The environment in the news friday, 30 December 2005

Other Environment News

29.12.05

Ces catastrophes ont aussi été très meurtrières, causant plus de 100 000 victimes, un chiffre atteint seulement deux fois lors des vingt-cinq dernières années, selon un bilan annuel publié par le deuxième réassureur mondial, Munich Re, jeudi 29 décembre. Swiss Re, numéro un du secteur, avait évoqué la semaine dernière le nombre d'environ 112 000 victimes. Pour sa part, Munich Re mentionne une stabilité du nombre de catastrophes – environ 650 par an.

L'ensemble des dommages causés par ces catastrophes devrait coûter plus de 200 milliards de dollars, dont 75 à 80 milliards de dollars à la charge des assureurs.

Selon Munich Re, ces pertes records s'expliquent par "une saison des cyclones particulièrement importante et destructrice". Ainsi, dans la zone atlantique, le réassureur indique que la saison 2005 – par le nombre des cyclones et par leur puissance –"dépasse toutes celles des années précédentes, depuis que des mesures ont commencé à être prises en 1851". Wilma, qui a ravagé les côtes du Mexique en octobre, était l'ouragan le plus puissant jamais enregistré.

Quant au cyclone Katrina, il devrait coûter environ 45 milliards de dollars : c'est la catastrophe naturelle la plus chère de l'histoire. Elle avait notamment entraîné une paralysie quasi générale des installations pétrolières du golfe du Mexique, et touché une région où de nombreux biens sont assurés.

L'Europe n'a pas été épargnée. En août, d'importantes inondations ont touché l'Allemagne, l'Autriche et la Suisse – cette catastrophe est d'ailleurs la plus chère de son histoire ; les pertes s'élèvent à environ 3 milliards de dollars, dont 1,7 milliard pour les assurances, selon Munich Re.

Ces chiffres dépassent de loin les dommages enregistrés en 2004, que Munich Re avait pourtant déjà qualifié à l'époque d'année "la plus coûteuse de l'histoire de l'assurance". Les dégâts se montaient alors à 145 milliards de dollars, et les assureurs avaient dû débourser environ 40 milliards de dollars.

Munich Re estime que les catastrophes continueront à pouvoir être assurées, "en acceptant le fait que les prix et les conditions évoluent avec l'augmentation des risques", ajoute-t-elle. A l'avenir, le secteur devra notamment prendre en compte le risque croissant de cyclones, "avec une situation de risques plus élevés en Atlantique nord" , liée notamment au réchauffement climatique.

Les catastrophes naturelles ont surtout été très meurtrières. A lui seul, le tremblement de terre au Pakistan en octobre – le cinquième plus meurtrier du globe – a entraîné la mort d'environ 87 000 personnes. Les réassureurs préconisent ainsi un effort accru "pour améliorer la prévention du risque et le contrôle des mégacités"  telles que Tokyo ou Miami, qui pourraient connaître un tremblement de terre majeur.

Inventan científicos un propulsor iónico electrónico que pondrá a prueba la Agencia Europea del Espacio. Se trata de una forma de energía más simple, segura y barata

Científicos de la Universidad Nacional de Australia anunciaron hoy, jueves, haber inventado un propulsor iónico electrónico para viajar al espacio, que la Agencia Europea del Espacio pondrá a prueba.

La experta Christine Charles indicó a la radio australiana ABC que el “Helicon Double-Layer Thruste” (HDLT), como se llama en inglés, es una fuente de energía más simple, segura y barata que el resto de tecnologías rivales.

Charles señaló que, si las pruebas europeas salen bien, podría empezar ser aplicable en viajes espaciales en cinco o diez años.

El nuevo sistema utiliza electricidad solar para crear un campo magnético a través del que pasa el hidrógeno provocando una corriente de plasma que propulsa la nave. “No necesita partes móviles, ni electrodos, y parte de un fenómeno físico” , indicó Charles.

El profesor de la ANU Rod Boswell, que participa en el proyecto junto a Charles, indicó que los científicos esperan que el gobierno australiano firme un memorándum de entendimiento con la Agencia Europea del Espacio para que Australia conserve su participación en la investigación europea del espacio en el futuro.

