Carbon capitalists warming to climate battle using derivatives

December 7, 2009 · 0 comments

Across Uganda, thousands of women warm supper over new, $8 orange-painted stoves. The clay-and-metal pots burn about two-thirds the charcoal of the open-fire cooking typical of East Africa, where forests are being chopped down in the struggle to feed the region’s 125 million people.

Four thousand miles away, at the Charles Hurst Land Rover dealership in southwest London, a Range Rover Vogue sells for £90,000 pounds. A blue windshield sticker proclaims that the gasoline-powered truck’s first 45,000 miles (72,421 km) will be carbon neutral.

That’s because Land Rover, official purveyor of 4x4s to Queen Elizabeth II, is helping Ugandans cut their greenhouse gas emissions with those new stoves.

These two worlds came together in the offices of Blythe Masters at JPMorgan Chase & Co. Masters, 40, oversees the New York bank’s environmental businesses as the firm’s global head of commodities. JPMorgan brokered a deal in 2007 for Land Rover to buy carbon credits from ClimateCare, an Oxford, England-based group that develops energy-efficiency projects around the world. Land Rover, now owned by Mumbai-based Tata Motors, is using the credits to offset some of the CO2 emissions produced by its vehicles.

For Wall Street, these kinds of voluntary carbon deals are just a dress rehearsal for the day when the US develops a mandatory trading program for greenhouse gas emissions. JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley will be watching closely as 192 nations gather in Copenhagen next week to try to forge a new climate-change treaty that would, for the first time, include the US and China.

US CAP AND TRADE

Those two economies are the biggest emitters of CO2, the most ubiquitous of the gases found to cause global warming. The Kyoto Protocol, whose emissions targets will expire in 2012, spawned a carbon-trading system in Europe that the banks hope will be replicated in the US.

The US Senate is debating a clean-energy bill that would introduce cap and trade for US emissions. A similar bill passed the House of Representatives in June. The plan would transform US industry by forcing the biggest companies , such as utilities, oil and gas drillers and cement makers, to calculate the amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases they emit and then pay for them.

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CNN – Peanut shells, corn stalks: China's alternative to coal?

December 7, 2009 · 0 comments

Beijing, China (CNN) — Mountains of peanut shells are spread out across Shengchang Bioenergy’s property on the outskirts of Beijing. Local farmers drive in and out, unloading dried corn stalks in exchange for a small fee.

The peanut shells, corn stalks and even tree bark are dried, ground and re-purposed. The end result: Biomass pellets that can be used as a replacement for coal.

Shengchang Bioenergy also makes a line of stoves and boilers in which the pellets can be burned. The company says the stoves are up to five times more energy efficient than traditional coal boilers and are slightly cheaper to operate.

“Our stoves mean a lot to rural villagers because they heat more effectively,” said the company’s general manager, Fu Youhong. “They’re very accessible and we’re planning to expand with the government.”

Just down the street from the factory, Bi Hongjun, a bus driver for the city of Beijing, has received a new stove as part of a test project with Shengchang Bioenergy and the Ministry of Agriculture.

“It’s very easy to use,” Bi said as he demonstrated how to load the energy-saving stove with the pellets. “It’s not like the old-style cumbersome boiler which is difficult to light.”

The Shengchang boilers are one small-scale example of how China can make a large-scale transition to becoming a low-carbon economy.

But the Chinese government has recently made some commitments to change that. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) — China’s top economic planner — has pledged to cut carbon intensity 40 to 45 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. Carbon intensity is the amount of carbon released per unit of gross domestic product.

Last week Xie Zhenhua, vice minister of the NDRC, vowed that China would meet these goals.

“China will not repeat traditional path of growth of developed nations of high emissions, high energy consumption and high pollution,” Xie said.

Analysts say this means China’s emissions will still continue to rise significantly — though at a slower pace. While China is not capping emissions absolutely, most argue it is a significant step in the right direction.

