news20091221gdn1

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Copenhagen Climate change conference 2009]
China blamed as anger mounts over climate deal
> Beijing accused over emissions cuts
> Campaigners say accord 'a disaster'
Jonathan Watts and John Vidal in Copenhagen Robin McKie and Toby Helm
The Observer, Sunday 20 December 2009 Article history

An outbreak of bitter recrimination has erupted among politicians and delegates following the drawing up of the Copenhagen accord for tackling climate change.

The deal, finally hammered out early yesterday, had been expected to commit countries to deep cuts in carbon emissions. In the end, it fell short of this goal after China fought hard against strong US pressure to submit to a regime of international monitoring.

The Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, walked out of the conference at one point, and sent a lowly protocol officer to negotiate with Barack Obama. In the end, a draft agreement put forward by China – and backed by Brazil, India and African nations – commits the world to the broad ambition of preventing global temperatures from rising above 2C. Crucially, however, it does not force any nation to make specific cuts.

"For the Chinese, this was our sovereignty and our national interest," said Xie Zhenhua, head of China's delegation.

Last night, some delegates were openly critical of China for its intransigence. Asked by the Observer who was to blame for blocking the introduction of controlled emissions, the director general of the Swedish environment protection agency, Lars-Erik Liljelund, replied: "China. China doesn't like numbers." At the same time, others have criticised the Americans for pushing China too hard.

"President Obama's speech blaming China didn't help," says John Prescott, writing in today's Observer.

The accord was formally recognised after a dramatic all-night plenary session, during which the Danish chairman was forced to step aside, a Venezuelan delegate cut her hand, and Britain's climate and energy secretary, Ed Miliband, salvaged the deal just as it appeared on the verge of being rejected.

The tumultuous events concluded a fortnight of fraught and sometimes machiavellian negotiations that saw a resurgent China link forces with India, Brazil and African states to thwart efforts by rich nations to steamroller through a binding treaty that would suit their interests.

Although hailed by Obama, the deal has been condemned by activists and NGOs, while the European commission's president, José Manuel Barroso, admitted he was disappointed after EU attempts to introduce long-term targets for reducing global emissions by 50% by 2050 were blocked.

Last night Miliband was being credited with helping to rescue the summit from disaster. He had been preparing to go to bed at 4am, after the main accord had been agreed, only to be called by officials and warned that several countries were threatening to veto its signature.

Miliband returned to the conference centre in time to hear Sudanese delegate Lumumba Di-Aping comparing the proposed agreement to the Holocaust. He said the deal "asked Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries". A furious Miliband intervened and dismissed Di-Aping's claims as "disgusting".

This was "a moment of profound crisis", Miliband told delegates. The proposed deal was by no means perfect, and would have many problems, he admitted. "But it is a document that in substantive ways will make the lives of people around this planet better because it puts into effect fast-start finance of $30bn; it puts into effect a plan for $100bn of long-term public and private finance." The deal was then agreed by delegates.

The accord makes reference to the need to keep temperature rises to no more than 2C, and says rich countries will commit to cutting greenhouse gases, and developing nations will take steps to limit the growth of their emissions. Countries will be able to set out their pledges for action in an appendix. In addition, there are provisions for short-term finance of up to $10bn a year over three years to help poorer countries fight climate change, and a long-term funding package worth $100bn a year by 2020.

However, the original plan was for the Copenhagen talks to deliver a comprehensive, legally binding international deal to tackle climate change. This has not materialised and last night leaders of NGOs united in condemning the limited nature of the deal.

"This accord is not legally binding, it's a political statement," said Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International. "This is a disaster for the poor nations – the urgency of climate change was not really considered."

Dame Barbara Stocking, Oxfam's chief executive, agreed. "World leaders in Copenhagen seem to have forgotten that they were not negotiating numbers, they were negotiating lives," she said.


[Environment]
Has peak theory reached its tipping point?
We have all heard of peak oil? But now there is peak wood. And peak gold. And even peak rock music . . .
David Adam
The Guardian, Monday 21 December 2009 Article history

First there was peak oil. Then came peak wood and peak gas. What is it with all these peaks ? Is the world really running out of the raw materials it needs to make it tick, move and communicate? Or should the next peak be in stories about peaks?

Attributed to American geophysicist M King Hubbert, peak theory assumes that resource production follows a bell-shaped curve. Early on, the production rate increases as discoveries are made and infrastructure built. Later in the curve, after the eponymous Hubbert's peak, production declines as reserves run dry. US oil production reached its Hubbert's peak in the early 70s and has declined since. But what about the rest?

Peak coal Coal started the whole peak theory craze when Hubbert used records of how its production levelled off to forecast future peaks in US oil supply. Conventional thinking says there are hundreds of years of coal supplies left, but are the figures accurate? Predictions are complicated by there being several types of coal, with much of the high-grade stuff already burnt. Although production keeps rising, the total energy obtained may peak sooner.

Peak oil and gas Every schoolchild is taught that world supplies will eventually run out. But when? Supporters and critics of global peak oil theory argue about the timing of the peak, with some insisting it has already been reached. Reliable, independent estimates of discoveries and production are rare, and most governments rely on statistics from the International Energy Agency, which has long been accused of painting too rosy a picture.

Peak gold Earlier this month, Aaron Regent, president of the Canadian gold company Barrick Gold, reportedly warned there was a strong case that the world was already at peak gold. Global output has fallen steadily since 2000 and, Regent said, it was becoming harder and harder to find ore.

Peak water There is a serious academic school of thought that says the Earth's water was delivered from outer space on the back of wet asteroids and comets. But there is growing concern that the water is running dry. As Alex Bell describes in his book Peak Water, we are using more water than is available in the places where we live. For some, in the wet regions, peak water will never occur, but for the people of the US, Africa, southern Europe, India, Middle East and China, he says, it is already here.

