Week 3: Everyone Posts Comments to This Thread (by Sunday 3/23)
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5 comments:
Anonymous
said...
1. Park, Dae-yun 2. Science and technology of water purification With an emphasis on environmentally friendly tools 3. The main reasons I think why we need to effort to protect water and prevent water crisis as following. First of all, ecosystem will be destroyed because of food chain confused. Furthermore, we'll not be able to drink pure water and many people will suffer from water shortage more and more. Finally, I heard that water pollution makes to soke the land area of the earth by melting graciers of the South and North pole.
After all, mankind will be ended by water crisis.
This news is about researchers' consideration for water purification as an effort to preserve water. The effort to purify water is to be sure important. However, I think that the most important thing to overcome water crisis is everyone's perception about presence of water crisis and earth pollution. We need to reduce discharged waste water caused by factories and breeding farms. We need to know many people are dying now by shortage of water and have a habit to save water. We need to throw away overeating meat which makes to disappear large land of america and asia-especially, china. I think we are not interested in this kind of effort in Korea.
------------------- From: National Science Foundation Published March 22, 2008 09:30 AM Countering an approaching water crisis RELATED ARTICLES Cleaner water through nanotechnology U.N. Urges World Leaders To Get Clean Water to the Billions Suffering Without Top U.S. Scientists To Provide Web Help For Global Drinking Water Crisis General Electric Agrees to Buy Water Company /ecosystems/article/33406/print Researchers outline obstacles and solutions for providing water in the 21st century As growing demand for clean water stretches even the resources of the world's largest industrialized nations, scientists and engineers are turning to new technology and novel ideas to find solutions.
Mark Shannon of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign joined a slate of world leaders in water resource research to address this crisis in a review paper in the March 20, 2008, issue of Nature.
"As dire as the growing problems are with a lack of enough clean water in the world, I have a great deal of hope that many of these problems can be solved by increasing research into the science and technology of water purification," said Shannon, who also serves as director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center of Advanced Materials for the Purification of Water with Systems (WaterCAMPWS).
With an emphasis on environmentally friendly tools for killing microbes, membrane bioreactors, nanoscale filtration, and a host of other advanced technologies, the review paper addresses how these systems can be used for disinfection, decontamination, reuse and reclamation, and desalination of water supplies across the globe.
"Clearly, a coordinated, multi-faceted approach is needed to deal with complex water issues," said Geoffrey Prentice, the NSF program director supporting the WaterCAMPWS center and currently on detail to the U.S. Mission to UNESCO in Paris.
"Ours is one of several agencies working to address the water crisis before it grows worse. Working with the U.S. Mission to UNESCO, we are highlighting the international dimensions of inadequate water supplies, which lead to millions of deaths each year, primarily in the developing world," Prentice added.
One example is a June 27 international water forum at the Department of State at which NSF, UNESCO and a number of agencies and international organizations will be joining Shannon and other technical experts to confront some of the most pressing global water needs.
Shannon will lead the Congress for Water Purification Science and Technologies in the 21st Century in New Orleans on April 6-10, 2008, an event that coincides with an NSF public webcast on April 10 called Water in 2025, co-hosted by Popular Mechanics. Part of the larger Bridges to the Future forum (www.nsf.gov/bridges), the event is an opportunity for the public to call-in and ask questions of some of the top water researchers in the United States.
1. Name: Madhabi Bhatta 2. Melting Mountain Glaciers Will Shrink Grain Harvests in China and India 3. The world is facing Global Warming. Environmentalists have expressed serious concern on the effect of global warming that can paralyze life cycle of human and other inhabitant. The article linked below explains ice-melting in Himalaya and its direct effect in Rivers in China and India. According to the article, due to this ice-melting, rivers will face water shrinkage in dry seasons which lead China and India into the food shortage. Rivers are main sources of Chinese and Indian irrigations. This is a welcome article by several ways. Firstly, it has linked environmental problems in social life. Secondly it has carried out the special concern of Chinese and Indian people who are facing poverty and if this both countries suffer additional irrigation problem they will face unimaginable problem. Another key point highlighted in article is underground water pumping in India and China. I was also witnessed while visited New Delhi of India and Tibet of China (?), Underground water pumping is very common in both countries which can lead the reason into Warming disaster.
