The Economist: The environment

Pining for a cold winter

OVER the past 14 years, a tiny insect no bigger than a grain of rice has laid waste a swathe of British Columbia's forests so vast that the rust-red wasteland is visible from space. The mountain pine beetle has infested and killed over half the lodgepole pine forest in the centre of the province--an area larger than England. It has rampaged eastwards into northern Alberta for the first time. (It has also made localised attacks on forests in all 11 western American states.) Scientists now fear the voracious beetle is about to invade the jack pines of the boreal forest, which could see the plague sweep across northern Canada to the Atlantic coast. It is an unprecedented infestation that could become a catastrophe.

The pine beetle is a well-known pest, not an exotic import, but no effective means has been found to stop it. The beetles swarm up trees in large numbers, killing them by boring through the bark, sapping their nutrients and emitting a damaging blue fungus. Cold winters and forest fires normally keep the beetle populations in check. Some forest scientists trace the current outbreak to 1994, when provincial-government foresters, fearing the ire of greens, failed to eradicate a small infestation in a provincial park by cutting and burning. In any event, recent British Columbian winters have not been cold enough to kill the beetles. ...

Democrats in the House and the Senate have not been as green as their word

WANDER through the marble hallways of Washington's Capitol and look up. Screwed into the sconces and lanterns of one of the city's oldest buildings are the glowing helices of very 21st-century compact fluorescent bulbs. Downstairs, Hill staffers eat off compostable plates. And soon the spotlights that illuminate the Capitol's great dome--so inefficient that their heat requires workmen to wear special suits in order to handle them--will be replaced with more efficient LED bulbs.

Nancy Pelosi, the speaker, came into office last year promising a slew of green initiatives, including an overhaul of her House of Representatives itself, which is on track to be carbon-neutral by December. More significant are the legislative achievements the Democratic majority proudly touts, particularly last year's passage of the first increase in car fuel-efficiency standards for three decades. Now Congress is moving to preserve millions of acres of wilderness, far more than it has done in preceding years, setting aside land in states from California to West Virginia. ...

Pesticides keep food edible and cheap. On the other hand they are, by definition, poisonous. Europe's legislators thus face a dilemma

WHAT is the difference between risk and hazard? Quite a lot, it seems, if you make or use pesticides. Everybody hates them (dangerous, unnatural things). But everybody likes their benefits (cheap and unblemished food). Sensibly regulating their manufacture and use is thus a minefield--but one that Europe's politicians and bureaucrats are now attempting to cross without getting blown up.

The difference between hazard and risk, in this context, is that hazard is something you measure in a laboratory by finding out how much of a substance you need to kill or injure an experimental animal. Risk is something you measure in the real world. Risk depends not just on how toxic a chemical is, but on how it is actually used, how much of it is used and how often it is used. At the moment, Europe's rules on pesticides are based on risk. However, a piece of legislation regulating plant-protection products, which is awaiting its final reading in the European Parliament later this year, will shift the basis of the law towards an assessment of hazard. ...

Stephane Dion, the Liberal with a carbon-tax plan

FANS of "Yes, Minister", a 1980s British sitcom, will recall that whenever Sir Humphrey Appleby, the emollient civil servant, labelled a brainwave by his minister "courageous", a climbdown was inevitable. That is the adjective being used by many of the supporters of Stephane Dion, the leader of Canada's opposition Liberal Party, to describe the plan for a national carbon tax that he unveiled with campaign-style fanfare in mid-June.

Despite a slightly wimpish image, Mr Dion, a former academic, certainly does not lack courage. On July 4th he was due to head for Alberta, Canada's oil patch, to spend the weekend at the Calgary Stampede endeavouring to sell a tax expressly designed to curb energy use. ...

Kenya plants sugarcane; America uproots it

LAST week Charlie Crist, the governor of Florida, announced the purchase of almost 300 square miles of land in the middle of the Everglades from a sugar producer. Rather than building on it, Florida will allow the land to revert into its natural state.

On the other side of the world, the government of Kenya said it plans to do exactly the opposite: 80 square miles of the Tana river delta will be dug up by a private company that will grow sugarcane to be turned into biofuel. The Tana delta, which lies 120 miles north of the coastal city of Mombasa and drains Kenya's longest river, is a mix of savannah, mangrove swamps, forest and beaches. Like the Everglades, this wetland area has unique wildlife; it sustains lions, hippos, reptiles, primates, rare sharks and 345 bird species, as well as thousands of farmers and fishermen. It provides the only dry-season grazing for hundreds of miles around. ...

The United States may drop a tariff on Brazilian ethanol. But the industry is still the victim of much misplaced criticism

WHEN John McCain laid out his plans for reducing America's dependence on oil to an audience in California on June 23rd, the candidate's keenest listeners were 6,000 miles away in Sao Paulo. Mr McCain argued that the tariff on imported ethanol of 54 cents per gallon should be scrapped. Others in the Senate (though not Barack Obama) are pushing for it to be reduced. Either way, the case against the tariff has been strengthened by high oil prices and by the June floods that damaged the mid-western corn (maize) crop. That sent corn prices soaring and made subsidising corn to produce ethanol look like an even worse idea than it did before, given the greener, cheaper ethanol that the United States could buy from Brazil instead.

America's thirst for ethanol is set to grow in line with targets in last year's Energy Independence and Security Act. Brazil would like to sell more to Europe and Japan too. Yet just when it seems poised to reduce the world's dependence on oil, its largely sugar-based ethanol industry stands accused of being less wonderful than it looks. Campaign groups lump it together with biofuels elsewhere, which they blame for raising food prices. Some environmentalists claim that Brazilian farmers have torn up forest to plant cane. Some media reports allege ill-treatment of farm workers. More prosaically, some American officials question how much ethanol Brazil can supply. ...