Peak wood At an energy conference in Abu Dhabi earlier this year, the Dutch Crown Prince Willem-Alexander warned that we should learn a lesson from history. When the Roman empire collapsed, he said, large parts of Europe had been deforested for farmland and to provide firewood. "Wood and food were essential to maintain the Roman empire," he said. "So the demise of a seemingly invincible civilisation was partially due to the unsustainable use of their prime energy resource. What the Romans were experiencing, we would now describe as peak wood."

Peak rock music Most of the good musical ideas really have been used up. Last year, popular culture blog Overthinking It analysed Rolling Stone magazine's top 500 songs of all time, and found that rock music peaked in the late 1960s. "It would seem that, like oil, the supply of great musical ideas is finite. The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, the Motown greats and other genre innovators quickly extracted the best their respective genres had to offer, leaving little supply for future musicians."

news20091221gdn2

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Copenhagen Climate change conference 2009]
A great step forward: Obama's verdict on climate change pact
President's intervention was failure, say critics
Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 December 2009 20.49 GMT Article history

Barack Obama returned to a snowbound Washington at the weekend clutching a deal that was cast as a step forward by his administration but decried as a waste of paper by critics on both sides of the climate change debate.

At the end of another of his interventions on the world stage that are becoming a hallmark of his presidency, Obama said the Copenhagen talks amounted to an "important breakthrough" and they had laid the foundation for international action "in the years to come".

But he also accepted it was a partial victory, saying the pact was "not enough", the road ahead would be hard and there was a long way still to go.

David Axelrod, his chief adviser, took to the airwaves this morning to defend the outcome of the 31-hour negotiations in similar vein: it was not perfect but it was a start. "Nobody says that this is the end of the road," Axelrod told CNN. "The end of the road would have been the complete collapse of those talks. This is a great step forward."

Politico, a Washington-based political news website, said the agreement was "more notable for what it doesn't accomplish than what it does, an inconvenient truth Obama ruefully acknowledged".

The last time Obama imposed himself into a gathering of world leaders in Copenhagen in October, when he lent his weight to Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics, it ended in humiliation. This time the outcome was not so ignominious, and the administration could and did claim credit for some, albeit non-binding, results.

Critics were quick to disparage Obama's achievement as a meaningless compromise. Friends of the Earth US dismissed the agreement as a sham. "This is not a strong deal or a just one – it isn't even a real one," said the group's president Erich Pica. He blamed the US for the absence of concrete results saying it was the main polluter behind the climate crisis yet it had failed to put enough money on the table to help poor countries cope with its consequences.

On the other side of the debate, Club for Growth, a campaign for small government and low taxes, hailed the agreement as an ironic triumph. Its head, Chris Chocola, said a binding deal would have destroyed 30 million American jobs, but he was relieved when Obama described it as a meaningful pact. "When politicians call something 'meaningful', that means it isn't," Chocola said.

The question for the White House now is how the Copenhagen agreement will affect its ambitions to present Congress with a wide ranging energy bill that would enshrine a cap-and-trade system for reducing emissions through bartering. Opponents of cap-and-trade, such as the Club for Growth, are likely to be emboldened in their efforts to frustrate the administration, pointing to the absence of a firm commitment internationally to set emissions reduction targets. Against that, the White House will argue there is enough of a global mandate to merit pressing ahead with its legislative plans.

The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said it was time for America to move quickly to develop a unilateral strategy in which the Senate would pass an energy bill setting a long-term price on carbon "that will really stimulate America to become the world leader in clean-tech. If we lead by example, more people will follow us by emulation than by compulsion of some UN treaty."

In an editorial, the Washington Post saw grounds for limited optimism that the Senate would act. It said that the Copenhagen agreement was weak and inadequate, but "this outcome, however imperfect, should prod the US Senate to take up climate-change legislation. Even if China hadn't moved, reducing America's dependence on foreign sources of energy and tacking domestic pollution are strong enough reasons to pass a bill."

The Post also noted that Copenhagen had given a glimpse of a new world order in which the US and China would increasingly shape international diplomacy. This so-called G2 of the world's two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases had the fate of any climate change treaty in its hands.


[Environment > Copenhagen Climate change conference 2009]
We're all eco-warriors now after world leaders failed us at Copenhagen
Our political leaders failed to do the right thing: now it's up to us to push them into action or get on with it without them
James Garvey
guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 December 2009 12.40 GMT Article history

What did the UN climate change talks in Copenhagen achieve? Our governments failed to agree a deal which might have avoided a global catastrophe. They did nothing but take yet another "important first step". We've had nearly two decades of those.

It's likely that Copenhagen is a long-term disaster for the planet and its people, but it might have another, more immediate consequence for you right now. Your moral obligations might have just changed dramatically. In situations like the one we're in now, the demand for action shifts from our leaders to us. They missed what might have been our last chance to take to take concerted, worldwide action on climate change, so the rest of us have to do something about it. Their failure means that we're all eco-warriors now.

When things go smoothly, you do your civic duty by casting a vote, paying your taxes, and generally keeping out of trouble. It's enough to leave it to the ones in power to think things through and make certain choices for you. In rare circumstances, though, our obligations enlarge, and it's up to us to do the right thing when no one else will.

When the state perpetuates injustice and human suffering, when there's real urgency, when other avenues of protest have done no good at all, your civic duty becomes something very substantial. You have to bring change into the world, and a vote is not enough. Anything less ties you to an ongoing wrong. Civil disobedience and other direct efforts to bring about change are the only options you have.

It's no longer any good just hoping that the men in suits will come up with a decent solution. They messed it up. It's not enough to click a link and send a message to your representative or even go on a march. None of it is enough when the people you petition fail again and again to do the right thing. Perhaps it's now up to us to make trouble for them, to leave our governments no choice but to act, to get in the way, make business as usual impossible, and force real action against climate change. Think of all the usual examples, large and small, of human beings at their finest: the end of slavery in America, the civil rights movement, suffrage, India, the velvet revolution, the poll tax protests and on and on. When human beings see that something is wrong we almost always change for the better. Sometimes we need our noses rubbed in it, but we do the right thing in the end. The developed and developing worlds are doing something wrong – we're all causing suffering to people alive right now and to great numbers of those who will come after us. If civil disobedience was warranted to stop past injustices, isn't it warranted right now to stop what is probably the greatest amount of harm any group of human beings ever inflicted on any other?

