Why It’s Worth Going to Jail to Stop Keystone XL

••••

On Monday, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told the State Department that the information in the State Department’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the Keystone XL pipeline is “insufficient.” Among EPA’s many concerns was the State Department’s failure to adequately address the pipeline’s impacts on climate change. EPA raised a host of other issues. In fact, the State Department’s EIS is not useful for answering some of the most basic questions about Keystone XL.

Ever since Feb. 13, when I chained myself to the White House fence with 47 other protestors urging President Obama to kill the Keystone pipeline, people have asked me why I felt strongly enough about the issue to endure arrest. Many of them have the same questions that should have been asked in the State Department’s EIS. If we don’t build the pipeline through the American prairie, won’t the oil companies just route it through British Columbia by rail, tank trucks or pipelines and sell their oil to Asia? Won’t the Keystone XL pipeline give America energy security and the U.S. jobs? Won’t the pipeline lower the price of gasoline at the pump? Haven’t the oil industry and government regulators given us adequate assurances that Keystone is safe? Don’t the oil and pipeline companies have their own incentives to make sure the Keystone pipeline doesn’t leak?

Here are the answers:

1) Is the Keystone XL Pipeline safe? Anyone who watched the oil industry and its regulators scramble to point fingers and dodge responsibility during the BP oil spill should be skeptical about industry claims of pipeline safety. Tar sands oil, sometimes known as bitumen, is extraordinarily corrosive and the industry has not figured out how to stop it from bursting even the most fortified pipelines. On March 31, an Exxon pipe carrying 95,000 barrels per day of Alberta tar sands oil from Illinois to Texas refineries burst and flooded an upscale suburb in Mayflower, Arkansas beneath an ocean of toxic heavy bitumen and lighter dilutents, added by oil companies to help the gelatinous bitumen move through the pipe. Arkansas taxpayers were shocked to learn that thanks to a loophole artfully created by the industry’s political allies, they—not the oil companies—will have to pay for the cleanup.

That same week a burst Minnesota pipeline vomited 15,000 gallons of Alberta crude. In 2010, an Exxon pipeline in Michigan spewed a million gallons of dilbit into the Kalamazoo River, causing the worst and most expensive pipeline-based oil spill in U.S. history. Experts are still scratching their heads trying to figure out how to clean up the Kalamazoo spill which received little coverage from the mainstream corporate media. Clean-up crews commonly collect aquatic oil spills using floatable booms. As it turns out, tar sands oil doesn’t float. Instead, it tarred and coated the Kalamazoo River bottom, which is the foundation of the aquatic ecosystem. In fact, oil and gas companies even shipping conventional oil, experience thousands of oil spills each year. In June, an Exxon pipe that runs parallel to the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline burst, spilling between 750 and 1,000 barrels, at a crossing on the iconic Yellowstone River and killed life in that blue ribbon trout fishery and national treasure for 25 miles.

Given the industry’s abysmal record, it’s safe to say that Keystone XL will experience a major spill and, due to its planned route, that spill will almost certainly contaminate the Ogallala aquifer, the sole water supply for millions of middle state Americans as well as the breadbasket of American agriculture and the ranching industries in seven states.

[pullquote]We don’t need oil-based fossil fuels while we ramp up renewables like Solar and Wind. Renewables are proven and market-ready technologies. Their widespread deployment is only being impeded by multibillion dollar annual subsidies to oil and gas [and flaccid support by the government—Eds]. In any case, the Keystone XL Pipeline is not a stop gap measure. Instead the pipeline will entrench our use of fossil fuels[/pullquote]

2) Keystone XL will not create significant American jobs. According to the State Department’s study, Keystone will provide only 35 full time jobs following the construction period. We could more beneficially create permanent jobs by incentivizing solar and wind development which, even with the current anemic federal incentives, are creating each year, more new generation capacity than all the incumbents (oil, gas, coal and nuke) combined. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are already 93,000 jobs in solar and 85,000 in wind, and those numbers are growing exponentially.

3) Keystone XL will neither improve energy security nor lower gasoline prices. Virtually all of Keystone’s Alberta tar sands oil is destined for Asian markets. Canadian and mostly non-U.S. owned oil services companies, the Koch Brothers, and Asian plutocrats will profit from the pipeline but there will be little value to the U.S. in terms of security or lower oil prices. In fact, U.S. oil prices will actually increase as the result of Keystone because U.S. oil prices are dictated not by world market prices but by refinery capacity in this country. Since tar sands oil destined for Asian markets will first be refined in U.S. refineries, tar sands will compete for limited refinery space and therefore drive up the price of oil. The State Department estimates that the average cost of American gasoline will actually rise upward of 7¢ per gallon if Keystone is constructed. The Pipeline will hurt the U.S. economy, not help it.

