The environment in the news

Delegates from the 88 member states of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), meeting in Agadir, Morocco, were unable to reach agreement, after two days of talks behind closed doors, on the three-year-old proposal to abandon the official whaling ban in exchange for smaller, agreed kills by the whaling states. Britain was part of a European Union group that strongly opposed the plan.

Russia says it is aware of the problem, but the company's capacity to shift is limited for financial reasons.

Energy balance

"Our government and minister of natural resources know this problem... and this question was discussed maybe one month ago," he said.

Going south

The New York Times, 23 June 2010, By Elisabeth Rosenthal

For much of this year, the panel has been under attack for lax vetting procedures in incorporating scientific information into its last report, the fourth assessment, which came out in 2007. That report concluded that the planet was warming and human activity was to blame. But critics say that the report in some cases overstated the level of scientific certainty on the issue or simply got things wrong.

For example, the report misrepresented the rate of retreat of Himalayan glaciers, and the panel was slow to correct the error after it was pointed out. So-called climate skeptics complained that the report did not adequately reflect the fact that scientists are not in full agreement on the pace of manmade climate change.

Today, in announcing its selection of scientists for the fifth report, the panel proactively addressed those concerns. “Particular attention has been given to relevant expertise to ensure that I.P.C.C. author teams consist of leading experts in the respective field with a range of scientific views on climate change,” its announcement said.

This time, far more representatives are included from developing nations, which are likely to feel the earliest effects of climate change, and from emerging economies –- the catch phrase for nations like China and India. Sixty percent of the authors are new to the panel, the statement noted, injecting fresh blood into the process.

Working Group II, the section that focuses on the impacts of climate change and how to adapt to it, was a particular target for climate skeptics in assailing the fourth assessment report. Today the working group went into public relations overdrive.

Some 3,000 scientists were nominated to fill the positions, mostly by national committees. The panel did not say what criteria were used to whittle the number to 831.

The full list of authors (links are here) includes some interesting newcomers to the panel’s process, like Daniel Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Center, who was quoted in a Times article last year about Amazon deforestation, and Julian Allwood of Cambridge University, whom we interviewed about sustainable clothing.

UN climate panel names new authors after criticism

Associated Press, 23 June 2010, By Frank Jordans

GENEVA — The U.N. science body on climate change, accused of ignoring its critics and allowing glaring errors to creep into its work, announced Wednesday that a broader range of experts will write its next report on global warming.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change included more women and scientists from developing countries, but also selected authors with a wider range of backgrounds than previously — partly in response to recent criticism that earlier groups refused to address dissenting views.

"We didn't want old club members who repeat themselves from one assessment to the next," Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the group's vice premier, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The previous panel had 559 members, chosen from 2,000 nominations. This one has 861 experts, picked from 3,000 nominations. Some 60 percent of the scientists are new to the role, the IPCC said.

The group, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 together with Al Gore, issues reports that governments, businesses and individuals use to determine how they will deal with climate change. It began in 1989, and has issued four voluminous reports so far — the most recent one in 2007.

"Climate change 20 years ago was very much a physical science question" but has since come to include social, economic and even ethical issues, van Ypersele said. He noted, in addition to meteorologists, physicists, statisticians and engineers, the latest group of authors now includes at least one philosopher.

Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental studies scientist at University of Colorado and past critic of the IPCC, said the list "looks like business as usual," but insisted the authors should be given a chance to show they could improve on previous reports.

Pielke said his concerns with the reports have "far less to do with the individuals involved than a deeply flawed process."

An independent review of the IPCC's methods for gathering, synthesizing and reviewing data, due to be released Sept. 1, might improve the work on the fifth report, said Pielke, who declined an invitation to participate for "professional and personal" reasons.

Chris Field, who co-chairs the group that will examine the impact of climate change, told a conference call the IPCC authors were open to making changes to their work if recommended to do so by the independent review.

Among the most blatant errors in the fourth report was the conclusion that Himalayan glaciers would disappear as early as 2035 — a date that turned out to be wrong by hundreds of years.

"I believe the column concerning the Himalayan glaciers was a genuine mistake made in good faith," said Field. Nevertheless, the group will put in place better quality controls, particularly for the regional reports, he said.

None of those who wrote the section on Asia for the fourth report are involved with the next installment, he said, but added that this was coincidental.

"I view the fact that we have a different team coming in now as just part of the normal flow of events," Field said.

Climate change skeptics say IPCC scientists have in the past overestimated the effect of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and underplayed natural cycles of warming and cooling, which cannot be controlled. Others have claimed the authors, who aren't paid for their work, exaggerated the effects that climate change will have on the environment and human life.

