Sustainablog

Hong Kong magnate Stanley Ho is at it again. Not formulating a “Ho Plan” for Hong Kong energy security that centers around wind power, as the growing similarities between him and T. Boone Pickens might suggest. Stanley Ho’s investment du jour, while on par with his recently established eco-trend, will not be in Asia. Rather, the biofuel play will be located off of the Western coast of Africa.

Geocapital, a Macau-based investment holding company started in 2007 and comprised of partner investors Stanley Ho and Jorge Ferro Ribeiro, is in negotiations with the Government of Cape Verde to install a biofuels research and development center on the African archipelago, Portugal’s Lusa news agency recently reported.

The pair hopes to take advantage of Cape Verde’s experience producing biofuels from jatropha, a crop that yields ten times the output of corn plants. Jatropha-based biofuel is considered one of the best candidates for future biofuel production, and has already been successfully tested as a substitute for jet fuel in commercial airplanes. The poisonous seed has a long history as a fuel source: in the early 1900s, it was exported to France and Portugal for use in streetlamps.

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Beijing authorities have announced that driving restrictions will be extended another year, as part of the city’s overall strategy to reduce airborne pollution and traffic congestion, according to reports from China’s state-run media. The plan hopes to take 930,000, or roughly 20%, of Beijing’s over 3.6 million vehicles off the road each weekday.

Starting Monday, April 13, cars will be banned from metro roads one day per working week, depending on the last digit of their license plate. There will be no restriction on weekend driving.

This measure represents the most strict action taken since lifting a ban that was put in place one month prior to and during the Olympics, wherein vehicles were prohibited from driving in Beijing every other day, as officials scrambled to achieve decent air quality and clear roadways for the competing athletes and attendees. Read the rest of this entry »

China appears to be backing out of global efforts to address climate change, intensifying pre-Copenhagen debate.

A top China central government think tank yesterday released a framework for quantifying countries’ historical emissions. Under this proposed framework, the State Council Development Research Center (DRC) would create a “historic account” of past emissions, used to benchmark developing countries with lower accumulated emissions - like China - against countries with higher accumulated emissions and assign emissions “deficits” to countries who have emitted less. Using this quantitative assessment, countries with emissions “deficits” would get the green light to emit, or trade emissions credits with countries that have already exceeded their allowance.

The release of this plan supports external analysis that China believes it should have the right to develop free from carbon reductions until their accumulated emissions are on par with industrialized countries. A recent Brookings Institute report: “Overcoming Obstacles to US-China Cooperation on Climate Change” articulated Beijing’s stance, which included the conviction that:

Countries should be held responsible not only for their current emissions but also for their cumulative historical emissions, given that greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere over many decades.

This plan is Beijing’s most comprehensive effort to date to both highlight and quantify development inequalities as a justification for releasing China and other developing countries from emissions reduction expectations.

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Next Wednesday night, March 25th, tune into HBO2’s premiere of the documentary They Killed Sister Dorothy at 8 pm if you want to begin to understand the violence and injustice that surrounds the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. If you aren’t going to be home, then set your Tivo.

I was fortunate enough to see Daniel Junge’s film last month at the City of the Angels Film Festival in Los Angeles. The documentary follows the aftermath of the murder of 73 year-old Sister Dorothy Stang, known as the Angel of the Amazon, a Catholic nun and rainforest activist shot in the back while trying to empower local communities to set up sustainable farms while fighting illegal logging and land grabs.

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The G20 Global Summit, which will take place in the UK in April, stands to be an important factor in determining China’s stance on climate change commitments as Copenhagen draws near.

First, this meeting will provide the US and China a chance to meet behind the scenes, for the first time since Hillary Clinton visited China last month to initiate a discussion on robust bilateral coordination on energy and climate issues. Both Clinton and her Chinese counterparts suggested in February that the G20 meeting would give the two nations’ leaders a chance to move ahead with the compact. The next step may well be a US-China leader summit, which a recent policy think tank “roadmap” for collaboration, given to Clinton in advance of her trip, identified as a crucial building block in the process.