March 20, 2008 - 3
Melting Mountain Glaciers Will Shrink Grain Harvests in China and India Lester R. Brown The world is now facing a climate-driven shrinkage of river-based irrigation water supplies. Mountain glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau are melting and could soon deprive the major rivers of India and China of the ice melt needed to sustain them during the dry season. In the Ganges, the Yellow, and the Yangtze River basins, where irrigated agriculture depends heavily on rivers, this loss of dry-season flow will shrink harvests.
The world has never faced such a predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia. China and India are the world’s leading producers of both wheat and rice—humanity’s food staples. China’s wheat harvest is nearly double that of the United States, which ranks third after India. With rice, these two countries are far and away the leading producers, together accounting for over half of the world harvest.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that Himalayan glaciers are receding rapidly and that many could melt entirely by 2035. If the giant Gangotri Glacier that supplies 70 percent of the Ganges flow during the dry season disappears, the Ganges could become a seasonal river, flowing during the rainy season but not during the summer dry season when irrigation water needs are greatest.
Yao Tandong, a leading Chinese glaciologist, reports that the glaciers on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau in western China are now melting at an accelerating rate. He believes that two thirds of these glaciers could be gone by 2060, greatly reducing the dry-season flow of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. Like the Ganges, the Yellow River, which flows through the arid northern part of China, could become seasonal. If this melting of glaciers continues, Yao says, “[it] will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe.”
Even as India and China face these future disruptions in river flows, overpumping is depleting the underground water resources that both countries also use for irrigation. For example, water tables are falling everywhere under the North China Plain, the country’s principal grain-producing region. When an aquifer is depleted, the rate of pumping is necessarily reduced to the rate of recharge. In India, water tables are falling and wells are going dry in almost every state.
On top of this already grim shrinkage of underground water resources, losing the river water used for irrigation could lead to politically unmanageable food shortages. The Ganges River, for example, which is the largest source of surface water irrigation in India, is a leading source of water for the 407 million people living in the Gangetic Basin.
In China, both the Yellow and Yangtze rivers depend heavily on ice melt for their dry-season flow. The Yellow River basin is home to 147 million people whose fate is closely tied to the river because of low rainfall in the basin. The Yangtze is China’s leading source of surface irrigation water, helping to produce half or more of China’s 130-million-ton rice harvest. It also meets many of the other water needs of the watershed’s 368 million people. (See data.)
The population in either the Yangtze or Gangetic river basin is larger than that of any country other than China or India. And the ongoing shrinkage of underground water supplies and the prospective shrinkage of river water supplies are occurring against a startling demographic backdrop: by 2050 India is projected to add 490 million people and China 80 million.
In a world where grain prices have recently climbed to record highs, with no relief in sight, any disruption of the wheat or rice harvests due to water shortages in these two leading grain producers will greatly affect not only people living there but consumers everywhere. In both of these countries, food prices will likely rise and grain consumption per person can be expected to fall. In India, where just over 40 percent of all children under five years of age are underweight and undernourished, hunger will intensify and child mortality will likely climb.
For China, a country already struggling to contain food price inflation, there may well be spreading social unrest as food supplies tighten. Food security in China is a highly sensitive issue. Anyone in China who is 50 years of age or older is a survivor of the Great Famine of 1959–61, when, according to official figures, 30 million Chinese starved to death. This is also why Beijing has worked so hard in recent decades to try and maintain grain self-sufficiency.
As food shortages unfold, China will try to hold down domestic food prices by using its massive dollar holdings to import grain, most of it from the United States, the world’s leading grain exporter. Even now, China, which a decade or so ago was essentially self-sufficient in soybeans, is importing 70 percent of its supply, helping drive world soybean prices to an all-time high. As irrigation water supplies shrink, Chinese consumers will be competing with Americans for the U.S. grain harvest. India, too, may try to import large quantities of grain, although it may lack the economic resources to do so, especially if grain prices keep climbing. Many Indians will be forced to tighten their belts further, including those who have no notches left.