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By DANNY HAKIM

30.12.2005

Willie Nelson drives a Mercedes.

But do not lose faith, true believers. The exhaust from Mr. Nelson's diesel-powered Mercedes smells like peanuts, or French fries, or whatever alternative fuel happens to be in his tank.

While Bono tries to change the world by hobnobbing with politicians and Sir Bob Geldof plays host to his mega-benefit concerts, Willie Nelson has birthed his own brand of alternative fuel. It is called, fittingly enough, BioWillie. And in BioWillie, Mr. Nelson, 72, has blended two of his biggest concerns: his love of family farmers and disdain for the Iraq war.

BioWillie is a type of biodiesel, a fuel that can be made from any number of crops and run in a normal diesel engine. If it sounds like a joke, a number of businesses, as well as city and state and county governments, have been switching their transportation fleets to biodiesel blends over the last year. The rationale is that it is a domestic fuel that can provide profit to farmers and that it will help the environment, though environmentalists are not universally enthusiastic about it.

"I knew we needed to have something that would keep us from being so dependent on foreign oil, and when I heard about biodiesel, a light come on, and I said, 'Hey, here's the future for the farmers, the future for the environment, the future for the truckers," Mr. Nelson said in an interview this month. "It seems like that's good for the whole world if we can start growing our own fuel instead of starting wars over it."

In some ways, it is a return to the origins of the diesel engine; some of Rudolf Diesel's first engines ran on peanut oil more than a century ago.

Last week, a cargo-loading company that operates in the Port of Seattle said that to fuel its equipment next year it would purchase 800,000 gallons of biodiesel, most of it a blend known as B20 that is 80 percent conventional diesel. As of late September, Minnesota requires almost all diesel fuel sold in the state to be 2 percent biodiesel, and Cincinnati started using a 30 percent biodiesel blend, B30, in its city buses because of concerns about fuel shortages after Hurricane Katrina.

Biodiesel can cost as much as a $1 a gallon more than regular diesel when pure, though it is typically sold as B20. Prices vary depending on volume and region, and new tax incentives are aimed at closing the cost gap. BioWillie was selling for $2.37 a gallon yesterday in Carl's Corner, Mr. Nelson's own truck stop in Texas that serves as headquarters of his year-old company, Willie Nelson BioDiesel. That was just 4 cents more than the conventional diesel selling at another station nearby.

Mr. Nelson's BioWillie is aimed mostly at truckers and is usually sold as B20 (pure biodiesel can congeal in colder climates). BioWillie is currently sold at 13 gas stations and truck stops in four states (with Texas having the most), and it fuels the buses and trucks for Mr. Nelson's tours.

If BioWillie demonstrates anything, it is that the combination of Middle East wars, global warming and rising prices at the pump has led many people to offer solutions to the world's energy's squeeze. Depending on whom you ask, cars will someday run on hydrogen, electricity, natural gas or ethanol.

Mr. Nelson is making his bet on biodiesel.

"I don't like the war," he said in the interview. "In fact, I don't know if you ever remember a couple years ago, it was Christmas day, and my son Lukas was born on Christmas Day, he's like 16 years old, and we were watching TV and there was just all kind of hell breaking loose and people getting killed and I was talking to my wife, Annie, and I said, You know, all the mothers crying and the babies dying and she said, 'Well, you ought to go write that.' "So I wrote a song called 'Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?' "

He began to recite the first verse:

So many things going on in the world,

Babies dying, mothers crying.

Just how much oil is human life worth?

And whatever happened to peace on earth?

"That upset a lot of people, as you can imagine," he continued. "I've been upset about this war from the beginning and I've known it's all about oil."

Every alternative to oil, however, has its drawbacks. Biodiesel would reduce most emissions of smog-forming pollutants and global warming gases, and it could be used instead of foreign oil. But some studies show that it increases emissions of one harmful pollutant, nitrogen oxide, and it could not be produced in vast enough quantities to supplant oil-based fuel, or come close to it, unless the nation starts turning the suburbs over to farmland. And as with ethanol, producing great quantities of biodiesel from corn or soybeans could drive up food prices.

