NY Times
by: Thomas L. Friedman 23 December 2006
I know that you should never generalize about global warming from your own weather, but as a longtime resident of Washington, D.C., it's hard not to, considering that it's been so balmy this winter season I'm half expecting the cherry blossoms to come out for Christmas. In fact, my wife was rummaging through her closet the other day and emerged to tell me she needed a whole new wardrobe — "a global warming wardrobe," clothes that are summer weight but winter colors.
For this, and other reasons, had I been editing Time magazine I would not have opted for the "you" in YouTube as Person of the Year — although that was very clever. No, I'd have run an all-green Time cover under the headline, "Color of the Year." Because I think that the most important thing to happen this past year was that living and thinking "green" — that is, mobilizing for the environmental/energy challenge we now face — hit Main Street.
For so many years the term "green" could never scale. It was trapped in a corner by its opponents, who defined it as "liberal," "tree-hugging," "girly-man," "unpatriotic," "vaguely French."
No more. We reached a tipping point this year — where living, acting, designing, investing and manufacturing green came to be understood by a critical mass of citizens, entrepreneurs and officials as the most patriotic, capitalistic, geopolitical, healthy and competitive thing they could do. Hence my own motto: "Green is the new red, white and blue."
How did we get here? It was a combination of factors: Katrina, Al Gore's terrific movie, the growing awareness that our gas guzzlers are financing the terrorists, preachers and rogue regimes we're fighting, the real profits that major companies like G.E. and DuPont are making by going green, and the fact that even the Pentagon has given birth to "Green Hawks," who are obsessed with powering our army with less energy.
The most telling sign was the last election, when "being green became pragmatic," said the Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. "No one thought that running an ad on alternative energy was something for an elite target audience anymore. The only debate we had was whether it was one of the three things a candidate should talk about or the only thing."
And now, Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has earned its black eyes for labor practices. But the world's biggest retailer lately has gotten the green bug — in part to improve its image, but also because it has found that being more energy efficient is highly profitable for itself and its customers.
Wal-Mart has opened two green stores where it is experimenting with alternative building materials, lighting, power systems and designs, the best of which it plans to spread to all its outlets. I just visited the one in McKinney, Tex. From the big wind turbine in the parking lot and solar panels on key walls, which provide 15 percent of the store's electricity, to the cooking oil from fried chicken that is recycled in its bio-boiler and heats the store in winter, to the shift to L.E.D lights in all exterior signs and grocery and freezer cases — which last longer and sharply reduce heat and therefore the air-conditioning bill — you know you're not in your parents' Wal-Mart.
Other big companies are now sending teams to inspect the green Wal-Marts, and customers are asking the manager how they can adopt these innovations at home.
"When I started having people stop me in the aisles and say, ‘How do I do that?' or ‘Can I do that?' that's when we really started realizing that this isn't just a small thing, this can be really large and can be very rewarding to the planet," said the store's manager, Brent Allen.
Hey, the more energy-saving bulbs Wal-Mart sells, the more innovation it triggers, the more prices go down. That's how you get scale. And scale is everything if you want to change the world, but to achieve scale you have to make sure that green energy sources — biofuels, clean coal, and solar, wind and nuclear power — can be delivered as cheaply as oil, gas and dirty coal. That will require a gasoline or carbon tax to keep the price of fossil fuels up so investors in green-tech will not get undercut while they drive innovation forward and prices down. The U.S. Congress has to stop running from this fact.
Because while our embrace of green has finally reached a tipping point, the tipping point on climate change and species loss is also fast approaching, if it's not already here. There's no time to lose. "People see an endangered species every day now when they look in the mirror," said the environmentalist Rob Watson. "It is not about the whales anymore."
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Car Boom Puts Europe on Road to a Smoggy Future
NY Times
January 7, 2007
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
DUBLIN — Rebecca and Emmet O’Connell swear that they are not car people and that they worry about global warming. Indeed, they looked miserable one recent evening as they drove home to suburban Lucan from central Dublin, a crawling 8.5-mile journey that took an hour.
But in this booming city, where the number of cars has doubled in the last 15 years, there is little choice, they said. “Believe me — if there was an alternative we would use it,” said Ms. O’Connell, 40, a textile designer. “We care about the environment. It’s just hard to follow through here.”
No trains run to the new suburbs where hundreds of thousands of Dubliners now live, and the few buses going there overflow with people. So nearly everyone drives — to work, to shop, to take their children to school — in what seems like a constant smoggy, traffic jam. Since 1990, emissions from transportation in Ireland have risen about 140 percent, the most in Europe. But Ireland is not alone.
Vehicular emissions are rising in nearly every European country, and across the globe. Because of increasing car and truck use, greenhouse-gas emissions are increasing even where pollution from industry is waning.
The 23 percent growth in vehicular emissions in Europe since 1990 has “offset” the effect of cleaner factories, according to a recent report by the European Environment Agency. The growth has occurred despite the invention of far more environmentally friendly fuels and cars.
