The Economist: The environment

Why hasn’t the carbon price fallen further?

SOMETHING curious has been happening in the carbon markets. They are entirely political creations—even the most inventive financial engineers would not, on their own, have come up with the idea of a difference in value between the air people breathe in and the air they breathe out. Yet traders seem pretty uninterested in political cues. At the chaotic end of the Copenhagen climate summit in December, prices in the largest market in carbon-dioxide emissions, the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), did drop from €14.60 ($20.50) to €12.70. But that still left the price of a tonne of carbon dioxide comfortably above its lowest level last year.

The Democrats’ subsequent Senate-election loss in Massachusetts, which dealt a crippling blow to the prospects of an American cap-and-trade system that would have greatly expanded world carbon markets, had even less effect. And the announcement this week of the commitments to carbon reduction that countries were willing to accept under the Copenhagen “accord” caused scarcely a ripple. ...

Increasing scrutiny of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and, in particular, its chairman, should lead to reforms

THE past month has not been a good one for Rajendra Pachauri (pictured above), the charismatic chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and director general of TERI, an Indian research institute. His numerous positions on boards and industrial advisory panels, in India and beyond, have led to charges of conflicts of interest. His intemperate defence of mistakes about Himalayan glaciers in the most recent IPCC report had to be followed by a public statement of regret as it became clear that the IPCC had indeed been wrong—and that its source has been a magazine article rather than a piece of scientific literature. And, to cap it all, public mockery of mildly salacious passages in his recently published novel (he writes poetry, too) has added further spice, if not substance, to the stories.

The mistaken claim about the glaciers—that they could disappear by 2035—“never really came to my attention” before the end of last year, Dr Pachauri maintains, though the opportunities for it to have done so were numerous. Syed Hasnain, the researcher cited by press reports as a source for the number (though he denies saying it), is now a consultant at TERI, though Dr Pachauri says he “hardly interacts” with him. The claim featured prominently in a presentation that Anastasios Kentarchos of the European Union gave at a TERI meeting where Dr Pachauri was to deliver a “keynote” address. Dr Pachauri, however, says he left without attending any of the actual sessions. Pallava Bagla, who brought the story to wide attention in Science last November, says he discussed the matter with Dr Pachauri and e-mailed him about it. Dr Pachauri says the discussions were just a question at a press conference that he did not really take on board, and that he read no such e-mails. ...

As international aid reaches a devastated people, their leaders wonder how to rebuild a country in ruins

IN THE days after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti on January 12th, the country’s shock and grief were tempered by the urgent need to save lives. Now that search-and-rescue operations are officially over—with just 132 people plucked from the rubble alive, and estimates of the dead ranging as high as 300,000—Haitians are confronting the devastation wrought on their perennially troubled land.

The past week has seen remarkable progress. Because Haiti’s roads and ports were badly damaged by the quake, little aid arrived in the disaster’s immediate aftermath. Moreover, since the government was almost wiped out—the presidential palace and most main ministries collapsed—there was no one to co-ordinate those relief workers that did arrive. ...

California’s agricultural heartland threatens to become a wasteland

MIKE CHRISMAN looks out from his SUV as he drives through seemingly endless rows of walnut trees on his property near Visalia, in central California. “I have to be optimistic, I’m so tied to this land,” he says. His great-grandfather, after trying his luck in the Gold Rush, settled in Visalia in the 1850s, and the family has been there ever since. But as California’s secretary for natural resources—a job at the intersection of the environmental and farming lobbies, perennially at loggerheads over the state’s scarcest resource, water—Mr Chrisman also knows that optimism has become a minority view.

His land is in California’s Central Valley, a region that covers 19 counties and stretches for 450 miles (725km) from the Cascade mountains in the north to the Tehachapis in the south, and is bounded in the east by the Sierra Nevada and the west by California’s Coast Ranges. Much of it was an inland sea in its geological past, and its alluvial soils and Mediterranean climate make parts of it, particularly the San Joaquin valley in the south, about the most fertile agricultural region in the world. ...

The world’s attempt to aid Haitians stumbles against extraordinary difficulties of transport and communications

IN ONE of the ramshackle tent cities that have sprouted in open spaces all across Port-au-Prince, Isa Longchamp, a dishevelled and dejected eight-year-old girl, starts to whimper. After losing her mother when the Haitian capital was devastated by the earthquake of January 12th, she is now struggling to survive. Batted aside when hundreds of desperate victims of the disaster swarmed around aid workers handing out a batch of supplies earlier in the day, she is still hungry. She depends on the charity of her new neighbours. But at least she is alive, and fairly healthy.