A series of e-mails stolen last year from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in Britain showed climate scientists discussing ways to keep the research of climate skeptics out of peer-reviewed journals.

Yet Van Ypersele insisted that the U.N. panel welcomed critical views.

"We are quite open to people who have strong opinions against IPCC, as long as they play by the rules," he said.

The fifth report will be released between 2013 and 2014

The New York Times, 23 June 2010, By Ian Urbina

But about three miles off the coast of Alaska, BP is moving ahead with a controversial and potentially record-setting project to drill two miles under the sea and then six to eight miles horizontally to reach what is believed to be a 100-million-barrel reservoir of oil under federal waters.

All other new projects in the Arctic have been halted by the Obama administration’s moratorium on offshore drilling, including more traditional projects like Shell Oil’s plans to drill three wells in the Chukchi Sea and two in the Beaufort.

But BP’s project, called Liberty, has been exempted as regulators have granted it status as an “onshore” project even though it is about three miles off the coast in the Beaufort Sea. The reason: it sits on an artificial island — a 31-acre pile of gravel in about 22 feet of water — built by BP.

The project has already received its state and federal environmental permits, but BP has yet to file its final application to federal regulators to begin drilling, which it expects to start in the fall.

Some scientists and environmentalists say that other factors have helped keep the project moving forward.

Rather than conducting their own independent analysis, federal regulators, in a break from usual practice, allowed BP in 2007 to write its own environmental review for the project as well as its own consultation documents relating to the Endangered Species Act, according to two scientists from the Alaska office of the federal Mineral Management Service that oversees drilling.

The environmental assessment was taken away from the agency’s unit that typically handles such reviews, and put in the hands of a different division that was more pro-drilling, said the scientists, who discussed the process because they remained opposed to how it was handled.

“The whole process for approving Liberty was bizarre,” one of the federal scientists said.

The scientists and other critics say they are worried about a replay of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico because the Liberty project involves a method of drilling called extended reach that experts say is more prone to the types of gas kicks that triggered the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon.

“It makes no sense,” said Rebecca Noblin, the Alaska director for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental watchdog group. “BP pushes the envelope in the gulf and ends up causing the moratorium. And now in the Arctic they are forging ahead again with untested technology, and as a result they’re the only ones left being allowed to drill there.”

BP has defended the project in its proposal, saying it is safe and environmentally friendly. It declined to respond to requests for further comment.

Extended-reach drilling has advantages. Drilling at an angle might be less threatening to sensitive habitats. But engineers say that this type of drilling is riskier and more complicated than traditional drilling because it is relatively new and gas kicks are more frequent and tougher to detect.

And because of the distance and angles involved, drilling requires far more powerful machinery, putting extra pressure on pipes and well casings.

Several companies have built artificial islands to drill offshore in the Arctic and elsewhere, in part because surging ice floes can destroy conventional floating or metal-legged offshore drilling platforms.

Critics say that such islands are so tiny that a large oil spill will quickly flow into the surrounding waters.

BP officials say that by accessing the Liberty oil field from far away, the project reduces its environmental impact in the delicate North Shore area.

The Liberty field lies about five miles from land under the shallow waters of the Beaufort Sea in an area populated during the winter by seals and polar bears and covered by thick floating ice.

During the summer, bowhead whales migrate through the region.

“The overall Liberty Project has been planned and designed to minimize adverse effects to biological resources,” BP wrote in 2007 in the development proposal to federal regulators. “Impacts to wetlands have been significantly reduced including shoreline and tundra habitat for birds and caribou.”

The project will also involve nearly 400 workers in a region where jobs are scarce, according to BP.

But concerns exist about the project’s oversight and critics say the project offers another example of dangerous coziness between industry and regulators.

For example, the federal scientists say that BP should never have been allowed to do environmental reviews that are the responsibility of the regulators. And yet, the language of the “environmental consequences” sections of the final 2007 federal assessment and BP’s own assessment submitted earlier the same year are virtually identical.

No such overlap existed in the documents for other major projects approved by the same office around the same time, a review of the documents shows.

Both assessments concluded that the effects from a large spill potentially could have a major impact on wildlife, but discounted the threat because they judged the likelihood of spill to be very remote.

They also asserted that BP’s spill response plan would be able to handle a worst case — which BP estimated as a spill of 20,000 barrels per day.

Officials from the minerals agency declined to answer questions about the handling of the BP’s environmental assessment, but they added, “In light of the BP oil spill in the gulf and new safety requirements, we will be reviewing the adequacy of the current version of the Liberty project’s spill plan.”