“What we gain by hybrid cars and ethanol buses, we more than lose because of sheer numbers of vehicles,” said Ronan Uhel, a senior scientist with the European Environment Agency, which is based in Copenhagen. Vehicles, mostly cars, create more than one-fifth of the greenhouse-gas emissions in Europe, where the problem has been extensively studied.
The few places that have aggressively sought to fight the trend have taken sometimes draconian measures. Denmark, for example, treats cars the way it treats yachts — as luxury items — imposing purchase taxes that are sometimes 200 percent of the cost of the vehicle. A simple Czech-made Skoda car that costs $18,400 in Italy or Sweden costs more than $34,000 in Denmark.
The number of bicycles on Danish streets has increased in recent years, and few people under the age of 30 own cars. Many families have turned to elaborate three-wheeled contraptions. (Beijing, meanwhile, has restricted the use of traditional three-wheeled bikes.)
On a recent morning in Copenhagen — which is flat, and has bike lanes — Cristian Eskelund, 35, a government lobbyist, hopped on a clunky bicycle with a big wooden cart attached to the front. The day before, he had used the vehicle, a local contraption called a Christiania bike, to carry a Christmas tree he had bought. This day, he was taking his two children to school, then heading to the hospital, where his wife was in labor.
“How many children do I have?” Mr. Eskelund said. “Two, perhaps three.”
There are high-end options, too. At $2,800, a three-wheeled Nihola bike costs as much as a used car, but many people insist it is far more practical. Sleek, lightweight, with a streamlined enclosed bubble in front, it is good for transporting groceries and children.
High taxes on cars or gasoline of the type levied in Copenhagen are effective in curbing traffic, experts say, but they scare voters, making even environmentalist politicians unlikely to propose them. When Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, revealed his “green” budget proposal, it included an increase in gas taxes of less than two and a half cents per quart.
Other cities have tried variations that require fewer absolute sacrifices from motorists. Rome allows only cars with low emissions ratings into its historic center. In London and Stockholm, drivers must pay a congestion charge to enter the city center. Such programs do reduce traffic and pollution at a city’s core, but evidence suggests that car use simply moves to the suburbs.
But Dublin is more typical of cities around the world, from Asia to Latin America, where road transport volumes are increasing in tandem with economic growth. Since 1997, Beijing has built a new ring road every two years, each new concentric superhighway giving rise to a host of malls and housing compounds.
In Ireland, car ownership has more than doubled since 1990 and car engines have grown steadily larger. Meanwhile, new environmental laws have meant that emissions from electrical plants, a major polluter, have been decreasing since 2001.
Urban sprawl and cars are the chicken and egg of the environmental debate. Cars make it easier for people to live and shop outside the center city. As traffic increases, governments build more roads, encouraging people to buy more cars and move yet farther away. In Europe alone, 6,200 miles of motorways were built from 1990 to 2003 and, with the European Union’s enlargement, 7,500 more are planned. Government enthusiasm for spending on public transportation, which is costly and takes years to build, generally lags far behind.
For instance, Dublin and Beijing are building trams and subways, but they will not reach out to the new commuter communities where so many people now live.
The trend is strongest in newly rich societies, where cars are “caught up in the aspirations of the 21st century,” said Peder Jensen, lead author of the European Environmental Agency report on traffic.
Peter Daley, a Dublin retiree who has five children, said: “We used to be a poor country and all the kids used to leave to find work. Now they stay and they need a car when they’re 17. So families that would have had one car 15 years ago, now have three or four.”
As a result, traffic limps around Dublin’s glorious St. Stephen’s Green. Just as skiers can check out the snow at St. Moritz on the Internet, drivers can monitor Dublin’s traffic through the City Council home page.
In the past two years, the city has completed two light-rail lines. During the holidays, the police provide extra officers to direct traffic at all major junctions. But nothing helps much.
When the O’Connells returned from London four years ago, and could not afford the prices of Dublin’s city center, they bought a wood and brick semi-detached house in one of hundreds of new developments. Today, it seems that every home has two or three cars out front.
“No one thought, ‘How will all these people get home from work?’ ” said Mr. O’Connell, an architectural technician, who said the commute took just 20 minutes at first. Ms. O’Connell’s job at the National College of Art and Design in downtown Dublin comes with a parking space. So their gray Toyota Yaris is their lifeline.
One day a week, Mr. O’Connell does take the bus. But if he does not leave home by 7:30 a.m., the buses are all full and simply speed by his stop. On a recent evening, their 18-year-old daughter, Imogen, missed her art class in town because the bus ride took two hours; when she tried to get home, all the buses were full, leaving her stranded.
So they drive. “I complain and I moan, but we continue,” Ms. O’Connell said. “I suppose if petrol got really expensive or I lost my free parking, we’d face up to the fact that we shouldn’t be driving so much, and try to figure something else out.”
John MacClain, a cabdriver in Dublin for 20 years, said that on a recent trip to Prague, he liked the architecture just fine. But what really impressed him, he said, was “the tram system.”