Her home now is a precarious lean-to made from a couple of stained, fraying sheets tied to some sticks. She shares it with what remains of her family. Not far away other earthquake survivors wail in agony in a makeshift hospital. Field surgery is performed with rudimentary equipment and morphine is scarce. Many of the injured have died because of a lack of medical supplies. ...

Haiti’s government cannot rebuild the country. A temporary authority needs to be set up to do it

MORE than a week after the earth convulsed beneath it, Haiti has still to plumb the depths of suffering and want. The numbers are still only more-or-less informed guesses, but their magnitude is grim: perhaps 200,000 killed, 250,000 more injured and some 3m in desperate need of help. The generosity of the world’s response has also been profound. Barack Obama led the way, dispatching 16,000 American troops and marines, but others, from Europe to Brazil, Cuba, China and Israel, responded too. Immediate promises of aid added up to around nearly $1 billion.

The urgent task is to connect this supply of help with the demand. That is proving extraordinarily hard (see article). Seven days after the earthquake, the United Nations had got food to only 200,000 people. Lessons from other disasters are not always relevant to Haiti. The Asian tsunami, for example, struck a ribbon of remote, mainly rural, areas. The governments of the affected nations could lead the relief effort. But Haiti’s institutions were weak even before the disaster. Because the quake devastated the capital, both the government and the UN, which has been trying to build a state in Haiti since 2004, were decapitated, losing buildings and essential staff. So did many NGOs. The president, Rene Preval, and his cabinet have been reduced to meeting in a police station. ...

A mistaken claim about glaciers raises questions about the UN’s climate panel

THE idea that the Himalaya could lose its glaciers by 2035—glaciers which feed rivers across South and East Asia—is a dramatic and apocalyptic one. After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said such an outcome was very likely in the assessment of the state of climate science that it made in 2007, onlookers (including this newspaper) repeated the claim with alarm. In fact, there is no reason to believe it to be true. This is good news (within limits) for Indian farmers—and bad news for the IPCC.

The IPCC, like ancient Gaul, is divided into three parts. Working Group I looks at the physical science of climate change. Working Group II is concerned with impacts, vulnerability and adaptation. Working Group III deals with mitigation. The claims about Himalayan glaciers come from a short “case study” in a chapter on Asia in WG-II’s report from 2007. Like all of the IPCC’s work, this was meant to be an expert assessment of relevant research, resting mostly on peer-reviewed sources but also, at times, on the “grey literature”—reports by governments and other organisations that are not commercially or academically published. ...

Why the outside world—and especially the United States—must respond

EARTHQUAKES can be measured and mapped, but it will be days and perhaps weeks before the scale of the human suffering unleashed on Haiti this week by the collision of the Caribbean and North American plates can be known. The pictures reaching the outside world are horrific and heart-rending: whole districts reduced to dust; the trapped, the dead, the wounded, the dazed, in their hundreds and thousands, jumbled together in the rubble and in the streets. The hope is that many more people than expected have survived. The fear is that it turns out to be the worst natural disaster since the Kashmir earthquake of 2005, when 86,000 died, or even the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 that killed 230,000.

Haiti is unusually ill-equipped to cope. That is partly because the earthquake struck the capital, Port-au-Prince, knocking out such institutions as the country possessed. The devastation included the parliament, the cathedral, the only two fire stations, hospitals and schools, the tax office, the prison and the headquarters of the United Nations mission, which had been trying to build a nation out of a failed state (see article). So Haitians are almost entirely dependent on what the outside world can do. The priority in the coming hours must be rescue, medical care and emergency feeding. It helps that the airport is just about open, and that Haiti is close to the United States. ...

One of the world’s most vulnerable countries is devastated by a murderous earthquake

IF THERE is one country in the Americas that cannot afford to suffer a natural disaster, it is dirt-poor and politically fragile Haiti. In 2008 four tropical storms killed 800 people, left 1m of the 9m population homeless and wiped out 15% of the economy. But the earthquake that devastated the country, including Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, just before 5.00pm on January 12th was a yet crueller blow.