Bill Reinert, Toyota's national manager for advanced technologies, said in an interview this year: "I frankly don't see biodiesel being an early alt-fuel player across a wide swath of geography. It's a boutique fuel. There's not enough payoff and not enough people into it."

Peter J. Bell, the chief executive of Distribution Drive, a distributor of biodiesel that is working with Mr. Nelson, said of the nation's nearly 200,000 gas stations, "650 carry biodiesel, so we have a job in front of us." Mr. Nelson sits on the board of Distribution Drive's parent, Earth Biofuels, a publicly traded company.

Daniel Becker, the Sierra Club's top global warming expert, said he would prefer to see wider use of a cleaner alternative fuel, like natural gas.

Referring to biodiesel, he said, "In order to grow soybeans, you need multiple passes over the field with diesel tractors, you need a lot of fertilizer that's energy intensive to produce and, at the end of the day, you have a product that is no boon for the environment."

He went on: "If you're going to go to the trouble of using an alternative fuel, use a good alternative fuel. If you really want to listen to Willie Nelson, go buy one of his records and play it in a hybrid."

Mr. Nelson first heard about biodiesel two years ago from his wife while they were staying in Hawaii. He recounted the story.

"My wife came to me and said 'I want to buy this car that runs on biodiesel, and I said, 'What's that?' And so she told me, and I thought it was a scam or joke or something. So I said, 'Go ahead, it's your money.' "

She bought a Volkswagen Jetta with a diesel engine and started filling it with fuel made from restaurant grease. This is not uncommon. Home hobbyists make their own biodiesel by collecting used grease from restaurants and chemically treating it to turn it into usable fuel, or by outfitting their car or truck with equipment to re-form the grease.

"I drove the car, loved the way it drove," Mr. Nelson said. "The tailpipe smells like French fries. I bought me a Mercedes, and the Mercedes people were a little nervous when I took a brand new Mercedes over and filled it up with 100 percent vegetable oil coming from the grease traps of Maui. I figured I'd be getting notices about the warranty and that stuff. However, nobody said anything."

"I get better gas mileage, it runs better, the motor runs cleaner, so I swear by it," he added.

How far does he think biodiesel can go?

"It could get as big as we can grow fuel or find different things to make fuel from, such as chicken fat, beef fat, add that along to soybeans, vegetable oils, peanuts, safflower, sunflower," Mr. Nelson said.

O.K.. What about hemp?

"Hemp is a very good one," he replied, not missing a beat. "In fact, several years ago, a friend of mine named Gatewood Galbraith was running for governor of Kentucky and we campaigned all over the state of Kentucky in a Cadillac operating on hemp oil. He was trying to get it legalized in the state of Kentucky and, of course, he lost, but the cannabis thing in fuel is a very real thing."

Mr. Nelson said he did not expect to make much money on his venture. As he put it when asked about his Mercedes, "I didn't get it selling BioWillie, I'll tell you."

"I hope somebody makes money out of it; I'm sure they will. And probably what'll happen is that the oil industry will wait until everybody else builds all the infrastructure and then they'll come in and take over," he said. "But that's O.K. I don't worry about that. As along as the idea progresses because all I'm caring about is getting it out there and maybe helping the country, the farmer, the environment."

Asked if he intended to become a fat cat C.E.O. with a big cigar in his mouth, he replied: "I'll give you my part of it. I'll just sign over all my earnings and belongings to you right now and I'll sing 'Whiskey River.' "

One thing is certain: if Mr. Nelson's venture makes any money, none of it will go to pay a $16 million tax bill to the Internal Revenue Service. That debt, which arose from Mr. Nelson's participation in illegal tax shelters, was erased in 1993 with surrender of some property and the profit from his album "The IRS Tapes: Who'll Buy My Memories?"

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San Francisco Chronicle: New dawn for the delta?
With levee instability leaving the Bay Area increasingly vulnerable to earthquakes and floods, some scientists think its time to re-engineer the Sacramento-San Joaquin River ecosystem
- Glen Martin, Chronicle Environment Writer
Friday, December 30, 2005

The recent population collapse of native fish in the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers has prompted a number of scientists to call for a radical re-engineering of the region as the best way to revive its flagging ecosystems.