“Now that was beautiful,” he said. “I could get everywhere with ease.”
January 7, 2007
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
DUBLIN — Rebecca and Emmet O’Connell swear that they are not car people and that they worry about global warming. Indeed, they looked miserable one recent evening as they drove home to suburban Lucan from central Dublin, a crawling 8.5-mile journey that took an hour.
But in this booming city, where the number of cars has doubled in the last 15 years, there is little choice, they said. “Believe me — if there was an alternative we would use it,” said Ms. O’Connell, 40, a textile designer. “We care about the environment. It’s just hard to follow through here.”
No trains run to the new suburbs where hundreds of thousands of Dubliners now live, and the few buses going there overflow with people. So nearly everyone drives — to work, to shop, to take their children to school — in what seems like a constant smoggy, traffic jam. Since 1990, emissions from transportation in Ireland have risen about 140 percent, the most in Europe. But Ireland is not alone.
Vehicular emissions are rising in nearly every European country, and across the globe. Because of increasing car and truck use, greenhouse-gas emissions are increasing even where pollution from industry is waning.
The 23 percent growth in vehicular emissions in Europe since 1990 has “offset” the effect of cleaner factories, according to a recent report by the European Environment Agency. The growth has occurred despite the invention of far more environmentally friendly fuels and cars.
“What we gain by hybrid cars and ethanol buses, we more than lose because of sheer numbers of vehicles,” said Ronan Uhel, a senior scientist with the European Environment Agency, which is based in Copenhagen. Vehicles, mostly cars, create more than one-fifth of the greenhouse-gas emissions in Europe, where the problem has been extensively studied.
The few places that have aggressively sought to fight the trend have taken sometimes draconian measures. Denmark, for example, treats cars the way it treats yachts — as luxury items — imposing purchase taxes that are sometimes 200 percent of the cost of the vehicle. A simple Czech-made Skoda car that costs $18,400 in Italy or Sweden costs more than $34,000 in Denmark.
The number of bicycles on Danish streets has increased in recent years, and few people under the age of 30 own cars. Many families have turned to elaborate three-wheeled contraptions. (Beijing, meanwhile, has restricted the use of traditional three-wheeled bikes.)
On a recent morning in Copenhagen — which is flat, and has bike lanes — Cristian Eskelund, 35, a government lobbyist, hopped on a clunky bicycle with a big wooden cart attached to the front. The day before, he had used the vehicle, a local contraption called a Christiania bike, to carry a Christmas tree he had bought. This day, he was taking his two children to school, then heading to the hospital, where his wife was in labor.
“How many children do I have?” Mr. Eskelund said. “Two, perhaps three.”
There are high-end options, too. At $2,800, a three-wheeled Nihola bike costs as much as a used car, but many people insist it is far more practical. Sleek, lightweight, with a streamlined enclosed bubble in front, it is good for transporting groceries and children.
High taxes on cars or gasoline of the type levied in Copenhagen are effective in curbing traffic, experts say, but they scare voters, making even environmentalist politicians unlikely to propose them. When Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, revealed his “green” budget proposal, it included an increase in gas taxes of less than two and a half cents per quart.
Other cities have tried variations that require fewer absolute sacrifices from motorists. Rome allows only cars with low emissions ratings into its historic center. In London and Stockholm, drivers must pay a congestion charge to enter the city center. Such programs do reduce traffic and pollution at a city’s core, but evidence suggests that car use simply moves to the suburbs.
But Dublin is more typical of cities around the world, from Asia to Latin America, where road transport volumes are increasing in tandem with economic growth. Since 1997, Beijing has built a new ring road every two years, each new concentric superhighway giving rise to a host of malls and housing compounds.
In Ireland, car ownership has more than doubled since 1990 and car engines have grown steadily larger. Meanwhile, new environmental laws have meant that emissions from electrical plants, a major polluter, have been decreasing since 2001.
Urban sprawl and cars are the chicken and egg of the environmental debate. Cars make it easier for people to live and shop outside the center city. As traffic increases, governments build more roads, encouraging people to buy more cars and move yet farther away. In Europe alone, 6,200 miles of motorways were built from 1990 to 2003 and, with the European Union’s enlargement, 7,500 more are planned. Government enthusiasm for spending on public transportation, which is costly and takes years to build, generally lags far behind.
For instance, Dublin and Beijing are building trams and subways, but they will not reach out to the new commuter communities where so many people now live.
The trend is strongest in newly rich societies, where cars are “caught up in the aspirations of the 21st century,” said Peder Jensen, lead author of the European Environmental Agency report on traffic.
Peter Daley, a Dublin retiree who has five children, said: “We used to be a poor country and all the kids used to leave to find work. Now they stay and they need a car when they’re 17. So families that would have had one car 15 years ago, now have three or four.”
As a result, traffic limps around Dublin’s glorious St. Stephen’s Green. Just as skiers can check out the snow at St. Moritz on the Internet, drivers can monitor Dublin’s traffic through the City Council home page.