The glaciologists have given us a clear sense of how fast glaciers are shrinking. The challenge now is to translate their findings into national energy policies designed to save the glaciers. At issue is not just the future of mountain glaciers, but the future of world grain harvests.
The alternative to this civilization-threatening scenario is to abandon business-as-usual energy policies and move to cut carbon emissions 80 percent—not by 2050 as many political leaders suggest, because that will be too late, but by 2020, as outlined in Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. The first step is to ban new coal-fired power plants, a move that is fast gaining momentum in the United States.
Ironically, the two countries that are planning to build most of the new coal-fired power plants, China and India, are precisely the ones whose food security is most massively threatened by the carbon emitted from burning coal. It is now in their interest to try and save their mountain glaciers by shifting energy investment from coal-fired power plants into energy efficiency and into wind farms, solar thermal power plants, and geothermal power plants. China, for example, can double its current electrical generating capacity from wind alone.
We know from studying earlier civilizations that declined and collapsed that it was often shrinking harvests that were responsible. For the Sumerians, it was rising salt concentrations in the soil that lowered wheat and barley yields and brought down this remarkable early civilization. For the Mayans, it was soil erosion following deforestation that undermined their agriculture and set the stage for their demise. For our twenty-first century civilization, it is rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations and the associated rise in temperature that threatens future harvests.
3.This news article reminded me of 'hybridity'that we've studied. A policy of energy is related with 'dead zone' in this article. and this kind of relation could be visible with NEP idea, i think.
--------------------------------
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Growing more corn to meet the projected U.S. demand for ethanol could worsen an expanding "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico that is bad for crawfish, shrimp and local fisheries, researchers reported on Monday.
The dead zone is a huge area of water -- some 7,700 square miles -- that forms above the continental shelf of the Gulf of Mexico every summer. It contains very low levels of oxygen.
The dead zone starts in Midwestern corn country when farmers fertilize their fields with nitrogen. The fertilizer run-off flows down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, making algae bloom on the surface and cutting oxygen to creatures that live on the bottom.
The low levels of oxygen in the zone make it difficult for crustaceans and bottom-feeding fish to survive, said Simon Donner, who worked on the study published the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Crustaceans will likely struggle to stay alive, Donner said by telephone. Fish will swim out of the zone, potentially devastating local fisheries, he said.
"We're already at a point where recommendations have been made that nitrogen levels in the Mississippi River have to decrease by up to ... 55 percent in order to shrink the dead zone," said Donner, of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
"And now with this incentive to produce more corn and use more fertilizer, we're pushing in the other direction," Donner said. "The two policies are just completely incongruous."
A recent Senate energy policy proposal recommended the manufacture of 15 billion to 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by the year 2022, Donner's team found.
To reach that goal with corn-based ethanol would increase nitrogen pollution in the Mississippi River by 10 to 18 percent, Donner said. ----------------- http://www.enn.com/agriculture/article/32635
2.Strategy is needed in order to increase use of Renewables
3. This article is about reality of renewable energy and it's barriers to common usage. Though we need to greatly reduce CO2 because of global warming, yet renewable has never been competitive with fossil fuel in economical way. Advanced countries are setting mandatory target of using renewable energy but more goverment subsidies and legal protections are needed in order to compete with fossil fuel and nuclear energy.
We all know that we are running out of fossil fuel someday. Advanced countries are trying to reduce demand of energy as well as developing new energy source. But developing countries such as Brazil, India, Russia, China need and will need huge amount of energy on industralization. Mutual understanding and spirit of cooperation are needed to overcome Energy crisis.
Energy policy of Korea is focused on finding new source of fossil fuel from outside of Korea. For stable energy supply, Korea is trying to collaborate with Kazakhstan. As Korea utilize Kazakhstan`s abundant energy resources - such as petroleum, natural gas, and iron - and in return provide financial investment and advanced technology. But this will not be the fundermental solution to deal with global energy crisis. More concerns are needed to increase proportion of renewable energy use in Korea.