The green movement has always suffered from the lack of a clear target. How do you protest against something that's all around us, a fossil-fuel burning world we all inhabit and depend upon? Do you chain yourself to yourself and insist on a carbon tax on the things you value most? With the failure at Copenhagen we have for the first time a clearly delineated and easily accessible object for our protests: our governments.

What about the so-called deal-breakers at Copenhagen? It's being said that what really stood in the way of a binding conclusion is China and America failing to see eye to eye. The philosopher Peter Singer argues that sanctions were warranted against South Africa because it harmed its own people. The world's biggest polluters harm not just their own people, but people all over the world. How much greater are sanctions warranted in their case, compared with South Africa?

But maybe this isn't the right way to think, and anyway we've all had enough doom and gloom. It might be wrong not because it's over the top, but because it depends on a conception of politics that no longer fits the world as it is now. Perhaps global treaties and talks and sanctions are not part of the solution to climate change. Those are the bones of something that died near the start of this awful millennium.

Maybe the solution never was a deal at Copenhagen – who really thinks that climate change has just one big answer? What we need are a billion different solutions, perhaps billions of little revolutions in thinking and acting all over the world. The good news is that such things do not depend on a handful of negotiators sitting around a table. What matters are people like you and me who see the world for what it is and do something about it. There's room for a little hope still, the hope that even though our leaders fail to do the right thing, the rest of us will either push them into action or get on with it without them.

James Garvey is secretary of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and author of The Ethics of Climate Change

news20091221gdn3

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Carbon emissions]
Falling carbon price could result in higher bills, energy firms warn
Tim Webb
guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 December 2009 21.11 GMT Article history

Electricity bills could go up as a result of the weekend's feeble agreement on climate change at Copenhagen, energy suppliers have warned.

The price of carbon – paid by heavy polluters such as power plant operators – plummeted yesterday by almost 10% on Europe's emissions trading market. This was in response to the EU scrapping a planned commitment to cut emissions by 30% by 2020 because other countries failed to show similar ambition.

E.ON and Centrica warned that they would not invest the tens of billions of pounds to build expensive new nuclear reactors and clean coal plants at today's carbon price, which is supposed to penalise dirty coal and gas plants.

Spot prices are now around €12 (£10) a tonne, close to a six-month low, and experts say that to make building new nuclear reactors financially viable, a price closer to €40 is needed.

A spokesman for E.ON said that without government action to tighten carbon markets, companies would wait until ageing reactors and coal plants close over the next decade and until power prices rocket before they made the investment.

"It is taking a hell of a risk of the lights going out," he said. "Power prices would go through the roof – they would have to get at a level where we think 'there's money to be made'. But we will get very, very tight [on security of supply]. It's the worst case scenario."

Some companies including Centrica repeated calls for the UK government to intervene and put a floor – or higher minimum price – on carbon to guarantee them a profit on building the expensive low carbon emitting power plants. The Guardian reported in October that senior government officials had promised the nuclear industry to fix a higher carbon price in the event of a failure at Copenhagen. A spokeswoman for Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change secretary, last night would not comment on his plans.

Centrica also pointed out that the failure by the EU to increase its commitment from a 20% reduction in carbon emissions to a 30% cut by 2020 left the UK at a distinct disadvantage. Gordon Brown has already set a much higher target for the UK to cut emissions by 34% by 2020. This will make it harder for heavy polluters in Britain, such as manufacturers, to be competitive with their European rivals, who have less onerous pollution targets. The EU's lower reduction target – which determines the price of carbon on the EU emissions market – also makes it much harder for the UK which needs a higher carbon price to meet its own target.

Global energy companies such as Shell have also been pushing for a global market for carbon as the best way to stimulate investment in low carbon technologies. But analysts said the Copenhagen talks made this less likely, because countries did not sign up to individual binding emissions targets as they did under the Kyoto protocol. Countries also split into negotiating blocks, epitomised by the final agreement drawn up by the US, China, India, South Africa and Brazil, which excluded the rest of the world, making it harder to set up a global carbon trading system.

Andreas Arvanitakis, senior analyst at Point Carbon, said: "In some respects, it looks as though a single international carbon market is less and less likely, with a patchwork of regional price signals emerging instead."

A spokeswoman for Shell was downbeat about the Copenhagen summit. "The Copenhagen accord is just a step towards a global framework, but much more is required. We appreciate the difficulties of the process and recognise that the accord reflects a true political willingness to combat climate change. However, it remains unclear how this political willingness will translate into concrete steps and drive an international process to deliver a global framework."

news20091221nn1

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 20 December 2009 | Nature 462, 978-983 (2009) | doi:10.1038/462978a
News Feature
Newsmaker of the year: The power player
As a physicist, he found a way to capture atoms and won a Nobel prize. Now he is marshalling scientists and engineers to transform the world's biggest energy economy. Eric Hand profiles the US energy secretary, Nature's Newsmaker of the Year.
Eric Hand

STEVEN CHU is heading home on a bright day in October. His motorcade of government cars powers up the slope of Cyclotron Road, past the fragrant stands of eucalyptus and through the guard station at the entrance of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The vehicles continue along Chu Road and come to a stop near the top of the hill.

The man after whom the road is named heads into Building 50, which housed his office for the five years that he ran this laboratory overlooking the University of California, Berkeley. Inside an auditorium, 225 former colleagues await his arrival. Some wear suits; others slouch in hooded sweatshirts and sandals. There is an eager anticipation in the air, and moments before Chu arrives, the crowd grows quiet. Orange-vested security guards, armed with walkie-talkies, open the doors, and Chu walks down to the podium, his entourage trailing.