Many died—how many nobody will know until Haiti’s people and the rescue workers who began arriving the next day have completed the grim task of picking through the choking mounds of rubble and concrete. But by the morning of January 14th they were talking of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of lives lost as schools, hospitals, houses, offices, shops and the cathedral and the headquarters of the United Nations mission collapsed in those 45 murderous seconds. The president, Rene Preval, as stunned and dazed as the people seeking refuge in the streets, said simply, “It is a catastrophe.” ...

A storm is blowing up over charges for transmitting renewable power

MOST new technologies get cheaper to use as time goes by. Not so in Scotland, where power from renewable sources may become a lot more expensive on its way to the national grid. Indeed, some think it could eventually become uneconomic to produce it.

The reason is a charging formula for transmitting electricity that was introduced to England and Wales by National Grid, a privatised utility, in 2000 and extended to Scotland in 2004. Because it costs a lot to build long lines of pylons, and much electricity is lost when it is sent over long distances, companies were given incentives to build new power stations close to big centres of demand. ...

New plans to increase clean power are ambitious and expensive

THE diameter of a wind turbine capable of generating five megawatts (MW) of electricity is, at 120 metres, roughly that of the London Eye. If it is to be installed in seas 40 metres deep, its pylon and foundations must measure 170 metres or so, half again as high as St Paul’s Cathedral. If it is to stand in the North Sea, it will confront waves that can rise more than ten metres high and winds that can reach over 100 kilometres an hour. And if it is to be part of plans to increase the proportion of electricity generated from renewable sources to something like 30% by 2020 (it is currently 5.5%), it will be one among thousands.

On January 8th the Crown Estate, which administers the seabed around Britain, revealed the preferred bidders for the nine areas seen as suitable for a third round of offshore wind power. These sites could house turbines with a combined capacity of over 30 gigawatts (GW, or 30,000MW), though average energy production would be at best only about a third of that. The largest of the sites, Dogger Bank, is calculated to offer 9GW—six times the worldwide installed base of offshore wind generating capacity in 2009. ...

Britain may get green jobs, but not the sort ministers promise

BRUISED by the worst recession since the second world war, and staring glumly at a megalithic national debt that their children will be repaying decades hence, few Britons are keen for finance to make up as big a slice of the national economy in the future as it has in the past. Politicians from all parties are keen to talk about new ways for Britain to earn a living.

One popular idea is to turn to greenery: Britain (like the rest of the world) must cut its emissions of greenhouse gases in any case, so it makes sense to profit from the endeavour. The claim that greenery is the future goes back to the fiscal-stimulus package launched by the government last year to revive the credit-crunched economy. Gordon Brown, the prime minister, was beating the drum again in an interview on January 3rd, claiming that a “strong industrial strategy” would turn Britain into the world’s “leader in low-carbon industry”. ...

The betting is that 2010 will be the hottest year on record. But understanding how the planet’s temperature changes is still a challenge to science

IT MAY seem implausible at the moment, as northern Europe, Asia and parts of America shiver in the snow, but 2010 may well turn out as the hottest year on record. Those who doubt that greenhouse gases are quite the problem they have been cracked up to be by most of the world’s climatologists have taken comfort from the fact that the Hadley Centre, part of Britain’s Meteorological Office, reckons the warmest year since records began was 1998 (see chart 1). Twelve years without a new record would, the sceptics reckon, be rather a large lull in what is supposed to be a rising trend. Computer modelling by the Met Office, though, gives odds-on chances of the lull being broken.

The fact that no record high happened in the 2000s does not mean that there was no warming over the decade—trends at scales coarser than the annual continued to point upwards, and other authorities suggest there have been record years during the period. Nor was the length of time without an annual record exceptional. Models simulating centuries of warming normally have the occasional decade in which no rise in surface temperatures is observed. This is because heat can be stored in other parts of the system, such as the oceans, for a time, and thus not show up on meteorologists’ thermometers. ...

A dangerous Dutch epidemic: goats now, humans next?

EVEN for one of Europe’s most efficient countries, it is a tricky problem. At least 40,000 pregnant goats must be destroyed in the coming weeks to head off a new outbreak of Q-fever, a nasty disease that has killed six of the 2,300 people in the Netherlands who caught it last year. The culprit, Coxiella burnetii, is one of the most infectious bugs around. Released into the air during birthing or miscarriages by infected goats, a single bacterium is enough to infect a human, causing symptoms much like flu, though more persistent. Though treatable with antibiotics, it can cause fatal complications if undiagnosed. Governments have investigated it as a potential biological weapon.