4) Why are environmentalists mad at Obama? Why have they made this the political line in the sand for his carbon legacy? Because this issue is one of the few issues that is solely under Obama’s control. President Obama doesn’t need to go to a Congress awash in democracy-polluting oil money. He can pull the plug on Keystone XL while sitting alone in the Oval Office. If we cannot win this issue with Obama, what hope do we have with other environment issues where he has to work with Senate Republicans?

5) If we don’t build Keystone, the oil companies will just haul their tar sands out by rail and truck, generating more carbon and more spills. The $7 billion Keystone pipeline will transport 1.1 million barrels each day—far more than could be transported economically by rail and truck traffic. If we stop Keystone, we lock most of this carbon permanently underground.

6) If we kill Keystone, the oil companies will not build a pipeline elsewhere in Canada. The oil industry will not build an alternative pipeline elsewhere in Canada. Resistance among Canadians in British Columbia, especially salmon-dependent First Nations, is even greater than here in the United States.

7) We don’t need oil-based fossil fuels while we ramp up renewables like Solar and Wind. Renewables are proven and market-ready technologies. Their widespread deployment is only being impeded by multibillion dollar annual subsidies to oil and gas [and flaccid support by the government—Eds]. In any case, the Keystone XL Pipeline is not a stop gap measure. Instead the pipeline will entrench our use of fossil fuels.

8) Keystone XL will have a catastrophic impact on climate change. The amount of carbon in the tar sands is equivalent to all the carbon in all the oil ever removed from Saudi Arabia. Burning the vast oceans of oil beneath Saudi Arabia has gotten us where we are today; ice caps melting, glaciers retreating on every continent, water supplies drying up, continent wide droughts disrupting agriculture and global food supplies, acidified oceans and rising sea levels, and climate chaos flooding our greatest cities. According to a new study published last week by Oil Change International, “Cooking the Books: How the State Department Analysis Ignores the True Climate Impact of the Keystone XL Pipeline,” the pipeline will emit 181 methane tons of carbon every year—the equivalent of 37.7 million cars or 51 new coal plants. There are 561 tons of carbon locked in Alberta’s tar sands. More than twice the amount, according to former Goddard scientist James Hansen, then have been released by all the oil and combustion in the history of mankind. We can double that sum by burning Alberta’s tar sands, but what genocidal politician or oilman, would want to do that to future generations? We could better solve our energy problems by scuttling the pipeline, investing in renewables, and putting the greedy megalomaniacs from Koch oil and Exxon’s puppets in the U.S. Capitol in jail, where they belong.

Visit EcoWatch’s KEYSTONE XL page for more related news on this topic.

Designer Protests and Vanity Arrests in DC

The Mirage of an Opposition
Protest and resistance are two very different things

Daryl Hanna, arrested in DC. Well intentioned, but does "soft-gloves" activism really accomplish timely social change?

Daryl Hanna, arrested in DC. Well intentioned, but can “soft-gloves” activism really accomplish timely social change, or merely the illusion of protest?

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, CounterPunch.org

The scene was striking for its dissonance. Fifty activists massed in front of the White House, some of them sitting, others tied to the iron fence, most of them smiling, all decorous looking, not a Black Blocker or Earth First!er in the viewshed. The leaders of this micro-occupation of the sidewalk held a black banner featuring Obama’s campaign logo, the one with the blue “O” and the curving red stripes that looks like a pipeline snaking across Kansas. The message read, prosaically: “Lead on Climate: Reject the KXL Pipeline.” Cameras whirred franticly, most aimed at the radiant face of Daryl Hannah, as DC police moved in to politely ask the crowd to disperse. The crowd politely declined. The Rubicon had been crossed. For the first time in 120 years, a Sierra Club official, executive director Mike Brune, was going to get arrested for an act of civil (and the emphasis here is decisively on civil) disobedience.

