Lead pollution scare in WB before puja

Lead pollution scare in WB before puja

UN or UNEP in the news

Florida is inhabited by endangered and threatened land mammals such as bears, panthers, Key deer, mink and otters, rats and mice, voles and bats. Florida waters host manatees, and endangered humpback, fin, sperm, sei whales, and Atlantic right whales.

On August 20 through 22, experts from the FWC and other state and federal agencies will meet to discuss the predicted impacts of climate change on these and other species of Florida wildlife.

The conference, entitled Florida's Wildlife: On the Frontline of Climate Change, will highlight the climate challenges facing wildlife managers, governments, industry leaders and the public in the next 50 years.

"This summit has global significance, because the effects of climate change on places like Florida and Alaska will be a prelude to what's going to happen elsewhere in the world," said FWC Chairman Rodney Barreto.

One of the keynote speakers, Dr. Jean Brennan, a climate change scientist with Defenders of Wildlife, was a member of the U.S. delegation at international negotiations under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. She also served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and shares the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 for her contribution to the IPCC.

Brennan says that Florida's wildlife and habitats are in a sensitive position when it comes to the effects of climate change.

"Florida is extremely vulnerable with its low elevation," Brennan said. "And it's the hardest hit with extreme weather such as hurricanes. The Arctic is seeing greater temperature changes, but the biological diversity of plants and animals in Florida forces the question: What are you losing?"

The summit will feature presentations and workshops to stimulate discussion and offer solutions to the complexities of a state growing rapidly in an environment changing just as quickly.

The Audubon Society of Florida, which is represented on the conference Program Committee, has issued a report on how climate change is affecting the state.

Sea level rise poses a serious threat to south Florida's water supply through salt water incursion. As sea levels rise, coastal and wetlands habitats are seriously altered and flooding risks increase, the Audubon report points out.

Increased hurricane and tropical storm intensity and storm surges are expected. Audubon cites a 2007 scientific and economic study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that ranked the city of Miami among the top 10 most vulnerable metropolitan areas worldwide in terms of assets exposed in a 100 year storm-related flooding event.

Floridians can expect more extreme weather patterns, including droughts and heat waves as well as algae blooms and associated impacts, including seagrass and fish die-offs.

Florida has the largest reef system in America and the third largest barrier reef in the world, which is already stressed by human pressures. "This system, rich in biological diversity, is already ongoing severe coral bleaching events, which weaken corals ability to ward off disease and cause serious mortality," the Audubon report states.

Development pressures and human water supply demands have already seriously degraded the Everglades and other wetlands systems, and the impacts of climate change add additional stress for wetland species, warns the report.

In May, the Florida Coastal and Ocean Coalition, also on the conference Program Committee, released a report recommending a series of steps to combat the effects of rising sea levels, extreme weather and declining ocean health.

"We need more than just planning, we need action today," said National Wildlife Federation senior global warming specialist Patty Glick, a co-author of the report.

The report, "Preparing for a Sea Change in Florida," is the "beginning of a long dialogue" in Florida about how to deal with global warming, said Gerald Karnas, Florida climate project director for the Environmental Defense Fund.

Conference participants will consider habitat and species management, human needs, hunting, fishing, boating, and outdoor recreation; invasive species; linking climate change initiatives with the conservation community; congressional climate change and cap and trade legislation; increasing awareness of climate change impacts and human capacity to respond; education and outreach.

Presenters and workshop participants will identify key research needs, improve awareness of impacts on wildlife, and develop ideas to optimize species conservation for integration into Florida Fish and Wildlife's comprehensive climate change strategy.

Using The Conservation Fund's Go Zero Program, the Center for Environmental Studies will calculate carbon dioxide emissions that will result from the energy use at the summit, as well as from travel and donate funds for The Conservation Fund to plant native trees in protected parks and wildlife refuges across the nation to offset those carbon emissions.

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2008/2008-08-03-095.asp

General environmental news

By Dan Barry

August 4, 2008

Driving south out of the agricultural town of Ainsworth, you can’t miss its newest crop: wind turbines, three dozen of them, with steel stalks 230 feet high and petal-like blades 131 feet long, sprouting improbably from the sand hills of north-central Nebraska, beside ruminating cattle.

Though painted gray, the turbines stand out against the evening backdrop of battleship-colored thunderclouds and bear an almost celestial whiteness when day’s light is right. Airplane pilots can spot them from far away, and rarely does a bird make their unfortunate acquaintance.

The sound of 8.5-ton blades, three to a turbine, turning and turning, only enhances their almost supernatural presence. Standing at the base of a turbine’s stalk, you hear a whistling whoosh — whuh ... whuh ... whuh — as steady summer winds come like the breath of gods to toy with pinwheel amusements.

