USGS says an early warning system is a good idea, and one in keeping with the seismic risk assessment protocol for well-blasting operations employed by geothermal-energy producers. He is less sanguine, however, about estimates of the maximum severity that earthquakes triggered by fracking and injection wells can reach, saying this question needs more science. That means the risk of anthropogenically inducing large, deadly quakes cannot be ruled out.

"Virtually every part of the country was affected"

2012-01-19T08:21:00.009-05:00

So just what are the true costs of continuing to burn fossil fuels? (GW)

USDA Announces $308 Million in Aid to States

By Bill Draper
Associated Press
January 18, 2012

The nation's top agriculture official is expected to announce Wednesday more than $300 million in emergency assistance to 33 states and Puerto Rico to help them recover from an unusually intense year for natural disasters across the U.S.

Utah and Missouri will receive the most disaster aid, together taking in $109 million, or more than one-third of the $308 million in aid from Department of Agriculture watershed and conservation emergency funds, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack told The Associated Press ahead of a formal announcement later Wednesday.

Flooding last spring in Utah inundated thousands of acres of farmland, costing farmers tens of millions of dollars lost to damaged and destroyed crops or delayed planting. Utah will receive $60 million in watershed money for repair work and preventative measures in 13 cities and counties hit by floods within the last 13 months, said Bronson Smart, state conservation engineer for the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service.

He said his agency requested that amount to deal with two rounds of flooding, including flash flooding in southern Utah in December 2010 and flooding last spring in northern and central Utah caused by a record snowpack.

Missouri suffered months of flooding along the Missouri River after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers authorized unprecedented releases from reservoirs in the northern river basin all summer to deal with unexpectedly heavy rain in May and above-average mountain snowpack. Farmers in the Missouri Bootheel, meanwhile, saw their crops swamped when the Army Corps of Engineers exploded a levee to relieve water pressure on an upriver town in Illinois. The intentional breach sent water cascading over thousands of acres of prime farmland.

Missouri will receive around $49 million, of which $35 million will come from the watershed program and the rest from the Farm Service Agency's Emergency Conservation Program.

Vilsack said disaster funds will be used for financial and technical assistance to help rebuild and repair land damaged by flooding, drought, tornadoes and other natural disasters.

"There have been years that have had more intensive damage in a particular geographic area, but what's unique about last year is that virtually every part of the country was affected," Vilsack told the AP. "It was different in every part of the country. We've not seen tornadoes as devastating as last spring. Flooding on the Missouri River, because of the longstanding nature of the flooding — not a two- or three-week situation — was unique. Fires in the southwest part of the country were historic in magnitude. It's been a tough year."

Slightly more than $215 million of the aid comes from the Emergency Watershed Program, about $80 million will come from the Emergency Conservation Program and nearly $12 million is from the FSA's Emergency Forest Restoration Program. Texas, for instance, will receive nearly $6 million after wildfires charred the southern part of the state.

The watershed funds will go toward public safety and restoration efforts on private, public and tribal land, Vilsack said. Projects funded by that money will include removing debris from waterways, protecting eroded stream banks, reseeding damaged areas and, in some cases, purchasing floodplain easements on eligible land.

New York trails only Utah in the amount of watershed protection money received, at $37.8 million.

In addition to flooding, 2011 was a big year for tornadoes, including record outbreaks in the South and a monster storm that leveled a large portion of Joplin, Mo.

Alabama is scheduled to get nearly $7 million in assistance for tornado recovery, followed by nearly $4 million in Georgia. Missouri, at the other end of the spectrum, is to receive only $130,000 to fix damage to agricultural land by tornadoes.

In addition to keeping U.S. agriculture profitable and helping communities rebuild, the disaster money also will spark job growth, Vilsack said.

"The beauty of this resource is that it generates job opportunities, to hire contractors and buy supplies at local hardware stores," he said. "Folks are in the process of planning what they're going to be doing this spring. We're hoping by this announcement they will be able to plan more effectively."

The conservation program funds will go to producers to help remove debris from farmland, restore livestock fences and conservation structures, provide water for livestock during periods of extreme drought, and grade and shape farmland damaged by natural disasters, he said.

The forest money will help eligible owners of nonindustrial private forest land take emergency measures to restore areas damaged by disasters.

Vilsack said the emergency money is being used to help agricultural interests beyond what is covered by crop insurance. He said the USDA paid out $8.6 billion in crop insurance payments last year, and $17.2 billion over the past three years.

Do no harm?

2012-01-18T08:09:00.006-05:00

In Pennsylvania, cattle are dying on land where fracking wells have been drilled. Water from nearby wells contains so much gas it can be ignited as it streams from faucets. Now there is evidence that fracking practices may even be triggering earthquakes. Did I mention greenhouse gas emissions?

Despite this, fracking wells continue to be drilled. Meanwhile, opponents of wind turbines have been accused of causing everything from headaches and nausea to high blood pressure and anxiety. Wind projects have been delayed or canceled while oil, coal and natural gas facilities seem immune to all concerns and criticisms. (GW)

State: Wind turbines not harmful

By Patrick Cassidy
Cape Cod Times
January 18, 2012

A review of existing scientific literature by a state-appointed panel has found no evidence that noise and shadow flicker from wind turbines directly harm people living near the machines.

Opponents of wind energy projects on Cape Cod and elsewhere in Massachusetts immediately blasted the panel's 164-page report, released Tuesday, saying the agencies that organized the review failed the residents of the state.

The group Windwise Massachusetts, which has fought wind energy projects across the state, called for an epidemiological study of the health effects of wind turbines rather than a review of the literature as was done by the state panel.

"It's inconclusive to me," said Mark Cool, of Falmouth, one of dozens of outspoken residents who live near two turbines at that town's wastewater treatment facility.

The panel's findings indicate a lack of evidence, but that doesn't prove that there is no connection between the operation of wind turbines and health problems, Cool said.

"There's evidence that our health is being affected, but what we need to do is find out what causes that," he said.

Proponents of wind energy, meanwhile, praised the panel's findings.

"This advances the ball and it helps provide some form of a road map for local officials navigating the body of information out there," said Sue Reid, vice president and director of Conservation Law Foundation Massachusetts. While there is room for more analysis, the report rules out some of the basic claims made by wind energy opponents, such as detrimental effects on human health attributed to low-frequency infrasound produced by turbines, Reid said.

No scientific evidence

The seven-member panel was convened in June 2011 by the state Department of Environmental Protection and the state Department of Public Health in response to concerns raised by opponents of locating large turbines near residential neighborhoods, including on Cape Cod, where wind energy projects in various towns have sparked contentious debates about the technology.

The epicenter for the debate is in Falmouth, where the first turbine erected at the wastewater treatment facility is blamed by residents for a variety of health issues, including anxiety, high blood pressure and nausea.

During a teleconference Tuesday to announce the report's findings, panel member Sheryl Grace, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Boston University, said it was interesting that the turbine in Falmouth was stall regulated — a technology that has been known to have issues with noise — versus pitch regulated, a design where the turbine blades are constantly adjusted to capture the wind's energy.

Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Kenneth Kimmell deflected the idea that the pro-wind energy policy of Gov. Deval Patrick's administration influenced the content of the report.

"The findings and recommendations that are in this report are those of the panel members only," he said. "We are not concerned that there will be a claim that the panel had a bias."

The panel included health professionals and academics from Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston University, the University of Massachusetts and the Harvard School of Public Health.

In the report they found that, while it is possible that noise from some turbines could cause annoyance and sleep disruption, there is not enough evidence to say the noise directly causes health problems or disease.

The passage of wind turbine blades in front of the sun, known as flicker, does not pose a risk for eliciting seizures, according to the report.

At least one area where the report finds a potential danger is if ice is flung into the air after accumulating on a turbine's blades.

"There is sufficient evidence that falling ice is physically harmful and measures should be taken to ensure that the public is not likely to encounter such ice," according to the report.

'Syndrome' not found

In addition, the report's authors called into question a contention by opponents of wind energy projects that there is a group of symptoms associated with living near turbines.

"There is no evidence for a set of health effects from exposure to wind turbines that could be characterized as a 'Wind Turbine Syndrome,'" according to the report.

The phrase "wind turbine syndrome" was coined by Nina Pierpont, a New York pediatrician who wrote a book on the subject that opponents of wind energy often cite in their arguments.

Reached Tuesday, Pierpont said the Massachusetts panel cherry-picked in deciding what literature to review and should have spoken to people in Falmouth to find out what they were experiencing.

The state should sponsor a epidemiological study, she said.

"For them to choose only to review journal literature is an easy out but it's irresponsible," she said.

During Tuesday's teleconference the report's authors defended their work.

The report points to some areas where more study is required, said Mark Weisskopf, assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health's Department of Environmental Health and Epidemiology.

"As scientists we always want to study things more," Weisskopf said, adding, however, that most of the report's conclusions are "firm."

The panel accepted public comment on its work until July 22 and received 25 peer-reviewed articles, 20 government reports, 35 white papers prepared by nonprofit or business organizations as well as hundreds of emails, news reports and blog postings, according to the DEP's website.

Patrick has made wind energy a primary piece of his administration's energy policy, including a goal of 2,000 megawatts of wind energy in the state by 2020.

At the end of 2011 the administration suffered a major setback when several powerful lawmakers who had previously backed legislation to streamline permitting for large wind turbines withdrew their support.

A public comment period on the report will run through March 19, according to the DEP. Comments may be sent to MassDEP Wind Turbine Docket, 1 Winter St., Fourth Floor, Boston 02108 or to WindTurbineDocket.MassDEP@MassMail.State.MA.US.

There will also be three public meetings to accept comment on the report, including one from 5 to 8 p.m. Feb. 16 at Bourne High School.

Wind Turbine Health Study Findings:

There is no evidence for "Wind Turbine Syndrome" - a set of health effects opponents of wind energy projects have argued is associated with living near the machines.

Claims that infrasound - low-frequency sound that cannot be heard by humans - from turbines affect balance have not been demonstrated scientifically.
Evidence suggests no association between noise from turbines and psychological distress or mental health problems.
No evidence suggests an association between noise from turbines and pain and stiffness, diabetes, high blood pressure, tinnitus, hearing impairment, cardiovascular disease and headaches or migraines.
Limited evidence suggests an association between exposure to turbines and annoyance, although there is not enough evidence to determine if the association is independent of the effects of seeing a turbine.
It's possible that noise from some turbines can disrupt sleep.
Shadow flicker from turbine blades passing in front of the sun does not pose a risk for epileptic seizures.

To view the full report go to www.mass.gov/dep.

Other Earths?

2012-01-17T08:36:00.007-05:00

Does astronomy matter? I for one think it does. We are all made up of stardust from the original Big Bang. Astronomy helps us understand how truly amazing the Earth is. Now astronomers are confirming that the likelihood that there are many other planets (called exoplanets) similar to ours circling other stars (similar to the sun?) in Universe.

This news certainly seems to increase the odds that life exists elsewhere. In fact, it now seems utterly inconceivable that Earth is the sole planet hosting life. (GW)

By Jason Palmer
BBC News
11 January 2012

There may be billions of Earth-sized planets out there

That implies there are some 10 billion Earth-sized planets in our galaxy.

Using a technique called gravitational microlensing, an international team found a handful of exoplanets that imply the existence of billions more.

The findings were released at the 219th American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting, alongside reports of the smallest "exoplanets" ever discovered.

Gravitational microlensing is a method that uses the gravity of a far-flung star to amplify the light from even more distant stars that have planets.

Astronomers used a number of relatively small telescopes that make up the Microlensing Network for the Detection of Small Terrestrial Exoplanets, or Mindstep, to look for the rare event of one star passing directly in front of another as seen from Earth.

The team witnessed 40 of these microlensing events, and in three instances spotted the effects of planets circling the more distant stars.

While the number of actual events and detected planets was low, the team was able to estimate how many such exoplanets must exist.

Most news of exoplanets in recent years has come from the Kepler telescope, which spots planets by looking for the slight dimming of their host stars' light as planets pass in front of them.

That method is better at finding large planets close to their host stars.