Brune had sought special dispensation for the arrest from the Sierra Club board, a one-day exemption to the Club’s firm policy against non-violent civil disobedience, The Board assented. One might ask, what took them so long? One might also ask, why now? Is the Keystone Pipeline a more horrific ecological crime than oil drilling in grizzly habitat on the border of Glacier National Park or the gunning down of 350 wolves a year in the outback of Idaho? Hardly. The Keystone Pipeline is one of many noxious conduits of tar sand oil from Canada, vile, certainly, but standard practice for Big Oil.

The Sierra Club has an image problem. Brune’s designer arrest can be partially interpreted as a craven attempt to efface the stain of the Club’s recent dalliance with Chesapeake Energy, one of the largest natural gas companies on the continent and a pioneer in the environmentally malign enterprise of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”. Between 2007 and 2010, Chesapeake Energy secretly funneled nearly $30 million to the Sierra Club to advocate the virtues of natural gas as a so-called “bridge” fuel. Bridge to where is yet to be determined. By the time this subornment was disclosed, the funders of the environmental movement had turned decisively against fracking for gas and the even more malicious methods used to extract shale oil. The Sierra Club had to rehabilitate itself to stay in the good graces of the Pew Charitable Trusts and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had lavished $50 million on the Club’s sputtering Beyond Coal Campaign.

As the cops strolled in to begin their vanity arrests, they soon confronted the inscrutable commander of these delicately chained bodies, Bill McKibben, leader of the massively funded 350.Org. McKibben had repeatedly referred to this as the environmental movement’s “lunch counter moment,” making an odious comparison to the Civil Right’s movement’s courageous occupation of the “white’s only” spaces across the landscape of the Jim Crow era, acts of genuine defiance that were often viciously suppressed by truncheons, fists and snarling dogs.

But McKibben made no attempt to stand his ground. He allowed the PlastiCuffs that tied his thin wrists to the fence to be decorously snipped. He didn’t resist arrest; instead he craved it. This was a well-orchestrated photo-op moment. He was escorted to the police van, driven to the precinct station, booked, handed a $100 fine and released. An hour later, McKibben was Tweeting about how cool it was to be arrested with civil rights legend Julian Bond. But are you really engaged in civil disobedience if you can Tweet your own arrest?

Beyond the fabric of self-congratulation, what’s really going on here? The mandarins of Big Green blocked nothing, not even entry to the White House grounds. It was a purely symbolic protest, but signifying what? Directed at whom? Even Derrida would have a hard time decoding the meaning of a demonstration that so effusively supported the person it supposedly targeted.

Of course, Obama, who was in North Carolina during the designer arrests, had no such problem. He correctly divined the impotence on display. In a matter of weeks, he delivered a State of the Union Address pledging to expedite oil and gas drilling on public lands and off-shore sites, nominated pro-nuke and pro-fracking zealots to head the EPA and Department of Energy.

Predictably, the Sierra Club, which now functions as little more than an applause machine for the administration, praised both the State of the Union address and the dubious appointments to EPA and Energy. Here we have what Jean-Paul Sartre called “the mirage of an opposition.”

Then the coup de grâce: the State Department issued its final report endorsing the pipeline an ecologically-benign sluice toward economic prosperity. This was swiftly followed by an order from the White House to the EPA demanding that the agency withdraw the stern new standards on greenhouse gas emissions from powerplants.

So Obama is set to screw Gang Green on the Keystone XL Pipeline. But, like Pavlovian Lapdogs, the Enviro Pros will lick their wounds, cash a few checks and within two weeks be back to issuing press releases touting him as the Greenest President of All Time. Rest assured, Obama feels terrible about these setbacks and will move decisively to fix them in his third term.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book (with Joshua Frank) is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

Disaster Awaits Cities in Earthquake Zones

ARCHIVES— Originally posted: February 25, 2010
Disaster Awaits Cities in Earthquake Zones

Istanbul has a program to secure its schools against earthquakes. Above, construction at the Atakoy Lisesi school.

By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times

As he surveys the streets of this sprawling mega-city, Mustafa Erdik, the director of an earthquake engineering institute here, says he sometimes feels like a doctor scanning a crowded hospital ward.

It is not so much the city’s modern core, where two sleek Trump Towers and a huge airport terminal were built to withstand a major earthquake that is considered all but inevitable in the next few decades. Nor does Dr. Erdik agonize over Istanbul’s ancient monuments, whose yards-thick walls have largely withstood more than a dozen potent seismic blows over the past two millenniums.

His biggest worry is that tens of thousands of buildings throughout the city, erected in a haphazard, uninspected rush as the population soared past 10 million from the 1 million it was just 50 years ago, are what some seismologists call “rubble in waiting.”