Six renewable energy technicians share in tending this strange garden, including Jered Saar and Devin Painter, neither of whom could be described as chatty. Mr. Painter, 25, is the son of ranchers; when he’s working at the top of a turbine, he can see his family’s spread miles away. Mr. Saar, 34, comes from the nearby town of Bassett; he spent last year in Iraq with the Nebraska Army National Guard, and yes, he would rather be here than there.

Wearing sunglasses and hard hats, they drive the undulating hills in a white pickup truck emblazoned with the name of their employer, the Nebraska Public Power District, often stopping to check a turbine’s control panel, or to climb dozens of feet up its spine to the gear box. Or, simply, to listen attentively to the whuh-whuh-whuhing rhythms.

The sound, they say, of energy created; of less coal burned; of the future.

Ainsworth, population 1,800, maybe, embraces its intimate remoteness. For example, local officials say that back in the 1980s a professional bowler was interviewed on national television about his plans to attend a horseshoe tournament in Ainsworth; when asked where Ainsworth was, he replied: the middle of nowhere. The town now has an annual Middle of Nowhere festival.

One of the blessings of being in the middle of this nowhere is its wind. Years ago, after setting up wind monitors at nine spots around the state, energy officials discovered that Ainsworth and its surrounding areas had wonderful prevailing winds flowing down from Canada and up from Mexico: winds that carried the Goldilocks charm of being neither too hard nor too soft, but just right.

“There’s a free shot of it coming from the north,” explains John B. Richards, an engineer for Nebraska Public. “You look north and you don’t see much getting in the way.”

Nebraska Public first tapped into this natural gift a decade ago by building two modest, 750-kilowatt turbines in Springview, a dot of a town 20 miles north of here that was previously known mostly for its rich history of lynch mobs and horse thieves. The town quickly seized upon its new distinction as the home of wind turbines generating power for nearly 400 homes. The main street became Turbine Avenue, town elders began an annual Turbine Days celebration and someone opened a store called the Turbine Mart.

Utility officials harbored larger hopes for Ainsworth, in part because suitable transmission lines were already in place. Soon consultants and engineers were descending upon the sand hills, which had been good for little more than hunting and grazing since forever, and coming up with solutions for matters like how to build the turbines without disturbing the American burying beetle, an endangered species with a taste for carrion.

After determining the best locations for the 36 turbines, Nebraska Public struck a long-term deal with some ranchers for 11,000 acres: the turbines would take up about 50 acres, the cattle could roam the rest of the land, and no development would come along to impede the flow of the wind.

In May 2005, crews began erecting 195-ton wind turbines, one after another. Crowds gathered to watch the construction, which altered the Ainsworth horizon in a way that might have been imagined only by Dali, or Christo.

“It was, shall we say, somewhat of a godsend when we were picked to be the first major wind farm in Nebraska,” says Russ Moody, mayor of Ainsworth. “And to be honest with you, I don’t think I’ve heard anybody grumble about them as far as the looks.”

By the fall of 2005, the $81.3 million project was complete. Nebraska Public created a viewing area near the main road, where visitors could consider the larger meaning of these gargantuan, color-changing flowers of steel. They soon became a source of state pride, as did the very wind.

“Nebraska has wind,” a Nebraska Public brochure boldly states. “In fact, the state ranks 6th in America for wind development potential.”

In its first two years of operation, the Ainsworth wind project has sent enough energy to a national grid to power about 19,000 homes a year — or about 1 percent of the state’s needs, which are satisfied mostly by coal-burning and nuclear plants.

“One percent is a lot of energy,” Mr. Richards says.

These days, fewer and fewer cars are pulling up to the viewing area in Ainsworth. And up in Springview, the twin turbines have been dismantled and sold for parts, mostly because the outdated machinery could not keep up with the wind. The Turbine Mart has closed.

But this does not mean that Nebraska’s interest in wind is flagging. The sight of a truck lugging a massive midsection of a wind turbine down a state highway only hints at the rush among public utilities and private companies, investors and speculators. Nebraska Public, for example, will buy the energy created by two wind farms being built by private developers 140 miles east of here, and will replace those two turbines up in Springview by next year. It hopes that within a decade or so, 10 percent of its energy will be produced by clean, free, plentiful wind.

But someone has to mind the turbines: someone like Jered Saar; someone like Devin Painter.

The two men drive the sand hills, tending to their crop. They know the 36 turbines by name and idiosyncrasy; the tendencies of T-9, of T-24, of T-35. They know how the blades will seek the wind like flowers seeking the sun; how come winter, the blades will turn north to receive strong winds carrying the whiff of a feedlot in town. They know that winds blowing 9 miles an hour begin to create energy, and winds blowing more than 45 miles an hour mean the turbines will shut down in self-protection.

This time a year ago, Staff Sergeant Saar was providing security to convoys snaking through dangerous, nerve-raw terrain; two soldiers from his company, the 755th Chemical, were killed. Now he snakes through hills of calm, his only neighbors some American burying beetles, the occasional deer or grouse, and herds of cows.