"It's very good to be back here," he says, flipping open his computer. "You people know I do my own PowerPoints. That has not changed." He launches headlong into a fast-paced and scattered talk that leaps across dozens of topics, all under the banner of climate change. He clicks ahead to the crucial slide — the one that shows actual measurements of rising global temperatures outpacing what would be expected without all the carbon dioxide that humans have spewed into the atmosphere. "Here's the evidence," he says. "I have to play this over and over again."

Such is his task back in Washington DC, where Chu now works as Secretary of the Department of Energy (DOE) and a member of President Barack Obama's cabinet — the first Nobel-prizewinning scientist to hold such a high office in the US government.

{{“Necessity is the mother of invention and this is the mother of all necessities.”}
Steven Chu}

He is charged with transforming the world's biggest energy economy, and he has assumed the role of persuader-in-chief, trotting before Congress to explain the science of climate change and his plans for combating it. Meeting regularly with representatives and senators, he targets sceptics and walks them through the data. "I say, 'Come to my office and we'll talk about it'," he explains. "At the very least you can put a little doubt in their minds. If they're so sure it's natural causes, they may be less sure." It helps to have a Nobel prize, he adds.

In confronting what he sees as the most pressing problem facing the world today, Chu looks back in time to chart a way forwards. The Berkeley lab he once ran is the descendant of the Radiation Laboratory, where the physicist Ernest Lawrence helped find ways to enrich uranium for the Manhattan Project. Chemist Glenn Seaborg's team discovered plutonium there, and theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer worked just down the hill before heading into the New Mexico mountains to build the first nuclear bombs.

Chu plans to tackle climate change by reviving the scientific and technological urgency of the Manhattan Project — enlisting some of the nation's best minds to find a way to power the world without ruining it. His plans start at home, where he is trying to push the ponderous DOE to support riskier research that could yield huge dividends.

With a budget of US$27 billion, the department runs 17 national laboratories, oversees America's nuclear stockpile and manages the environmental clean-up after the early nuclear age. It is the largest source of funds for physical-science research in the United States, and this year Chu had a much bigger pot to dole out. Just one month into his tenure, Congress gave the agency $37 billion in economic stimulus money — funds that Chu is steering towards renewable energy, nuclear power, carbon-sequestration pilot plants and projects to modernize the electric grid, all of which should help to solve the climate problem. "They say that necessity is the mother of invention and this is the mother of all necessities," he says. "So we're going to get the mother of all inventions. And it's not going to be just one, it has to be many."

Hands-on manager

In the 1980s, Chu made his name scientifically by trapping atoms using lasers tuned with the utmost precision. Now he is applying that same mastery of detail to a vastly more complex system: an agency of 100,000 people working on all aspects of energy and nuclear issues.

Some Washington veterans have questioned whether Chu's research talent and hands-on style of management will serve him well, both at the DOE and amid the harsh political environment of the nation's capital. He has made some mistakes, notably in his dealings with Congress. But nearly a year into his tenure, Chu has proved that he is a quick learner. He has established himself as a voice that can be trusted by politicians of various stripes. He has helped to bridge international divides, particularly between the United States and China. And he has lured some top scientists from industry and universities to join him at the DOE in his quest.

Carol Browner, Obama's climate tsar, works often with Chu as part of the president's 'green cabinet', a group of senior officials who oversee environmental matters. "I think he's going to turn out to be the best energy secretary ever," she says. Praise also flows from some Republican politicians. Samuel Bodman, who led the DOE for former president George W. Bush, says that Chu has "shown skills as a manager. I think it was an inspired choice by the president to pick him."

Growing up in a New York suburb during the 1950s, Chu and his two brothers learned quickly that academic excellence — and competition — were family traditions. The boys would watch College Bowl, a 1960s television quiz show, and "the three of us would shout out answers and try to beat the contestants", recalls Morgan Chu, the youngest brother and a high-profile lawyer in California.

Chu's father and mother fled China during the Second World War and both did graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. The eldest son, Gilbert, followed the path of academic prestige — accumulating science degrees from Princeton University in New Jersey and MIT before gaining an MD from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Morgan did a PhD in social science before heading to Harvard Law School. Steven, on the other hand, was the A-minus student who favoured tinkering over schoolwork. In a family of Ivy Leaguers, he says he was the "academic black sheep", who settled for the University of Rochester in New York, where he studied mathematics and physics. Family pressures, he says, drove him — and frustrated him — early on, but once at Rochester, his facility for science flourished. "All of a sudden, the things they wanted me to do were very natural," he says.

On entering graduate school at Berkeley in 1970, Chu began a love affair with lasers. The work that was once a chore became the focus of an obsessive energy. "I've never been that good at apportioning time," he says. "When I got really excited about something, I would dig into it. It turns out that is a quality that the best researchers have." Another Berkeley graduate student, Phil Bucksbaum, recalled nearly getting into a fist fight with Chu because he was being "bossy about the lasers", until a third student, who had studied with Chu at Rochester, explained to Bucksbaum: "It's the way he always has been. Focused and brusque," says Bucksbaum.

Chu's graduate work using polarized light to probe atomic transitions was good enough for him to get a job at Bell Labs in New Jersey, then a utopia for basic research. Chu thrived there, but he also made sacrifices. As his work progressed, he spent more time away from home, says his ex-wife, Lisa Chu-Thielbar. Sometimes, she would smuggle his first son, Geoffrey, under her overcoat onto the laboratory campus to catch some time with his father. "He was always a scientist first and a father second," says Chu's second son, Michael, who doesn't fault his father for the singular focus that allowed him to achieve so much. "The ambition was all intellectual and scientific. Steve never cared about money. He didn't even care about advancement," says Chu-Thielbar.

After seven years at Bell Labs, Chu had a key insight in 1985 into how to trap atoms. He crossed six lasers to form what he called "optical molasses", a goo of photons. It slowed atoms nearly to a standstill, making them sluggish enough to be held by the electromagnetic forces of an additional laser.