Think Chesapeake Bay, they say.

A large, deep body of water could be created by breaching levees east and north of Antioch, the scientists say. Tidal marshes would ring this brackish bay, with restored wetlands conjoining the upper reaches.

The new bay, while submerging tracts that have been farmed for decades, would allow salt water to intrude into the delta and create ideal conditions for large plankton populations and native fish -- particularly delta smelt.

The smelt and other native species are in a death spiral, biologists say, because of water diversions from the delta to southern California, toxic chemicals in the region's waterways and invasions of nonnative mollusks, crabs and fish.

Planned or not, such a scenario may be inevitable. Massive levee failure is likely in the next 50 to 100 years as a result of floods or earthquakes, according to a recent study by Jeffrey Mount, a UC Davis geology professor and director of the university's Center for Watershed Sciences.

"One thing's for sure -- the delta isn't going to stay the way it is," said Peter Moyle, a professor of fish biology at UC Davis and an authority on California native fishes. "We can either let the levees collapse randomly or be proactive about it. If it was done the right way, you could create some of the tidal and flow conditions that would increase biological productivity."

The delta and San Francisco Bay constitute the West Coast's most significant estuary, and while the bay generally has been improving in environmental quality in recent decades, the delta is in ecological freefall.

In 1850, it was a vast maze of marshlands, shallow sloughs, tidal flats and riparian forest, charged by the free-flowing Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. But in the past century, it has become a patchwork of croplands and urban development drained by a scant network of deep canals.

The delta originally was brackish, which accounted for its biological richness -- brackish systems are far more productive than fresh or salt-water systems.

The key problem now is that the delta is split, with water that is fresh in its middle and upper reaches to assure reliable supplies for cities and farms, and extremely saline in the lower end. The brackish zone is greatly reduced, causing severe declines in native species.

But any ambitious delta restoration would run up against three daunting obstacles -- the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the California Department of Water Resources, which are mandated to deliver large amounts of water from the delta to south state farms and cities; and farmers who resist the notion of tearing down levees protecting their cropland.

State water officials say the intrusion of salt water would require a new system to divert water from the Sacramento River around the eastern edge of the delta to the existing government pumps at Tracy, or to a new pumping site.

But the idea of a so-called peripheral canal has long been opposed, and with a price tag estimated at $10 billion and scant support from environmentalists, the project has little political traction.

Nature may not provide much time to mull over alternatives. The delta's levees are in miserable shape, and there is no money to fix them, short of funds from a proposed state multibillion-dollar infrastructure bond. Major levee collapses are a particular worry during periods of heavy and extended rainfall -- such as now, when the California coast is being battered by a series of extremely wet subtropical storms.

"In many cases, farming is occurring 20 feet below sea level," said Moyle. "The stresses on the levees are incredible. Once they go, there will be little or no economic incentive to rebuild them. And in a major earthquake, you could see wholesale failure."

It therefore may make sense to deliberately collapse some of the levees in a strategic fashion before nature does it haphazardly, Moyle said.

Even in its altered state, the delta is many things to Californians: A source of fresh water for 25 million people and hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland; a nursery, foraging ground and waypoint for the North State's great salmon fisheries; a prime recreational destination.

Its ecological decline has been a political and social flash point for years, but efforts to halt the trend have proved fruitless. A recent and particularly grim reminder of the delta's plight is the near disappearance of the delta smelt, a small native fish considered a prime indicator of the region's biological health.

Mount said the decline of biological productivity in the delta is "a classic case of multiple stressors -- water diversions, invasive species, urbanization, pesticides and other toxics. The delta is warming, which is also having an impact. It would be very difficult to parse out the individual weights of all the different factors."

Many researchers see the collapse of the delta's ecosystems as the inevitable result of a process that began long ago.

"I don't think it's surprising that we're seeing the disappearance of these native species given the changes that have occurred in the delta," said Robin Grossinger, director of the historical ecology program for the San Francisco Estuary Institute in Oakland.

The delta's essential function, he said, has changed from a nursery for fish, shellfish and wildlife to a food production factory and a fresh water source for the south state.

Grossinger said the best way to revive the delta's flagging biological systems is to restore as many of its historic characteristics as possible.

