World is Green

How the World Works - Salon.com

According to the FAO, “Average world rice consumption per person is set to increase by 0.5 percent to 57.3 kilo per year, up from 57 kilo in 2007.”

Whether that means going from one meal a day to two or three, or a Western-style epidemic of ballooning portion-sizes, the FAO doesn’t say. But it should give some pause to those who would blame the spread of biofuels for everything that is suddenly awry in grain markets. While it is true that competition from other crops (corn, soy) is depressing rice production in the United States, almost everywhere else in the world, rice harvests are booming — including Africa, where the FAO reports that “large expansions” are “anticipated in Ivory Coast, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Mali and Nigeria.”

Taking from where the Nytimes suggested the increase in public transport usage in America, Krugman says that:

But … as of 2005, only 4.7 percent of American workers took mass transit to work. So even a 10% surge in mass transit ridership would take only around half a percent of drivers off the road.

The point isn’t that nothing can be done — it’s just that serious reductions in driving would require a lot of long-term rearrangement of the way we live. It will come — but not quickly.

More on comparisons between, US, Canada and Europe,

A tale of three cities

What’s more, as far as I can make out from the data, a lot more Canadians than Americans (as a percentage of the population) have switched to public transit over the past year; because the system is there, they have more flexibility.

All in all, this comparison is a reason not to believe apocalyptic warnings about the long-run effects of energy scarcity: there’s a lot of substitution possible. America’s main problem is that we have a capital stock — cars, public infrastructure, and housing — designed for dirt-cheap oil. And the transition may be nasty.

The Nytimes writes that:

With the price of gas approaching $4 a gallon, more commuters are abandoning their cars and taking the train or bus instead.

BBC NEWS | Special Reports | The cost of food: Facts and figures

The cost of food: Facts and figures
Explore the facts and figures behind the rising price of food across the globe.

Line graphs showing rising food prices 2005-07 and price rises by food type, 2007

Graphic illustrating price rises in corn, rice, soya and wheat

As biofuels get the blame, the BBC provides a FAQ which provides some analyses into the real causes.

What are the main causes?

The first reason why prices are rising is growth in the world’s population, which is expected to top nine billion by the middle of the century.

That is an incredible number of mouths to feed and will put pressure on a range of resources, including land, water and oil, as well as food supply.

But lurking behind the headline figures for population is an even more significant factor pushing up prices, and that’s the economic miracle driving emerging economies such China and India.

To put it bluntly, rich people eat more than poor people, and all this economic growth is generating a whole new tier of middle-class consumers who buy more meat and processed food.

The FAO estimates that processed food now accounts for 80% of food and beverage sales.

What other factors are involved?

There is also the added environmental pressure all these extra people are loading onto the planet, as well as the impact of climate change.

Desertification is accelerating in China and sub-Saharan Africa, while more frequent flooding and changing patterns of rainfall are already beginning to have a significant impact on agricultural production.

And global warming has played a significant role in another driver of rising prices: the shift in agricultural production from food to biofuels.

Ethanol production is on course to account for some 30% of the US corn crop by 2010, dramatically curtailing the amount of land available for food crops and pushing up the price of corn flour on international commodity markets.

So what is happening in India? The report argues that the real issue is the purchasing power of the poor and farm productivity.

There has never been an acute shortage of food in India, not even during the infamous famine in Bengal in 1943 in which more than 1.5 million people are estimated to have died of starvation.

The problem then - and now - is entitlement or access to food at affordable prices.

Given the low purchasing power of India’s poor, even a small increase in food prices contributes to a sharp fall in real incomes.

The current crisis in Indian agriculture is a consequence of many factors - low rise in farm productivity, unremunerative prices for cultivators, poor food storage facilities resulting in high levels of wastage.

The Tata Mundra power project has been provided the necessary loans and subsidy by the IFC to start the project. As I argued yesterday in Coal power or no power, the power plants need to be built.

Dot Earth considers the dilemma and provides more stark numbers.