In the past two years, the city has completed two light-rail lines. During the holidays, the police provide extra officers to direct traffic at all major junctions. But nothing helps much.
When the O’Connells returned from London four years ago, and could not afford the prices of Dublin’s city center, they bought a wood and brick semi-detached house in one of hundreds of new developments. Today, it seems that every home has two or three cars out front.
“No one thought, ‘How will all these people get home from work?’ ” said Mr. O’Connell, an architectural technician, who said the commute took just 20 minutes at first. Ms. O’Connell’s job at the National College of Art and Design in downtown Dublin comes with a parking space. So their gray Toyota Yaris is their lifeline.
One day a week, Mr. O’Connell does take the bus. But if he does not leave home by 7:30 a.m., the buses are all full and simply speed by his stop. On a recent evening, their 18-year-old daughter, Imogen, missed her art class in town because the bus ride took two hours; when she tried to get home, all the buses were full, leaving her stranded.
So they drive. “I complain and I moan, but we continue,” Ms. O’Connell said. “I suppose if petrol got really expensive or I lost my free parking, we’d face up to the fact that we shouldn’t be driving so much, and try to figure something else out.”
John MacClain, a cabdriver in Dublin for 20 years, said that on a recent trip to Prague, he liked the architecture just fine. But what really impressed him, he said, was “the tram system.”
“Now that was beautiful,” he said. “I could get everywhere with ease.”
Climate Change: No Time to Debate (6 Letters to the Editor)
NY Times
January 8, 2007
To the Editor:
Re “Middle Stance Emerges in Debate Over Climate” (news article, Jan. 1):
Do we know for certain when and how much Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will melt with global warming, and the exact amount the sea level will rise as a result? Or how intense heat waves, droughts, floods and storms will become?
The answer is no, it is not possible to make exact predictions about such complex systems.
But there is no uncertainty among the world’s leading scientists that if we do not significantly reduce our current levels of burning fossil fuels, our world will experience profound changes, many of them irreversible, in its physical, chemical and biological composition.
And there is absolutely no question that these changes will severely threaten life, including human life, on this planet. It would be shamefully ignorant and morally inexcusable if we did not do everything in our power to prevent these changes from occurring.
Political leaders, policy makers and the public should not be misled by the few scientists who persistently emphasize the uncertainties of climate science, as if these uncertainties guaranteed that global warming consequences would not be catastrophic.
Eric Chivian, M.D.
Boston, Jan. 2, 2007
The writer is director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard Medical School.
•
To the Editor:
The middle stance views climate change as a potential risk and responds in ways akin to buying fire insurance, as described in your article. This is classic public health policy.
Climate change may or may not bring heat waves, more severe hurricanes, an increase in tropical diseases, worsening air pollution, compromised food supplies and other threats to life and health. But as long as credible scientific evidence points to these possibilities, as it does, protecting the public requires that we anticipate and prepare for them.
Similar logic motivates us to vaccinate against influenza, remove lead paint, use seat belts and treat high blood pressure.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is committed to addressing the public-health consequences of climate change, which is preparedness at its best.
Howard Frumkin, M.D.
Atlanta, Jan. 3, 2007
The writer is director of the National Center for Environmental Health and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
•
To the Editor:
One issue on climate change, which is alluded to in this article, is the public’s apparent lack of interest in the topic. This probably stems from the inconvenience that is required in solving the global warming problem.
Conserving natural resources or switching to alternative energy would be quite cumbersome for a society accustomed to overindulgence. It is imperative, however, that we realize that other solutions are available and will need to be explored.
These solutions include such energy forms as hydropower and geothermal, wind and nuclear power, which have all shown to be viable remedies in other areas of the world. It is also important to realize that the inconvenience of exploring these solutions will only accumulate if the problem is ignored.
Nick Tataryn
Philadelphia, Jan. 2, 2007
•
To the Editor:
The article about the global warming debate claims to identify an intermediate position between President Bush’s refusal to acknowledge the reality of climate change and the view, articulated by Al Gore in his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” that such change poses a clear and present danger to human life.
This is not, however, what the article does. Rather, on every major point, starting with the question of whether climate change is an established scientific finding, the middle stance agrees with the Gore position and rejects the Bush deception. The notion that the truth is midway between two poles of debate is a longstanding American myth, but it does not work in this case.
While neither “An Inconvenient Truth” nor the so-called middle stance is the final word on climate change, both are responsible efforts to get at the truth. By contrast, skepticism about global warming is a position unmoored from reality.
Daniel A. Segal
Claremont, Calif., Jan. 1, 2007
The writer is an anthropology professor at Pitzer College.
•
To the Editor:
While there is diversity in the views of climate scientists about the imminence of threats, there is near unanimity that the risks posed by global warming are genuine and potentially very serious.
The real dispute over what should be done is between responsible scientists and the Bush administration, whose policy on climate change has been to acknowledge little and do almost nothing.