------------------- The Reality of Renewables RELATED ARTICLES Senate Debates Requirement for Utilities To Use More Renewable Fuels UK clears 3 wind farms in clean energy target chase Germans and Spain warn EU on renewables plan Renewables supply 14 pct of German power: industry /pollution/article/33352 In the 1970s they were called “new and renewable energies” a grouping that allowed energy planners to lump nuclear energy (relatively new) in with hydro, solar, wind and biomass. A WBCSD Learning by Sharing session at our October meeting in Brussels focused on new and renewable energies in Europe and some of the barriers to realizing the high official hopes for them there.
The very name renewable has great appeal, as it promises unlimited sources of relatively clean energy daily, such as sunlight or a breeze. But today, when we need them to greatly reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, they are not ready because they were never able to overcome the marketplace muscle of cheap coal and oil. This market strength makes targets for renewable energy use, such as the 20% mandatory target set by the European Union, either overly ambitious or overly naïve. Participants in the Brussels session heard that the share of traditional renewables, especially hydro, in the overall mix of energy sources has declined and is lower than it was 30 years ago. Hydro will still be in first position among all renewables in 2050, approaching 50% of total renewables production.
Biomass accounts for 10-11% of all primary energy, but this is mostly the cooking fires of the developing world, with their devastating effects on health through indoor air pollution.
Wind is the largest second-generation technology available today, with 25% growth in 2006 and a global market value of 8 billion Euros and costing 4-8 Euro cents per kWh for onshore production. Key issues surrounding it are wind variability and forecasting. Solar is the next largest second generation technology It has huge potential, but at 12-20 Euro cents per kWh it also has huge costs. Installed capacity is increasing 40% per year, while costs are decreasing by 18-20% for every doubling of installed capacity. Solar is more effective in areas with lots of sun, and it requires state-of-the-art batteries to store the electricity. It is good for off-grid solutions, but as more people move into cities, there are fewer in the countryside who need such solutions.
In order to make the picture a bit rosier for renewables, some European companies are calling for harmonized government certificates for CO2 emissions, rather than the 30-some different support systems currently in place. For example, the UK’s Renewables Obligation Certificate (ROC) is issued to an accredited generator for eligible renewable electricity generated within the UK and supplied to customers within the country by a licensed electricity provider. It places an obligation on UK electricity suppliers to source an increasing proportion of their electricity from renewable sources.
Harmonizing these certificate programs throughout Europe would put governments and business in a win-win situation, lowering emissions and growing the marketplace for renewables. Business would also like to see the removal of national feed-in tariff systems (a regulated rate paid by the utility to a private electricity producer) that arguably stymie innovation in that the regulators pick the technology and set the price.
A common market would be more efficient, making the transport and sharing of resources (such as biomass) easier. It would create a European arena for innovation where technology is crucial and can benefit from active research, common development policies and public support.
However, the relatively low historic price of fossil fuels has slowed innovation in renewables, and participants felt that the price of oil would have to stay well over US$ 60 per barrel to encourage companies and governments to embrace renewables.
Politicians who want to see more use of renewables will have to subsidize more. The average price of electricity will need to go up in order meet the EU’s 2020 target, an increase that would have to be covered by subsidies, carbon taxes and green certificates.
Nuclear energy works well in many parts of the world but has enjoyed high government subsidies and legal protection. Nuclear is currently a lot cheaper than renewables, at 4 Euro cents per kWh as opposed to 6 on average for renewables, because of those subsidies.
The discussion concluded that getting anywhere close to Europe’s goals will require a clever patchwork of solutions to overcome present technological, economic and policy barriers. ----- http://www.enn.com/pollution/article/33352
A very down to earth* kind of guy. I'm an environmental sociologist interested in establishing material and organizational sustainability worldwide. I'm always looking for interesting materials/technologies, inspiring ideas, or institutional examples of sustainability to inspire others to recognize their choices now. To be fatalistic about an unsustainable world is a sign of a captive mind, given all our options.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.