“Earthquakes always find the weakest point,” said Dr. Erdik, a professor at Bogazici University here.

Istanbul is one of a host of quake-threatened cities in the developing world where populations have swelled far faster than the capacity to house them safely, setting them up for disaster of a scope that could, in some cases, surpass the devastation in Haiti from last month’s earthquake.

Roger Bilham, a seismologist at the University of Colorado who has spent decades studying major earthquakes around the world, including the recent quake in Haiti, said that the planet’s growing, urbanizing population, projected to swell by two billion more people by midcentury and to require one billion dwellings, faced “an unrecognized weapon of mass destruction: houses.”

Without vastly expanded efforts to change construction practices and educate people, from mayors to masons, on simple ways to bolster structures, he said, Haiti’s tragedy is almost certain to be surpassed sometime this century when a major quake hits Karachi, Pakistan; Katmandu, Nepal; Lima, Peru; or one of a long list of big poor cities facing inevitable major earthquakes.

In Tehran, Iran’s capital, Dr. Bilham has calculated that one million people could die in a predicted quake similar in intensity to the one in Haiti, which the Haitian government estimates killed 230,000. (Some Iranian geologists have pressed their government for decades to move the capitalbecause of the nest of surrounding geologic faults.)

As for Istanbul, a study led by Dr. Erdik mapped out a situation in which a quake could kill 30,000 to 40,000 people and seriously injure 120,000 at the very minimum.

The city is rife with buildings with glaring flaws, like ground floors with walls or columns removed to make way for store displays, or a succession of illegal new floors added in each election period on the presumption that local officials will look the other way. On many blocks, upper floors jut precariously over the sidewalk, taking advantage of an old permitting process that governed only a building’s footprint.

Worse, Dr. Erdik said, as with a doctor’s patients, not all of the potentially deadly problems are visible from the outside, and thousands more buildings are presumed to be at risk. “Little details are very important,” he said. “To say that a building is in bad condition is easy. To say that one is safe is hard.”

Some of Turkey’s biggest builders have readily admitted to using shoddy materials and bad practices in the urban construction boom. In an interview last year with the Turkish publication Referans, Ali Agaoglu, a Turkish developer ranked 468th last year on the Forbes list of billionaires, described how in the 1970s, salty sea sand and scrap iron were routinely used in buildings made of reinforced concrete.

“At that time, this was the best material,” he said, according to a translation of the interview. “Not just us, but all companies were doing the same thing. If an earthquake occurs in Istanbul, not even the army will be able to get in.” Echoing other engineers and planners trying to reduce Istanbul’s vulnerability, Dr. Erdik said that the best hope, considering the scale of the problem, might well be that economic advancement would happen fast enough that property owners could replace the worst housing stock before the ground heaved.

“If the quake gives us some time, we can reduce the losses just through turnover,” Dr. Erdik said. “If it happens tomorrow, there’ll be a huge number of deaths.”

But when a potent quake hit 50 miles away in 1999, killing more than 18,000 people, including 1,000 on the outskirts of Istanbul, the city was reminded that time might not be on its side. That earthquake occurred on the North Anatolian fault, which runs beneath the Marmara Sea, just a few miles from the city’s crowded southern flanks.

The fault, which is very similar to the San Andreas fault in California, appears to have a pattern of successive failures, meaning the section near Istanbul is probably primed to fail, said Tom Parsons, who has studied the fault for the United States Geological Survey. Istanbul stands out among threatened cities in developing countries because it is trying to get ahead of the risk.

A first step was an earthquake master plan drawn up for the city and the federal government by Dr. Erdik’s team and researchers at three other Turkish universities in 2006. Such a plan is a rarity outside of rich cities like Tokyo and Los Angeles.

Carrying out its long list of recommendations has proved more challenging, given that the biggest source of political pressure in Istanbul, as with most crowded cities, is not an impending earthquake but traffic, crime, jobs and other real-time troubles.

Nonetheless, with the urgency amplified by the lessons from Haiti’s devastation, Istanbul is doing what it can to gird for its own disaster. The effort to prepare is coming from the top, with tighter building codes, mandatory earthquake insurance and loans from international development banks for buttressing or replacing vulnerable schools and other public buildings.

But a push is also coming from the bottom, as nonprofit groups, recognizing the limits of centralized planning, train dozens of teams of volunteers in poor districts and outfit them with radios, crowbars and first-aid kits so they can dig into the wreckage when their neighborhoods are shaken.