CONTINUED ON newsnn2

news20091221nn2

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 20 December 2009 | Nature 462, 978-983 (2009) | doi:10.1038/462978a
News Feature
Newsmaker of the year: The power player
As a physicist, he found a way to capture atoms and won a Nobel prize. Now he is marshalling scientists and engineers to transform the world's biggest energy economy. Eric Hand profiles the US energy secretary, Nature's Newsmaker of the Year.
Eric Hand

CONTINUED FROM newsnn1

A year later, in the winter of 1986, Chu glimpsed the foundation of his Nobel prize through the windows of a vacuum chamber. Sodium atoms, cooled in optical molasses to 240 millionths of a degree above absolute zero, grew bright orange as they fell, one by one, into a trap the size of a sand grain. A colour photo, the first ever published in Physical Review Letters, provided the proof of his success (S. Chu, J. E. Bjorkholm, A. Ashkin and A. Cable Phys. Rev. Lett. 57, 314–317; 1986). The work would spawn applications across several disciplines. It provided biologists with 'optical tweezers' — ways to manipulate individual biomolecules, such as DNA. And it gave other atomic scientists the tools to create Bose–Einstein condensates, the super-cooled states of matter that can trap light and bring photons to a standstill, in a reversal of Chu's original technique.

{{“Steve never cared about money. He didn't even care about advancement.”}
Lisa Chu-Thielbar}

By 1987, Chu was ready to move back to academia. He had offers at Harvard and Berkeley, but was intrigued at the idea of helping to build up a less-celebrated physics department at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. It was a good plan. Stanford soon became a powerhouse; beginning in 1995, physicists there would win four Nobel prizes in a row, including Chu in 1997. While at Stanford, Chu started to push off in new directions, personally and professionally. He divorced Chu-Thielbar and married Jean Fetter, a physicist and former dean of admissions at Stanford. He took on graduate students with interests in biology and helped to convince the Stanford administration to build a $150-million biophysics centre.

But in 2004, just after that centre was completed, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) came calling. Chu, who had never managed anything bigger than a physics department, was ready to make the leap to running the laboratory, which now has 4,000 employees and a $650-million budget. He showed his mettle early on, pushing the University of California system, which manages the LBNL, to use its debt service in an unprecedented way to finance new buildings for the lab, and fighting to save employee pension plans. Chu personally argued on behalf of his employees with the president of the University of California system until he relented, says Graham Fleming, a chemist at Berkeley and Chu's deputy at the time. "If one argument didn't work, he'd try another," he adds.

The climate crusader

Chu says that there was no one moment when he decided to devote himself full time to climate and energy puzzles. He had been digesting the science for years, reading reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And he had pursued energy efficiency in his own life with his customary precision, complaining when workers skimped on insulation in his Stanford home. But soon after arriving at the LBNL, he decided that the time was ripe to resurrect an energy-research programme that had lain largely dormant since the fuel crisis of the 1970s. The lab was ready to revive those efforts, but it needed Chu's energy and vision, says Paul Alivisatos, who succeeded Chu as the head of the LBNL. "It's a bit like a supersaturated solution that you drop a seed crystal into," he says. "Steve was the seed crystal."

{{Chu was sworn in the day after President Obama.}
O. MUHAMMAD/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE}

Chu gave the sprawling lab a purpose and convinced many scientists to make the switch, as he had, into energy research. He attracted large infusions of funding from the DOE and from the energy company BP. The lab launched major initiatives in biofuels and photovoltaics, but Chu also got involved in the little stuff. Alivisatos recalls Chu's interest in revamping a system of old, lumbering shuttle buses that circle the heights of the Berkeley Hills. Chu would stand on the balcony of the director's office and keep tallies of riders at a bus stop. "He thinks at an incredibly high level, but he also delves down into the finest detail," says Alivisatos. "And one of his abilities is to find the salient detail that matters enormously to the big picture and to show you how those connect."

But some thought that Chu went too far by micromanaging lab operations. "He doesn't see the necessity to get other people involved," says one scientist who knows him well but did not want to be identified as criticizing an official who controls so much research funding. "His whole career has been founded on his fantastic ability to worry about all the details himself. And that makes it hard for him to empower an effective staff."

Obama's election, and his campaign pledges to revamp the US energy system, created new opportunities for Chu. A few weeks after the election, Chu flew to Chicago to meet with the president-elect. "A lot of people are telling me you're the person for the DOE," said Obama, according to Chu. Rarely at a loss for words, Chu could only think to quip, "Who are these former friends of mine?"

Inspired by a sense of service, Chu planned to accept the job, but he did have a demand. He had seen the energy department hamstrung in the past by ineffectual people placed in posts to satisfy political obligations, so he wanted control over senior appointments. "There was a reasonable shot I could attract the right people. There are a whole bunch of people that have to lift this load," Chu says. Obama agreed, and Chu has recruited top talent such as Steven Koonin, former chief scientist of BP and provost of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who is now undersecretary for science.

“One of his abilities is to find the salient detail that matters enormously in the big picture.”
Paul Alivisatos

On the top floor of the energy department, portraits of secretaries past preside over the long, carpeted hallway leading from the elevators to the secretary's office. Most are of career politicians, with a few exceptions: Charles Duncan, who ran his family's coffee company, Donald Hodel, who would go on to lead two Christian evangelical groups, and James Edwards, a dentist. Bodman, Chu's predecessor, has an engineering degree from MIT. But Chu is the first scientist to lead an agency that has such an important role in physical-science research.

On an end table in his waiting room lie some recent biophysics papers on which Chu is a co-author. Chu puts the papers out to make a point — to visitors and himself — that he is still a working scientist. During his time at the LBNL, he kept a small research group of Stanford and Berkeley students, holding group meetings on Friday nights and on weekends. Even now, he says, he finds a little time for research during plane flights. Although Chu's October visit to the LBNL was his first lab-wide talk, he had visited before to check in with postdocs and meet new, young scientists — trips that Alivisatos calls Chu's "science vacations".