“China will not repeat traditional path of growth of developed nations of high emissions, high energy consumption and high pollution.”

–Xie Zhenhua, vice minister of the National Development and Reform Commission
“Chinese leadership is very clear that China has to improve its environmental performance,” said Bjorn Stigson, president of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. “It’s really driven from a strong feeling that China needs to reduce its energy, reduce its pollution, to be able to provide a good future and quality of life.”

Stigson was among a team of experts recently invited by the Chinese government to develop a plan to help transform China’s energy-intensive economy. He personally met with Premier Wen Jiabao, who will represent China at Copenhagen.

In a November 2009 report entitled “China’s Pathway Towards a Low Carbon Economy,” Stigson outlined various steps China could take to “go green,” including low-carbon industrialization, developing renewable energies and educating residents about how to live sustainably.

Stigson also indicated that China’s rapid development gave the Asian giant the potential to implement green technology more quickly, perhaps bypassing the high polluting growth model of Western countries.

“Because China is building so much new capacity, China can leapfrog with solutions,” Stigson said. “That will be the platform for the next phase of economic growth, which will probably, hopefully, clean up their resources and make them more efficient.”

According to state-run news agency Xinhua, 80,000 households in downtown Beijing have done away with coal heating this winter, the Beijing Electric Power Company said.

The courtyards homes located in a historic section of Beijing have replaced the polluting coal stoves with electric heaters, a culmination of a seven-year program to eliminate coal heating in 160,000 homes in downtown Beijing, Xinhua reported.

But projects on the local level will not be enough to address the steep challenge in the country of 1.3 billion.

Hundreds of millions of rural Chinese citizens will still rely solely on coal to keep their families warm through the heating season that ends on March 15 of next year.

Shengchang Bioenergy has manufactured 12,000 stoves since opening in 2006. Many of them now belong to low-income families in the neighborhood around the plant outside Beijing, but many more are needed throughout China.

“It is understandable … that China has gone through this focus on economic growth,” Stigson said. “But now, you can, as a country, take this more holistic approach. You have to do it, because the consequences are beginning to be seen, in the form of local pollution, in the form of impacts on water, in the form of impacts on rural areas.”

Source – CNN

India – Launching of the National Biomass Cookstove Initiative

December 3, 2009 · 0 comments

Kirk Smith provided this information to us:

Launching of the National Biomass Cookstove Initiative – 2 December 2009 at New Delhi

PRESS RELEASE – New Initiative on Improved Biomass Cookstoves

The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) is launching a new initiative on biomass cookstoves, with the primary aim of enhancing the availability of clean and efficient energy for the energy deficient and poorer sections of our society.

A large section of our country’s population – 75% of the rural households and 22% of the urban households, according to the National Sample Survey’s 61st survey — still uses biomass for its cooking needs. An estimated 80% of the residential energy in India comes from biomass, much of it burnt in traditional chulhas. The adverse health and socio-economic implications of this form of energy supply are enormous, with women and children at particular risk. The burden of biomass fuel collection and processing for cooking also falls mainly upon women and children (mainly girls), who spend significant time gathering fuel resources every day.

Therefore, providing a clean cooking energy option for these households will yield enormous gains in terms of health and socio-economic welfare of the weakest and the most vulnerable sections of society. At the same time, the cleaner combustion in these devices will greatly reduce the products of incomplete combustion which are greenhouse pollutants, thus helping combat climate change.

This initiative of MNRE is envisaged to be structured differently from the earlier National Programme on Improved Chulhas, although it will build on the several successes of that programme while also drawing lessons from the experience gained from its implementation.

The starting point of the current exercise is the user. The solution on offer should, first and foremost, be easy to use and maintain and conform to local cooking habits across the country. Its adoption must make economic sense to the household. The programme is conceived not as a handout to poorer households, but rather as an economically sustainable business solution. As the Prime Minister of India has often said, we need to make the poor of this country bankable.