Mahmut Bas, who leads the city’s Directorate of Earthquake and Ground Analysis, is charged with consolidating and coordinating everything from building inspections to emergency response. Yet the bureaucracy is almost as sprawling and inefficient as the dizzying web of smog-shrouded streets, clogged with an estimated six million vehicles.

Mr. Bas said collapsing buildings were just one of many threats. One prediction about a potent quake concluded that 30,000 natural gas lines were likely to rupture. “If just 10 percent catch fire, that’s 3,000 fires,” he said, adding that the city’s fire stations are able to handle at most 30 to 40 fires in one day.

Still, keeping vital structures standing — those fire stations, hospitals and schools — remains the prime priority. Under a program financed with more than $800 million in loans from the World Bank and the European Investment Bank, and more in the pipeline from other international sources, Turkey is in the early stages of bolstering hundreds of the most vulnerable schools in Istanbul, along with important public buildings and more than 50 hospitals.

With about half of the nearly 700 schools assessed as high priorities retrofitted or replaced so far, progress is too slow to suit many Turkish engineers and geologists tracking the threat. But in districts where the work has been done or is under way — those closest to the Marmara Sea and the fault — students, parents and teachers express a sense of relief tempered by the knowledge that renovations only cut the odds of calamity.

“I hope it’s enough,” said Serkan Erdogan, an English teacher at the Bakirkoy Cumhuriyet primary school close to the Marmara coast, where $315,000 was spent to add reinforced walls, jackets of fresh concrete and steel rebar around old columns and to make adjustments as simple as changing classroom doors to open outward, easing evacuations.

“The improvements are great, but the building may still collapse,” he said. “We have to learn how to live with that risk. The children need to know what they should do.” In a fifth-grade classroom, the student training that goes with the structural repairs was evident as Nazan Sati, a social worker, asked the 11-year-olds what they would do if an earthquake struck right at that moment.

At first a forest of hands shot toward the ceiling. Ms. Sati quickly told them to show, not tell. In a mad, giggling scramble, the students dove beneath their desks.

But the threat for children, and their parents, also lies outside the school walls, in mile upon mile of neighborhoods filled with structures called gecekondu, meaning “landed overnight,” because they were constructed seemingly instantly as hundreds of thousands of migrants from rural regions flowed into the city seeking work in the past decade or two. That kind of construction is commonplace in many of the world’s most unstable seismic zones. Dr. Bilham at the University of Colorado has estimated that an engineer is involved in just 3 percent of the construction under way around the world.

Peter Yanev, who has advised the World Bank and the insurance industry on earthquake engineering and is the author of “Peace of Mind in Earthquake Country,” noted that in Turkey and other developing countries, even when someone with an engineering degree was involved, that was no guarantee of safe construction because there was little specialized training or licensing.

In the face of such problems, efforts are under way in Istanbul’s crowded working-class and poor neighborhoods to train and equip several thousand volunteers to be ready to respond when, not if, the worst happens. On a sunny Saturday morning, Mustafa Elvan Cantekin, who directs the Neighborhood Disaster Support Project, navigated back streets to meet with one team deep in the city’s Bagcilar district, where one estimate projects that some 4,200 people would be likely to die in a major earthquake.

Dr. Cantekin, a Turkish engineer educated at Texas A&M University and tested in the 1999 earthquake zone, has helped create 49 neighborhood teams in the city, each with a shipping container loaded with crowbars, generators, stretchers and other emergency gear. Through the project, paid for by a Swiss development agency and private companies, he has traveled to Morocco, Jordan and Iran to help initiate programs there based on Istanbul’s.

A map on his lap showed that the neighborhood was on the border of red and orange danger zones delineating the worst seismic risks. He pointed to one building after another where there was no permanent roof but instead columns poking skyward in anticipation of a landlord finding a new tenant and adding yet another unlicensed floor — and another layer of risk.

As his car crawled through mazes of traffic-choked streets, Mr. Cantekin said the harsh reality for the dozens of small communities within a mega-city, as with the residents of shattered towns in Sichuan Province in China after the 2008 earthquake there, was that they would have to be self-reliant when the quake hit.

“China has the biggest civil defense capability in the world, but it still took three or four days to reach the collapsed towns,” he said. “If there is the big one here, you are all alone to cope with whatever you have, at least for the first 72 hours.”