During an interview at his office, Chu settles into the centre of a couch, his back to an expansive view of Washington DC's mall and the Smithsonian Castle. At 61, Chu is resolutely trim. Although he no longer commutes to work by bike, as he often did at Berkeley, he manages long weekend rides and regularly climbs the seven flights of stairs to his office. Chu leans back when he listens, which is often, and leans forward when making a point. He is quick to crack a joke and eager to please. At least, he's that way with politicians (and reporters). With scientists, he can be impatient. "He does not suffer fools," says Michael Levi, an astrophysicist at the LBNL.

Chu retains a scientist's candour — and that can sometimes get him into trouble. At his confirmation hearing, some senators jumped on Chu for calling coal "his worst nightmare" in a 2007 talk. (Chu says that the United States, China and India are unlikely to turn their backs on their huge coal reserves and that underscores the need to find clean ways to use the fuel.) A month after taking office, Chu slipped when he told reporters that it was "not in his domain" whether the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) should cut oil production, an impolitic statement. He acknowledges that he was surprised at how his words have been magnified by the press.

Yet his inability to mince words is also an asset, especially in the floors below him in the DOE's headquarters, a fortress on concrete stilts. The DOE national labs have been characterized as inefficient, but that is in part because past safety and security lapses have led to a culture that stresses caution over aggressive research. When, during his talk at the LBNL, Chu mentions his desire to return to the original spirit of the labs, GOCO — government owned, but contractor operated — he gets a hearty round of applause. Chu says that the risk-averse culture, at both headquarters and the labs, must be changed. "The best way to protect yourself from something bad happening is to not do much."

CONTINUED ON newsnn3

news20091221nn3

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 20 December 2009 | Nature 462, 978-983 (2009) | doi:10.1038/462978a
News Feature
Newsmaker of the year: The power player
As a physicist, he found a way to capture atoms and won a Nobel prize. Now he is marshalling scientists and engineers to transform the world's biggest energy economy. Eric Hand profiles the US energy secretary, Nature's Newsmaker of the Year.
Eric Hand

CONTINUED FROM newsnn2

Chu has already made headway. When he found out that billions of dollars in loans for energy projects that had been authorized in 2005 had not progressed, he insisted that they be pushed out in months, with the first one going to a solar-power company. It has helped to get involved personally, he says. Before closing on a $5.9-billion loan with Ford Motors, Chu says he was talking to the firm's chief executive every third day — an example that sent a clear message to his subordinates to act. "In certain areas, I'm not going away," he says. "The pressure is not going to let up."

To encourage more adventurous research, he has pushed to develop the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, known as ARPA-E, which draws its inspiration from DARPA, the celebrated research programme run by the Department of Defense that had an important role in creating the Internet. ARPA-E is designed to pursue high-risk, high-reward research on new forms of energy and conservation (see 'Blue sky, green tech'). The programme preceded Chu, but it's a pet of his, not least because he recommended it as a co-author on an influential study by the National Academies entitled Rising Above the Gathering Storm, which in 2005 warned of declining American competitiveness.

The ARPA-E concept will work, says Chu, only if the smartest reviewers are enlisted to pick out the most innovative ideas — otherwise incremental research is rewarded. "I unfortunately can't review all of the proposals myself," he told a group of clean-energy businesspeople in October, only half-jokingly. So Chu wrote a letter to the presidents of top research universities asking them to nominate their best researchers as ARPA-E reviewers. Five hundred responded to the call for duty.

Chu himself spent about two hours with the final set of proposals. Fleming, Chu's former LBNL deputy, says this sort of task suits his old boss. "I've never known anyone able to go away and come back 10 minutes later knowing so much about a new topic." And on the day that he visited the LBNL, Chu announced the 37 winning proposals, which would use $151 million of an initial $400 million given to the programme.

Chu's most ambitious idea has been to create eight focused and independent energy labs, modelled after the Manhattan Project, to develop technologies such as next-generation batteries and advanced nuclear power (see 'Chu's innovation factories'). But this is where he has run into the most trouble, and it exposes the limitations of the do-it-all-yourself approach. As Congress debated whether to fund Chu's new labs in fiscal year 2010, staffers found that they couldn't get the details on what, exactly, the DOE wanted. Would they be virtual labs, or permanent facilities? How many years would they be funded for? What mix of basic and applied science would be supported? "The hubs were just dropped on Congress," says one congressional staffer who adds that Chu's office did not provide consistent or timely information.

The communication problems with the Hill were on display at a hearing of a congressional appropriations committee in May. Senator Diane Feinstein (Democrat, California), a friend of Chu's, had a complaint. She had wanted to talk privately with him about some solar projects, but she had not been able to make an appointment to see Chu via his staff. "I'm a little bit surprised if you asked to see me and my staff said no," Chu replied.

"We just haven't gotten a response, that's sort of the way it's done," said Feinstein in an apparent attempt to educate the secretary on Washington customs. But Chu, who likes to deal with issues himself, did not seem to understand. "I'm still surprised," he said. "You actually have my private number."

In the end, when Congress doled out money to the DOE, Chu lost some battles. Money that he had proposed cutting from hydrogen research was reinstated. A $115-million education programme he had championed received nothing. Worst of all, for Chu, only three of his eight energy hubs were funded.

Chu's critics say that more attention to Congress could have alleviated the problems, but nearly a year into his tenure, he has not appointed an assistant secretary to head up his legislative-affairs office. Chu says the vacant position was not the problem. The issue was that he hadn't followed through himself. "The failure was on my part," he says, "because I wasn't communicating what the real vision was."

Energy ambassador

On a cold day in early December, Chu was preparing to travel to the United Nations' climate-change conference in Copenhagen. Before the trip, one of the last public events on his schedule was to appear with Secretary of Commerce, Gary Locke, to talk about speeding up the process for granting patents on green technologies.

In July, the two secretaries went to Beijing together to meet with Chinese energy ministers. Locke, a prominent politician of Chinese descent, was greeted warmly. But Chu, with his Nobel-prize pedigree, was a rock star in a culture that reveres education. "He was like a Michael Jordan," says an administration official. "Everybody knew this guy."