"Only about one percent of the historic habitat exists," Grossinger said. "Half of the (agricultural lands) have subsided so much that we can't restore them to wetlands -- if you flooded them, you'd just have deep water. But a 10 percent restoration is possible -- and that would be exponentially better than the situation we have now."

Mount agrees that restoring wetlands is crucial to reviving the delta. But like Moyle, he thinks a big, brackish lake in the west delta, obtained by removing levees, could also be beneficial.

Major wetland restorations could still be achieved on thousands of acres of cropland in the north delta, where soil subsidence is minimal, Mount said, but it would be a mistake to assume the delta can be restored in the sense of resurrecting its pre-Gold Rush condition. That delta is gone, he said, and it isn't coming back.

Still, any large-scale restoration project in the delta will have to pass muster with water agencies and farmers -- and they will require a lot of convincing.

Katherine Kelly, who heads the Bay/Delta Office of the Department of Water Resources, said any project that involved saltwater intrusion into the delta would have to include new water-delivery facilities. In addition, Kelly said, federal and state water agencies would oppose any move to increase freshwater flows through the delta and out the bay because they are barely able to meet current water demands.

"But we're certainly not willing to write off the ecological component of the delta, and it's increasingly clear we can't continue to rely on old policies," Kelly said. "We're trying to balance ecosystem needs with water quality. It's complicated and difficult."

Dante John Nomellini, a former delta farmer and the manager and general counsel of the Central Delta Water Agency, a water district serving 120,000 acres of mostly agricultural tracts in San Joaquin County, said the idea of removing western levees is faulty for several reasons.

"We don't know if it will be really helpful to the fish," he said. "We simply don't know what the hydrological effects of removing these levees will be. And I'm not worried about levee breaks, or even multiple island failures. We've seen them before, and we know how to deal with them."

The real problem, Nomellini said, is the growing pressure to increase the amount of water sent south. Scientists long have known that the answer to reviving the delta's fisheries involves sending more fresh water through the delta and out the bay, he added.

"We've known this since the first serious studies came out in the late 1960s," he said. "You take too much water out of the system, and you can't preserve the environment."

Many scientists share Nomellini's point of view.

Tina Swanson, the senior scientist for the Bay Institute in Novato, a group supporting conservation of the bay-delta estuary, says that while the crumbling of the westernmost delta islands is inevitable, any plan to selectively breach levees should be approached with caution.

"I'm not sure we understand the system enough to predict what will happen if we start deliberately removing levees," Swanson said. "We're unsure of the ecological consequences."

An effective and more immediate remedy, Swanson said, would be to bolster fresh-water flows through the delta. That, she said, would expand the brackish zone that native species love and invasive species loathe.

"We have to remember that the delta was largely converted to farmland a century ago, and from a biological standpoint, it still functioned pretty well," Swanson said.

What really changed things were the big dams on the Sacramento, San Joaquin and American Rivers that went up in the 1940s, said Swanson.

"They greatly reduced springtime flows through the delta, restricting the brackish zone, changing the basic dynamics of the system," she said. "That's when things started to fall apart. If we want to restore the productivity, we have to restore the water."

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BBC: Top 10 green energy schemes named

30.12.2005

Ten new green energy projects have been named as best in the UK for leading the way in cutting carbon emissions and promoting renewable energy.

The schemes, which began operation in 2005, were exciting and innovative, the Department of Trade and Industry said.

They include offshore turbines in Kent, the solar-powered CIS tower in Manchester and a wave buoy in Cornwall.

A target of supplying 10% of the UK's electricity from renewable energy by 2010 has been set by the government.

Energy minister Malcolm Wicks said: "The projects highlighted have certainly made their contribution to reducing carbon emissions and increasing the megawatt capacity that comes from green sources."

'Considerable progress'

He said they had also helped people understand "what renewable energy is and where it comes from", and added it was essential for the UK to make "considerable year on year progress" if the 2010 renewable energy target was to be met.

The list includes three wind farms, three solar-power projects, and two examples of microgeneration, or projects with lower outputs.

According to the government, the 30-turbine Kentish Flats wind farm has been described as "the Ferrari of the turbine world".