Outside a community center where children sat at computers playing Farmville on Facebook, Mr. Cantekin inspected the container contents with the team leader, Cuma Cetin, 36, a father of five and a factory worker.

“We’re not waiting for the disaster,” Mr. Cetin said as he and his team, dressed in orange coveralls, accompanied Mr. Cantekin while he pointed out fatal flaws in nearby buildings.

Along an avenue that was a stream bed four decades ago, in a spot where houses were built on sediment instead of bedrock and thus particularly vulnerable, Mr. Cantekin led the team into a ground-floor area beneath four stories of apartments with laundry flapping in the breeze on balcony after balcony.

The columns holding up this part of the building are too thin, he said, pointing to cracks that have already scarred the concrete surface.

“This is one of the first to go,” Mr. Cantekin said, before they walked on to the next one.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 1, 2010
A map on Thursday with an article about the risks posed by poor construction in Istanbul and other growing cities in the developing world threatened by earthquakes mislabeled one city. It was Almaty, Kazakhstan — not Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

SOURCE: NYT

Environmental change ‘triggers rapid evolution

By Mark Kinver
Environment reporter, BBC News

Population of soil mites (Image: Tim Benton)

Researchers were surprised how quickly the mites evolved as a result of environmental changes

Changes to their surroundings can trigger “rapid evolution” in species as they adopt traits to help them survive in the new conditions, a study shows.

Studying soil mites in a laboratory, researchers found that the invertebrates’ age of maturity almost doubled in just 20-or-so generations.

It had been assumed that evolutionary change only occurred over a much longer timescale.

The findings have been published in the journal Ecology Letters.

“What this study shows for the first time is that evolution and ecology go hand-in-hand,” explained co-author Tim Benton, professor of population ecology at the University of Leeds, UK.

“The implicit assumption has always been, from Darwin onwards, that evolution works on long timescale and ecology works on short timescales.

“The thinking was that if you squash a population or you change the environment then nothing will happen from an evolutionary point-of-view for generations and generations, for centuries.”

Running wild

Prof Benton said that the soil mites experiment was set up to help shed light on whether the change in the size of harvested fish species, such as North Atlantic cod, was a result of an evolutionary change.

“The advantage of what we have done is that we have got free-running populations of organisms that do their own thing,” he told BBC News.

The findings mean that managing populations will have to take into account evolutionary factors. “You cannot do those sort of experiment with large organisms that live in the wild.”

The team sourced soil mites from four UK locations and housed them in 18 tests tubes in a laboratory.

“Some of the populations were harvested, as per a fisheries management approach; juveniles were harvested from some tubes, adults from others, and other tubes we just left alone,” Prof Benton explained.

“Then we just looked to see what happened to their genetics, their life history and their population dynamics.

“We were all rather surprised to see how quickly they evolved in ways that you would not necessarily would have thought possible.

“The key result is that over the 20-or-so generations, their age of maturity almost doubled – that is an evolutionary effect.”

“That means that if the population is squashed for any reason then the population take longer to grow back and so you have all sorts of longer term consequences, it is not just a matter of what is happening to their life histories.”

Prof Benton said that the findings also showed that people involved in population management schemes, such as conserving endangered species etc, would have to take into account evolutionary factors, as well as ecological ones, as the result of environmental change.

He said: “For example, if you think about the challenges of climate change and nature reserves, where do you put the reserves?

“The way that animals move across the landscape, their dispersal behaviour is likely to evolve as a result of climate change.

“Do you put the nature reserves just 10 miles apart because that is how far the animals travel now, but in 50 years time, they might disperse five miles.”

Prof Benton added that evolutionary change added an additional pressure to population management schemes, namely that it was much more difficult to reverse than ecological change.

“Once you have lost the genes and the species has evolved into something different then it is very difficult to go back to what they were before.”

Another Breakthrough in Hydrogen Energy Challenges Fossil Fuel Dominance

Alex Pietrowski, Staff Writer

Waking Times

Researchers at Virginia Tech have developed a new process that extracts large quantities of hydrogen gas from plants in a renewable and eco-friendly way, offering us another potential alternative to ending our dependence on fossil fuels.

After 7 years of research, Y.H. Percival Zhang, an associate professor at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, and his team have developed a new method of using customized enzymes to produce high quantities of hydrogen out of xylose, a simple sugar present in plants.