{Busy schedule: Chu likes to take care of many details on his own.}
C. OMMANNEY/GETTY}

Chu has taken a particular interest in China not because of his ancestry, he says, but because it emits more carbon dioxide than any other nation and it is also spending billions of dollars on clean-energy research. During the trip, Chu and Locke announced that the United States and China would jointly pursue research in areas such as energy efficiency and capturing carbon dioxide from coal-plant exhaust.

In his trip to Denmark, Chu reprised his role as energy ambassador. He announced plans to hold a conference next year with foreign energy ministers and pledged $85 million in US aid for renewable-energy projects in the developing world. For Chu, the summit served as a prelude to the fight next year, when he will use his main weapons — knowledge and powers of persuasion — to try to convince members of Congress to vote for a climate bill that would for the first time cap US emissions of greenhouse gases.

Chu says that when he ends his time as energy secretary, he will measure his success by two criteria: whether he aided adoption of a climate bill, and how much he changed the way that the DOE supports science. Those metrics would have seemed odd to a young scientist at Bell Labs in the 1980s who spent his days fretting over the precision of laser beams. Chu didn't plan on working his way to the upper echelons of the US government, where he is the first scientist since the cold war to play such an active part. "It just sort of happened," he says. "I followed the path first from going and doing the science, to getting very concerned about some issues that affect us all as a society, to finally saying, I can't sit idly by and occasionally give a talk on this. I really have to get proactive and put my money where my mouth is and do a career shift because it is that important."

But looking back, it's possible that the call to public service may have been whispering to Chu even during his graduate-school days at Berkeley, where the memories of the war effort remained fresh in the physics department. When Chu briefly took up sculpting at Berkeley, he chose to make a bust of Oppenheimer, the physicist-turned-manager who oversaw all details of the Manhattan Project.

Chu is now looking to another Berkeley star for inspiration. Lately, he has been reading the journals of Seaborg, who led the war-time team racing to extract plutonium for a bomb. Seaborg recounts how his group required fast-working Geiger counters that were not available at the time. So he pushed his crew to invent the needed detectors. For Chu, that sense of urgency in the face of a great threat stands out in Seaborg's work: "He kept saying: 'This isn't university research. We've got to move much faster'."

news20091221bbc

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[U.S. Healthcare reform]
John Whitesides and Donna Smith
WASHINGTON
Mon Dec 21, 2009 1:53am EST
U.S. health bill passes crucial Senate test
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A broad healthcare overhaul passed its first crucial test in the U.S. Senate on Monday, with 60 Democrats voting to put President Barack Obama's top legislative priority on a path to passage by Christmas.

In a middle-of-the-night vote in a snowbound U.S. capital, Democrats unanimously backed the first in a series of three procedural motions to cut off debate and move the bill to a final vote by at least Christmas Eve.

"We'll get this passed before Christmas and it will be one of the best Christmas presents this Congress has ever given the American people," Democratic Senator Tom Harkin said.

Monday's vote was the first test of whether Democrats could secure the 60 votes needed to overcome unified Republican opposition and muscle healthcare reform through the Senate.

Republicans acknowledged they could not stop the bill, which would spark the biggest changes in the $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare system since the 1965 creation of the Medicare health program for the elderly.

"The impact of this vote will long outlive this one frantic, snowy weekend in Washington," Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell said. "This legislation will reshape our nation, and Americans have already issued their verdict -- they don't want it."

The bitter healthcare debate has consumed the U.S. Congress for months and raised the stakes for Obama, with his political standing and legislative agenda on the line less than a year into his first term.

The Senate cast the vote in a formal roll call, with senators calling out their votes from their desk. Democrats hugged and shook hands in celebration afterward, while Republicans headed home quickly.

Democrats were assured of victory on Saturday after their last holdout, Senator Ben Nelson, agreed to a compromise ensuring federal funds would not be used to pay for abortions and sending extra healthcare money to his home state of Nebraska.

With 60 votes in hand, the only drama in the early Monday vote was whether all of the Democrats would make it through the snow-packed streets of Washington to the Capitol.

'PRAY FOR A NO-SHOW'

"What the American people ought to pray is that someone can't make the vote tonight," Republican Senator Tom Coburn said beforehand.

The loss of even one Democrat would sink the plan in the 100-member Senate. Democrats control 60 votes, the exact number needed to overcome united Republican opposition.

If the Senate passes the health bill, it must be reconciled with a version passed by the House of Representatives that has stricter anti-abortion language and a government-run insurance option dropped from the Senate bill to appease moderates.

The merged bill must be passed again by each chamber before it is sent to Obama, but the final measure is unlikely to stray far from the Senate version given the difficulties in winning approval there.

Nelson said he will oppose the combined bill if it changes his abortion deal or reinstates the government-run insurance option, and other Democrats voiced similar concerns.

"Significant deviations from the core principles I insisted on in this compromise must remain, or I will withhold my support," Democratic Senator James Webb said.

The Senate bill would require most Americans to have insurance, extend coverage to 30 million uninsured Americans and provide subsidies to help some pay for it.

It would set up exchanges where those who are not covered by work-based policies could choose which plans to buy, and would halt industry practices like refusing insurance to people with pre-existing medical conditions.

Obama has asked the Senate to finish by the end of the year to prevent the issue from spilling into the campaign for November 2010 congressional elections. Opinion polls show the bill losing public support, with majorities now opposed to it.

The vote early on Monday formally cut off debate on an amendment offered on Saturday by Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid that made the final changes needed to win the support of all 60 Democrats.

In addition to the abortion compromise and the jettisoning of the government-run insurance option, the revisions require health insurance plans for large groups to spend at least 85 cents of every dollar on medical costs, potentially crimping their profits.

Also included is an increase in the bill's Medicare payroll tax from 0.5 percent to 0.9 percent on income over $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples.

Democrats hope Republicans will surrender once Democrats prevail in the three procedural test votes that require a 60-vote threshold. The next test vote would be Tuesday morning -- 30 hours after the first one -- and the final one on Wednesday afternoon.