Russ Weiss
Princeton, N.J., Jan. 1, 2007
•
To the Editor:
Regarding the article about the climate change debate, I can only say that it is about time.
The debate simply detracts from the major issue, which is that dumping toxins into the atmosphere simply can’t be good. I am sure that all the debate’s participants care very much about their personal hygiene. It is time to improve our own public hygiene.
Alan Schulman
Colorado Springs, Jan. 1, 2007
January 8, 2007
To the Editor:
Re “Middle Stance Emerges in Debate Over Climate” (news article, Jan. 1):
Do we know for certain when and how much Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will melt with global warming, and the exact amount the sea level will rise as a result? Or how intense heat waves, droughts, floods and storms will become?
The answer is no, it is not possible to make exact predictions about such complex systems.
But there is no uncertainty among the world’s leading scientists that if we do not significantly reduce our current levels of burning fossil fuels, our world will experience profound changes, many of them irreversible, in its physical, chemical and biological composition.
And there is absolutely no question that these changes will severely threaten life, including human life, on this planet. It would be shamefully ignorant and morally inexcusable if we did not do everything in our power to prevent these changes from occurring.
Political leaders, policy makers and the public should not be misled by the few scientists who persistently emphasize the uncertainties of climate science, as if these uncertainties guaranteed that global warming consequences would not be catastrophic.
Eric Chivian, M.D.
Boston, Jan. 2, 2007
The writer is director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard Medical School.
•
To the Editor:
The middle stance views climate change as a potential risk and responds in ways akin to buying fire insurance, as described in your article. This is classic public health policy.
Climate change may or may not bring heat waves, more severe hurricanes, an increase in tropical diseases, worsening air pollution, compromised food supplies and other threats to life and health. But as long as credible scientific evidence points to these possibilities, as it does, protecting the public requires that we anticipate and prepare for them.
Similar logic motivates us to vaccinate against influenza, remove lead paint, use seat belts and treat high blood pressure.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is committed to addressing the public-health consequences of climate change, which is preparedness at its best.
Howard Frumkin, M.D.
Atlanta, Jan. 3, 2007
The writer is director of the National Center for Environmental Health and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
•
To the Editor:
One issue on climate change, which is alluded to in this article, is the public’s apparent lack of interest in the topic. This probably stems from the inconvenience that is required in solving the global warming problem.
Conserving natural resources or switching to alternative energy would be quite cumbersome for a society accustomed to overindulgence. It is imperative, however, that we realize that other solutions are available and will need to be explored.
These solutions include such energy forms as hydropower and geothermal, wind and nuclear power, which have all shown to be viable remedies in other areas of the world. It is also important to realize that the inconvenience of exploring these solutions will only accumulate if the problem is ignored.
Nick Tataryn
Philadelphia, Jan. 2, 2007
•
To the Editor:
The article about the global warming debate claims to identify an intermediate position between President Bush’s refusal to acknowledge the reality of climate change and the view, articulated by Al Gore in his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” that such change poses a clear and present danger to human life.
This is not, however, what the article does. Rather, on every major point, starting with the question of whether climate change is an established scientific finding, the middle stance agrees with the Gore position and rejects the Bush deception. The notion that the truth is midway between two poles of debate is a longstanding American myth, but it does not work in this case.
While neither “An Inconvenient Truth” nor the so-called middle stance is the final word on climate change, both are responsible efforts to get at the truth. By contrast, skepticism about global warming is a position unmoored from reality.
Daniel A. Segal
Claremont, Calif., Jan. 1, 2007
The writer is an anthropology professor at Pitzer College.
•
To the Editor:
While there is diversity in the views of climate scientists about the imminence of threats, there is near unanimity that the risks posed by global warming are genuine and potentially very serious.
The real dispute over what should be done is between responsible scientists and the Bush administration, whose policy on climate change has been to acknowledge little and do almost nothing.
Russ Weiss
Princeton, N.J., Jan. 1, 2007
•
To the Editor:
Regarding the article about the climate change debate, I can only say that it is about time.
The debate simply detracts from the major issue, which is that dumping toxins into the atmosphere simply can’t be good. I am sure that all the debate’s participants care very much about their personal hygiene. It is time to improve our own public hygiene.
Alan Schulman
Colorado Springs, Jan. 1, 2007
Paying in Pollution for Energy Hunger
NY Times
January 9, 2007
By KEITH BRADSHER
BAHARBARI, India — A toxic purple haze of diesel exhaust hangs over the rice and jute fields here in northeastern India, and bird songs are frequently drowned out by the chug-a-chug-a-chug of diesel generators.
Across the developing world, cheap diesel generators from China have become a favorite way to provide electricity. They power everything from irrigation pumps to television sets, allowing growing numbers of rural villages in many poor countries to grow more crops and connect to the wider world.
But as the demand increases for the electricity that makes those advances possible, it is often being met through the dirtiest, most inefficient means, creating pollution in many remote areas that used to have pristine air and negligible emissions of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases.