This new initiative is also based on the recognition that cookstove technology has improved considerably in the past few years. But further advances are still possible and, indeed essential. Our aim is to achieve quality of energy services from cookstoves comparable to that from other clean energy sources such as LPG.

MNRE has held several brainstorming sessions and consultations over the past few months with a range of stakeholders and experts from civil society, academia, business, and government to develop an understanding of current activities and future potential of such a programme. The Prime Minister’s Office has been closely associated with these deliberations.

Under this Initiative a series of pilot-scale projects are envisaged using several existing commercially-available and better cookstoves and different grades of processed biomass fuels. This will help in exploring a range of technology deployment, biomass processing, and delivery models leveraging public-private partnerships.

At the same time, it will set in motion a series of activities that are designed to develop the next-generation of household cookstoves, biomass-processing technologies, and deployment models. This may include an innovative global contest to develop combustion units with high thermal efficiency and low pollution characteristics and, in parallel, appropriate biomass-processing devices The Initiative will aim for a significant enhancement of technical capacity in the country by setting up state-of-the-art testing, certification and monitoring facilities and strengthening R&D programmes in key technical institutions. An independent monitoring and evaluation component is envisaged to assess the activities and fine-tune them on an ongoing basis. And, last but not the least, it will welcome and promote participation by civil society and private actors to make it a true public-private partnership.

MNRE also believes that the technologies and delivery models that will be developed through this Initiative will be useful for other developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America whose populations also suffer from health and other problems related to biomass use in household cooking. Therefore success of this Initiative could well have a transformative impact not only for our own citizens but also for the energy poor in other developing countries.

New Approaches to Performance Testing of Improved Cookstoves

December 3, 2009 · 0 comments

Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es9013294, Dec. 1, 2009

New Approaches to Performance Testing of Improved Cookstoves

Link to full-text – http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es9013294

Michael Johnson†, Rufus Edwards*†, Victor Berrueta‡ and Omar Masera§

Department of Epidemiology, School of Medicine, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, California 92697-3957, Interdisciplinary Group for Appropriate Rural Technology (GIRA), Ptzcuaro 61609, Mexico, and Center for Ecosystems Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Morelia 58190, Mexico

* Corresponding author phone: (949) 824 4731; email: edwardsr@uci.edu. , † University of California at Irvine.
‡ Interdisciplinary Group for Appropriate Rural Technology (GIRA).
§ National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Monitoring and evaluation of improved cookstove performance is a critical factor in program success; however, consistent evidence indicates water boiling tests and controlled cooking tests are not representative of stove performance during daily cooking activities, and there is no ability to link these tests to kitchen performance tests during normal daily cooking activities. Since emissions from cookstoves contribute heavily to regional estimates of carbonaceous aerosols and other short-lived greenhouse species and given the current importance of stove  performance tests as a basis for global climate prediction models and IPCC inventories, improvements in performance testing are critical to derive more representative estimates. Here real-time combustion efficiencies and emissions rates from daily burn cycles of open fires and improved stoves in Mexico are used to propose a new approach to stove performance testing, using simple and economical measurement methods, based on replication of the distribution of emission rates and combustion efficiencies seen during daily cooking activities in homes. This approach provides more relevant information for global climate models and inventories, while also providing a means to recreate representative emissions profiles in a laboratory setting for technical analyses. On the basis of emission rates and combustion efficiencies during normal daily cooking, we suggest performance criteria that can be used as benchmarks for laboratory testing of improved stoves in the absence of site-specific information, although requiring confirmation by field testing during daily cooking activities.

Research shows some plants can remove indoor pollutants

December 2, 2009 · 0 comments

UGA research shows some plants can remove indoor pollutants, 2 December 2009

Athens, Ga. – Some plants have the ability to drastically reduce levels of indoor pollutants, according to new research at the University of Georgia. Researchers showed that certain species can effectively remove air-borne contaminants, including harmful volatile organic compounds, suggesting a critical new role for plants in home and office environments.

