Green News Round-Up | Monday, June 16

The Washington Post reports that Congress might soon expand federal protection to 2 million acres of land. Congress has embarked on a push to protect as many as a dozen pristine areas this year in places ranging from the glacier-fed streams of the Wild Sky Wilderness to West Virginia's Monongahela National Forest. By the end of the year, conservation experts predict, this drive could place as much as 2 million acres of unspoiled land under federal control, a total that rivals the wilderness acreage set aside by Congress over the previous five years. A confluence of factors is driving this wilderness renaissance: the shift in Congress from Republican to Democratic control; environmentalists' decision to take a more pragmatic approach in which they enlist local support for their proposals by making concessions to opposing interests; and some communities' recognition that intact ecosystems can often offer a greater economic payoff than extractive industries.

The New York Times reports that energy prices are leading glassmakers to rethink things. With higher energy prices seemingly here to stay, clever people are devising ways to reduce the resources and energy consumed in making a wide range of everyday essentials. Consider industrial glass, used to make windows in houses and cars, containers for liquids, screens for computers and cellphones, and hybrid products like fiberglass or fiber optics. Glassmaking is a based on old, stable technologies that require lots of materials and energy. The basic furnace, which melts sand into glass at extremely high temperatures, hasn’t undergone a fundamental change since the 1850s. Furnace designers have long contented themselves with small improvements, such as using pure oxygen to improve energy efficiency. Today, glassmaking faces a technological upheaval that offers a reminder that “it is a mistake to assume that older technologies are less dynamic than new ones,” says David Edgerton, a historian at Imperial College in London and the author of “The Shock of the Old,” a history of the evolution of pre-electronic technologies in the 20th century. Across the United States and around the world, the “greening” of glass is only getting started.

The New York Times also reports that Old Farming methods in Uzbekistan have led to the Aral Sea losing more than half its surface area over the last 40 years. Uzbekistan, a land-locked country that was once part of the Soviet Union, is home to one of the biggest man-made disasters in history. For decades its rivers were diverted to grow cotton on arid land, causing the Aral Sea, a large saltwater lake, to lose more than half of its surface area in 40 years. But old habits are hard to break, and 17 years after the Soviet Union collapsed, cotton is still king and the environmental destruction continues unabated, cutting into crop yields. Uzbekistan is the world’s second-largest cotton exporter after the United States, drawing a third of its foreign currency earnings from the crop, but that status seems increasingly threatened by corruption, poor planning and the degradation of cropland. Far less money is spent now on maintaining the vast networks of water drainage and irrigation that crisscross the country than was expended under Communism. Authorities spend about $12 per hectare on maintenance (a hectare is around two and a half acres), down from $120 per hectare in Soviet times, according to the International Water Management Institute. Blocked drainage pipes push salt levels up, damaging the land and dragging crop yields ever lower.

The Los Angeles Times reports that L.A. County is hoping to fend off drought with a new cloud-seeding program. Hoping to wring water from the skies, a parched Los Angeles County plans to launch an $800,000 cloud-seeding project in the San Gabriel Mountains that officials believe will boost rainfall and raise the levels of local reservoirs. The project, which will rely on injecting clouds with silver iodide particles, has won county supervisors' backing and is slated to begin this winter. "We're basically coaxing Mother Nature to give us 15% more rain than there would be otherwise," said county civil engineer William Saunders. He said the county did seeding for several decades, beginning in the 1950s. This time, officials decided to resume the program after a seven-year lapse caused by concerns over mudslides in some mountain areas ravaged by brush fires. With California gripped by dry weather and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declaring a statewide drought, cloud-seeding is attracting both fresh attention and skeptics. Critics throughout the West have long dismissed seeding as a dubious technological rain dance. They worry it can trigger landslides, such as the deadly one in the San Gabriel foothills 30 years ago. Some water experts, including Peter Gleick at the nonprofit Pacific Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Oakland, believe public funds would be better spent promoting proven water-conservation measures, such as low-flow toilets.