While a more difficult effect to catch, gravitational microlensing is better at finding planets of all sizes and distances.

It can currently spot a planet as small as Mercury, orbiting at a similar distance to its host star, or as far away as Saturn.

The study, also published in the journal Nature, was a collaboration between researchers from more than 20 international institutes and universities.

"Just the recent 15 years have seen the count of known planets beyond the Solar System rising from none to about 700, but we can expect hundreds of billions to exist in the Milky Way alone," said co-author Dr Martin Dominik, from the University of St Andrews, UK.

Ever smaller

Complementing the microlensing approach, Kepler measurements hold a number of small-planet surprises as well.

The KOI-961 star would, as in this artist's view, be huge in the sky of the new planets

In December, the Kepler team announced the first Earth-sized planet, the smallest yet detected.

At the AAS meeting on Wednesday, the Kepler team announced even smaller planets, all three orbiting a tiny red dwarf star called KOI-961.

The planets are just 0.78, 0.73 and 0.57 times the radius of Earth.

The discovery came from an analysis of Kepler catalogue data released to the public in January 2011.

Among those poring through the data was John Johnson, a California Institute of Technology astronomer, who told the meeting that, as in the case of other red dwarfs, little is known about the size of the KOI-961.

Because of the way Kepler detects exoplanets, star size is crucial to the measurements of planet sizes. But UK amateur astronomer and longtime collaborator with Prof Johnson contacted the team with a clue.

"When he looked at the colours and other properties that we measure for KOI-961, he sent us an email immediately and said, 'Do you know you guys are looking at a twin of a very famous star called Barnard's star?'," Prof Johnson told the meeting.

The team was able to use known data from the well-studied Barnard's star to make guesses about KOI-961's properties.

That, Mr Apps told BBC News, was when "we realised that it was even more remarkable than we thought: the star was fainter, the planets were smaller. The whole thing was like a very compact triple planetary system."

Or, as Prof Johnson told the meeting, "It's like you took your shrink ray gun and set it to seven times smaller... What we have here is a planetary system that's shrunk down because the central star is so tiny."

What, exactly, is a pristine environment?

2012-01-16T08:59:00.007-05:00

Could it be that the Amazon was once inhabited by a people sophisticated technologies capable of sustainably supporting thousands (maybe a lot more) so in harmony with Nature that has led most environmentalists today to hold it up as one of the prime examples of a pristine ecosystem?

Question is: are we willing to learn from the past how to really co-evolve with Nature?

I have highlighted Charles C. Mann's outstanding book" "1491: New Revelations About The Americas Before Columbus" a number of times. It's a must read. (GW)

Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World

By Simon Romero
New York Times
January 14, 2012

RIO BRANCO, Brazil — Edmar Araújo still remembers the awe.

As he cleared trees on his family’s land decades ago near Rio Branco, an outpost in the far western reaches of the Brazilian Amazon, a series of deep earthen avenues carved into the soil came into focus.

“These lines were too perfect not to have been made by man,” said Mr. Araújo, a 62-year-old cattleman. “The only explanation I had was that they must have been trenches for the war against the Bolivians.”

But these were no foxholes, at least not for any conflict waged here at the dawn of the 20th century. According to stunning archaeological discoveries here in recent years, the earthworks on Mr. Araújo’s land and hundreds like them nearby are much, much older — potentially upending the conventional understanding of the world’s largest tropical rain forest.

The deforestation that has stripped the Amazon since the 1970s has also exposed a long-hidden secret lurking underneath thick rain forest: flawlessly designed geometric shapes spanning hundreds of yards in diameter.

Alceu Ranzi, a Brazilian scholar who helped discover the squares, octagons, circles, rectangles and ovals that make up the land carvings, said these geoglyphs found on deforested land were as significant as the famous Nazca lines, the enigmatic animal symbols visible from the air in southern Peru.

“What impressed me the most about these geoglyphs was their geometric precision, and how they emerged from forest we had all been taught was untouched except by a few nomadic tribes,” said Mr. Ranzi, a paleontologist who first saw the geoglyphs in the 1970s and, years later, surveyed them by plane.

For some scholars of human history in Amazonia, the geoglyphs in the Brazilian state of Acre and other archaeological sites suggest that the forests of the western Amazon, previously considered uninhabitable for sophisticated societies partly because of the quality of their soils, may not have been as “Edenic” as some environmentalists contend.

Instead of being pristine forests, barely inhabited by people, parts of the Amazon may have been home for centuries to large populations numbering well into the thousands and living in dozens of towns connected by road networks, explains the American writer Charles C. Mann. In fact, according to Mr. Mann, the British explorer Percy Fawcett vanished on his 1925 quest to find the lost “City of Z” in the Xingu, one area with such urban settlements.

In addition to parts of the Amazon being “much more thickly populated than previously thought,” Mr. Mann, the author of “1491,” a groundbreaking book about the Americas before the arrival of Columbus, said, “these people purposefully modified their environment in long-lasting ways.”

As a result of long stretches of such human habitation, South America’s colossal forests may have been a lot smaller at times, with big areas resembling relatively empty savannas.

Such revelations do not fit comfortably into today’s politically charged debate over razing parts of the forests, with some environmentalists opposed to allowing any large-scale agriculture, like cattle ranching and soybean cultivation, to advance further into Amazonia.

Scientists here say they, too, oppose wholesale burning of the forests, even if research suggests that the Amazon supported intensive agriculture in the past. Indeed, they say other swaths of the tropics, notably in Africa, could potentially benefit from strategies once used in the Amazon to overcome soil constraints.

“If one wants to recreate pre-Columbian Amazonia, most of the forest needs to be removed, with many people and a managed, highly productive landscape replacing it,” said William Woods, a geographer at the University of Kansas who is part of a team studying the Acre geoglyphs.

“I know that this will not sit well with ardent environmentalists,” Mr. Woods said, “but what else can one say?”

While researchers piece together the Amazon’s ecological history, mystery still shrouds the origins of the geoglyphs and the people who made them. So far, 290 such earthworks have been found in Acre, along with about 70 others in Bolivia and 30 in the Brazilian states of Amazonas and Rondônia.

Researchers first viewed the geoglyphs in the 1970s, after Brazil’s military dictatorship encouraged settlers to move to Acre and other parts of the Amazon, using the nationalist slogan “occupy to avoid surrendering” to justify the settlement that resulted in deforestation.

But little scientific attention was paid to the discovery until Mr. Ranzi, the Brazilian scientist, began his surveys in the late 1990s, and Brazilian, Finnish and American researchers began finding more geoglyphs by using high-resolution satellite imagery and small planes to fly over the Amazon.

Denise Schaan, an archaeologist at the Federal University of Pará in Brazil who now leads research on the geoglyphs, said radiocarbon testing indicated that they were built 1,000 to 2,000 years ago, and might have been rebuilt several times during that period.

Initially, Ms. Schaan said, researchers, pondering the 20-foot depth of some of the trenches, thought they were used to defend against attacks. But a lack of signs of human settlement within and around the earthworks, like vestiges of housing and trash piles, as well as soil modification for farming, discounted that theory.

Researchers now believe that the geoglyphs may have held ceremonial importance, similar, perhaps, to the medieval cathedrals in Europe. This spiritual role, said William Balée, an anthropologist at Tulane University, could have been one that involved “geometry and gigantism.”

Still, the geoglyphs, located at a crossroads between Andean and Amazonian cultures, remain an enigma.

They are far from pre-Columbian settlements discovered elsewhere in the Amazon. Big gaps also remain in what is known about indigenous people in this part of the Amazon, after thousands were enslaved, killed or forced from their lands during the rubber boom that began in the late 19th century.

For Brazil’s scientists and researchers, Ms. Schaan said, the earthworks are “one of the most important discoveries of our time.” But the repopulation of this part of the Amazon threatens the survival of the geoglyphs, after being hidden for centuries.

Forests still cover most of Acre, but in cleared areas where the geoglyphs are found, dirt roads already cut through some of the earthworks. People live in wooden shacks inside others. Electricity poles dot the geoglyphs. Some ranchers use their trenches as watering holes for cattle.

“It’s a disgrace that our patrimony is treated this way,” said Tiago Juruá, the author of a new book here about protecting archaeological sites including the earthworks.

Mr. Juruá, a biologist, and other researchers say the geoglyphs found so far are probably just a sampling of what Acre’s forests still guard under their canopies. After all, they contend that outside of modern cities, fewer people live today in the Amazon than did before the arrival of Europeans five centuries ago.

“This is a new frontier for exploration and science,” Mr. Juruá said. “The challenge now is to make more discoveries in forests that are still standing, with the hope that they won’t soon be destroyed.”

Lis Horta Moriconi contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.

"Making the Future"

2012-01-15T11:50:00.004-05:00

3-D printers are here and now. Seriously, can replicators be far behind? (GW)

The Art of 3-D Printing

MIT professor Neri Oxman is developing new design techniques that take advantage of "additive manufacturing."

By Kevin Bullis
Technology Review
January 11, 2012

As part of our special report on manufacturing, we asked Neri Oxman, a professor at the MIT Media Lab and an internationally recognized artist whose work is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to create a sculpture that would illustrate the future of manufacturing. (See a gallery of images here.)

What she produced, in collaboration with MIT materials science professor Craig Carter, is a powerful demonstration of the possibilities of 3-D printing, using techniques that take advantage of the capabilities of 3-D printers in ways that conventional manufacturing techniques cannot.

3-D printing encompasses a range of technologies—from inkjet heads mounted on gantries that can deposit plastics layer by layer to form intricate models, to more recent laser-based systems that sinter metal powders to make durable parts for airplanes. 3-D printers have mainly been used for prototyping, but they are becoming an option for manufacturing as well, and may eventually even be used to print buildings, Oxman says. But designers and architects haven't yet learned to take advantage of their capabilities.

Oxman, who trained as an architect, says buildings are designed today with an eye toward the components they can be made of—sheets of plywood, panes of glass, steel beams, and concrete columns. As a result, those designs are limited, in much the way Lego bricks constrain the shapes that children can build. There are similar limitations in conventional manufacturing; there are some shapes that simply can't be built with existing molds and machining tools, and designers have had to design with these limits in mind.

Oxman is exploring ways to break with conventional design thinking by looking to patterns and processes found in nature, and using equations that define these processes to generate new designs. The results are often surprising shapes and structures that can be made only with 3-D printers.

To help develop the algorithms needed, Oxman has teamed up with Carter and others. In some cases, the algorithms provide new aesthetics, but they can also have practical applications—such as varying the structure to help bear loads. For one sculpture—a model of a chaise longue reclined chair—the team combined algorithms taken from nature with a map of the pressure a body exerts on a chair. The result depends on where the algorithms determine the chair needs to be soft to provide comfort and where it needs to be stiff to provide support.

For the sculpture Oxman made for Technology Review, she and Carter didn't have the same structural constraints imposed by a chair. The only requirements were that the result look like a cube, and that it should have the words "Making the Future" on one side. The resulting cube isn't a practical object, but it illustrates their approach to design.

The algorithms that define the shape of the sculpture are based on natural processes. One is the unmixing of two fluids. At high temperatures, oil and vinegar, for example, become completely soluble, but as the solution cools, the two fluids start to separate.

"You write down a set of equations based on what you know about thermodynamics and the kinetics of materials, and the equations develop these structures that look like fluids separating," Carter says. The resulting sculpture looks as if that process has been frozen and a cube has been cut from the center of the liquids. To make the lettering, Carter introduced other equations that caused one "fluid" to be attracted to the letters, and the other to be repelled. (To see an animation of how the fluids move to create the lettering, click here.)

Oxman and Carter fiddled with the algorithms until they reached the final shape they wanted, then shipped the resulting computer-aided design file to the 3-D printing company Objet to make the six-inch cube.

The technology used to make the cube involves an inkjet printer to lay down a layer of polymer ink, which is exposed to ultraviolet light to cure it. This requires printing a sacrificial support structure made of a soft polymer that can be blasted away with a jet of water.