“There has been a mushrooming of these decentralized diesel generators,” said Ibrahim Rehman, a rural energy expert at the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi.
While many generators are purchased initially to power irrigation pumps, they have also opened up a huge new market for television sets, which in turn creates demand for even more diesel generators.
“You either want clean air or television” in many villages, said Nandita Mongia, the chief of the United Nations Development Program’s regional energy program for Asia and the Pacific. In nearly all cases, television wins.
Rising prices for diesel fuel have improved the commercial potential of alternatives, but renewable energy sources have been in an often-losing race against smoke-spewing backyard diesel generators, and occasionally coal, to become the energy source of choice in outlying areas.
Renewable sources have made some inroads, including tiny hydroelectric dams for Himalayan streams, biomass generators for India and Southeast Asia, solar-powered lanterns for India and Africa and rooftop water tanks in southern China.
But demand for electricity has been growing even more swiftly across the developing world, particularly in China and India.
When night falls here in Baharbari and countless stars blaze from an inky sky virtually uncontaminated by outdoor lighting, many of the thatch huts glow softly with the violet light of television screens, and occasionally a small bulb providing reading light for a child.
Three years ago, practically no one had a television set in this isolated community tucked between Nepal and Bangladesh. It is an area so remote and roadless that the only access is on foot or by bullock cart, after monsoon rains turn dirt paths into bogs that become impassable even for farm tractors.
Even so, half of the 1,000 households have TV, paying about 40 cents every few days to the owner of a diesel generator to recharge the batteries that power the sets. Ranvir Kumar Mandel, a slender 22-year-old, has built a bamboo hut here just to serve as a television repair shop.
“Before, there was no market,” he said, sitting near a pile of mostly black-and-white sets to be fixed.
Lavish government subsidies for diesel, kerosene and other fossil fuels have held down prices in many developing countries and made it harder to introduce renewable energy technologies.
While entrepreneurs and organized crime syndicates frequently raise the subsidized price of kerosene and pocket the profits, it remains very cheap and is frequently mixed with diesel to reduce the cost of running generators. The mixture shortens the life of the generator, however, and can make pollution even worse.
Given the popularity of generators, perhaps the most promising alternative is a new type like the one at the edge of the village here that contributes much less to air pollution and global warming. It burns a common local weed instead of diesel, costs half as much to operate and emits less pollution.
The main material is dhaincha, a weed commonly grown in India to restore nitrogen to depleted soils. The dhaincha grows 10 feet tall in just four months, with a green stalk three inches thick. Wood from shrubs and trees is used when there is not enough dhaincha.
“Other villagers were surprised,” said Ravindra Prasad Mandal, a village leader. “How was it possible that from dhaincha and wood, power was produced?”
For all its potential advantages, the toughest part of the project here has been to persuade change-resistant villagers to try it. Many projects fail in rural areas, development economists said, because governments or foreign aid organizations donate money or equipment without requiring any ongoing commitment. And they often threaten existing ways to obtain power, making it even harder to overcome resistance.
The biomass generator in Baharbari is owned by a collective of village residents, and has been supported by Hindus and Muslims alike. But local landlords, some with their own diesel generators that they rent out to charge batteries, have been wary.
The project has succeeded here partly because it has the active backing of one landlord family, the Sharans. Family members have gone on to successful business careers in big Indian cities and in Europe, and have dedicated themselves to helping their home village.
That makes it an unusual case, although the Sharans are trying to replicate it by setting up a school and training managers to establish similar cooperatives in nearby villages.
The biomass project has attracted interest and World Bank support because it appears to offer significantly cheaper electricity than diesel, at least at current prices. Another popular approach being tried in India and elsewhere — using solar energy to recharge lanterns by day — has run into difficulty even as diesel prices would seem to make it more competitive.
The problem is that prices for photovoltaic panels for solar energy have surged as governments in industrialized countries, especially Germany, have encouraged greater use of renewable energy, said Hemant Lamba, the coordinator of Aurore, a renewable energy service company in Auroville, India.
“It’s harder to do any solar energy projects in India,” he said.
In mountainous countries like Nepal, development agencies have focused on designing very small, inexpensive hydroelectric systems to install in streams. But deforestation has denuded many hillsides in the Himalayas and elsewhere, causing rainfall to surge into streams much more quickly. A Japanese project in Bhutan was recently destroyed this way.
“The villagers shrugged and said, ‘Nobody asked us, we knew every third year there would be a flood,’ ” Ms. Mongia, the United Nations energy expert, said.
Wind energy has found few applications in rural villages, because the turbines, even though far more capable than in the past, are still too expensive.
China has tried another approach: supplementing an expansion of electricity from coal-fired power plants with cheap rooftop solar water heaters that channel water through thin pipes crisscrossing a shiny surface.