In promotional materials, BP acknowledges that the Liberty project will push boundaries of drilling technology.

To reduce weight on the rig, BP has developed a new steel alloy for the drill pipe.

So much force is needed to power a drill over such long distances that BP had to invest more than $200 million to have a company build what it describes as the largest land rig in the world.

The drill’s top drive is rated at 105,000 foot-pounds of torque, while North Slope rigs are typically rated at 40,000 foot-pounds.

“It will take all of this technology that we’ve developed and exploited in Prudhoe Bay and extend it to a new realm,” Gary Christman, BP’s director of Alaska drilling and wells, told Petroleum News in 2007.

But engineers say that realm includes greater risk.

John Choe, an expert in extended-reach drilling and director of the department of energy resources at Seoul National University, said that it was less safe than conventional types of drilling because gas kicks that can turn into blowouts are tougher to detect as they climb more slowly toward the rig.

“So, you may not detect it until it becomes serious,” he said. “In that case, the kick or drilling related problems become too big to be managed easily.”

A 2004 study commissioned by the Minerals Management Service came to a similar conclusion.

“A gas kick represents probably the most dangerous situation that can occur when drilling a well since it can easily develop to a blowout if it is not controlled promptly,” it said. Extended-reach drilling wells “are more prone to kicks and lost-circulation problems than more conventional and vertical wells, but have some advantages when the well takes a kick because gas migration rates are lower.”

Despite these concerns, the Liberty’s 614-page environmental assessment says nothing about how the project would handle the unique risks posed by this type of drilling.

Mike Mims, a former owner of a company that specialized in extended-reach drilling, said he believed that the worries about this type of drilling were overblown. “The kicks can occur but they move slower and the bubbles don’t expand as fast,” he said.

“It all comes down to personnel,” he added, “If your people understand the risks and handle the work carefully, this drilling is entirely safe.”

BP discovered the Liberty oil field in 1997, began construction of a rig there in 2008, and was nearing final preparations this April when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico.

Two weeks after the Obama administration declared a moratorium on offshore drilling on May 27, BP announced that the Liberty project would continue, with drilling scheduled to start in the fall, generating its first oil production by 2011. By 2013, BP estimates, Liberty will yield 40,000 barrels of oil per day.

If approved, the Liberty will be the longest horizontal well of its kind in the world. BP’s production plan for the Liberty notes that drilling studies only support horizontal wells up to 8.33 miles. Any horizontal wells longer than that, the plan says, “have not been studied.”

State regulators have faulted BP for not being prepared to handle a spill at a similar, though less ambitious project, known as the Northstar field. That project involves vertical drilling and sits on an artificial island six miles northwest of Prudhoe Bay in the Beaufort Sea.

The Liberty project will tie into the Endicott pipeline when complete. On April 20, the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration warned BP that it was in “probable violation” of federal standards because of corrosion found on its Endicott oil pipeline and a lack of records indicating corrosion protection and monitoring efforts.

BP has faced a number of challenges at its Alaska facilities. The company sustained two corrosion-caused leaks in its rigs in Prudhoe Bay in 2006, including a leak of over 200,000 gallons that cost the company around $20 million in fines and restitution. This was the largest spill to have occurred on Alaska’s North Slope.

The New York Times, 23 June 2010, By Andrew W. Lehren and Justin Gillis

Scientists agree that the Deepwater Horizon spill poses at least some risk to the bluefin, one of the most majestic — and valuable — fishes in the sea. Its numbers already severely depleted from record levels, the bluefin is also the subject of a global controversy regarding overfishing.

The bluefin is not the only fish that spawns in the gulf, and while it is often a focus of attention, researchers are worried about the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on many other species.

In fact, scientists say, it is virtually certain that billions of fish eggs and larvae have died in the spill, which came at the worst possible time of the year. Spawning season for many fish in the gulf begins in April and runs into the summer. The drilling rig exploded on April 20, and the spill has since covered thousands of square miles with patches of oil.

Both the Bush and Obama administrations tried to win greater international protection for the bluefin, but their efforts were derailed by opposition from countries like Japan, where a single large bluefin can sell in the sashimi market for hundreds of thousands of dollars. (The tuna fish sold in cans comes from more abundant types of tuna, not from bluefin.)

The bluefin uses the Gulf of Mexico as a prime spawning ground, and the gulf is such a critical habitat for the animal that fishing for it there was banned in the 1980s. But after spawning in the spring and summer, many tuna spend the rest of the year roaming the Atlantic, where they are hunted by a global fishing fleet.