Oxman's designs even push the limits of existing 3-D printers—the cube was so complex that it proved impossible to remove all of the supporting material from its center. Yet pushing the limits of 3-D printing is partly her goal. Indeed, her lab at MIT is developing new kinds of 3-D printers.

Oxman's lab is also developing robotic systems that could print large concrete structures for buildings. The new robotic system is being designed to be able to vary the density of the concrete, making it possible to use dense, strong concrete where it's needed for support, and lightweight, porous concrete for non-load bearing walls, to save on materials costs. Eventually, it may even be possible to print concrete that's so porous that it's translucent, reducing the need for indoor lighting.

Oxman continues to push forward designs with her art. She says the approach used for the Technology Review cube could serve as the basis for one of the 18 sculptures in a new exhibit she is developing for the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibit will open this spring.

‘What else is going on down there?’

2012-01-14T10:19:00.003-05:00

Ephemeralization: Bucky's term for humanity's "know-how trajectory" that is leading us towards understanding how to create more life support using less resources. (GW)

New Storage Device Is Very Small, at 12 Atoms

By John Markoff
New York Times
January 12, 2012

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Researchers at I.B.M. have stored and retrieved digital 1s and 0s from an array of just 12 atoms, pushing the boundaries of the magnetic storage of information to the edge of what is possible.

The findings, being reported Thursday in the journal Science, could help lead to a new class of nanomaterials for a generation of memory chips and disk drives that will not only have greater capabilities than the current silicon-based computers but will consume significantly less power. And they may offer a new direction for research in quantum computing.

“Magnetic materials are extremely useful and strategically important to many major economies, but there aren’t that many of them,” said Shan X. Wang, director of the Center for Magnetic Nanotechnology at Stanford University. “To make a brand new material is very intriguing and scientifically very important.”

Until now, the most advanced magnetic storage systems have needed about one million atoms to store a digital 1 or 0. The new achievement is the product of a heated international race between elite physics laboratories to explore the properties of magnetic materials at a far smaller scale.

Last May, a group at the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Hamburg in Germany reported on the ability to perform computer logic operations on an atomic level.

The group at I.B.M.’s Almaden Research Center here, led by Andreas Heinrich, has now created the smallest possible unit of magnetic storage by painstakingly arranging two rows of six iron atoms on a surface of copper nitride.

Such closeness is possible because the cluster of atoms is antiferromagnetic — a rare quality in which each atom in the array has an opposed magnetic orientation. (In common ferromagnetic materials like iron, nickel and cobalt, the atoms are magnetically aligned.)

Under the laboratory’s founder, Don Eigler, I.B.M. has explored the science of nanomaterials far smaller than the silicon chips used in today’s semiconductors. Dr. Eigler recently retired from the company but is a co-author of the Science paper.

The researchers now use a scanning tunneling microscope, which looks like a giant washing machine festooned with aluminum foil, not only to capture images of atoms but to reposition individual atoms — much the way a billiard ball might be moved by a pool cue with a sticky tip.

Although the research took place at a temperature near absolute zero, the scientists wrote that the same experiment could be done at room temperature with as few as 150 atoms.

As part of its demonstration of the antiferromagnetic storage effect, the researchers created a computer byte, or character, out of an individually placed array of 96 atoms. They then used the array to encode the I.B.M. motto “Think” by repeatedly programming the memory block to store representations of its five letters.

Moreover, Dr. Heinrich said, smaller groups of atoms begin to exhibit quantum mechanical behavior — simultaneously existing in both “spin” states, in effect 1 and 0 at the same time.

In theory, such atoms could be assembled into Qbits — the basic unit of an experimental approach to computing that might one day exceed the capabilities of today’s most powerful supercomputers.

“If you do this with two atoms, then they behave more like a quantum mechanical object,” Dr. Heinrich said. “This is why science is interested in this work more than the technology.”

In an interview in a small laboratory office here, he said he was planning to knock out a wall to create room for an expanded effort in exploring the quantum mechanical properties of the antiferromagnetic effect.

“This is really where we live,” he said. “If you step outside of the press release, we are trying to control the quantum mechanics of this spin behavior to coax them to do whatever we want them to do.”

Computer industry analysts said the I.B.M. effort heralded a new direction for nanotechnology and that it might offer a route to new kinds of nanomaterials.

“Nanotechnology labs are going to begin asking, ‘What else is going on down there?’ ” said Richard Doherty an electrophysicist who is director of Envisioneering, an industry consulting firm based in Seaford, N.Y. “The information storage side of this is fantastic, but this truly changes our ideas of the behavior of materials at molecular levels.”

Antiferromagnetic materials are now instrumental in two types of data storage products. They are essential for the manufacture of recording heads, which resemble phonograph needles and are used in today’s hard disk drives. They are also used in a new type of memory chip known as spin-transfer-torque RAM, or STT-RAM, which some view as a future competitor for DRAM and Flash memory chips.

Dr. Heinrich said that the tiny devices built with scanning tunneling microscopes would never be more than laboratory experiments.

However, he noted that many research groups are exploring ways of designing novel materials using self-assembly methods, including mechanical and biological approaches.

Industry executives said that as the semiconductor industry draws closer to exhausting the ability to scale down today’s circuits using lithographic tools that etch patterns on the surface of silicon wafers, an intense international hunt is under way for a manufacturing technology beyond microelectronics.

“The nation that discovers the next logic switch will lead the nanoelectronics era and reap the economic rewards associated with it,” said Ian Steff, vice president for global policy and technology partnerships of the Semiconductor Industry Association.

"Wind works" for Marylanders

2012-01-13T07:59:00.011-05:00

Maryland citizens refuse to be duped or intimidated by the fossil fuel industry. The understand thevalue of investing in offshore wind when the full costs of electricity generation are taken into account. Dishonest fossil bean-counters throw everything they don't want factored into their costs (like environmental and health impacts) into a bin called "externalities" that you and I must pay for as they reap huge profits.

Renewables like offshore wind are not a panacea or a license to continue to be extravagant consumers of electricity. They may, however, play a crucial role in avoiding our own extinction. (GW)

Offshore Wind Activists an Unmatched Force at Maryland General Assembly Opener

By Keith Harrington
Huffington Post
January 12, 2012

If measured by the turnout at the rally at the Annapolis state house yesterday, of all the issues confronting the Maryland General Assembly as it reconvenes this week, offshore wind power enjoys the most energetic public support.

Maintaining the grassroots momentum from a statewide series of packed "Wind Works" town hall forums, over 100 citizen clean energy advocates from across Maryland descended on Lawyers' Mall on Wednesday morning to greet returning state lawmakers with an unequivocal message: "Get it done in 2012! Wind works for Marylanders' health, jobs, climate and energy costs!"

Decked out in blue campaign T-shirts, wind advocates were the most visible activist presence on the opening morning of the 2012 legislative session. The impressive show of support for a cold weekday morning jibed with recent statewide poll results which showed that nearly two-thirds of Marylanders support developing the state's robust offshore wind energy resources, even if it means a small initial bump in energy costs.

Speaking to the rally crowd, state Senate Majority Leader Rob Garagiola scoffed at charges from critics that Marylanders can't afford to invest in offshore wind: "The price of coal goes up; the price of gas goes up. Does the price of wind ever go up?"

The crowd responded with a resounding, "No!"

"That's right," Garagiola continued, "It doesn't go up. This is going to save ratepayers money."

Other speakers included the state House Majority Leader Kumar Barve, climate justice and health advocate Vernice Miller Travis, Chesapeake Climate Action Network Director Mike Tidwell, MD Delegate Tom Hucker, business innovator Joe Gaskins, Johns Hopkins student Tippy Patrinos and state Senator Paul Pinsky.

After the rally, the sea of blue shirts shifted from the mall to the inside of the state house and the legislative office buildings where activists took the wind works message to legislators and other dignitaries.

On his way to address the opening session, Governor Martin O'Malley stopped to greet wind activists distributing fliers on the mall, and reiterated his support for passing the bill through the Assembly this year. The Governor's new offshore-wind energy bill is expected to drop in the next few weeks along with the rest of his ambitious legislative package. With other big ticket issues like same-sex marriage, a proposed sales or gas tax increase on the agenda, clean energy advocates certainly have their work cut out for them in keeping wind at the top of the priority list. But if advocates keep bringing the same grassroots energy they brought to Annapolis on Wednesday, that shouldn't be a problem.

Learn more about the "Wind Works for Maryland" campaign and get involved at www.marylandoffshorewind.org.

Climate changers

2012-01-12T08:49:00.004-05:00

So are you really puzzled why the U.S. is so reluctant to make a real commitment to reduce greenhouse gases and mitigate climate change? It has less to do with the members of Congress' skepticism about human-induced global warming and everything to do with the fossil fuel industry's powerful and well-funded lobbying efforts. (GW)

Power Plants Top EPA List on Emissions

Three of Southern Co.'s Facilities Grab the Top Spots for Large U.S. Emitters of Greenhouse Gases in 2010

By Tennille Tracy
Wall Street Journal
January 12, 2012

The U.S. government Wednesday released a detailed listing of facilities that emitted the most greenhouse gases in 2010, with three coal-fired power plants owned by Southern Co. topping the list.

Power plants accounted for more than half of the greenhouse-gas emissions by the major emitters on the list, with refineries and chemical facilities also contributing large shares.

The release of Wednesday's data mark the first time the Environmental Protection Agency made detailed information available to the public.

Power plants make up over half of the largest emitters on the list. Southern's Bowen plant in Georgia in 2009.

All three Southern Co. plants use coal to generate electricity and each released more than 20 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2010. Two of the plants, known as Scherer and Bowen, are in Georgia. The third, known as James H. Miller Jr., is in Alabama.

The fourth-largest emitter was the Martin Lake, Texas, power plant of Energy Future Holdings Corp. subsidiary Luminant. Duke Energy Corp.'s largest plant, the Gibson plant in Indiana, came in fifth.

Duke Energy spokesman Lew Middleton said the company has spent more than $1 billion in pollution-control technology at the Gibson plant since 1990. The plant is the third-largest coal-fired power plant in North America "and so it's really not unusual that it would show up where it is on the list," he said.

Greenhouse Gases

The Top 5 Emitters

Scherer(Southern Co.): 23 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent
Bowen(Southern): 21 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent
James H. Miller Jr. (Southern): 20.8 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent
Martin Lake(Luminant): 18.7 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent
Gibson(Duke): 18 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent

Source: Environmental Protection Agency

Representatives of Southern and Luminant didn't respond to requests for comment.

The EPA data covers the largest emitters, more than 6,700 facilities in the U.S. Each facility on the list emitted more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2010—roughly the same amount of emissions that would come from burning 131 railcars of coal, the EPA said.

Of the 100 largest emitters—defined as facilities emitting more than 7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent—96 of them are power plants. Two are refineries and two are iron and steel mills.

Congress required the EPA to begin collecting and publishing the data under a 2008 spending law.

The EPA is slowly rolling out new greenhouse-gas standards after the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases qualified as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

Explore an EPA database of greenhouse gas emissions from large facilities.

The agency has so far regulated emissions from vehicles and has forced power plants, refineries and other large facilities to obtain permits when building new facilities or making major changes to existing ones.

Later this month, the agency is expected to propose new greenhouse-gas standards for power plants. In a call with reporters Wednesday, EPA air chief Gina McCarthy said the agency is "looking forward to trying to adhere to that" timeline.

Republicans and industry groups say the EPA lacks the authority to try to force carbon dioxide reductions using existing laws. Industry groups have filed numerous lawsuits seeking to overturn the EPA's rules and Republicans have drafted bills to block the agency's actions.

Write to Tennille Tracy at tennille.tracy@dowjones.com

They committed a crime against God

2012-01-11T09:25:00.006-05:00

N.C. is urged to compensate those it made sterile

Sometimes activists can't understand why some people aren't willing to just jump on the bandwagon and join their fight against injustices they have identified and taken up the cause.

Sometimes we need to know the whole story. When we do we may see that the injustices we're fighting for pale in comparison to what they've had to endure. (GW)

Each should get $50,000 task force says

By Martha Waggoner
Associated Press
January 11, 2012

RALEIGH, N.C. - As many as 2,000 people forcibly sterilized decades ago in North Carolina should get $50,000 each, a task force said yesterday, marking the first time a state has moved to compensate victims of eugenics programs that weeded out those it deemed “feeble-minded’’ or otherwise undesirable.