Black Law A in South Lanarkshire was one of the largest wind farms approved in the UK, and the Cefn Croes project near Aberystwyth the most powerful when it opened in June.

The CIS tower in Manchester - the city's tallest building - was on course to be the biggest user of solar panels in the UK.

And the biomass plant in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, was singled out for producing a "revolutionary new wood pellet bio fuel", created by burning sawdust and woodchips.

The wave buoy project off the north Cornwall coast was highlighted as a project that would "speed up the installation of one of the world's first wave farms".

The site is being investigated as a possible wave hub location - an offshore electrical socket that would be connected to the national grid.

Also included in the list are:

 Spen Valley Sports College, West Yorkshire - microgeneration.

 Eden Project, Cornwall - solar power.

 Nissan Motor Plant, Sunderland - microgeneration.

 Science Museum, London - solar power.

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Associated Press: Mount St. Helens still oozing lava

PEGGY ANDERSEN

SEATTLE - For more than a year now, Mount St. Helens has been oozing lava into its crater at the rate of roughly a large dump truck load - 10 cubic yards - every three seconds. With the sticky molten rock comes a steady drumfire of small earthquakes.

The movement of lava up through the southwest Washington volcano is "like a sticky piston trying to rise in a rusty cylinder," U.S. Geological Survey geologist Dave Sherrod said Thursday in a telephone interview from the agency's Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Wash.

"These quakes are very small - we think they're associated with that sticking and slipping as the ground is deformed and relaxes."

The mountain is about 50 miles north of Vancouver and 100 miles south of Seattle.

St. Helens' violent May 18, 1980, eruption blasted 3.7 billion cubic yards of ash and debris off the top of the mountain. A torrent of scalding mud poured down the north fork of the Toutle River. Fifty-seven people died in the blast, which left a gaping crater in place of the perfect, snowclad cone that had marked the original 9,677-foot peak known as "America's Mount Fuji."

St. Helens - now 8,325 feet - rumbled for another six years, extruding 97 million cubic yards of lava onto the crater floor in a series of 22 eruptions that built a 876-foot dome. The volcano fell silent in 1986.

Then in September 2004, the drumfire of low-level quakes began - occasionally spiking above magnitude 3, but generally ranging between magnitude 1 and 2. In the past 15 months, the mountain has squeezed out about 102 million cubic yards of lava.

Winter weather has prevented aerial monitoring of the crater since Oct. 24, "but we know what the rate has been. It's been relentless," Sherrod said, noting geologists can also rely on a network of remote monitoring equipment to tell them what's happening.

"One view of this eruption is that we're at the end of the eruption that began in 1980," he added. "If it hadn't been so cataclysmic ... it might instead have gone through 30 or 40 years of domebuilding and small explosions."

All the recent activity has remained within the crater, though scientists - keenly aware of the potential damage that silica-laced ash can pose to jet engines - monitor St. Helens closely for plumes of smoke and ash that can go as high as 30,000 feet.

"We haven't had that kind of plume since March 8, which is either a blessing or it leads us into complacency," Sherrod said, adding quickly, "We avoid complacency."

"This dome collapses and grows and collapses and grows. It changes its location ... it can't seem to maintain its height at much more than it is now " - about 1,300 feet. "Then it kind of shoves the sandpile aside and starts over."

It's not entirely clear where the lava is coming from. If it were being generated by the mountain, scientists would expect to see changes in the mountain's shape, its sides compressing as lava is spewed out.

At the current rate of extrusion, "three or four months would have been enough time to exhaust what was standing in the conduit. ... The volume is greater than anything that could be standing in a narrow 3-mile pipe," Sherrod said.

That suggests resupply from greater depths, which normally would generate certain gases and deep earthquakes. Neither is being detected.

"That's one of the headscratchers, I guess," Sherrod said.

St. Helens' unremitting, monthslong pace is not common, he said. "It's not a characteristic feature of volcanism."

The mountain is the youngest and most restless of the Cascade volcanos. "Most of what we see today is 4,000 years old," Sherrod said. By comparison, Oregon's Mount Hood is 30,000 to 50,000 years old. Parts of Mount Rainier in Washington date back 200,000 years.

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