5 comments:
1. Park, Dae-yun
2. Science and technology of water purification
With an emphasis on environmentally friendly tools
3. The main reasons I think why we need to effort to protect water and prevent water crisis as following.
First of all, ecosystem will be destroyed because of food chain confused.
Furthermore, we'll not be able to drink pure water and many people will suffer from water shortage more and more.
Finally, I heard that water pollution makes to soke the land area of the earth by melting graciers of the South and North pole.
After all, mankind will be ended by water crisis.
This news is about researchers' consideration for water purification as an effort to preserve water.
The effort to purify water is to be sure important.
However, I think that the most important thing to overcome water crisis is everyone's perception about presence of water crisis and earth pollution.
We need to reduce discharged waste water caused by factories and breeding farms.
We need to know many people are dying now by shortage of water and have a habit to save water.
We need to throw away overeating meat which makes to disappear large land of america and asia-especially, china.
I think we are not interested in this kind of effort in Korea.
-------------------
From: National Science Foundation
Published March 22, 2008 09:30 AM
Countering an approaching water crisis
RELATED ARTICLES
Cleaner water through nanotechnology
U.N. Urges World Leaders To Get Clean Water to the Billions Suffering Without
Top U.S. Scientists To Provide Web Help For Global Drinking Water Crisis
General Electric Agrees to Buy Water Company
/ecosystems/article/33406/print
Researchers outline obstacles and solutions for providing water in the 21st century
As growing demand for clean water stretches even the resources of the world's largest industrialized nations, scientists and engineers are turning to new technology and novel ideas to find solutions.
Mark Shannon of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign joined a slate of world leaders in water resource research to address this crisis in a review paper in the March 20, 2008, issue of Nature.
"As dire as the growing problems are with a lack of enough clean water in the world, I have a great deal of hope that many of these problems can be solved by increasing research into the science and technology of water purification," said Shannon, who also serves as director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center of Advanced Materials for the Purification of Water with Systems (WaterCAMPWS).
With an emphasis on environmentally friendly tools for killing microbes, membrane bioreactors, nanoscale filtration, and a host of other advanced technologies, the review paper addresses how these systems can be used for disinfection, decontamination, reuse and reclamation, and desalination of water supplies across the globe.
"Clearly, a coordinated, multi-faceted approach is needed to deal with complex water issues," said Geoffrey Prentice, the NSF program director supporting the WaterCAMPWS center and currently on detail to the U.S. Mission to UNESCO in Paris.
"Ours is one of several agencies working to address the water crisis before it grows worse. Working with the U.S. Mission to UNESCO, we are highlighting the international dimensions of inadequate water supplies, which lead to millions of deaths each year, primarily in the developing world," Prentice added.
One example is a June 27 international water forum at the Department of State at which NSF, UNESCO and a number of agencies and international organizations will be joining Shannon and other technical experts to confront some of the most pressing global water needs.
Shannon will lead the Congress for Water Purification Science and Technologies in the 21st Century in New Orleans on April 6-10, 2008, an event that coincides with an NSF public webcast on April 10 called Water in 2025, co-hosted by Popular Mechanics. Part of the larger Bridges to the Future forum (www.nsf.gov/bridges), the event is an opportunity for the public to call-in and ask questions of some of the top water researchers in the United States.
---
URL - http://www.enn.com/business/article/33249
1. Name: Madhabi Bhatta
2. Melting Mountain Glaciers Will Shrink Grain Harvests in China and India
3. The world is facing Global Warming. Environmentalists have expressed serious concern on the effect of global warming that can paralyze life cycle of human and other inhabitant. The article linked below explains ice-melting in Himalaya and its direct effect in Rivers in China and India. According to the article, due to this ice-melting, rivers will face water shrinkage in dry seasons which lead China and India into the food shortage. Rivers are main sources of Chinese and Indian irrigations.
This is a welcome article by several ways. Firstly, it has linked environmental problems in social life. Secondly it has carried out the special concern of Chinese and Indian people who are facing poverty and if this both countries suffer additional irrigation problem they will face unimaginable problem. Another key point highlighted in article is underground water pumping in India and China.