India faces power shortages that leave more than 400 million people without access to electricity, mainly in poor rural areas. The country needs to expand generation capacity by 160,000 megawatts over the next decade, and this new project helps address this gap.

As Michael Wines reported last year, the 700 million people of sub-Saharan Africa outside of South Africa have access to the same amount of electricity used by the 38 million people of Poland.

Dot Earth concludes, “Is all of this bad? If you’re one of many climate scientists foreseeing calamity, yes. If you’re a village kid in rural India looking for a light to read by, no.”

Sreenivas Ghatty points me to a interview with Thomas M. Connelly, Executive Vice President & Chief Innovation Officer of DuPont. The main important part of the interview is the discussion on the food vs fuel debate in bio fuels.

But how is it that DuPont, which thinks much ahead of others, was caught on the wrong foot on this issue of using food crops?

It is not a question we did not recognise. We thought the timescale on which we will move there would be different. Keep in mind, for example, that certain other agricultural commodities were trading at low prices for decades. And frankly, many farmers were looking for additional markets for their products.

So while we recognised that in time the supply trends would become a limiting factor, that the grand plan would accelerate in a matter of five years we never anticipated. We thought it would be at least ten years. The pace at which this has been progressing has been surprising to us.

I think it is because of the global emphasis on climate change, run up in the prices of petroleum. All these are pushing us to non-food crop sources of carbon material for the production of fuel.

I should say we anticipated the direction but not the speed at which we would reach there.

This is the interesting part. How fast the food prices have gone up and the increasing ban on exports from various countries. In some cases, countries like India are ready to sacrifice growth to curb food inflation.

Six Environmental groups, Environmental Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth US, National Wildlife Federation, Bretton Woods Project and the International Accountability Project are fighting the World bank to stop providing a subsidy for the construction of the Tata Mundra coal plant which will provide electricity to 16 million people in 5 states in western and northern India.

The IFC says that the Tata Mundra Project (PPT)

• will have amongst the lowest GHG emission rates globally - lower by 40%, 18% and 16% compared to the average GHG emission rate of coal based plants in India, across the globe and OECD, respectively

• first supercritical project sets a precedent for efficient coal usage: consumes 1.7 million tons of coal less per year than traditional subcritical plants of comparable size

The environmental groups want to consider the costs to the environment and have suggested wind and solar technologies as alternative to the coal plant. The coal plant would cost about $4.2 billion with the World bank providing a subsidy of $450 million. The wind or solar alternatives would cost around $24 billion for the same capacity.

Clearly, coal is the cheapest option at this point in time.

The question that these groups need to consider is this - what happens when there is no power? What are the costs and benefits of providing the least cost power to poor people in a developing country to providing no power at all? Who is working on the side of the people?

The following image from the German Advisory Council on Global Change’ provides a good idea of the countries without power.

The interesting option is the reliance of people on biomass. In some ways Coal may be a better option.

It is a very clear case that development around the world has been due to the emergence of cheap power. What these environmentalists miss in the entire picture is the case for the poor people to come out of poverty using energy. What about the person who dies since there was no electricity in the hospital? What about the child who cannot study because of the lack of electricity?

Interestingly, there are other people supporting the environmental groups. For example, Sreekumar Raghavan at the International Business Times. He provides examples of countries like Australia and the US where there is a movement towards not supporting coal powered plants unless there is a carbon capture mechanism. That is a really good initiative. However, he misses the point. Firstly, Australia and the US do not have millions of people without electricity in their countries. If that is the case, they would have gone ahead with the coal powered plant like the UK has done recently. Also, the US and Australia are highly dependent on coal powered plants. 75% of Australia’s electricity comes from coal.  Second, the per capita GDP of these countries are way above India. There is no comparison at all. It is foolish to think that India can solve its poverty issues without abundant and cheap energy.

Robert Zoellick, the president of World Bank,  makes an important point. He said, “…that if developing nations are deprived of energy it will be counter productive and a setback for the larger issues of climate change.” Mr. Raghavan calls this a weak defense. However, it is he who needs to understand that this is an important argument. The capacity to fight and adapt to climate change is dependent on the ability of nations to develop economically. And to develop economically, we need to have cheap and abundant energy.