If he sees connections between these two lives of his, if he sees the ceaseless need for energy as the common thread, he does not say. The Nebraska winds blow, the turning blades create a new kind of power, whuh ... whuh ... whuh, and the man says it again: “I definitely would much rather be here than there.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/us/04land.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all

New York Times
Shipping Costs Start to Crimp Globalization
By Larry Rohter
August 3, 2008

When Tesla Motors, a pioneer in electric-powered cars, set out to make a luxury roadster for the American market, it had the global supply chain in mind. Tesla planned to manufacture 1,000-pound battery packs in Thailand, ship them to Britain for installation, then bring the mostly assembled cars back to the United States.

But when it began production this spring, the company decided to make the batteries and assemble the cars near its home base in California, cutting more than 5,000 miles from the shipping bill for each vehicle.

“It was kind of a no-brain decision for us,” said Darryl Siry, the company’s senior vice president of global sales, marketing and service. “A major reason was to avoid the transportation costs, which are terrible.”

The world economy has become so integrated that shoppers find relatively few T-shirts and sneakers in Wal-Mart and Target carrying a “Made in the U.S.A.” label. But globalization may be losing some of the inexorable economic power it had for much of the past quarter-century, even as it faces fresh challenges as a political ideology.

Cheap oil, the lubricant of quick, inexpensive transportation links across the world, may not return anytime soon, upsetting the logic of diffuse global supply chains that treat geography as a footnote in the pursuit of lower wages. Rising concern about global warming, the reaction against lost jobs in rich countries, worries about food safety and security, and the collapse of world trade talks in Geneva last week also signal that political and environmental concerns may make the calculus of globalization far more complex.

“If we think about the Wal-Mart model, it is incredibly fuel-intensive at every stage, and at every one of those stages we are now seeing an inflation of the costs for boats, trucks, cars,” said Naomi Klein, the author of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”

“That is necessarily leading to a rethinking of this emissions-intensive model, whether the increased interest in growing foods locally, producing locally or shopping locally, and I think that’s great.”

Many economists argue that globalization will not shift into reverse even if oil prices continue their rising trend. But many see evidence that companies looking to keep prices low will have to move some production closer to consumers. Globe-spanning supply chains — Brazilian iron ore turned into Chinese steel used to make washing machines shipped to Long Beach, Calif., and then trucked to appliance stores in Chicago — make less sense today than they did a few years ago.

To avoid having to ship all its products from abroad, the Swedish furniture manufacturer Ikea opened its first factory in the United States in May. Some electronics companies that left Mexico in recent years for the lower wages in China are now returning to Mexico, because they can lower costs by trucking their output overland to American consumers.

Decisions like those suggest that what some economists call a neighborhood effect — putting factories closer to components suppliers and to consumers, to reduce transportation costs — could grow in importance if oil remains expensive. A barrel sold for $125 on Friday, compared with lows of $10 a decade ago.

“If prices stay at these levels, that could lead to some significant rearrangement of production, among sectors and countries,” said C. Fred Bergsten, author of “The United States and the World Economy” and director of the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, in Washington. “You could have a very significant shock to traditional consumption patterns and also some important growth effects.”

The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs. Big container ships, the pack mules of the 21st-century economy, have shaved their top speed by nearly 20 percent to save on fuel costs, substantially slowing shipping times.

The study, published in May by the Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, calculates that the recent surge in shipping costs is on average the equivalent of a 9 percent tariff on trade. “The cost of moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the largest barrier to global trade today,” the report concluded, and as a result “has effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades.”

The spike in shipping costs comes at a moment when concern about the environmental impact of globalization is also growing. Many companies have in recent years shifted production from countries with greater energy efficiency and more rigorous standards on carbon emissions, especially in Europe, to those that are more lax, like China and India.

But if the international community fulfills its pledge to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol to combat climate change, even China and India would have to reduce the growth of their emissions, and the relative costs of production in countries that use energy inefficiently could grow.

The political landscape may also be changing. Dissatisfaction with globalization has led to the election of governments in Latin America hostile to the process. A somewhat similar reaction can be seen in the United States, where both Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton promised during the Democratic primary season to “re-evaluate” the nation’s existing free trade agreements.

Last week, efforts to complete what is known as the Doha round of trade talks collapsed in acrimony, dealing a serious blow to tariff reduction. The negotiations, begun in 2001, failed after China and India battled the United States over agricultural tariffs, with the two developing countries insisting on broad rights to protect themselves against surges of food imports that could hurt their farmers.

Some critics of globalization are encouraged by those developments, which they see as a welcome check on the process. On environmentalist blogs, some are even gleefully promoting a “globalization death watch.”