I was also witnessed while visited New Delhi of India and Tibet of China (?), Underground water pumping is very common in both countries which can lead the reason into Warming disaster.
March 20, 2008 - 3
Melting Mountain Glaciers Will Shrink Grain Harvests in China and India
Lester R. Brown
The world is now facing a climate-driven shrinkage of river-based irrigation water supplies. Mountain glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau are melting and could soon deprive the major rivers of India and China of the ice melt needed to sustain them during the dry season. In the Ganges, the Yellow, and the Yangtze River basins, where irrigated agriculture depends heavily on rivers, this loss of dry-season flow will shrink harvests.
The world has never faced such a predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia. China and India are the world’s leading producers of both wheat and rice—humanity’s food staples. China’s wheat harvest is nearly double that of the United States, which ranks third after India. With rice, these two countries are far and away the leading producers, together accounting for over half of the world harvest.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that Himalayan glaciers are receding rapidly and that many could melt entirely by 2035. If the giant Gangotri Glacier that supplies 70 percent of the Ganges flow during the dry season disappears, the Ganges could become a seasonal river, flowing during the rainy season but not during the summer dry season when irrigation water needs are greatest.
Yao Tandong, a leading Chinese glaciologist, reports that the glaciers on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau in western China are now melting at an accelerating rate. He believes that two thirds of these glaciers could be gone by 2060, greatly reducing the dry-season flow of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. Like the Ganges, the Yellow River, which flows through the arid northern part of China, could become seasonal. If this melting of glaciers continues, Yao says, “[it] will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe.”
Even as India and China face these future disruptions in river flows, overpumping is depleting the underground water resources that both countries also use for irrigation. For example, water tables are falling everywhere under the North China Plain, the country’s principal grain-producing region. When an aquifer is depleted, the rate of pumping is necessarily reduced to the rate of recharge. In India, water tables are falling and wells are going dry in almost every state.
On top of this already grim shrinkage of underground water resources, losing the river water used for irrigation could lead to politically unmanageable food shortages. The Ganges River, for example, which is the largest source of surface water irrigation in India, is a leading source of water for the 407 million people living in the Gangetic Basin.
In China, both the Yellow and Yangtze rivers depend heavily on ice melt for their dry-season flow. The Yellow River basin is home to 147 million people whose fate is closely tied to the river because of low rainfall in the basin. The Yangtze is China’s leading source of surface irrigation water, helping to produce half or more of China’s 130-million-ton rice harvest. It also meets many of the other water needs of the watershed’s 368 million people. (See data.)
The population in either the Yangtze or Gangetic river basin is larger than that of any country other than China or India. And the ongoing shrinkage of underground water supplies and the prospective shrinkage of river water supplies are occurring against a startling demographic backdrop: by 2050 India is projected to add 490 million people and China 80 million.
In a world where grain prices have recently climbed to record highs, with no relief in sight, any disruption of the wheat or rice harvests due to water shortages in these two leading grain producers will greatly affect not only people living there but consumers everywhere. In both of these countries, food prices will likely rise and grain consumption per person can be expected to fall. In India, where just over 40 percent of all children under five years of age are underweight and undernourished, hunger will intensify and child mortality will likely climb.
For China, a country already struggling to contain food price inflation, there may well be spreading social unrest as food supplies tighten. Food security in China is a highly sensitive issue. Anyone in China who is 50 years of age or older is a survivor of the Great Famine of 1959–61, when, according to official figures, 30 million Chinese starved to death. This is also why Beijing has worked so hard in recent decades to try and maintain grain self-sufficiency.
As food shortages unfold, China will try to hold down domestic food prices by using its massive dollar holdings to import grain, most of it from the United States, the world’s leading grain exporter. Even now, China, which a decade or so ago was essentially self-sufficient in soybeans, is importing 70 percent of its supply, helping drive world soybean prices to an all-time high. As irrigation water supplies shrink, Chinese consumers will be competing with Americans for the U.S. grain harvest. India, too, may try to import large quantities of grain, although it may lack the economic resources to do so, especially if grain prices keep climbing. Many Indians will be forced to tighten their belts further, including those who have no notches left.