Close to 5,000 small Chinese companies sell these simple water heaters, and together they have made China the world’s largest market for solar water heaters, with 60 percent of the global market and more than 30 million households using the systems, said Eric Martinot, an expert on renewable energy at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Wang Youyun, a 27-year-old lettuce farmer in Wangjiaying, a village of 3,000 people in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province, bought one such hot water system a year ago for $360 and installed it on his family’s roof next to a spot where ears of corn dry in the sunshine.
The village now has electricity, and some residents use it for water heaters, but Mr. Wang calculates that the solar system will pay for itself in two years. There is so much competition that even without government subsidies, the same size model now costs $330 and the price is still falling, he said.
The water heaters can be installed only on a sturdy, flat concrete roof, however, and not on the beautiful but fragile tile roofs that still adorn many of the houses in the village. The systems pose another drawback as well, Mr. Wang acknowledged: “If there is no sun for two or three days then there’s no hot water.”
Big conventional power plants, even those that burn coal, are often cleaner, safer and more efficient than crude household stoves and other small systems. So many economists say that the first step in developing countries should be the construction of power lines connecting as many villagers to national grids as possible.
Cooperation across national borders can help make this happen. Vietnam has made electricity available to 84 percent of its households, up from 50 percent in the early 1990s, partly by building a high-power line from China across Vietnam’s impoverished northern highlands.
But power plants have actually closed in some of the poorest and most chaotic parts of the developing world, from Africa to dysfunctional states in India like Bihar, which includes Baharbari. Causes range from corruption to a failure of government-owned electricity boards to invest in maintenance and replacement parts.
Mohamad Aslam, 21, who sells time on a shared phone in Harwa, a village near Baharbari, said that he could remember lights shining outside homes when he was a boy, and when power from the national grid was still available. “It gradually decreased until it was gone: 10 to 12 hours a day, then five to six hours, then three to four hours and then there was no more,” he said.
So for now, diesel generators remain the favorite choice of millions across the developing world — so much so that the International Energy Agency plans to assess the extent of their use as part of a detailed look next year at energy use in India and China.
Mohan Lal Yadav, the 55-year-old owner of a diesel station in Vehbra, a community of 4,000 people near Baharbari, calculates residents there have bought 100 diesel generators and 100 to 150 diesel-powered irrigation pumps in recent years. “It’ll keep on increasing,” he said.
January 9, 2007
By KEITH BRADSHER
BAHARBARI, India — A toxic purple haze of diesel exhaust hangs over the rice and jute fields here in northeastern India, and bird songs are frequently drowned out by the chug-a-chug-a-chug of diesel generators.
Across the developing world, cheap diesel generators from China have become a favorite way to provide electricity. They power everything from irrigation pumps to television sets, allowing growing numbers of rural villages in many poor countries to grow more crops and connect to the wider world.
But as the demand increases for the electricity that makes those advances possible, it is often being met through the dirtiest, most inefficient means, creating pollution in many remote areas that used to have pristine air and negligible emissions of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases.
“There has been a mushrooming of these decentralized diesel generators,” said Ibrahim Rehman, a rural energy expert at the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi.
While many generators are purchased initially to power irrigation pumps, they have also opened up a huge new market for television sets, which in turn creates demand for even more diesel generators.
“You either want clean air or television” in many villages, said Nandita Mongia, the chief of the United Nations Development Program’s regional energy program for Asia and the Pacific. In nearly all cases, television wins.
Rising prices for diesel fuel have improved the commercial potential of alternatives, but renewable energy sources have been in an often-losing race against smoke-spewing backyard diesel generators, and occasionally coal, to become the energy source of choice in outlying areas.
Renewable sources have made some inroads, including tiny hydroelectric dams for Himalayan streams, biomass generators for India and Southeast Asia, solar-powered lanterns for India and Africa and rooftop water tanks in southern China.
But demand for electricity has been growing even more swiftly across the developing world, particularly in China and India.
When night falls here in Baharbari and countless stars blaze from an inky sky virtually uncontaminated by outdoor lighting, many of the thatch huts glow softly with the violet light of television screens, and occasionally a small bulb providing reading light for a child.
Three years ago, practically no one had a television set in this isolated community tucked between Nepal and Bangladesh. It is an area so remote and roadless that the only access is on foot or by bullock cart, after monsoon rains turn dirt paths into bogs that become impassable even for farm tractors.
Even so, half of the 1,000 households have TV, paying about 40 cents every few days to the owner of a diesel generator to recharge the batteries that power the sets. Ranvir Kumar Mandel, a slender 22-year-old, has built a bamboo hut here just to serve as a television repair shop.
“Before, there was no market,” he said, sitting near a pile of mostly black-and-white sets to be fixed.
Lavish government subsidies for diesel, kerosene and other fossil fuels have held down prices in many developing countries and made it harder to introduce renewable energy technologies.
While entrepreneurs and organized crime syndicates frequently raise the subsidized price of kerosene and pocket the profits, it remains very cheap and is frequently mixed with diesel to reduce the cost of running generators. The mixture shortens the life of the generator, however, and can make pollution even worse.