Zhang and his team have succeeded in using xylose, the most abundant simple plant sugar, to produce a large quantity of hydrogen that previously was attainable only in theory. Zhang’s method can be performed using any source of biomass.

This new environmentally friendly method of producing hydrogen utilizes renewable natural resources, releases almost zero greenhouse gasses, and does not require costly or heavy metals. Previous methods to produce hydrogen are expensive and create greenhouse gases. [Science Daily]

Hydrogen fuel has the potential to dramatically revolutionize the automobile market and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Vehicle manufacturers are already developing cars that run on hydrogen fuel cells, which do not produce as many pollutants as regular gasoline cars. Currently in the US, the transportation sector produces 82% of total CO2 emissions in the country.

EIA estimates that U.S. gasoline and diesel fuel consumption for transportation in 2011 resulted in the emission of about 1,089 and 430 million metric tons of CO2 respectively, for a total of 1,519 million metric tons of CO2. This total was equivalent to 82% of total CO2 emissions by the U.S. transportation sector and 28% of total U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions.

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, March 28, 2012

Zhang’s method of hydrogen production will need to find its way into commercial markets, which could happen in about 3 years, before any significant impact on the alternative energy market is possible. Even though Zhang’s process addresses the previous obstacles to hydrogen gas production, including high process costs, greenhouse gas emissions, and low quality of the end product, large investment in technology development and infrastructure would still be necessary to transition to hydrogen fuel cars.

“The potential for profit and environmental benefits are why so many automobile, oil, and energy companies are working on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as the transportation of the future,” Zhang said. “Many people believe we will enter the hydrogen economy soon, with a market capacity of at least $1 trillion in the United States alone.”

“It really doesn’t make sense to use non-renewable natural resources to produce hydrogen,” Zhang said. “We think this discovery is a game-changer in the world of alternative energy.” [Science Daily]

A future where renewable energy replaces energy production using fossil fuels is inevitable. Some have gone as far as to illustrate that we have the potential to make this shift in less than 20 years, for example, Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford University and Mark A. Delucchi of the University of California, published a study that shows it is possible to power New York State using only renewable sources by 2030.

Nevertheless, governments’ support of traditional energy production via fossil fuel subsidies, which amount to $1.9 trillion per year, as reported by the International Monetary Fund, is one of the main obstacles to the growth of alternative energy sources. The IMF estimates that $480 billion of the total is comprised of direct subsidies, which have the goal of making petroleum products more affordable.

A fossil fuel subsidy is any government action that lowers the cost of fossil fuel energy production, raises the price received by energy producers or lowers the price paid by energy consumers. There are a lot of activities under this simple definition—tax breaks and giveaways, but also loans at favorable rates, price controls, purchase requirements and a whole lot of other things. [Oil Change International]

The remaining $1.4 trillion are comprised of “externalities”: “the effects of energy consumption on global warming; on public health through the adverse effects on local pollution; on traffic congestion and accidents; and on road damage.” (IMF) Current energy policies are established in such a way that fossil fuel companies do not pay for any of these “externalities”, and thus leaving these industry costs to be indirectly subsidized by governments.

Here are some more statistics about the energy subsidies in the US:

“…between 1994 and 2009 the U.S. oil and gas industries received a cumulative $446.96 billion in subsidies, compared to just $5.93 billion given to renewables in those years. (The nuclear industry, by the way. received $185 billion in federal subsidies between 1947 and 1999.)”

Source: Forbes

With such policies in place, heavily influenced by large multi-billion dollar companies with strong government ties, is a rapid change towards renewable energy even possible? Are we ready to challenge our policies to shift financial support from harmful and damaging energy production to renewable technologies, and change our own behaviors to create a cohesive movement towards a cleaner and safer planet?

If breakthroughs in technology can offer salient alternatives to the economic stranglehood fossil fuels has on our economy, then we may realize a future of clean energy. One thing is certain, however, without practical alternatives there is no chance of changing the momentum behind extraction based energy toward clean energy.

About the Author

Alex Pietrowski is an artist and writer concerned with preserving good health and the basic freedom to enjoy a healthy lifestyle. He is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and an avid student of Yoga and life.

Sources:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130403104104.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_vehicle

http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=23&t=10

http://priceofoil.org/fossil-fuel-subsidies/

http://grist.org/climate-energy/can-we-shift-to-renewable-energy-yes-as-to-how/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2013/02/14/government-subsidies-silent-killer-of-renewable-energy/

http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2013/032713.htm

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