BBC News reports that Honda has begun the world’s first commercial production of a zero-emission, hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle. Japanese car manufacturer Honda has begun the first commercial production of a zero-emission, hydrogen fuel-cell powered vehicle. The four-seater, called FCX Clarity, runs on electricity produced by combining hydrogen with oxygen, and emits water vapour. Honda claims the vehicle offers three times better fuel efficiency than a traditional, petrol-powered car. Honda plans to produce 200 of the cars over the next three years. One of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of wider adoption of fuel-cell vehicles is the lack of hydrogen fuelling stations. This is an important day in the history of fuel-cell vehicle technology. John Mendel, executive vice president of American Honda Critics also point out that hydrogen is costly to produce and the most common way to produce hydrogen is still from fossil fuels. Analysis of the environmental impact of different fuel technologies has shown that the overall carbon dioxide emissions from hydrogen powered cars can be higher than that from petrol or diesel-powered vehicles.

The Guardian (UK) reports that things are looking up for solar power, as the world's biggest producer of solar panels has doubled its output. Moreover, the soaring price of oil has led to such a boom for solar power that the industry could operate without subsidies in just a few years, according to industry leaders. At the solar industry trade fair in Munich over the weekend, there was growing confidence that the holy grail known as "grid parity" - whereby electricity from the sun can be produced as cheaply as it can be bought from the grid - is now just a few years away. Solar photovoltaics (PV), which convert sunlight into electrical power, have long been dismissed as too expensive to make a meaningful contribution to the battle against climate change. But costs are falling as PV production booms, and with electricity prices rising rapidly in line with soaring oil and gas prices, demand for solar panels is increasing sharply.

Reuters reports that the Philippine Government has promised to loan the equivalent of $22 million to convert the engines of busses and taxis. Specifically, the money will be used to convert diesel engines and cut reliance on costly imported fuel. Concerned about the political fallout from soaring inflation, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is trying to alleviate the impact on poor Filipinos from rising prices of fuel, food and other basic commodities.

Agence France-Press reports that China has urged a green partnership with the United States. China's pointman on US trade has urged Washington to work closely with Beijing to develop energy-efficient and pollution-reducing technologies ahead of talks. Vice Premier Wang Qishan said in an opinion piece in The Financial Times that China and the United States should set up joint research and development centers to encourage new energy and environmental protection technologies.

Agence France-Press also reports that the US Ambassador to Japan has voiced doubt on whether the upcoming G-8 summit would take action on climate change. The US ambassador to Japan voiced doubt Monday on whether the upcoming Group of Eight summit would take action on climate change, saying that any solution must also involve developing nations. Host nation Japan has expressed hope that the July 7-9 summit of the Group of Eight (G8) rich nations -- Britain, Canada, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United States -- will help shape negotiations on a post-Kyoto climate treaty. But Thomas Schieffer, the US ambassador to Japan, said that any solution on curbing greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming needed to bring on board major emitters in the developing world such as China and India.

The Associated Press reports that a planned solar utility is finding opposition from environmental groups. The utility, built primarily by San Diego Gas & Electric Co, would be one of the world's largest solar power operations and would be surrounded with plants that run on wind and underground heat. But the project faces fierce opposition because the plan also calls for a 150-mile, high-voltage transmission line which would cut through pristine parkland to reach the nation's eighth-largest city. And this particular case might exemplify what utility companies will face elsewhere in the US as they debate with environmental groups about how to get renewable energy to consumers and as state regulators require electric utilities to rely less on coal and natural gas to fire their plants — the biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. In general, providers of renewable power covet cheap land and abundant sunshine and wind in places like west Texas, Montana, Wyoming and California's Mojave Desert and Imperial Valley. But utility executives say no one will build plants without power lines to connect those remote spots to big cities and those power lines are ripe to spark debate.

The Economist Magazine reports on the geography of green consumerism. Matthew Kahn and Ryan Vaughn, economists at the University of California at Los Angeles, wrote a paper that analyzed patterns of green consumerism in California. By mapping the index that resulted by zip code across the entire state they came up with a graphic representation of where California's green conscious consumers live. The result raised the question of why “the politically green huddle together in the same or similar locations. One proposed answer, by Dr Kahn, is that “small initial differences in spatial attributes, such as being close to a beach or public transport, may create the initial seeds of green communities,” which “in turn attracts ‘green businesses’… such as tofu restaurants and bike shops, and this in turn attracts more greens.” The process culminates when greens have enough political clout to elect politicians and enact green regulation that further enhances their community’s attractiveness to environmentalists. The point is that, though greens are a small minority in America generally, when they are concentrated in certain locations they can have a strong influence on local policy. Moreover, “What we know of work on social interactions suggests that the chance that any person will buy a Prius is likely to be related to the probability that his neighbour buys one.”