The payout, which could amount to as much as $100 million, still needs approval from the Legislature. But the prospects for passage of some sort of compensation are promising because the governor immediately embraced the recommendation and the House speaker has come out in favor of payments.

While dozens of states had programs in the 20th century that allowed people to be sterilized against their will in the name of improving the human race, no other state has offered anything more than apologies.

Compensation “sends a clear message that we in North Carolina are people who pay for our mistakes and that we do not tolerate bureaucracies that trample on basic human rights,’’ said Dr. Laura Gerald, a pediatrician and the panel chairwoman.

From 1929 to 1974, more than 7,600 people in North Carolina were surgically rendered unable to reproduce under state laws and practices that singled out epileptics and others considered mentally defective. Many were poor, black women deemed unfit to be parents.

A task force report last year said 1,500 to 2,000 of the victims were still alive, though the state has verified only 72.

Last year, Governor Beverly Perdue, a Democrat, created the five-person task force to decide how to compensate victims. It consisted of a judge, a doctor, a former journalist, a historian, and a lawyer.

The panel had discussed amounts between $20,000 and $50,000, and some victims and family members had complained that was too little. The panel also weighed whether to compensate victims’ family members or descendants - some people were sterilized after giving birth - but decided against it.

Yesterday, some victims said they were just looking forward to seeing the issue resolved.

Elaine Riddick, 57, was sterilized at 14 after she gave birth to a son who was the product of a rape.

“I was a victim twice: once by the rapist and one by the state of North Carolina. Normally, if you commit a crime, you pay for it. They committed the biggest crime. They committed a crime against God. They committed a crime against humanity,’’ she said, wiping tears. “And this is all I can do is just accept what they said today and go on with my life.’’

While taking away someone’s ability to have children sounds barbaric today, eugenics programs gained popularity in the United States and other countries in the early 1900s, promoted as a means of raising the health and intellectual level of the human race.

More than 30 states enacted laws allowing surgical sterilization for certain people, though not all of them carried out such procedures. More than 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized under such programs, and some historians think the same thing was done to thousands more in other states under the authority of doctors or local officials.

Most states abandoned those efforts after World War II, when such practices became closely associated with Nazi Germany’s attempts to achieve racial purity, though North Carolina stood out because it ramped up its program after the war. Sterilizations in North Carolina peaked in the 1950s, according to state records.

People as young as 10 were sterilized, in some cases for not getting along with schoolmates or for being promiscuous. Although officials obtained consent from patients or their guardians, many did not comprehend what they were signing.

North Carolina is among about a half-dozen states to apologize.

Melissa Hyatt, whose stepfather was sterilized, said the task force “did what was reasonable as far as budgets and economy.’’

“It’s not really about the money,’’ she said. “It’s about the suffering and the pain.’’

Mike Marion, whose 59-year-old aunt was sterilized at 18 because she was seen as mildly disabled mentally, said estates or descendants should get some compensation, too.

“If you’re going to admit wrong, admit wrong in its whole capacity,’’ he said. “By offering compensation to only the living, that’s taking partial responsibility.’’

Despite the potentially high price tag in this economy, there is bipartisan support for some compensation. The governor issued a statement endorsing the task force recommendation.

House Speaker Thom Tillis, a Republican, said he will review it.

Continuing to build a healthy culture throughout the winter

2012-01-10T08:28:00.003-05:00

There are some real challenges to being a New England locavore. The most obvious is what local foods are available during the long winter months? The answer is: probably more than you think. Greenhouses and other season-extending technologies together with food preservation and processing options are creating new possibilities for increasing the local food supply well into the winter.

Then other key to all this is markets - and that means more local food distribution systems like winter farmers markets that provide access to healthy, locally-grown and processed foods. (GW)

Winter Farmers' Market now in season in Dorchester

By Miriam Valverde
Boston Globe
Janaury 9, 2012

Hundreds of people elbowed past each other, carrying shopping bags loaded with carrots, potatoes, and onions. Sellers of artisan cheeses and farm-fresh vegetables had to rush to restock their wares.

Yesterday was opening day of the Dorchester Winter Farmers’ Market, which organizers hope will encourage all members of the community - including low-income families - to shop healthy and locally.

And judging by the turnout, the first day was a success.

“Everything went so quickly,’’ said Mike Smith, a manager at Oakdale Farms, based in Rehoboth. “I didn’t expect this great demand.’’

The farmers’ market in Codman Square is the only one in the city where shoppers can use their electronic benefit transfer cards issued as part of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to pay for groceries. Those who qualify for the program include low-income families and some people with disabilities.

In the long term, organizers want to open a neighborhood store where residents can have easy access to healthy food and share a space for community activities.

As Bernadette Rucker, 63, waited to receive a complimentary 10-minute massage - offered to all visitors to the market from Heart of Boston Massage Therapy - she said she was very grateful to have a farmers’ market in her neighborhood.

“I love the idea of coming here to get fresh food and vegetables,’’ said the 20-year Dorchester resident. “I’m a diabetic, so I’m one of those at-risk folks. I’m trying to get introduced to organic stuff, trying to find out how to eat more organically.’’

Shoppers who are members of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program can also take advantage of a city initiative called Boston Bounty Bucks, which will match up to $10 worth of purchases, said Jenny Silverman, project manager at the Dorchester Community Food Cooperative, which sponsored the event.

“A lot of people write Dorchester off when it comes to healthy eating, but look at the excitement of the crowd. There’s real interest in this community,’’ said Silverman. “Dorchester wants to be part of the healthy food conversation.’’

Just 30 minutes into the event, dozens of people crowded a hall at the Codman Square Health Center, perusing stands of cheese, frozen meat, and vegetables. Long lines formed at farmers’ tables as visitors waited their turn to pick up white potatoes for $1 per pound, cabbage at $2.50 per head, and winter squash - ranging from $2 to $4, among other items.

Sandra Cotterell, chief executive of the Codman Square Health Center, said the market is a “great way to build a healthy culture’’ in Dorchester.

“There are not a lot of big markets here that offer fresh products, but everyone wants to eat healthy,’’ she said.

Barbara Ferrer, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission, said she was impressed by the “outpouring of residents.’’

“This was all locally organized, and they made a dream a reality,’’ Ferrer said. “This really talks about supporting different needs. [The farmers] are providing healthy food and [the shoppers] are helping the economy.’’

Smith said he wished he had packed more vegetables and vowed to be better prepared next Sunday. The market will run for 12 weeks, every Sunday until late March, from noon to 3 p.m., organizers said.

Leaf remnants and pencil-size pieces of carrots indicated that a bucket was once filled with $2 organic carrots.

“Thanks for coming. This means an awful lot to us,’’ said Smith, as he sold $7 worth of white potatoes to a smiling customer.

Time to prepare for a mass wave of climate refugees?

2012-01-09T09:27:00.004-05:00

Want to know one major difference between weather anomalies and climate change? Mass migrations! (GW)

Climate change castaways consider move to Australia

By Ben Doherty in Male, Maldives
Sydney Morning Herald
January 7, 2012

THE President of what could be the first country in the world lost to climate change has urged Australia to prepare for a mass wave of climate refugees seeking a new place to live.

The Maldivian President, Mohamed Nasheed, said his government was considering Australia as a possible new home if the tiny archipelago disappears beneath rising seas.

''It is increasingly becoming difficult to sustain the islands, in the natural manner that these islands have been,'' he told the Herald in an interview in Male, the Maldives capital.

''So … if everyone else around Australia is so poor and unable to fend for themselves and have a decent life, would that necessarily make life in Australia any better? Would that be the castle that you can defend?''

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a sea-level rise of up to 59 centimetres over the next century, a level that would inundate most of the Maldives' inhabited atolls. Low-lying Pacific island nations, such as Kirabati and Tuvalu, would also face being flooded.

''If nations won't do good for themselves, they really must do good for everyone around, simply in your self-interest as well,'' Mr Nasheed said.

''Not necessarily because you're so nice, and so benevolent and good that you want to provide others with things.

''But I think it's really quite necessary for Australians and for every rich country to understand that this is unlike any other thing that's happened before.''

The country has established a sovereign wealth fund, drawn from its tourist revenue, to be used to buy land overseas and finance the relocation of the country's population of 350,000.

Australia, for its climate and abundance of space, along with Sri Lanka and India, for their proximity and cultural similarities, are the three countries the President has identified as possible destinations.

''They are the talked about countries, though we haven't necessarily had official conversations with these governments,'' Mr Nasheed said.

Eighty per cent of the Maldivian land mass - a string of more than 1200 islands, 200 inhabited, running 750 kilometres north-south in the Indian Ocean - is less than a metre above sea level. The highest point in the entire country is 2.4 metres above sea level, and already, 14 islands have had to be abandoned because of massive erosion by the sea.

Mr Nasheed said Maldivians want to stay but moving was an eventuality his government had to plan for. He said he did not want his people ''living in tents'' for years, or decades, as refugees.

The Maldives is not the first nation to look to Australia as a destination for its climate change refugees. A decade ago, the government of Tuvalu, north of New Zealand in the Pacific Ocean, requested immigration assistance for its population of 12,000 to move to Australia. The Australian government said its humanitarian obligations were to people who require ''assistance urgently''.

Mr Nasheed praised Australia's decision to adopt a carbon tax, describing it as a ''brave move forward''.

''That is the kind of progressive legislation we want to see from other countries,'' he said.

But other Maldivian government officials told the Herald Australia was ''destructive'' at the just-completed round of climate change talks in Durban.

Under the last-minute agreement reached in Durban, countries have agreed to begin work on a new global treaty to cut carbon emissions, to be signed in 2015, but not to come into force until 2020.

Dig for Victory

2012-01-08T06:58:00.005-05:00

Many years ago, John and Nancy Todd and I had a dream to translate and transfer what we learned about sustainable design at the New Alchemy Institute to the city. Although that didn't happen during my tenure as director there, I did see the vision realized nearly a decade later at the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative. But even as recent as 1995, the notion of urban agriculture was still considered radical. (GW)

Next stop, the Olympics: Urban farmers are digging for eco-victory

Not since the war has growing food been so popular with 'townies', and many are now turning their hobby into a business

By Genevieve Roberts
The Independent
8 January 2012

Think of farming, and the rolling fields of the countryside spring to mind. But across Britain's towns and cities, veggie growers, cheese-makers and honey producers are becoming established. Not since the Second World War, when people were urged to Dig for Victory, has urban farming been so popular.

Across the country, more than 2,000 new spaces for growing food have been created over the past three years. And this is just the start of the upsurge of inner-city farming. Already, eco-designers have been invited to look round the Olympic site in east London to see if there is potential for a farm after the Games.

While city allotments have long been popular, people are now growing produce to sell: Gordon Ramsay's Bread Street Kitchen features Bermondsey Frier cheese on its menu, while St Mungo's, the homeless shelter in south London, sells its vegetables to The Table Café in Southwark.

In Nottingham, Ecoworks runs a local vegetable scheme delivering vegetable boxes to eight points across the city, and in Newcastle, bees on the roof of Fenwick yield the honey sold in the department store.

Today, Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming, launches its report "A Growing Trade" to advise people how to grow for sale in an urban environment. Ben Reynolds, network director of Sustain, said: "In the last year, we have seen people start selling their urban agricultural produce."

In London, there are now almost 1,500 growing spaces that have joined Capital Growth, a scheme run by Sustain for city gardens and farms, funded by the Mayor of London. That has risen from only 50 at the launch of the scheme in 2008.

"It's a vast rise, with 50,000 people getting involved across these sites," Mr Reynolds said. "People are now thinking how to make this sustainable, and are establishing relationships with local restaurants. A growing number of community projects are going down the enterprise route."

Polly Higginson, author of the report, said: "There has been a real change in attitude in the community food sector towards how they see their pr ojects. Trading is a good opportunity to generate income to contribute towards project costs and to lift the ambitions of those involved."