Given the popularity of generators, perhaps the most promising alternative is a new type like the one at the edge of the village here that contributes much less to air pollution and global warming. It burns a common local weed instead of diesel, costs half as much to operate and emits less pollution.
The main material is dhaincha, a weed commonly grown in India to restore nitrogen to depleted soils. The dhaincha grows 10 feet tall in just four months, with a green stalk three inches thick. Wood from shrubs and trees is used when there is not enough dhaincha.
“Other villagers were surprised,” said Ravindra Prasad Mandal, a village leader. “How was it possible that from dhaincha and wood, power was produced?”
For all its potential advantages, the toughest part of the project here has been to persuade change-resistant villagers to try it. Many projects fail in rural areas, development economists said, because governments or foreign aid organizations donate money or equipment without requiring any ongoing commitment. And they often threaten existing ways to obtain power, making it even harder to overcome resistance.
The biomass generator in Baharbari is owned by a collective of village residents, and has been supported by Hindus and Muslims alike. But local landlords, some with their own diesel generators that they rent out to charge batteries, have been wary.
The project has succeeded here partly because it has the active backing of one landlord family, the Sharans. Family members have gone on to successful business careers in big Indian cities and in Europe, and have dedicated themselves to helping their home village.
That makes it an unusual case, although the Sharans are trying to replicate it by setting up a school and training managers to establish similar cooperatives in nearby villages.
The biomass project has attracted interest and World Bank support because it appears to offer significantly cheaper electricity than diesel, at least at current prices. Another popular approach being tried in India and elsewhere — using solar energy to recharge lanterns by day — has run into difficulty even as diesel prices would seem to make it more competitive.
The problem is that prices for photovoltaic panels for solar energy have surged as governments in industrialized countries, especially Germany, have encouraged greater use of renewable energy, said Hemant Lamba, the coordinator of Aurore, a renewable energy service company in Auroville, India.
“It’s harder to do any solar energy projects in India,” he said.
In mountainous countries like Nepal, development agencies have focused on designing very small, inexpensive hydroelectric systems to install in streams. But deforestation has denuded many hillsides in the Himalayas and elsewhere, causing rainfall to surge into streams much more quickly. A Japanese project in Bhutan was recently destroyed this way.
“The villagers shrugged and said, ‘Nobody asked us, we knew every third year there would be a flood,’ ” Ms. Mongia, the United Nations energy expert, said.
Wind energy has found few applications in rural villages, because the turbines, even though far more capable than in the past, are still too expensive.
China has tried another approach: supplementing an expansion of electricity from coal-fired power plants with cheap rooftop solar water heaters that channel water through thin pipes crisscrossing a shiny surface.
Close to 5,000 small Chinese companies sell these simple water heaters, and together they have made China the world’s largest market for solar water heaters, with 60 percent of the global market and more than 30 million households using the systems, said Eric Martinot, an expert on renewable energy at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Wang Youyun, a 27-year-old lettuce farmer in Wangjiaying, a village of 3,000 people in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province, bought one such hot water system a year ago for $360 and installed it on his family’s roof next to a spot where ears of corn dry in the sunshine.
The village now has electricity, and some residents use it for water heaters, but Mr. Wang calculates that the solar system will pay for itself in two years. There is so much competition that even without government subsidies, the same size model now costs $330 and the price is still falling, he said.
The water heaters can be installed only on a sturdy, flat concrete roof, however, and not on the beautiful but fragile tile roofs that still adorn many of the houses in the village. The systems pose another drawback as well, Mr. Wang acknowledged: “If there is no sun for two or three days then there’s no hot water.”
Big conventional power plants, even those that burn coal, are often cleaner, safer and more efficient than crude household stoves and other small systems. So many economists say that the first step in developing countries should be the construction of power lines connecting as many villagers to national grids as possible.
Cooperation across national borders can help make this happen. Vietnam has made electricity available to 84 percent of its households, up from 50 percent in the early 1990s, partly by building a high-power line from China across Vietnam’s impoverished northern highlands.
But power plants have actually closed in some of the poorest and most chaotic parts of the developing world, from Africa to dysfunctional states in India like Bihar, which includes Baharbari. Causes range from corruption to a failure of government-owned electricity boards to invest in maintenance and replacement parts.
Mohamad Aslam, 21, who sells time on a shared phone in Harwa, a village near Baharbari, said that he could remember lights shining outside homes when he was a boy, and when power from the national grid was still available. “It gradually decreased until it was gone: 10 to 12 hours a day, then five to six hours, then three to four hours and then there was no more,” he said.
So for now, diesel generators remain the favorite choice of millions across the developing world — so much so that the International Energy Agency plans to assess the extent of their use as part of a detailed look next year at energy use in India and China.
Mohan Lal Yadav, the 55-year-old owner of a diesel station in Vehbra, a community of 4,000 people near Baharbari, calculates residents there have bought 100 diesel generators and 100 to 150 diesel-powered irrigation pumps in recent years. “It’ll keep on increasing,” he said.
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