The epidemic has been growing since 2007. In 2008 infections exceeded 1,100, a record. In 2009 that doubled, and the disease claimed its first human victims. That has prompted the Dutch authorities to order the destruction of all pregnant animals testing positively for Q-fever, including healthy but vaccinated ones. Farms marked as “infected” face breeding bans and may not buy more animals. ...

How the underwhelming Copenhagen accord could yet turn into a useful document

FACED with the undoubted grandeur of climate change, a grand response seems in order. But, to the immediate disappointment to most of those participating and watching, the much anticipated UN climate conference held in Copenhagen in December led to no such thing.

Initial ambitions for a legally binding agreement with numerical targets for big emitters had already been abandoned in favour of a “politically binding” deal in which developed and developing countries would commit themselves to numerical targets to cut emissions. In the event a few countries produced a short “accord” that sets down no specific limits for future emissions beyond those that its signatories volunteer (see article)—and the commitments they have made so far do not look tough enough to limit the rise in temperature to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, the widely accepted boundary beyond which scientists do not recommend going. ...

Water through the ages

Water. By Steven Solomon. Harper; 563 pages; $27.99. Harper Collins; GBP18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

TO WRITE a history of water was a good idea. Since life depends on water, it has been man’s constant companion from the moment his forebears emerged from the sea and, you could say, even before. Human affairs have therefore been intricately related to water. But man has mistreated his friend, and now, it is said, the world faces a water crisis. There is too much of it in some places, too little in others. It has been acidified, dirtied and squandered. It should no longer be taken for granted. ...

Some clever, new ways of stopping rivers flooding

THE destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 showed the importance of keeping levees—the artificial banks that contain the flow of partly canalised rivers—in tip-top condition. In practice, though, that is hard. Levees fail for many reasons, not all of them associated with violent storms, and there are so many of them (100,000 miles-worth in America alone) that keeping an eye on all of them is an almost impossible task. It is good, therefore, to have a backup plan to block up unexpected holes before they can cause too much damage.

The traditional approach is to throw bags filled with sand or rocks into a breach. Such bags, though, are heavy and unwieldy—particularly if they have to be filled far from the breach and then carried there. William Laska of the Science and Technology Directorate at America’s Department of Homeland Security has therefore sought out alternatives. He has found several technologies that have a common theme: they all use water itself to help stem the flood. ...

The tyres of the future may be made from dandelions

OTHER than being an ingredient of the more recherche sorts of salad, herbal tea or wine, dandelions are pretty useless plants. Or, at least, they were. But one species, a Russian variety called Taraxacum kok-saghyz (TKS), may yet make the big time. It produces molecules of rubber in its sap and if two research programmes, one going on in Germany and one in America, come to fruition, it could supplement—or even replace—the traditional rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis.

Despite the invention of synthetic rubbers, there is often no good substitute for the real thing, for nothing artificial yet matches natural rubber’s resilience and strength. This is because natural-rubber molecules, the product of a stepwise synthesis by enzymes, have a more regular structure than the artificial ones made by chemical engineering. Around a fifth of an average car tyre is therefore made of natural rubber. In an aeroplane tyre that figure can be more than four-fifths. Moreover, the price of synthetic rubber is tied to that of the oil from which it is made, rendering it vulnerable to changes in the oil price. Because oil is likely to become more costly in the future, natural rubber looks an attractive alternative from an economic point of view as well as an engineering one. ...

Business comes to terms with a disappointing outcome

SO KEEN were many energy and clean-technology executives to see a robust agreement to cut emissions of greenhouse gases emerge from December’s climate summit that thousands of them trekked to Copenhagen to cheer policymakers on. It was to no avail: the participants failed to agree on a global mechanism to put a price on emissions, making it harder for energy firms to justify big investments in unproven green technologies, such as advanced biofuels or carbon capture and storage. “Almost all areas of clean technology will get a little less investor interest because there is no mandate,” predicts Vinod Khosla, a prominent venture capitalist.

Clean-tech executives were encouraged by commitments to improve energy efficiency made by India and China, as well as a promise by rich countries to funnel billions to poor ones to pay for green investments. Many shrug off events in Copenhagen on the grounds that national, regional and local regulations are the main drivers of clean-tech investment, not international deals. Paul Holland of Foundation Capital, a venture firm, points out that many municipalities in America have promised to reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels. This is driving strong demand for smart grids, green building materials and the like. Many states have green initiatives too. ...