Charlie Price is founder of Aquaponics UK, which nurtures plants and fish in symbiotic balance in urban locations, including the FARM: Shop in Dalston, north-east London. "Urban agriculture is evolving rapidly into a viable, cost-effective and engaging way to produce food in our towns and cities," he said. "It provides good quality, healthy food that is sustainable environmentally, socially and economically."

Andrew Merritt, co-director of Something & Son eco-design company, who devised the FARM: Shop, has already toured the Olympic site to look at potential spaces to make a farm after the Games.

He said: "Urban farming is growing because buying food has become a process rather than a pleasure. It allows city folk to have a connection with where their food comes from; it's ultra fresh and you can pick it, touch it, and smell it. It's also a way of bringing industry, greenery, food education and fun into our cities, which can only be good."

Secret Science Club

2012-01-07T11:29:00.002-05:00

Suddenly, the notion of "passing the bar" takes on a whole new meaning for me. (GW)

Continuing Education, at the Bar

By Jennifer Schuessler
New York Times
January 5, 2012

FOR many, January means back to the lecture hall, and not just at colleges and universities. Across New York the backrooms of bars and the main stages of clubs are coming to resemble secret annexes to the Learning Annex — homes to a boom in alternative lecture series that combine the spirit of the seminar room with the atmosphere of speed dating.

Sometimes the matchmaking is purely intellectual, as speakers bring evolutionary biology or astrophysics to first-timers who thought they had just come for the beer. Other times it’s of the more literal kind (though sorry, ladies, the sex ratio doesn’t seem to be any better in nerd circles).

Whether it’s credentialed neuroscientists delivering a solid happy hour on the mysteries of the brain or tag teams of amateurs competing to give the best 15-minute PowerPoint on cephalopod sex or fake alphabets, never has New York (or Brooklyn, anyway) offered so many opportunities to get smart while also getting a bit stupid. Here’s a survey of some offbeat lecture series that let the intellectually curious go back to school, without the homework.

Secret Science Club

Quick-freezing demonstrations onstage and straight-up theme cocktails at the bar are the order of the evening at the Secret Science Club, a five-year-old lecture series that draws overflow crowds to its monthly meetings at the Bell House in Gowanus, Brooklyn.

Competition for bicycle parking can be fierce, as is the scramble just to get in the door of the 400-capacity club to hear top-flight speakers like the New York University astrophysicist David Hogg, who begins this year’s season on Jan. 18.

For regulars like Mike Garbarino, 42, a self-described “educated layperson” from Yonkers who boasts of having attended every session except the one given the day his father died, the club is a social night out as well as an act of cultural dissidence.

“It got started in 2006, which was the height of national stupidity,” Mr. Garbarino said at a recent event. “This was pushback. People were sick of being dumb.”

Margaret Mittelbach, a writer and editor who started the Secret Science Club with Michael Crewdson and Dorian Devins, said it was important to keep the barriers to the audience as low as the qualifications of the speakers are high.

“People may not know how interested they are until they come,” Ms. Mittelbach said. “That’s why we keep it free. People don’t have anything to lose.”

Lecturers — three of whom have been Nobel Prize winners — hardly skimp on the substance, though they do tend to be mindful that the audience, unlike students in their 10 a.m. class, may be at least one sheet to the wind.

“I could talk to you for 25 minutes about the morphology of a particular foot bone, but that wouldn’t be particularly fair,” William Harcourt-Smith, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History, said during a standing-room lecture in November.

Instead, Dr. Harcourt-Smith flashed a “slightly kinky” slide of a chimp holding up a silver stiletto with its feet before offering to buy that evening’s special cocktail, the Fossil Evidence, for anyone who could guess the name of a certain bone.

“You get half a drink,” he said after someone shouted out a half-correct answer.

The speakers are paid only in beer and applause. Most talk for about 45 minutes, though the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, inaugurated the series’s move to the Bell House in 2009 from the smaller Union Hall in Park Slope by going a full two hours.

“He’s famous for being the Bruce Springsteen of science lecturers,” Ms. Mittelbach said. “It was a lengthy, meaty show.”

A more literal kind of meat is featured in December at the club’s annual Carnivorous Nights taxidermy contest, a raucous festival of applied zoology. At last month’s sold-out edition, the judges considered some 30 entries, including a “Pietà”-like mounting of a pygmy South American sloth and her baby, a diorama dramatizing the death of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith (represented by a beetle), and a Christmas tree trimmed with small-mammal hindquarters.

The occasional footnote about exotic chicken genetics aside, the taxidermy event was longer on gonzo creativity than real natural history. But for some, it’s a gateway drug to the club’s more serious offerings.

“It’s fun to come and get a small piece of how the world works,” said Nadia Siddiqui, 30, a worker for a human-rights organization who came for the taxidermy a few years ago but has since returned for a half-dozen lectures, including one on animal swarming behavior, her favorite so far.

“I’m a nerd,” she added. “I like these things.”

Nerd Nite

Nerdiness is elevated to a full-fledged badge of identity at Nerd Nite, a monthly lecture series that has been packing Galapagos Art Space in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn since 2008. Its date-night crowd goes to party to the mantra “Be there and be square,” projected on screen before each event underneath a line drawing of stylishly geeky spectacles.

If Secret Science Club is all about bringing the best scientific minds of New York to the people, Nerd Nite is all about celebrating the expertise of amateurs, the goofier and poppier the better.

“We like zombies,” said Malcolm McDonald, 32, a computer programmer, when asked to explain what drew him and his girlfriend to the November edition, which featured talks on bad trips in travel literature, the romantic psychology of “Twilight” and “nonballistic” methods for fighting off the undead.

“That, and the fact that it’s nerdy, I guess,” added his girlfriend, Lisa Yau, 29, who works in retail analytics and met Mr. McDonald on Match.com after he noticed her claim to have memorized pi to 50 digits. “We self-identify as nerds a little bit.”

That sense of shared identity has fueled the growth of Nerd Nite from a homespun event in a Boston bar to a meticulously branded global enterprise, with offshoots in more than 30 cities worldwide, regular speed-dating events, and a magazine, to be introduced on Friday night at a special event featuring talks on “The Rise and Fall of the Atari Empire” and the history of the jumpsuit, along with a rap duel.

Speed dating is also a good metaphor for how the series finds its lecturers, who are mostly chosen from among the half-dozen audience members who line up after each event to pitch the organizer, Matt Wasowski, on their ideas for future talks.

Anyone who knows more about something than 99.9 percent of the population is “qualified to be a nerd,” said Mr. Wasowski, though he does have a few iron-clad rules for speakers, starting with the requirement that they be as entertaining as possible.

“Ultimately you’re still at a social event on a Thursday or Friday night,” said Mr. Wasowski, a boyishly gangly 36-year-old with a day job at an educational software company. “It’s got to be fun.”

The Nerd Nite style — tongue-in-cheek PowerPoint slides, lots of (sometimes faux) data, plenty of audience participation — was on full display in the final fall event, though not everyone was satisfied by the steady stream of laugh lines in the opening talk, delivered by a stick-wielding financial-services marketer named Roger Ma, author of “The Zombie Combat Manual.”

“The first lecture was kind of fluffy,” John Evan Perigoe, 28, said during intermission. “Hopefully there will be more substance in the next one.”

Susan Carnell, a research psychologist at Columbia who gave the lecture on “Twilight,” did manage to slip some real science into her talk, including references to a recent study of the mating behavior of male topi antelopes and a slide depicting the vagina photoplethysmograph, a contraption used to measure female arousal.

But after the talk, Dr. Carnell — who called herself “a genuine nerd” — said the Nerd Nite experience was less about imparting knowledge than being part of a familial event. “I’ve always wanted to be a best man,” she said. “Everyone’s on your side and wants you to be funny.”

Moonlighter Presents

If Secret Science Club is the rock-star professor dropping statistics jokes, and Nerd Nite is the “Star Trek” obsessive who has suddenly started wearing a bit of product in his hair, then Moonlighter Presents is the slightly intimidating couple from your semiotics seminar, ready with a casually brilliant postironic take on just about everything.

This series, which started in 2010 in a former funeral home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, draws about 50 people. It features youngish academics, artists and writers on subjects outside their expertise, though you get the feeling the speakers wouldn’t be caught dead talking about vampires. Instead, topics lean toward theory-tinged eclectica like the poetics of hay fever, the cultural politics of Steely Dan fandom and the history of the car ferry in Elberta, Mich., along with subjects of more urgent local concern, like “What Is Pretentiousness, and Does It Make Me Look Good?”

Stephanie DeGooyer, a doctoral candidate in English literature at Cornell, who started the series with Justin Martin, an artist, said Moonlighter was meant to push back against the hyper-specialization of intellectual life.

“Professionalism has made it so that you can only speak in public if you’ve been invited to speak on something you’ve researched for a long time,” Ms. DeGooyer said. “But off the clock people have all these ideas.”

The events, which are free, have an ambience that’s less date night than earnest dorm-room bull session, though actual dancing did break out at one recent event, held at a Polish bar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. New York is increasingly full of D.I.Y. intellectual enterprises like Open City Dialogue, a lecture series held every other Monday at Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg, and the courses organized by the Public School or the Brooklyn Brainery, which match people who want to learn about a proposed topic (death in Derrida, beekeeping, “Genetic Engineering in Your Basement”) with someone who wants to teach it.

But few take their metaphors both as seriously and as lightly as Moonlighter, which, this month, means moving the event to an office space in Manhattan, after hours.

A fluorescent-lighted cubicle farm may seem like the last place cool Brooklynites would voluntarily spend an evening, even if the schedule does promise a talk on the “aesthetics, history and mythology of the airport carpet” and an experimental wordless lecture titled “Next Slide Please.”

But to Ms. DeGooyer the setting captures the Moonlighter ethos perfectly. “The idea of an office space is symbolic for what we do,” she said. “Being in a more awkward space inspires a different kind of thinking.”

Beer and Brains

MOONLIGHTER PRESENTS Jan. 15, 7 p.m., R.S.V.P. to justin@moonlighterpresents.com for locations; moonlighterpresents.com.

NERD NITE LAUNCH PARTY Friday night at 8, Galapagos Art Space, 16 Main Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn; (718) 222-8500, nyc.nerdnite.com; $11.11.

SECRET SCIENCE CLUB Jan. 18, 8 p.m., the Bell House, 149 Seventh Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn; (718) 643-6510, secretscienceclub.blogspot.com, thebellhouseny.com; free.

Other opportunities to wear your pocket protector:

BROOKLYN BRAINERY 515 Court Street, at Ninth Street, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn; brooklynbrainery.com.

OPEN CITY DIALOGUE SERIES Pete’s Candy Store, 709 Lorimer Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn; (718) 302-3770, petescandystore.com.

PROTEUS GOWANUS 543 Union Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn; (718) 243-1572, proteusgowanus.org.

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL Various locations; nyc.thepublicschool.org.

Vertical-axis wind turbine takes the plunge in deep water

2012-01-06T06:59:00.009-05:00

Can the vertical-axis wind turbine find a niche for itself in deep offshore waters? Some wind engineers and developers think this design has advantages over the more commonly deployed three-blade, horizontal-axis wind turbine. (GW)

Deep-water vertical-axis wind turbine gets last dry run

Recharge
January 6, 2012

Construction will begin this summer in the south of France on the 2MW onshore prototype of a floating vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT) that is on course to be the first full-scale machine of its kind operating offshore.

The VertiWind concept is the first fruit of a collaboration between French offshore oil and gas engineering giant Technip and compatriot start-up Nénuphar, which for the past three years has been road-testing a 1:10 scale version of its VAWT design, kitted out with a foundation with hydraulic jacks that simulate the marine environment.

The diagonally bladed concept, designed for deep-water use, is on the fast track. The companies plan to have a 25MW development consisting of 13 full-scale “multifloater” units on line by 2015.

The unit’s designers, aeronautical engineers Charles Smadja and Frédéric Silvert, came into offshore wind with the idea that although current utility-scale turbines were “optimal” for onshore and shallow waters, in deeper waters the machines would call for either “very large” floaters buoyed by massive ballasts or “very costly” tension-leg-type moorings. A vertical-axis rotor needs neither.