The environmental advocacy group, the Center for Biological Diversity, in Tucson, filed the request under the Endangered Species Act in late May. If the petition is granted, a process that could take years, the endangered listing would require that federal agencies conduct exhaustive analysis before taking any action, like granting drilling permits, that would pose additional risk to the fish.

Beyond tuna, other animals at apparent risk of harm include the whale shark, the largest fish in the ocean, and a group known as billfish, the foundation of a large recreational fishery in the Gulf of Mexico and the western Atlantic. The billfish that could be affected include the fastest fish in the ocean, the sailfish, as well as blue marlin and swordfish.

“This is a much bigger problem than people are making out,” said Barbara Block, a Stanford researcher who is among the world’s leading experts on the bluefin tuna. “The concern for wildlife is not just along the coast; it is also at sea. We’re putting oil right into the bluewater environment.”

Some of the science documenting the risks that oil drilling poses to spawning fish was paid for by none other than the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency responsible for leasing offshore tracts for oil development.

Yet the results appear to have had little impact on the way the agency carried out its business. For instance, it never adopted seasonal limitations on drilling in the gulf that might have reduced the risk of oil spills during spawning season. It also dismissed the dangers that drilling posed to deep-water fish as “negligible.”

President Obama has acknowledged the agency’s failings. Its director, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, resigned, and a reorganization of the agency’s functions is under way (last week, it was renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement).

The agency responded to inquiries by saying that in light of the Deepwater Horizon spill, its policies — including those for fisheries — were under review.

Given that a single female fish can produce tens of millions of eggs, scientists say that many billions of them would have been in the water on April 20. The vast majority of those would never survive to adulthood even in normal times; now bathed in oil, fewer will make it.

“It’s obvious that any egg or larvae encountering oil will die,” said Molly Lutcavage, director of a research center on large fish and turtles at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Less clear is whether fish would have continued to lay eggs near the spill after it began. Most fish can smell, and researchers hope that at least some species would have avoided spawning in oil. However, fish that can be readily spotted from the air, like whale sharks, have been seen in recent weeks in the vicinity of the spill.

“The question is, does everything shut down if there’s oil there, or do they just go ahead and spawn anyway?” said Eric Hoffmayer, a researcher at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Many important fish in the region, like yellowfin tuna, are able to spawn across broad areas of the gulf, and that means significant numbers of such fish should have hatched this year far from the oil spill.

But other species, including bluefin tuna, apparently have a strong instinct to spawn in a specific part of the ocean. Scientists fear that instinct might overcome the presence of oil in the water, causing the fish to spawn in areas where their offspring would be likely to die. One of the spawning areas in the gulf favored by bluefin is in the vicinity of the spill, Dr. Block said.

The risks the spill poses to fish of all kinds have provoked deep alarm among commercial and sport fishing groups. At least a half-dozen major billfishing tournaments scheduled for June and July have been canceled, and tourists who would normally take deep-sea fishing trips this time of year are avoiding the gulf. The American Sportfishing Association estimated that business owners were losing millions of dollars in a recreational fishing industry worth more than $3.5 billion a year in the gulf.

“It’s having a horrific impact on the marine and fishing industry,” said Dan Jacobs, tournament director for an offshore fishing championship. “The big question is, how long is it going to last?”

Given that it takes some big fish years to reach spawning age, the death of larvae and juvenile fish could have consequences that might not show up for a long time.

“The oil spill could be the last straw with these very vulnerable species,” said Ellen Peel, president of the Billfish Foundation, a nonprofit group that supports recreational offshore fishing.

In Fertilizer, a Climatic Dividend

The New York Times, 23 June 2010, By Sindya N. Bhanoo

A commonly held belief is that modern agriculture, which depends heavily on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, is bad for the environment.

Although the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers has sharply increased crop yields, these fertilizers emit nitrous oxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that is 310 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

A new study makes a slightly more counterintuitive point — that without fertilizer and other high-yield agricultural techniques, humans would have emitted significantly greater amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by cutting down trees, which sequester carbon dioxide, and by farming more land.

“Every time forest or shrub land is cleared for farming, the carbon that was tied up in the biomass is released and rapidly makes its way into the atmosphere – usually by being burned,” Jennifer Burney, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, said in a press release.

The use of fertilizers may have reduced emissions by as much as 590 billion metric tons from 1961 to 2005, Dr. Burney found.

In those years, the world’s population more than doubled, or grew 111 percent. Keeping pace with that, crop production rose 162 percent, largely as a result of the green revolution, which involved intense use of fertilizers and pesticides to improve production.