A double blow for solar energy

IT SEEMED so promising--mirrors sprawled across desert land in the scorching south-west delivering clean electricity and helping to wean Americans off imported fossil fuels. Some scientists and industry developers claim that Nevada's empty and sun-drenched expanses alone could supply enough terawatts to power the entire country.

Now even the optimists fear this wonderful prospect may be a mirage. Congress has been dithering over extending a valuable investment tax credit for solar-energy projects, which solar advocates say is critical to the future of their industry but which is due to expire at the end of the year. The latest attempt failed in the Senate earlier this month: prospects for a deal before November's presidential and congressional elections now look dim. Uncertainty has led some investors to delay or abandon projects in the past few months. Rhone Resch, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said if the tax credits are allowed to expire at the end of the year, "it will result in the loss of billions of dollars in new investments in solar." ...

A new rating agency aims to separate emissions reductions from hot air

EMISSIONS trading, says Ian Johnson of IDEAcarbon, a research firm, "is not an easy concept to understand". Indeed, the process whereby the United Nations assesses projects that reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and issues their owners with a corresponding number of tradable credits is so confusing that not even its main practitioners, the firms that develop the projects, seem to have got the hang of it. Over the past year, the regulators at the UN have been questioning and rejecting a higher share of projects. The project developers, in turn, have had to reduce their estimates of the number of credits they will receive, contributing to sharp falls in some of their share prices (see chart).

On average, IDEAcarbon calculates, if you discount the first wave of big, easy projects, emissions-reduction schemes have yielded only 70% of the expected number of credits. So how do potential purchasers or investors assess whether they will get the credits they are counting on? The answer, as far as IDEAcarbon is concerned, is a new sort of rating agency that will evaluate just how creditworthy, so to speak, each project is. ...

Not for the first time, navigating the archipelago by ferry proves deadly

THE shipping industry in the Philippines put another big blot on its abysmal safety record when the ferry Princess of the Stars, carrying 862 passengers and crew, sank during a typhoon in the central Philippines on June 21st. By the middle of the week rescuers had found 48 survivors. But 70 bodies had been recovered and 744 people were still missing. The authorities had little hope of finding any more alive. It will probably turn out to have been the most deadly maritime accident in the Philippines for 20 years.

The route taken by the 24,000-tonnes Princess of the Stars from Manila heading for the central city of Cebu took it straight into the path of the approaching Typhoon Fengshen. The coastguard received a signal saying the ship had engine trouble and that it had run aground just off the island of Sibuyan. Survivors said that the order to abandon ship was given, but that the vessel capsized shortly afterwards in high winds and rough seas. ...

How to rescue the reputation of Chilean salmon

A GENERATION ago, Puerto Montt, the last town before southern Chile breaks up into a myriad of islands and fjords, was such a dead place that wags changed its prefix to "Muerto" Montt. Nowadays it is booming, thanks to salmon farming, an industry that last year produced $2.2 billion in export revenues. That makes Chile the world's second-largest exporter of salmon after Norway. But some people worry that the industry has grown too fast for its own good.

Output is now stagnating, mainly because of the prevalence of diseases among the fish. These include infectious salmon anaemia, a virus that first appeared in Norway in the 1980s but from which Chile had remained free until last year. As if that was not enough, a report in the New York Times in March suggested that antibiotic and hormone residues could make Chilean salmon unsafe to eat. ...

Efforts to replace oil-based chemicals with renewable alternatives are taking off

FORTY years ago Dustin Hoffman's character in "The Graduate" was given a famous piece of career advice: "Just one word...plastics." It was appropriate at the time, given that the 1960s were a golden age of petrochemical innovation. Oil was cheap and seemed limitless. Since then, scientists have kept on coming up with wondrous new products made from petroleum that helped to ensure, in the words of one corporate slogan, better living through chemistry. Even so, someone offering advice to today's promising graduates might invoke a different, uglier word: chemurgy.

This term, coined in the 1930s, refers to a branch of applied chemistry that turns agricultural feedstocks into industrial and consumer products. It had several successes early in the 20th century. Cellulose was used to make everything from paint brushes to the film on which motion pictures were captured. George Washington Carver, an American scientist, developed hundreds of ways to convert peanuts, sweet potatoes and other crops into glue, soaps, paints, dyes and other industrial products. In the 1930s Henry Ford started using parts made from agricultural materials, and even built an all-soy car. But the outbreak of the second world war and the shift to wartime production halted his experiment. After the war, low oil prices and breakthroughs in petrochemical technologies ensured the dominance of petroleum-based plastics and chemicals. ...

Long a symbol of freedom, America's wild horses may soon be no more

IN 1964 a new car was launched at the New York World's Fair: the Ford Mustang. Both its name and its galloping horse logo, adapted from Frederic Remington's portraits of the Old West, epitomised a peculiarly American dream about a land of cowboys and big skies. More than 8m Mustangs have been sold. But on America's old frontier, the free-roaming wild horses now struggle for survival.

Deanne Stillman, a journalist, began researching this history in 1998 after 34 wild horses were massacred in the Virginia Range of mountains near Reno, Nevada. The horse began evolving on the North American continent 55m years ago, before crossing the Bering land bridge and spreading through Asia and Europe. The word mustang derives from the Spanish. Ms Stillman traces the return of the horse with the conquistadors; its partnership with Native Americans; its use in wars and cattle drives; its role in literature, lore and films; and its demise during the "Great Removal" of 1920-35 when hundreds of thousands of mustangs were sent to slaughter to provide cheap meat. ...