Technip had nailed its offshore colours to the mast off Norway in 2009 with the switch-on of Statoil’s spar-type Hywind turbine, which the contractor had designed, fabricated and installed in 220 metres of water off the southwest municipality of Karmøy.

“The starting point is certainly Hywind,” says Technip’s vice-president for renewable energy, Stéphane His. “It will always be seen as a key project in the history of our offshore wind strategy. Whether this sort of installation could be multiplied by a high number, however, unless certain optimisations were made [was a question].

“During this project there was some head-scratching on the subject of where we go from here. We were — and are — of the belief that floating offshore wind needs some sort of breakthrough and it needs something different to achieve this, something disruptive.”

Around this time, Technip got together with Nénuphar. It led quickly to the two companies taking the lead in an all-French consortium that is among the beneficiaries of the government’s Grand Emprunt €35bn ($45.3bn) industrial stimulus package.

Project partners for VertiWind include utility EDF; public-sector research, innovation and training centre IFP EN; and specialist deepwater contractor Seal Engineering, along with classification society Bureau Veritas.

The group’s 2MW offshore prototype is foreseen operating in water depths of at least 50 metres. Based on a three-column semi-submersible concept, it will, like its onshore forerunner, feature a 50-metre-diameter Darrieus-type rotor consisting of three 70-metre-tall blades, each angled at 120 degrees, attached by struts to a pole at the centre of the floater.

The unit’s mooring system will be a chain-and-wire three-point spread, with standard drag anchors or piles, depending on a site’s soil conditions, securing it to the seabed.
Offshore, there will be an “air gap” — the distance between the rotor and the sea — of 25 metres.

Being a VAWT, the VertiWind has no yaw or pitch system — the 100-metre-high “omnidirectional” turbine can harness wind from any point on the compass; nor is there a gearbox, which is in line with a minimum-component philosophy.

The unit will be smaller than like-rated horizontalaxis models, with a power-production curve — according to Nénuphar’s output modelling — revved up by the faster, steadier winds found offshore, and an algorithm-based control system regulating rotor speed to improve the turbine’s efficiency.

His says: “The vertical-access turbine designs offer many advantages: high production output, operational stability, a low centre of gravity that means it can be built and installed in most places in the world, and a nacelle that is easily accessed, which is very important later, once the turbine is in operation offshore.”

The rotor, its shaft guided with two bearings enclosed in the mast, is connected via an elastic coupling to a direct-drive transmission, with a fail-safe emergency disc-and-caliper braking system stopping the turbine in any situation, including a network failure, as well as “parking” the rotor when the wind speed reaches cut-off.

The power take-off system will include a transformer to step-up electricity export over long distances through a dynamic subsea cable without a booster substation.

The floater’s generator, a 50-tonne permanent-magnet model built by France’s Alstom and Converteam, serves more than just the expected role of power producer, sitting 20 metres above the sea — 40 metres lower than on a conventional 100-metre-tall turbine — to give the floater a low centre of gravity.

VertiWind’s nine-metre draft is central to the commercial case behind its design.

Unlike spars, which need upwards of 100 metres of water during turbine mating and transport, VertiWind’s floating structure — fabricated with cylindrical steel columns set into hexagonal concrete heave plates — could be constructed and commissioned complete with turbine at the quayside. It would then be towed out to site with offshore service vessels for hook up to its mooring and electrical infrastructure, doing away with expensive heavy-lift crane work.

“[Deepwater ports] are not a situation we have everywhere in the world, so if you’re looking at many areas of the world where there is a demand for an easy-to-install solution, draft matters,” says His. “This opens up the possibilities for construction at a much larger number of ports.

“Working with Nénuphar has allowed us to think not only about the floating part of the system but also about the wind turbine itself, together, in an integrated way, along with construction and installation and operation.”

In operation offshore, the low-riding rotor lends stability to the floater in concert with the carbonreinforced glass-fibre blades, minimising the gyroscopic effect on the structure by smoothing the torque dynamics and lessening the chances of a stall or blade-bending damage in high winds.

“Our rotor design evolved from one with straight, vertical blades as a response to the problem of torque variations during rotation, particularly in extreme wind velocities,” says Nénuphar’s Smadja. “In such a dynamic storm, the load occurs on the whole length of a straight blade at once; with our design, [the loads are distributed] along all the blades as they turn.”

The 35kW prototype that has been put through its paces since early 2009 at a site near the northern city of Boulogne-sur-Mer stands 12 metres tall, and is fitted with seven-metre blades on a six-metre-diameter rotor. Testing of the machine, built with engineering institute Arts et Métiers ParisTech, has concentrated on calibrating the power curve to the control system to hone efficiency and output, with refinements made to the aerofoil structure and the supporting struts.

The prototype’s base has a tilting mechanism that makes it possible for the turbine to operate in a “skewed flow”, as a floating VAWT might offshore, with the turbine axis being rotated up to 15 degrees. The “inclineable” foundation can also generate harmonic rotation to simulate motions and accelerations that mirror the offshore environment.

Cut-in speed on the prototype, which has been running at full load for the past 12 months, is four metres per second (m/s); cut-out is at “somewhat higher than 25m/s”.
“The measured output has matched very well with the calculations,” says Smadja. “We have also been able to prove, among other things, [that] this type of machine performs very well under skewed flow. On a floater, given the offshore wave and wind conditions, you often have skewed flow.

“Due to the architecture and the turbine design, the power production is not really impacted by the inclination of the turbine axis relative to the wind direction.”

Construction and operation of the full-scale onshore prototype will feed into fine-tuning and optimisation of the engineering for the building of the first offshore unit. An application has been made to the French authorities to install the flagship 2MW floater in 85 metres of water in the French Mediterranean, about 5km off the city of Fos-sur-Mer, where winds can whip through at 43m/s and waves of seven metres are not uncommon.

For the full-scale prototype — to be tested at a soon-to-be-announced site — Nénuphar has developed a composite blade technology that can be manufactured using an integrated, one-piece “monobloc” design, says Smadja. The resulting rotor blades are engineered to be light and of a stiffness tailored to the “dynamical and mechanical behaviour” of a VAWT, but with a manufacturing process that “remains as simple as for a straight blade”.

“I am amazed how far this project has come in the past three years,” Smadja remarks. “But this is just a start. What is coming is more challenging yet.”

The project timeline sees a second VertiWind turbine being floated out and connected with the flagship, followed, in 2015, by the 25MW development, dubbed VertiMed, which is being partly financed through the NER300 programme, a renewable-energy technology scheme managed jointly by the European Commission and European Investment Bank.

“Hywind has been an important project for [Technip] because it made us think about our involvement in offshore wind strategically,” notes His. “The acquisition earlier this year of [UK offshore installation contractor] Subocean, the creation of a distinct sector identity in TOW [Technip Offshore Wind] — and we are going to be very active in the French tender, supporting the Iberdrola-Areva bid.

“The VertiWind project shows how serious we continue to be about involving ourselves in this industry that is expanding so quickly and so broadly.

“We are approaching this with some humility; we know we have knowledge to build up, but we also have the confidence in the knowledge that we can bring to the [offshore wind] sector through our project-management experience in the offshore oil and gas industry.

“Projects are getting much bigger. You quickly get to projects costing €1bn and you can’t manage them in the way that onshore projects have been. Offshore wind is a different world.”

"...the new stuff for people to do "

2012-01-05T08:07:00.007-05:00

Bucky Fuller was well known for his provocative Utopian visions including a dome-covered Manhattan and the notion of a "a World That Works For Everyone" wherein the World Game with its emphasis on "Livingry replaces War Games obsessed with "Weaponry". As radical as those ideas are, however, I found the one that seemed to strike most of my friends as his most outlandish vision was his conviction that evolution (spurred by technological innovation) was leading society inevitably towards total unemployment.

He talked a lot about a "Guaranteed Minimum Income" for everyone that would spark individual and collective creativity. Extra income could be earned by those who choose to work at essential jobs related to manufacturing, education, public safety, infrastructure maintenance/repair, etc.

Is there such a thing as being too Utopian? I for one, don't think so. (GW)

"Tectonic Shifts" in Employment

Information technology is reducing the need for certain jobs faster than new ones are being created.

By David Talbot
Technology Review
January/February 2012

The United States faces a protracted unemployment crisis: 6.3 million fewer Americans have jobs than was true at the end of 2007. And yet the country's economic output is higher today than it was before the financial crisis. Where did the jobs go? Several factors, including outsourcing, help explain the state of the labor market, but fast-advancing, IT-driven automation might be playing the biggest role.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, people have feared that new technologies would permanently erode employment. Over and over again, these dislocations of labor have been temporary: technologies that made some jobs obsolete eventually led to new kinds of work, raising productivity and prosperity with no overall negative effect on employment.

There's nothing to suggest that this dynamic no longer operates, but new research is showing that advances in workplace automation are being deployed at a faster pace than ever, making it more difficult for workers to adapt and wreaking havoc on the middle class: the clerks, accountants, and production-line workers whose tasks can increasingly be mastered by software and robots. "Do I think we will have permanently high unemployment as a consequence of technology? No," says Peter Diamond, the MIT economist who won a 2010 Nobel Prize for his work on market imperfections, including those that affect employment. "What's different now is that the nature of jobs going away has changed. Communication and computer abilities mean that the type of jobs affected have moved up the income distribution."

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee study information-supercharged workplaces and the innovations and productivity advances they continually create. Now they have turned their sights to how these IT-driven improvements affect employment. In their new book, Brynjolfsson, director of the Center for Digital Business at MIT's Sloan School of Management, and McAfee, its principal research scientist, see a paradox in the first decade of the 2000s. Even before the economic downturn caused U.S. unemployment to rise from 4.4 percent in May 2007 to 10.1 percent in October 2009, a disturbing trend was visible. From 2000 to 2007, GDP and productivity rose faster than they had in any decade since the 1960s, but employment growth was comparatively tepid.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee posit that more work was being done by, or with help from, machines. For example, Amazon.com reduced the need for retail staffers; computerized kiosks in hotels and airports replaced clerks; voice-recognition and speech systems replaced customer support staff and operators; and businesses of all kinds took advantage of tools such as enterprise resource planning software. "A classically trained economist would say: 'This just means there's a big adjustment taking place until we find the new equilibrium—the new stuff for people to do,' " says McAfee.

We've certainly made such adjustments before. But whereas agricultural advances played out over a century and electrification and factory automation rolled out over decades, the power of some information technologies is essentially doubling every two years or so as a consequence of Moore's Law. It took some time for IT to fully replace the paper-driven workflows in cubicles, management suites, and retail stores. (In the 1980s and early 1990s productivity grew slowly, and then it took off after 1996; some economists explained that IT was finally being used effectively.) But now, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue, the efficiencies and automation opportunities made possible by IT are advancing too fast for the labor market to keep up.

More evidence that technology has reduced the number of good jobs can be found in a working paper by David Autor, an economist at MIT, and David Dorn, an economist at the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Madrid. They too point to the crucial years of 2000–2005. Job growth happened mainly at the ends of the spectrum: in lower-paying positions, in areas such as personal care, cleaning services, and security, and in higher-end professional positions for technicians, managers, and the like. For laborers, administrative assistants, production workers, and sales representatives, the job market didn't grow as fast—or even shrank. Subsequent research showed that things got worse after 2007. During the recession, nearly all the nation's job losses were in those middle categories—the positions easiest to replace, fully or in part, by technology.

Brynjolfsson says the trends are "troubling." And they are global; some of the jobs that IT threatens, for example, are at electronics factories in China and transcription services in India. "This is not about replacing all work, but rather about tectonic shifts that have left millions much worse off and others much better off," he says. While he doesn't believe the problem is permanent, that's of little solace to the millions out of work now, and they may not be paid at their old rates even when they do find new jobs. "Over the longer term, they will develop new skills, or entrepreneurs will figure out ways of making use of their skills, or wages will drop, or all three of those things will happen," he says. "But in the short run, your old set of skills that created a lot of value are not useful anymore."