There is another argument too. The IPCC predictions for future increases in CO2 emissions have already considered the growth of transport, energy and other emissions in their calculations. This growth would mean the building up of coal powered plants and small cars like Nano. If the cuts suggested by IPCC are to be followed by the world, then there should be no opposition to the current growth of power and CO2 for developing countries.

Well, the point is simple. Coal power or no power. Which is better?

Malcolm Turnbull, the current liberal leader current liberal member (thanks Julie White for the correction) in Australia and the former Environment minister under the Howard government gave a recent speech on Climate Change and Economics. (Hat tip: Green Link Central)

During my time as Environment Minister three points about climate change became very clear to me and you will have heard me making them often. They bear repeating today.

The first is obvious: climate change is a fact, not a theory. By that I mean that whatever reservations people might have about the science, policymakers must, as Rupert Murdoch once observed, “give the planet the benefit of the doubt.”

The second point is less obvious. Given that so much of our emissions are from sources that are likely to be very hard to abate either at all or at realistic cost, the emission reduction goals we are setting ourselves for 2050 will mean in practical terms that we will need in 42 years to have a world where all or almost all of our energy comes from zero emission sources and where deforestation, currently the source of 20 per cent of global emissions, is replaced by a global programme of reforestation – an initiative I was proud to have pioneered while Environment Minister in the Howard Government last year.

This would mean that there would be no coal fired power stations unless the CO2 was captured and stored safely under the ground. Automobiles would be electric – a whole energy hungry world would have to undergo an industrial and technological transformation of a kind never seen before in its global scope and scale.

The third point is that there is no prospect of achieving the massive global reductions in emissions that science demands unless all of the major emitting nations both in the developed and developing world play a part. Until a few years ago that was a controversial statement, but as always the relentless logic of arithmetic has won the day. Indeed, as we saw at the US President’s first Major Economies Meeting on climate last September even if the developed world cut its emissions by 100 per cent by 2050, to achieve a global reduction to 50 per cent of 2005 levels, the developing world would need to cut its
emissions by 47 per cent.

The Martu people are Australian Indigenour people living in the western desert. The Age reports that they have formed a deal with Reward Minerals, which will reward them with 7 million options at a strike price of 50c, valid for 4 years, amounting to 10% of the shareholding of the company.

This deal is being suggested a landmark deal in terms of securing appropriate compensation and ownership to the traditional owners of the land, the Martu people. The share price traded up to tis highest ever and at the current share price, the deal is is worth a little above $ 5 million.

The indigenous community believes that “the presence of a generous indigenous equity component as part of the transaction is the way of the future in mining negotiations,”.

This could well work out in a positive way, depending on the development of the mine. It may also act as a blueprint for deals in India where tribal people are being evacuated for industrial and mining projects with payments in cash now. With many issues around compensation arrangement including the sensible use of cash for the financial inexperienced tribals, a cash+stock compensation option may be a good deal.

Computer Weekly talks about some of the simple steps that you can take to save energy, costs and improve efficiencies.

The government’s CIO Council is planning a “green” strategy for the public sector which includes cutting tens of thousands of printers, taking power consumption into consideration when buying PCs, and keeping equipment for up to two years longer.

One of those leading the green initiative is the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Defra’s CIO Chris Chant said there has been a dramatic reduction in printers in large offices, from one per eight employees to one for every 15 staff. This cuts buying costs, electricity bills and the amount of equipment that needs to be disposed of, he said.

Defra recently decided to fund centrally only one computing device per employee - usually a thin-client desktop or a laptop. It also discourages docking stations for laptops and thousands of power-hungry CRT monitors have been replaced with flat screens.

We have been doing similar stuff at DFC. The printers have been the biggest surprises with almost 1 printer for every 2 employees in some offices. Some big savings can come out there for DFC.