Secondly, this meeting will give other countries some signposts as to what they can expect from China in December. G20 participants have already expressed their expectation that China will ante up in this time of global economic need. Gauging the tone of China’s reaction to G20 participants’ financial demands will provide participating OECD countries – particularly those expecting China to make serious commitments on emissions reductions in the “Green New Deal” – some hint as to what a distressed China can be expected to deliver in environmental negotiation terms. The last two weeks’ NPC legislative session in Beijing definitively demonstrated that China’s first priority is repairing the economy, not the environment. Thus, China’s reaction to the key role G20 participants expect her to play in the summit may serve as an accurate litmus test for anticipated outcomes in Copenhagen.

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By Lester R. Brown

http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/Seg/PB3ch07_ss4.htm

Ensuring basic health care for people in low-income countries is critical to the Plan B goal of eradicating poverty and stabilizing population.

While heart disease and cancer (largely the diseases of aging), obesity, and smoking dominate health concerns in industrial countries, in developing countries infectious diseases are the overriding health concern. Besides AIDS, the principal diseases of concern are diarrhea, respiratory illnesses, tuberculosis, malaria, and measles. Child mortality is high.

Progress in reaching the United Nations (U.N.) Millennium Development Goal of reducing child mortality two thirds by 2015 is lagging badly. As of 2005 only 32 of 147 developing countries are on track to reach this goal. In 23 countries child mortality has either remained unchanged or risen. And only 2 of the World Bank’s 35 fragile states are on track to meet this goal by 2015.

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Lester R. Brown

http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Seg/PB3ch06_ss3.htm

Health challenges are becoming more numerous as new infectious diseases such as SARS, West Nile virus, and avian flu emerge. In addition, the accumulation of chemical pollutants in the environment is starting to take a toll. While infectious diseases are fairly well understood, the health effects of many environmental pollutants are not yet known.

Among the leading infectious diseases, malaria claims more than 1 million lives each year, 89 percent of them in Africa. The number of people who suffer from it most of their lives is many times greater. Economist Jeffrey Sachs estimates that reduced worker productivity and other costs associated with malaria are cutting economic growth by a full percentage point in heavily affected countries.

Although diseases such as malaria and cholera exact a heavy toll, there is no recent precedent of a disease affecting as many people as the HIV epidemic does. To find anything similar to such a potentially devastating loss of life, we have to go back to the smallpox decimation of Native American communities in the sixteenth century or to the bubonic plague that took roughly a fourth of Europe’s population during the fourteenth century. HIV is an epidemic of epic proportions that, if not checked soon, could take more lives during this century than were claimed by all the wars of the last century.

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In a rare admission of China’s strategic petroleum reserve capacity, a senior industry executive acknowledged that all four state-owned emergency oil reserve tanks – holding a total 100 million barrels – are filled to the brim.

Revealing that China’s current stockpiles have already exceeded the capacity of the first phase of facilities, which the government built over the last two years, China Shipping Group President Li Shaode urged the government to use foreign exchange reserves to finance floating storage capacity in the short term.

Li’s comments come after a string of recent oil- and gas-related events in China. Within the last few months, China has entered into natural gas supply agreements with Myanmar, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and has already begun construction on needed pipelines. Just yesterday, China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC) signed a 25 year gas supply agreement with Qatar.

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A “green economy” can be built in China in less than 20 years, argues a new McKinsey report. The new study, “China’s Green Revolution“, offers the most comprehensive quantitative analysis to date of China’s abatement cost curve.

Previous studies of a similar ilk, like the Stern Review, have incorporated social benefits to partially offset the cost of scaling up energy efficient and clean technologies. In contrast, the latest McKinsey report considers only technology-related costs and attaches a figure to the cost of green initiatives in China.

So what is the final damage? While costs are negative for upgrades in some industries, like buildings, due to the savings generated from energy efficiency improvements, a total 1.5-2 trillion yuan (USD 220-295 billion) would have to be spent every year until 2030 in order to reach McKinsey’s alternative scenario. Read the rest of this entry »

In honor of International Women’s Day on March 8th, a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women, the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) and Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) have released three new case studies and a video on the impacts of monoculture tree plantations on women in Nigeria, Papua New Guinea and Brazil.

These tree plantations provide rubber for car and bus tires, palm oil for processed foods and pulp for toilet paper - all items being used in the west. They are also destroying local communities according to WRM and FoEI.

In the case of Nigeria, in 2007, the French tire maker Michelin came in to the Iguóbazuwa Forest Reserve, a biologically diverse region supplying food for around 20,000 people. Michelin bulldozed the forest and local farm lands to convert them into rubber plantations. Women living there lost their subsistence farms and the local forest which provided medicinal herbs and plants.

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