This means there's a risk, unless the economy generates new high-quality jobs, that the people in the middle will face the prospect of menial jobs—whose wages will actually decline as more people compete for them. "Theory says the labor market will 'clear.' There are always things for people to do," Autor says. "But it doesn't say at what price." And even as it gets crowded and potentially even less rewarding at the bottom, employees at the top are getting paid more, thanks to the multiplier effects of technology. Some 60 percent of the income growth in the United States between 2002 and 2007 went to the top 1 percent of Americans—the bulk of whom are executives whose companies are getting richer by using IT to become more efficient, Brynjolfsson and McAfee point out.

Dramatic shifts have happened before. In 1800, 90 percent of Americans were employed in agriculture. The figure was down to 41 percent by 1900 and stands at 2 percent today. People work, instead, in new industries that were unimaginable in the early 19th century. Such a transformation could happen again. Today's information technologies, even as they may do short-term harm to some kinds of employees, are clearly a boon to entrepreneurs, who now have cheaper and more powerful tools at their disposal than at any other time in history. As jobs are lost, Brynjolfsson says, "we will be running an experiment on the economy to see if entrepreneurs invent new ways to be productive equally quickly." As examples, he points to eBay and Amazon Marketplace, which together allow hundreds of thousands of people to make their living hawking items to customers around the world.

The problem, he says, is that not enough people are sufficiently educated or technologically savvy to exploit such rapid advances and develop as-yet-unimagined entrepreneurial niches. He and McAfee conclude their book by arguing that the same technologies now making industry far more productive should be applied to updating and improving the educational system. (In one promising example they cite, 58,000 people went online to take an artificial-intelligence class offered by Stanford University.)

IT-based entrepreneurship isn't the only potential technological driver of new jobs. Revitalizing manufacturing (see "Can We Build Tomorrow's Breakthroughs?") could also help. But automation has made manufacturing far less labor intensive, so even a manufacturing revival is not likely to mean a great many new jobs on balance. Likewise, anyone whose hopes are pinned on "green jobs" may be disappointed. Though jobs will be created in the switch to cleaner energy sources, jobs tied to traditional energy will be lost in the same process. Many economists are not certain what the net effect will be. And in any case, these days manufacturing and energy account for small slices of the U.S. economy, which is now driven much more by the service sector. That's why fast-advancing information technologies, with their pervasive reach and their potential to create new services and satisfy new niche markets, may be a better bet for job creation—though the tumult IT is causing in the labor market isn't necessarily going to resolve itself quickly.

Peter Diamond says that one of the most important things the government can do for employment is to take care of basics, like infrastructure and education. "As long as we have so many idle resources, this is the time when it's advantageous—and socially less expensive—to engage in public investment," he says. Eventually, he believes, the economy will adapt and things will work out, once again. "Jobs have been changing and moving around—within the country, out of the country—for a very long time," he says. "There will be other kinds of jobs that still require people."

David Talbot is TR's chief correspondent.

Fracturing by any other name...

2012-01-04T08:26:00.008-05:00

Let me get this straight: people are opposed to wind turbines being sited near them because they don't like the way they look or the swishing sound they make. I guess they prefer fires and oil spills in the Gulf resulting from oil drilling or fracking-related earthquakes in the Midwest? And what about the greenhouse has emissions?

The oil and gas industries are running some very expensive PR ads on television an in major newspapers these days. Shoring up their image in the face of harsh realities and the threat posed by the emerging offshore wind industry.(GW)

Ohio Shuts Wells Following Quakes

By Daniel Gilbert
Wall Street Journal
JANUARY 3, 2012

Ohio became the latest state to take action on the possible link between seismic activity and wells used to dispose of waste water from oil and gas production when state officials ordered a halt to the practice near Youngstown this weekend after several minor earthquakes.

The wells, known as injection wells, have been proliferating in Ohio to accommodate growing volumes of waste water left over from hydraulic fracturing, which involves blasting water, sand and chemicals underground to break apart dense layers of rock to free up oil and gas.

The state's move could stoke the political debate about hydraulic fracturing, also called fracking, a technique that has sparked an energy boom in several states but also concerns from environmental advocates.

The decision also highlights a controversy surrounding the exporting of fracking waste water from one state to another. More than half of the fluid injected at the Youngstown well came from Pennsylvania, said Andy Ware, deputy director of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

Ohio regulators previously asked the company operating the Youngstown well, D&L Energy Inc., to stop injecting waste water after a 2.7-magnitude earthquake Dec. 24. But on Saturday evening, officials declared a moratorium on all injections within a five-mile radius of the well after another, 4.0-magnitude earthquake earlier in the day.

There have been 11 small temblors around the well since March, roiling the rustbelt region of northeast Ohio, which has no known history of seismic activity.

"While we couldn't say for sure that there's a direct causation between the injection well and the earthquakes, we thought it better to be overly cautious," Mr. Ware said.

Arkansas regulators last year declared a moratorium on injection wells in the vicinity of a series of earthquakes, and in 2010 researchers at Southern Methodist University also found a link between injection wells in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and nearby quakes.

The natural-gas industry has said there is no evidence their activities are causing earthquakes and that injection wells are the safest way of disposing of waste water.

"I can't wait to see the results," Ben Lupo, chief executive of D&L Energy, said in an interview last month about tests being performed to determine if the operation of his company's well caused the earthquakes.

"I really want to know if it is, which I doubt very much." Mr. Lupo didn't respond to a request for comment Monday.

Ohio last year permitted the most such wells since 1988, and 2011 also marked the first year that a majority of the waste injected underground in the state came from out of state, notably from Pennsylvania, which is in the midst of a drilling boom, Ohio officials say.

Pennsylvania doesn't prohibit injection wells, but officials there say the state has limited geologic formations that are suitable for them. Pennsylvania has seven wells that can receive waste; Ohio has permitted 194.

Drilling companies operating in Pennsylvania had been disposing of 95% of their liquid waste at treatment plants until April, when the state's governor called on them to stop over concern the facilities weren't adequately removing contaminants before discharging them into waterways.

This, Ohio officials say, has prompted companies to truck their waste water over the state line.

Residents of northeast Ohio are hoping that drilling will reverse the region's economic fortunes, which have been in decline since steel mills closed a generation ago.

But receiving waste from other states doesn't go over well in communities such as Hubbard Township, a mile from the Pennsylvania line. "It's too toxic to discharge into the ground in Pennsylvania, but it's OK to discharge into the ground in Ohio," said Fred Hanley, a Hubbard Township official.

Mr. Hanley has filed objections with state regulators to a proposed waste water well in the township, which would operate behind a car-repair business and an ice cream parlor. Citing environmental and economic concerns, he has written Ohio Gov. John Kasich to ask for a moratorium on such wells until their impact is studied further.

In Mahoning County, which encompasses Hubbard, the volume of waste injected from out of state rose more than 400% between March and September, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of state data.

In adjacent Trumbull County, companies injected nearly 800% more out-of-state waste in that same period.

The Ohio Oil and Gas Association says injecting the waste underground is the safest way to dispose of it.

But the association worries that the surge in waste water from Pennsylvania will make it difficult for in-state producers to get rid of their waste and that their disposal costs will be increased, said Tom Stewart, the association's executive vice president.

Genomic costs and benefits of adaptation?

2012-01-03T08:10:00.005-05:00

In can be argued that African slaves were subjected to abrupt environmental/climate change when they were brought to America. The study referenced in the article below may offer clues as to the breadth and depth of the strategies Nature may employ to resotore/maintain overall ecological integrity. It certainly reveals our lack of understanding of that process and make us all the more wary of our ability as a species to adapt to abrupt global climate change. (GW)

Genome Study Points to Adaptation in Early African-Americans

By Nicholas Wade
New York Times
January 2, 2012

Researchers scanning the genomes of African-Americans say they see evidence of natural selection as their ancestors adapted to the harsh conditions of their new environment in America.

The scientists, led by Li Jin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, report in the journal Genome Research that certain disease-causing variant genes became more common in African-Americans after their ancestors reached American shores — perhaps because they conferred greater, offsetting benefits. Other gene variants have become less common, the researchers say, like the gene for sickle cell hemoglobin, which in its more common single-dose form protects against malaria. The Shanghai team suggests the gene has become less common in African-Americans because malaria is much less of a threat.

The purpose of studying African-American genomes is largely medical. Most searches for variant genes that cause disease take place in people of European ancestry, and physicians want to make sure they have not missed variants that may be more common in African-Americans and helpful for developing treatments or diagnosis.

Such searches often reveal events in a population’s history by pinpointing genes that have changed under the pressure of natural selection.

The unusually common variants identified by the Shanghai team are associated with higher risk of hypertension, prostate cancer, sclerosis and bladder cancer.

“Most of the genes associated with African-American ethnic diseases,” they write, “may have played an important role in African-Americans’ adaptation to local environment.” But the authors have not yet been able to identify the benefits they believe such genes conferred.

Mark D. Shriver, a geneticist at Penn State, said it was plausible that some versions of a gene would become more common as African-Americans adjusted to a new environment. “It’s very valid to expect that there will be factors subject to genetic adaptation and that are now more prevalent in contemporary African-Americans than in the ancestral group,” he said.

But Alkes L. Price, a geneticist at the Harvard School of Public Health, said the Shanghai team’s results, though plausible, fell short of proof. “This paper does not provide evidence of selection having occurred post-Africa,” he said.

The Shanghai researchers used a method for studying admixture, a geneticist’s term for when two populations or races intermarry; China has several such populations, perhaps accounting for the team’s interest. Using gene chips that analyze common variations in the human genome, researchers can deconstruct the chromosomes of an African-American, say, assigning each chunk of DNA to an African or European origin.

The scientists found that of the African-American genomes in their sample, 22 percent of the DNA came from Europeans, on average, and the rest from African ancestors, a figure in line with other estimates.

They then looked for sites along the genome where either European or African ancestry was present at statistically significant levels above the average, finding four regions with very common European ancestry and two with very common African ancestry. Most of these sites harbored genes of unknown function, but one, of European origin, holds a gene that combats influenza, suggesting it has become more common in African-Americans by conferring protection from the disease.

Dr. Price, however, said that two other research teams had applied the same method to African-American genomes without finding any statistically significant excess of European or African ancestry. The Chinese team, in his view, should have applied a correction factor to their statistics and, had they done so, would have obtained the same result.

In another approach, the Shanghai team focused on all the DNA segments of the African origin in the African-American genomes, discarding all the European DNA. They then compared the African component of African-American genomes with the DNA of the Yoruba of Nigeria, a well-studied population that happens to be genetically very close to the West African population from which many slaves were taken.

The Shanghai team then asked how the African genome had changed after Africans arrived in the United States. They found that versions of some genes had become more common and others less so. The less common genes included several known to be involved in protection against malaria.

Dr. Price, however, said the decrease in gene frequency might have another explanation — the fact that resistance to malaria varies in strength in different regions of West Africa. The Shanghai team may be looking at the difference in malaria resistance between the Yoruba and other African populations, not the difference between today’s African-Americans and their African ancestors, he said.

Researchers can analyze the ancestry of admixed populations because of the way the hereditary material is shuffled between generations. People have a double set of chromosomes, of which one member of each pair comes from the mother and one from the father. When the egg or sperm is made, the maternal and paternal copies of a chromosome line up and swap large chunks of DNA.

The swapped segments are so large that it takes many generations before they are whittled down to a length too small to be recognized. Meanwhile, the ancestry of each segment can be identified from its pattern of single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, the sites on the human genome where there is commonly variation in the A, T, C and G units that make up DNA.

Among human populations, there are very few absolute differences, meaning those in which all members of one population will have, for example, unit T at a site and all members of another will have unit G. But populations do have characteristic percentages. Among Europeans, 70 percent may have C and 30 percent A at a particular SNP site, whereas in Africans the ratio may be 40 percent C and 60 percent A. So a section of genome with C at this SNP site is somewhat more likely to be European.

This is hardly decisive in itself. But take a row of 10 SNPs, and if European ancestry is more likely for most of them, then that section of DNA is probably European in origin.