Many leading economists say such predictions are probably overblown. “It would be a mistake, a misinterpretation, to think that a huge rollback or reversal of fundamental trends is under way,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “Distance and trade costs do matter, but we are still in a globalized era.”

As economists and business executives well know, shipping costs are only one factor in determining the flow of international trade. When companies decide where to invest in a new factory or from whom to buy a product, they also take into account exchange rates, consumer confidence, labor costs, government regulations and the availability of skilled managers.

‘People Were Profligate’

What may be coming to an end are price-driven oddities like chicken and fish crossing the ocean from the Western Hemisphere to be filleted and packaged in Asia not to be consumed there, but to be shipped back across the Pacific again. “Because of low costs, people were profligate,” said Nayan Chanda, author of “Bound Together,” a history of globalization.

The industries most likely to be affected by the sharp rise in transportation costs are those producing heavy or bulky goods that are particularly expensive to ship relative to their sale price. Steel is an example. China’s steel exports to the United States are now tumbling by more than 20 percent on a year-over-year basis, their worst performance in a decade, while American steel production has been rising after years of decline. Motors and machinery of all types, car parts, industrial presses, refrigerators, television sets and other home appliances could also be affected.

Plants in industries that require relatively less investment in infrastructure, like furniture, footwear and toys, are already showing signs of mobility as shipping costs rise.

Until recently, standard practice in the furniture industry was to ship American timber from ports like Norfolk, Baltimore and Charleston to China, where oak and cherry would be milled into sofas, beds, tables, cabinets and chairs, which were then shipped back to the United States.

But with transportation costs rising, more wood is now going to traditional domestic furniture-making centers in North Carolina and Virginia, where the industry had all but been wiped out. While the opening of the American Ikea plant, in Danville, Va., a traditional furniture-producing center hit hard by the outsourcing of production to Asia, is perhaps most emblematic of such changes, other manufacturers are also shifting some production back to the United States.

Among them is Craftmaster Furniture, a company founded in North Carolina but now Chinese-owned. And at an industry fair in April, La-Z-Boy announced a new line that will begin production in North Carolina this month.

“There’s just a handful of us left, but it has become easier for us domestic folks to compete,” said Steven Kincaid of Kincaid Furniture in Hudson, N.C., a division of La-Z-Boy.

Soaring transportation costs also have an impact on food, from bananas to salmon. Higher shipping rates could eventually transform some items now found in the typical middle-class pantry into luxuries and further promote the so-called local food movement popular in many American and European cities.

“This is not just about steel, but also maple syrup and avocados and blueberries at the grocery store,” shipped from places like Chile and South Africa, said Jeff Rubin, chief economist at CIBC World Markets and co-author of its recent study on transport costs and globalization. “Avocado salad in Minneapolis in January is just not going to work in this new world, because flying it in is going to make it cost as much as a rib eye.”

Global companies like General Electric, DuPont, Alcoa and Procter & Gamble are beginning to respond to the simultaneous increases in shipping and environmental costs with green policies meant to reduce both fuel consumption and carbon emissions. That pressure is likely to increase as both manufacturers and retailers seek ways to tighten the global supply chain.

“Being green is in their best interests not so much in making money as saving money,” said Gary Yohe, an environmental economist at Wesleyan University. “Green companies are likely to be a permanent trend, as these vulnerabilities continue, but it’s going to take a long time for all this to settle down.”

In addition, the sharp increase in transportation costs has implications for the “just-in-time” system pioneered in Japan and later adopted the world over. It is a highly profitable business strategy aimed at reducing warehousing and inventory costs by arranging for raw materials and other supplies to arrive only when needed, and not before.

One likely outcome if transportation rates stay high, economists said, would be a strengthening of the neighborhood effect. Instead of seeking supplies wherever they can be bought most cheaply, regardless of location, and outsourcing the assembly of products all over the world, manufacturers would instead concentrate on performing those activities as close to home as possible.

In a more regionalized trading world, economists say, China would probably end up buying more of the iron ore it needs from Australia and less from Brazil, and farming out an even greater proportion of its manufacturing work to places like Vietnam and Thailand. Similarly, Mexico’s maquiladora sector, the assembly plants concentrated near its border with the United States, would become more attractive to manufacturers with an eye on the American market.

But a trend toward regionalization would not necessarily benefit the United States, economists caution. Not only has it lost some of its manufacturing base and skills over the past quarter-century, and experienced a decline in consumer confidence as part of the current slowdown, but it is also far from the economies that have become the most dynamic in the world, those of Asia.

“Despite everything, the American economy is still the biggest Rottweiler on the block,” said Jagdish N. Bhagwati, the author of “In Defense of Globalization” and a professor of economics at Columbia. “But if it’s expensive to get products from there to here, it’s also expensive to get them from here to there.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/business/worldbusiness/03global.html?sq=environment&st=cse&scp=4&pagewanted=all