Of the 28 plants tested, researchers identified five “super ornamentals”—those that had the highest rates of contaminant removal, a process called phytoremediation. These include the purple waffle plant (Hemigraphis alternataa), English ivy (Hedera Helix), variegated wax plant (Hoya cornosa), Asparagus fern (Asparagus densiflorus) and the Purple heart plant (Tradescantia pallida). Placed in glass, gas-tight containers, the plants were exposed to a number of common household VOCs, including benzene, toluene, octane, alpha-pinene and TCE. The work, funded by UGA’s Agricultural Experiment Stations, was published in the August 2009 issue of HortScience.

“The idea that plants take up volatile compounds isn’t as much of a surprise as the poor air quality we measured inside some of the homes we tested,” said Stanley Kays, UGA horticulture researcher and one of the study’s authors. “We found unexpectedly high levels of benzenes and many other contaminants that can seriously compromise the health of those exposed.”

In fact, harmful indoor air pollutants can cause a host of serious illnesses, including asthma, cancer, reproductive and neurological disorders—and more than 1.6 million deaths a year, according to a 2002 World Health Organization report. The VOCs emanate from furnishings, carpets, plastics, cleaning products, building materials like drywall, paint, solvents and adhesives. Even tap water can be a source of VOCs. The air inside homes and offices is often a concentrated source of these pollutants, in some cases up to 100 times more polluted than outdoor air, according to research.

Why some plants are very effective at remediation—while others show little promise—is a mystery. “That’s one of the things we want to learn,” said Kays. “We also want to determine the species and number of plants needed in a house or office to neutralize the problem contaminants.”

Kays, D.S. Yang and S.V. Pennisi at UGA collaborate with researchers at Konkuk University in Seoul and at the National Horticultural Research Institute in Suwon, Korea, “where scientists are substantially ahead of us in phytoremediation research,” said Kays. “My colleague, Kwang Jin Kim, has evaluated the ability of 86 species to remove formaldehyde in indoor environments.”

Not all VOCs are toxic, and plants themselves emit some VOCs, though most appear not to be toxic, at least at normal exposure levels. But Kays said a lack of information about chemical toxicity—and an affordable method for measuring interior air quality—makes assessing their presence and safety more difficult. Fifty million organic and inorganic chemicals are now registered in the CAS system, a registry that includes chemical substances identified since 1957.

Kays said simply introducing common ornamentals into indoor spaces has the potential to significantly improve the quality of indoor air, but further research could help scientists refine the concept.

Source: University of Georgia

India – Indoor exposure to respirable particulate matter and particulate-phase PAHs

December 1, 2009 · 1 comment

Environ Monit Assess. 2009 Nov 26.

Indoor exposure to respirable particulate matter and particulate-phase PAHs in rural homes in North India.

Ansari FA, Khan AH, Patel DK, Siddiqui H, Sharma S, Ashquin M, Ahmad I.

Fiber Toxicology Division, Indian Institute of Toxicology Research (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), Mahatma Gandhi Marg, Post Box No. 80, Lucknow, 226 001, India.

In order to evaluate the exposure of the northern India rural population to polyaromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) inhalation, indoor pollution was assessed by collecting and analyzing the respirable particulate matter PM (2.5) and PM(10) in several homes of the village Bhithauli near Lucknow, UP. The home selection was determined by a survey. Given the nature of biomass used for cooking, homes were divided into two groups, one using all kinds of biomass and the second type using plant materials only. Indoor mean concentrations of PM(2.5) and associated PAHs during cooking ranged from 1.19 +/- 0.29 to 2.38 +/- 0.35 and 6.21 +/- 1.54 to
12.43 +/- 1.15 mug/m(3), respectively. Similarly, PM(10) and total PAHs were in the range of 3.95 +/- 1.21 to 8.81 +/- 0.78 and 7.75 +/- 1.42 to 15.77 +/- 1.05 mug/m(3), respectively. The pollutant levels during cooking were significantly higher compared to the noncooking period. The study confirmed that indoor pollution depends on the kind of biomass fuel used for cooking.