The study appears in the June 15 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The New York Times, 23 June 2010, By Abby Goodnough

In Wednesday’s paper, I wrote about Jean Hill, who persuaded her fellow voters in Concord, Mass., to ban sales of bottled water there. The town of about 17,000 people is more environmentally conscious than most – it is home to Walden Pond, after all – but many who support the ban in theory are calling it impractical.

At the Cheese Shop, a sandwich place in the town’s retail district where bottled water is a top seller, employees predicted that thirsty shoppers would buy fewer healthy drinks if bottled water wasn’t available. “Why ban water but not soda and juice bottles?” asked Armine Roat, 48, who said she brings her own reusable water bottle to work every day. “That doesn’t seem right.”

She and another employee, Rachael Ward, 20, wondered what they would say to all the tourists who come to town to visit Walden Pond and other historic spots. Many stop in for bottled water, they said, especially on hot days.

“What are we supposed to tell them?” Ms. Ward said. “It’s a great concept, but putting it into practice seems harder than you’d think.”

She is among many residents wondering how Concord will enforce the ban. Officials have yet to figure that out, said Christopher Whelan, the town manager. As passed, he said, the ban does not designate an enforcement officer or spell out what the penalty would be if stores do not t comply.

Ms. Ward said it would make more sense for Concord to work on getting more plastic bottles recycled. “People are going to get the bottles somewhere else if not here,” she said.

An LED That Mimics an Old Standby

The New York Times, 24 June 2010, By Matthew L. Wald

The ubiquitous 40- and 60-watt incandescent light bulbs are supposed to be in their last few years of existence; a phase-out of incandescents mandated by the federal government begins next year with the 100-watt model and works its way down to the smaller bulbs in 2014.

Bulb manufacturers are working on a variety of replacements, including halogens, which, like incandescents, make light by letting current flow through a filament. Others will be replaced by compact fluorescents.
But in August, Osram Sylvania will introduce another lamp it hopes will take a share of the market, using light-emitting diodes, or LEDs.

LED lamps are already showing up in Christmas decorations, flashlights, traffic signals and the occasional street lamp. Another marketing target is the thousands of freezer cases and refrigerator cabinets at supermarkets and convenience stores. The ones with glass fronts keep the lights on even when the doors are closed. Most use fluorescents, and every watt they consume becomes heat that must be removed by the cooling system. A lower-wattage LED would mean less work for the whole system.

Some LED’s have been produced as downlights for use in recessed ceiling fixtures. Osram Sylvania’s entry mimics the bulb shape of the standard incandescent, at least in its upper half; the lower half is a series of arches meant to dissipate heat.

The device (which the lighting industry calls a lamp, not a bulb) uses 12 watts, 80 percent less electricity than the standard 60-watt incandescent, and emits nearly as much light. (Watts are a unit of power; light is measured in lumens.) It’s supposed to last 25,000 hours, which is about three years of continuous use, or about 11 years if used for six hours a day.

Rick Leaman, the chief executive of Osram Sylvania, would like some help selling them. He said the company had surveyed its customers and determined that, two years after Congress voted for the coming phase-out, 74 percent of the public is oblivious to it.

“We haven’t moved the needle in awareness,’’ Mr. Leaman said. And when lamps start to disappear from store shelves, “there will be a big backlash,’’ he said.

He suggested that the government should wage a publicity campaign. Otherwise, he predicted, the reaction will be, “Why are you taking my incandescent?”

Another U.S. clean energy generator finds a home abroad

ClimateWire, 24 June 2010, By Darius Dixon

A decade ago, Americans were fascinated with the idea of a hydrogen-powered economy. The George W. Bush administration projected images of millions of cars zipping down the highway, pumping out nothing but water for exhaust from their fuel cell engines. That future is still a long way off, but the technology for high-efficiency fuel cell power plants could be here today, if only the right policies were in place to bring it to the mainstream.

That was part of the message at a technology workshop hosted earlier this week by the U.S. Energy Association and its executive director, Barry Worthington. USEA is a collection of interested groups ranging from oil companies and power utilities to universities and federal agencies.

The other part of the message is that countries that provide the right incentives and take the necessary risks can be the first to push clean technology into commercial development. In the case of solar and wind energy -- both first developed in the United States -- it was Europe and Japan that turned them into major electricity producers.

In the case of the fuel cell power plant, it is South Korea that is now leading the way.

In principle, fuel cells are designed much like a normal battery: two electrodes on either end separated by a material that allows charge to move between them. Instead of burning the natural gas for energy, fuel cells use an electrochemical process that breaks down molecules that contain hydrogen and recombines them differently, creating an electrical current in the process.