The glaciologists have given us a clear sense of how fast glaciers are shrinking. The challenge now is to translate their findings into national energy policies designed to save the glaciers. At issue is not just the future of mountain glaciers, but the future of world grain harvests.
The alternative to this civilization-threatening scenario is to abandon business-as-usual energy policies and move to cut carbon emissions 80 percent—not by 2050 as many political leaders suggest, because that will be too late, but by 2020, as outlined in Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. The first step is to ban new coal-fired power plants, a move that is fast gaining momentum in the United States.
Ironically, the two countries that are planning to build most of the new coal-fired power plants, China and India, are precisely the ones whose food security is most massively threatened by the carbon emitted from burning coal. It is now in their interest to try and save their mountain glaciers by shifting energy investment from coal-fired power plants into energy efficiency and into wind farms, solar thermal power plants, and geothermal power plants. China, for example, can double its current electrical generating capacity from wind alone.
We know from studying earlier civilizations that declined and collapsed that it was often shrinking harvests that were responsible. For the Sumerians, it was rising salt concentrations in the soil that lowered wheat and barley yields and brought down this remarkable early civilization. For the Mayans, it was soil erosion following deforestation that undermined their agriculture and set the stage for their demise. For our twenty-first century civilization, it is rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations and the associated rise in temperature that threatens future harvests.
At issue is whether we can mobilize to lower atmospheric CO2 concentrations before higher temperatures melt the mountain glaciers that feed the major rivers of Asia and elsewhere and before shrinking harvests lead to an unraveling of our civilization. The good news is that we have the energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies to dramatically reduce CO2 concentrations if we choose to do so.
Copyright © 2008 Earth Policy Institute
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2008/Update71.htm
1. se kyoung, Jeoung
2.Corn-based ethanol could worsen "dead zone"
3.This news article reminded me of 'hybridity'that we've studied.
A policy of energy is related with 'dead zone' in this article. and this kind of relation could be visible with NEP idea, i think.
--------------------------------
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Growing more corn to meet the projected U.S. demand for ethanol could worsen an expanding "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico that is bad for crawfish, shrimp and local fisheries, researchers reported on Monday.
The dead zone is a huge area of water -- some 7,700 square miles -- that forms above the continental shelf of the Gulf of Mexico every summer. It contains very low levels of oxygen.
The dead zone starts in Midwestern corn country when farmers fertilize their fields with nitrogen. The fertilizer run-off flows down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, making algae bloom on the surface and cutting oxygen to creatures that live on the bottom.
The low levels of oxygen in the zone make it difficult for crustaceans and bottom-feeding fish to survive, said Simon Donner, who worked on the study published the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Crustaceans will likely struggle to stay alive, Donner said by telephone. Fish will swim out of the zone, potentially devastating local fisheries, he said.
"We're already at a point where recommendations have been made that nitrogen levels in the Mississippi River have to decrease by up to ... 55 percent in order to shrink the dead zone," said Donner, of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
"And now with this incentive to produce more corn and use more fertilizer, we're pushing in the other direction," Donner said. "The two policies are just completely incongruous."
A recent Senate energy policy proposal recommended the manufacture of 15 billion to 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by the year 2022, Donner's team found.
To reach that goal with corn-based ethanol would increase nitrogen pollution in the Mississippi River by 10 to 18 percent, Donner said.
-----------------
http://www.enn.com/agriculture/article/32635
1.Kim, Yoon-jung
2.Strategy is needed in order to increase use of Renewables
3. This article is about reality of renewable energy and it's barriers to common usage. Though we need to greatly reduce CO2 because of global warming, yet renewable has never been competitive with fossil fuel in economical way. Advanced countries are setting mandatory target of using renewable energy but more goverment subsidies and legal protections are needed in order to compete with fossil fuel and nuclear energy.
We all know that we are running out of fossil fuel someday. Advanced countries are trying to reduce demand of energy as well as developing new energy source. But developing countries such as Brazil, India, Russia, China need and will need huge amount of energy on industralization. Mutual understanding and spirit of cooperation are needed to overcome Energy crisis.