Shell Foundation – Smoke in the Kitchen Blog

December 1, 2009 · 1 comment

This new blog provides information on the Shell Foundation’s activities to combat indoor air pollution in India and other countries.

Link: http://www.smokeinthekitchen.com/

WHO – The Energy Access Situation in Developing Countries

December 1, 2009 · 0 comments

A Review focusing on the Least Developed Countries and Sub-Saharan Africa

Ensuring access to energy is arguably one of the major challenges the world faces today. For those living in extreme poverty, a lack of access to energy services dramatically affects and undermines health, limits opportunities for education and development, and can reduce a family’s potential to rise up out of poverty. The problem of energy access for the poor has become even more acute because of the increased vulnerability brought about by climate change, the global financial crisis and volatile energy prices.

The “Energy Access Situation in Developing Countries – A Review focusing on the Least Developed Countries and Sub-Saharan Africa” report draws attention to the energy access situation beyond the conventional focus on electricity, especially in poorer developing countries where access is the most constrained.

Main topics covered by the report include:

  • Energy access situation in LDCs and Sub-Saharan Africa, including access to electricity and modern fuels
  • Fuels and improved stoves used for cooking in developing countries
  • Health impacts attributable to indoor air pollution from household use of solid fuels for cooking and heating
  • Developing countries with modern energy access targets, and
  • An analysis of different energy access scenarios for 2015, to estimate the progress in energy access that will be needed for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

Download

:: Full report
:: Key slides [pdf 4.22Mb]
:: 1-pager brief [pdf 40kb]

The Lancet – Health benefits of tackling climate change

November 25, 2009 · 0 comments

Climate change will harm human health, and successful strategies to mitigate the extent of the change will restrict that harm. But new studies published in The Lancet show that appropriate mitigation strategies will themselves have additional and independent effects on health, most of them beneficial. The potential value of these co-benefits has not so far been given sufficient prominence in international negotiations.

The Lancet studies, supported by a global partnership of funders, were undertaken by an international team of researchers with the aim of informing discussions at the 2009 Copenhagen conference of parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Authored by an international group of public health, environmental, and other scientists, each focuses on one sector in which greenhouse-gas emissions need to be reduced. These sectors are household energy use, urban land transport, electricity generation, and food and agriculture. A fifth study reviews the effect on health of short-lived green-house pollutants, which are produced in several sectors.

Full-text – http://download.thelancet.com/flatcontentassets/series/health-and-climate-change.pdf, Nov. 25, 2009

Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: overview and implications for policy makers

November 25, 2009 · 0 comments

The Lancet, 25 November 2009doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61759-1

Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: overview and implications for policy makers

Prof Andy Haines FMedSci, Prof Anthony J McMichael PhD, Prof Kirk R Smith PhD, Prof Ian Roberts PhD, James Woodcock MSc, Prof Anil Markandya PhD, Prof Ben G Armstrong PhD, Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum PhD, Alan D Dangour PhD, Prof Michael Davies PhD, Nigel Bruce PhD, Cathryn Tonne ScD, Mark Barrett PhD, Paul Wilkinson FRCP

This Series has examined the health implications of policies aimed at tackling climate change. Assessments of mitigation strategies in four domains—household energy, transport, food and agriculture, and electricity generation—suggest an important message: that actions to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions often, although not always, entail net benefits for health. In some cases, the potential benefits seem to be substantial. This evidence provides an additional and immediate rationale for reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions beyond that of climate change mitigation alone. Climate change is an increasing and evolving threat to the health of populations worldwide. At the same time, major public health burdens remain in many regions. Climate change therefore adds further urgency to the task of addressing international health priorities, such as the UN Millennium Development Goals. Recognition that mitigation strategies can have substantial benefits for both health and climate protection offers the possibility of policy choices that are potentially both more cost effective and socially attractive than are those that address these priorities independently.

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