Geneticists can thus deconstruct the genomes of admixed populations into a mosaic in which each segment can be traced back to one or the other of the two parent populations. This is the basis of the Shanghai team’s approach. But proving that natural selection has been at work in very recent times — in this case, the last 300 years — is very difficult, because the traces of selection are still small. To be sure of detecting such weak selection signals, Dr. Jin and his colleagues conclude, researchers in the future should analyze many thousands of genomes.

Superbee

2012-01-02T07:03:00.001-05:00

If the bees are in trouble, so are we. (GW)

In search of a better bee

By Adrian Higgins
Washington Post
December 27, 2011

On a farm on the outskirts of Frederick, Kelly Rausch and Adam Finkelstein crack open a wooden beehive whose design dates to the 19th century. Inside, they point out a superbee they have made for the 21st century.

In two months, the carefully bred queen bee has built a large, productive colony that knows how to cluster against the cold and fill the winter larder with honey.

More important, her bees have sought out and destroyed a sneaky parasitic mite that feeds on their baby sisters. “The bees are definitely taking care of everything,” said Finkelstein from behind his veil.

The desire for a bee that will look after itself may seem pretty basic. But with as many as one-third of honeybee colonies routinely dying off each year and the rest requiring extraordinary care, the quest for a better bee has become critical.

Scientists are trying to find the cause of colony collapse disorder, the five-year-old phenomenon of worker bees suddenly disappearing. Other maladies abound and may be a factor in the disorder: new pests and diseases, the effects of pesticides and the strain of industrial-scale pollination.

Farmers rely on the insect not just for honey, but also to pollinate much of our food.

From their five bee yards in Frederick County, Rausch and Finkelstein run a business called VP Queen Bees, which supplies breeder queens to producers at up to $165 a queen. The producers, in turn, propagate daughter queens by the thousands and sell them to commercial beekeepers and backyard hobbyists for about $30 each.

The object: a queen that will pass on to her colony the traits of disease and pest resistance, gentleness, productivity and winter hardiness.

The single greatest threat is an Asian mite called the varroa. It feeds on honeybee young and adults and spreads viruses.

Commercial beekeepers have turned to heavy feeding and medication to try to keep hives strong in advance of their biggest gig of the year. In the new year, beekeepers will assemble more than a million hives — half the nation’s stock — in the almond groves of California’s San Joaquin Valley, to ensure a successful pollination of the 2012 nut crop.

One of the bright spots has been the development of a bee that battles the mite.

Marla Spivak, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota, began breeding bees to fight back nearly 20 years ago. She froze pupae and waited to see which colonies would fastidiously remove the corpses from the hive. This hygienic trait, first observed in the 1940s when young were killed by disease, was effective in breaking the life cycle of the mite. She called her queens Minnesota Hygienic.

Separately, scientists at the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s honeybee lab in Baton Rouge were studying why some of their hives had low mite levels. After about 10 years of work, they finally figured it out. The bees in those colonies were able to detect mites hiding in sealed cells and feeding on developing young. The bees uncapped the cells and dragged out the mites, along with infested brood. Hybridizers label these neatnik bees varroa sensitive hygienic (VSH).

Tom Glenn, of Glenn Apiaries in Fallbrook, Calif., has worked with the lab to produce VSH breeder queens for queen producers around the nation. After 10 years, about 25 percent of the nation’s honeybees have significant hygienic behavior in their DNA, Glenn said.

As vital as the hygienic bee is, the breeder must preserve existing desirable traits — a reluctance to sting or swarm, for example, as well as genetic diversity as a hedge against future diseases or pests.

“That’s why gains are so slow,” said Susan Cobey, a bee geneticist at the University of California and Washington State University. “I would say we are just in the infancy of bee breeding.”

Finkelstein, however, says he thinks he is close to achieving his primary aim of creating a bee that can survive with just basic husbandry. He says he hasn’t medicated his hives in 14 years.

Another challenge is that unlike with apple or cattle breeding, for example, the average bee breeder cannot control the male line. The queen mates on the wing with 2o or so drones from surrounding colonies. The most able breeders are getting around this by artificially inseminating virgin queens with the semen from known drone stock, a technique perfected by Cobey. Only a handful of hybridizers can do it. Glenn is one. Rausch is another.

Creating a superbee is one thing, getting professional beekeepers to accept it is another. For now at least, there is enormous resistance by the commercial beekeeping industry to using improved bee stock without the continued regimen of medication and supplemental feeding.

“The large commercial beekeepers are essentially farmers, and they’re risk averse,” said Robert Danka, a research entomologist at the government’s Baton Rouge lab. “This is a very dangerous parasite we’re dealing with, and a vast majority believe if you stopped treating with chemicals, their bees will die,” he said.

Pat Heitkam, a major queen producer in Orland, Calif. said he spends “in excess of $40,000” a year medicating his queens against gut disease. “I’m not sure it’s necessary,” he said, but he can’t risk selling diseased bees to his customers.

Under a new initiative, entomologists are working with queen producers in California to evaluate colonies for the strongest stock. Organizers hope that this, in turn, will lead to the selection of hardier bees and, ultimately, less reliance by beekeepers on chemical treatments. The 20 producers in the program raise about half the queen bees sold in the United States.

Near-term salvation may come from backyard hobbyists, who are more willing to risk losing an unmedicated colony.

Karla Eisen of the Prince William Regional Beekeepers Association tracked the fortunes of more than 40 hives over two years and found the survival rate of locally sourced hives and queens — most of them from Rausch and Finkelstein — significantly outperformed traditionally sourced queens and bee packages from the South.

After two winters, 74 percent of the local colonies were still alive compared with 40 percent of the Southern bees.

“They call it the James Bond approach,” Spivak said. “Live and let die. You keep colonies without any medications. In theory it sounds good, except you reduce the gene pool” by losing bees that might have other valuable breeding traits.

Everyone agrees that a bee that could survive pests without the stresses of chemicals “would make beekeeping a lot easier,” said Reed M. Johnson, an entomologist at Ohio State University. In the nightmarish maze that the honeybee has found herself, breeding, he said, “is really our way out.”

Point-to-point service

2012-01-01T11:38:00.003-05:00

Maps - physical and mental are tools for helping us understand the paths from getting "from here to there". No one understood this better than Bucky Fuller. He realized the limitations that our dependence on the Mercator Map and its few alternatives forced for our travel options. His Dymaxion Air Ocean World Projection was a revelation. It offered a way to see the entire planet at one time with minimal distortions. It showed the Earth as one island in one ocean and made the option of the polar route very clear. (GW)

Airlines cleared to use Santa's short-cut

New destinations and shorter journey times on way after North Pole route is approved for passenger jets. Simon Calder reports

By Simon Calder
The Independent
December 24, 2011

Hard-pressed airlines have been handed the perfect Christmas present: permission to fly twin-jet aircraft over the North Pole, saving millions on fuel costs, opening up new destinations and reducing damage to the environment.

The easing of rules about how close twin-jets must keep to diversion airports means faster, cheaper and cleaner flights.

Until now, America's aviation regulators have insisted that the nearest suitable place to land must be no more than three hours away. That has now been extended to five-and-a-half hours – so long as the airline meets a series of criteria, from additional equipment to special training.

As a result, Boeing 777 and 787 "Dreamliner" twin jets will be able to fly almost anywhere in the world. A patch of territory in Antarctica remains inaccessible. But "Santa's short cut," as the route has been called, gives a green light to flights from Britain straight across the North Pole to Pacific islands that are currently off the route map.

Sir Richard Branson, president of Virgin Atlantic, told The Independent: "This new development really does open up a whole new world and will allow us to take our Dreamliners to more exciting and exotic places. Our new fleet of 787s could well be flying to Honolulu or even Fiji one day." Fiji straddles the 180-degree line of latitude, and the most direct track passes directly over the North Pole – though because of the distance, over 10,000 miles, the payload would need to be restricted. The new policy could also make no-non-stop routes to Tahiti in the South Pacific and Anchorage in Alaska viable.

Twin-jets have always faced tight rules on how far they can stray from a diversion airport, with good reason: the failure of one engine is potentially much more serious than for a three- or four-jet aircraft. The default is that twin-jets must be able to reach a suitable diversion airport within an hour's flying time on a single engine. The worst-case scenario assumes depressurisation as well as the failure of one engine, requiring the aircraft to stay low. This implies a distance of 400-450 miles. The rules oblige pilots to fly circuitous routes that waste time and fuel, and render many trans-oceanic trips impossible for twin-engined aircraft.

To venture more than 60 minutes away requires "ETOPS" certification. The term derives from "Extended Twin-jet Operations over water", though a common joke in aviation circles is that it really stands for "Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim". The aircraft and engine makers must convince regulators that it is safe to fly further away from a safe haven. Many twin-jets are certified for 120-minute ETOPS, while British Airways' entire Boeing 777 fleet is ETOPS-180 compliant – so the planes face few restrictions across the Atlantic.

But routes across the North Pole, as well as many trans-Pacific journeys, have hitherto been out-of-bounds.

Larry Loftis, general manager of Boeing's 777 programme said: "This is the logical continuation of the Boeing philosophy of point-to-point service. Passengers want to minimise their overall travel time."

The first airline to take advantage of the relaxed restrictions is Air New Zealand, which operates across the Pacific. The airline's chief pilot, Captain David Morgan, said: "Less fuel is burned and less carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere. It's also good for customers."

The Boeing 787 is expected soon to be ETOPS-330 certified, with Airbus seeking the same for its big twin jet – coincidentally named the A330.

Not everyone in aviation is happy with the relaxation of restrictions. While it is generally accepted that dual engine failure is extremely unlikely, some safety experts express concern about cabin conditions during a diversion.

One safety manager, who wished to remain anonymous, said: "It's all very well being able to make a safe landing, but passengers are likely to be distraught and extremely cold after a five-hour diversion to an airstrip in the Arctic."

But a spokesman for the British Airline Pilots' Association said: "Our members are confident that the safety case for equipment redundancy, pilot training and passenger welfare will be fully satisfied."

And Sir Richard Branson looked forward to new sightseeing opportunities: "Apart from the stunning destinations on arrival, the Arctic scenery will be just amazing on the way."

12 Degrees of Freedom

It’s all in the yaw

It’s all in the yaw

What can we do?

The Midas Formula

Social enterprise entrepreneur and neophyte farmer

Rules for Radicals

Driven by renewable energy

The politics of scientific publishing

"This deal here is like winning the lottery"

Design intervention from the bottom outward

Wind o'er water everywhere but nary a kilowatt...yet

Solar sense

Parallel Political Universe

Important step for U.S. offshore wind

What is "fast reactor" technology?

2011: 9th warmest year since 1880

References

The connected car has finally arrived

Pesticides: subtle and malicious

Compelling new evidence from the US government's top bee expert that modern pesticides may be a major cause of collapsing bee populations led to calls yesterday for the chemicals to be banned.

What, me worry?

“Landscape of Slavery"

De-evolution

"climatic debt"

Animal and insect species in Europe are losing the fight to keep up with rapid changes in climate in a new phenomenon dubbed "climatic debt", according to an international study.

"climate-smart" agriculture

Will a smart grid make us smarter?

Who Will Control the Green Economy?

The Greatest Pirates

Whole lotta shakin' goin' on

"Virtually every part of the country was affected"

Do no harm?

No scientific evidence

'Syndrome' not found

Wind Turbine Health Study Findings:

Other Earths?

What, exactly, is a pristine environment?

"Making the Future"

‘What else is going on down there?’

"Wind works" for Marylanders

Climate changers

Greenhouse Gases

More

They committed a crime against God

Continuing to build a healthy culture throughout the winter

Time to prepare for a mass wave of climate refugees?

Dig for Victory

Secret Science Club

Vertical-axis wind turbine takes the plunge in deep water

"...the new stuff for people to do "

Fracturing by any other name...

Genomic costs and benefits of adaptation?

Superbee

Point-to-point service

Hard-pressed airlines have been handed the perfect Christmas present: permission to fly twin-jet aircraft over the North Pole, saving millions on fuel costs, opening up new destinations and reducing damage to the environment.