Energy policy of Korea is focused on finding new source of fossil fuel from outside of Korea. For stable energy supply, Korea is trying to collaborate with Kazakhstan. As Korea utilize Kazakhstan`s abundant energy resources - such as petroleum, natural gas, and iron - and in return provide financial investment and advanced technology. But this will not be the fundermental solution to deal with global energy crisis. More concerns are needed to increase proportion of renewable energy use in Korea.
-------------------
The Reality of Renewables
RELATED ARTICLES
Senate Debates Requirement for Utilities To Use More Renewable Fuels
UK clears 3 wind farms in clean energy target chase
Germans and Spain warn EU on renewables plan
Renewables supply 14 pct of German power: industry
/pollution/article/33352
In the 1970s they were called “new and renewable energies” a grouping that allowed energy planners to lump nuclear energy (relatively new) in with hydro, solar, wind and biomass. A WBCSD Learning by Sharing session at our October meeting in Brussels focused on new and renewable energies in Europe and some of the barriers to realizing the high official hopes for them there.
The very name renewable has great appeal, as it promises unlimited sources of relatively clean energy daily, such as sunlight or a breeze. But today, when we need them to greatly reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, they are not ready because they were never able to overcome the marketplace muscle of cheap coal and oil. This market strength makes targets for renewable energy use, such as the 20% mandatory target set by the European Union, either overly ambitious or overly naïve. Participants in the Brussels session heard that the share of traditional renewables, especially hydro, in the overall mix of energy sources has declined and is lower than it was 30 years ago. Hydro will still be in first position among all renewables in 2050, approaching 50% of total renewables production.
Biomass accounts for 10-11% of all primary energy, but this is mostly the cooking fires of the developing world, with their devastating effects on health through indoor air pollution.
Wind is the largest second-generation technology available today, with 25% growth in 2006 and a global market value of 8 billion Euros and costing 4-8 Euro cents per kWh for onshore production. Key issues surrounding it are wind variability and forecasting. Solar is the next largest second generation technology It has huge potential, but at 12-20 Euro cents per kWh it also has huge costs. Installed capacity is increasing 40% per year, while costs are decreasing by 18-20% for every doubling of installed capacity. Solar is more effective in areas with lots of sun, and it requires state-of-the-art batteries to store the electricity. It is good for off-grid solutions, but as more people move into cities, there are fewer in the countryside who need such solutions.
In order to make the picture a bit rosier for renewables, some European companies are calling for harmonized government certificates for CO2 emissions, rather than the 30-some different support systems currently in place. For example, the UK’s Renewables Obligation Certificate (ROC) is issued to an accredited generator for eligible renewable electricity generated within the UK and supplied to customers within the country by a licensed electricity provider. It places an obligation on UK electricity suppliers to source an increasing proportion of their electricity from renewable sources.
Harmonizing these certificate programs throughout Europe would put governments and business in a win-win situation, lowering emissions and growing the marketplace for renewables. Business would also like to see the removal of national feed-in tariff systems (a regulated rate paid by the utility to a private electricity producer) that arguably stymie innovation in that the regulators pick the technology and set the price.
A common market would be more efficient, making the transport and sharing of resources (such as biomass) easier. It would create a European arena for innovation where technology is crucial and can benefit from active research, common development policies and public support.
However, the relatively low historic price of fossil fuels has slowed innovation in renewables, and participants felt that the price of oil would have to stay well over US$ 60 per barrel to encourage companies and governments to embrace renewables.
Politicians who want to see more use of renewables will have to subsidize more. The average price of electricity will need to go up in order meet the EU’s 2020 target, an increase that would have to be covered by subsidies, carbon taxes and green certificates.
Nuclear energy works well in many parts of the world but has enjoyed high government subsidies and legal protection. Nuclear is currently a lot cheaper than renewables, at 4 Euro cents per kWh as opposed to 6 on average for renewables, because of those subsidies.
The discussion concluded that getting anywhere close to Europe’s goals will require a clever patchwork of solutions to overcome present technological, economic and policy barriers.
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http://www.enn.com/pollution/article/33352
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