If Republicans insist on using all of their allotted time under Senate rules, they can delay the final vote until late on Christmas Eve. That vote requires only a simple majority.

"We are not going to give up after this vote, believe me," Republican Senator John McCain said.

(Editing by Eric Walsh)

news20091221reut1

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
John McCrank
TORONTO
Mon Dec 21, 2009 11:32am EST
Canadian auto parts makers poised for green gains
TORONTO (Reuters) - A push by U.S. automakers to build more fuel efficient vehicles is playing to a strength of Canada's auto parts makers and positions them to pick up market share as the industry emerges from recession.

The Detroit-based automakers face a simple choice: adapt or die. Foreign-based manufacturers that specialize in smaller, greener vehicles are eating their lunch in car showrooms across the country, while U.S. fuel and emissions standards have tightened, forcing innovation.

That's good news for Canadian companies such as Magna International Inc, Linamar Corp, and Martinrea, all of which could benefit from their expertise in areas like weight reduction and advanced powertrains, analysts said.

"They are very well positioned because their larger customers, particularly General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, have had no money to put into research and development for the last few years, so they have been relying on the auto parts makers to invest in research and development on their behalf," said Michael Willemse, an analyst at CIBC Capital Markets in Toronto.

Shares of Linamar have risen nearly sevenfold in value since March, when the survival of both GM and Chrysler was in doubt. Martinrea shares have climbed five and a half times in value over the same period and Magna's stock has doubled.

Magna is particularly active in developing green technology. The company, which has nearly $1 billion in net cash, has made investments in technologies for electric vehicles and fuel efficiency a priority.

"I would regard Magna as extremely strongly positioned because of its technical capabilities," said David Tyerman, an analyst at Genuity Capital Markets in Toronto.

On Friday, Magna announced a partnership with the government of Canada on a new research facility for the development of thermoplastic composites, designed to cut the weight of structural car parts and make vehicles more fuel-efficient and affordable.

"It is absolutely critical that every vehicle part and/or system be focused on making a contribution to lower emissions and better fuel economy," said Don Walker, Magna's co-chief executive.

Like Magna, Brampton, Ontario-based Martinrea uses a technique called hydro-forming to make cost-effective, strong, lightweight parts. It also uses newer metal forming technologies, like hot stamping, to make lightweight pieces.

On the components side, Magna launched a joint venture with Switzerland's Brusa Elektronik in March to develop applications to target the wave of hybrid electric, plug-in hybrid, and electric vehicles being developed by the major automakers.

Magna also has the advantage of having full vehicle engineering and developing capability, due to its Magna Steyr facilities in Austria, said Tyerman. On top of building vehicles on contract for companies like BMW and Mercedes-Benz, it produces lithium-ion battery systems for Volvo's industrial fleet vehicles.

Aurora, Ontario-based Magna, which is working with Ford to bring a lithium ion battery-powered car to North America, has already built it own electric vehicle concept car -- the Mila EV -- to showcase its expertise.

FUEL EFFICIENCY A MUST

The push toward fuel efficiency comes as the U.S. government tries to wean the country off its dependence on foreign oil, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The initiative will boost fuel efficiency by 40 percent over current standards by 2030.

Reducing the mass of a vehicle will help achieve those tighter standards, as will improvements in propulsion systems, said Bill Pochiluk, president of West Chester, Pennsylvania-based consulting firm Automotive Compass.

"If you could only do one thing in Canada to support the supply base ... you would really support the heck out of powertrains," he said. "It's an area where there's still lots of room to grow, lots of room for improvement."

Guelph, Ontario-based Linamar is one company that has made big strides in powertrain development, said Genuity's Tyerman.

Rather than developing hybrid or electric propulsion systems, Linamar has focused mainly on making a more efficient internal combustion engine, which is still expected to be the dominant powertrain over the next 20 years.

"Linamar may be the largest beneficiary, proportionally, of all this over the next five, 10, 20 years," said Tyerman. "They are less diversified, so what they do is directly driven by fuel efficiency, and because they are a big player, they are benefiting from the rush to new engines and transmissions."

($1=$1.07 Canadian)

(Reporting by John McCrank; editing by Rob Wilson)


[Green Business]
GENEVA
Mon Dec 21, 2009 10:00am EST
WTO sets panel on China raw material export curbs
GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Trade Organization set up a panel on Monday to rule on complaints by the United States, European Union and Mexico about Chinese curbs on exports of raw materials important to their own industries.

The three, who agreed that only one panel need to look into the issue although they filed their complaints separately, argued that the restrictions pushed up costs of materials used to produce steel, aluminum and chemicals.

China had blocked a previous request for a dispute panel, to be composed of three trade experts who will have six months to come up with their findings, but under WTO rules was not able to reject it a second time.

Most disputes at the WTO, which umpires the rules for global commerce, involve attempts to block imports unfairly.

But in this case, the complainants argue that China's export restrictions give an unfair advantage to its domestic industries which can buy the raw materials involved more cheaply.

A U.S. official told the WTO's Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) that the curbs included export quotas and duties, minimum export pricing, and limits on the right to export and other measures that pushed up export prices for the goods involved.

The official, echoed by diplomats from the 27-nation EU and Mexico, argued that the Chinese measures not only violated WTO trading rules but also the terms of the agreement under which China entered the WTO in 2000.

China says the restrictions -- on exports of bauxite, coke, magnesium, manganese and other minerals -- are needed to conserve natural resources.

A Chinese representative told the DSB that Beijing felt the decision by the three to go ahead with the panel request in the case would not help find a solution, and that continuing dialogue would have been better.

He also argued that the way the three had formulated their complaint made it difficult to prepare a defense because the legal base on which it was based was not sufficiently clear.

China would ask the panel, likely to start work in the New Year, for a quick ruling on that issue, he said.

In a move ahead of Monday's WTO dispute settlement body meeting, China announced last Wednesday that it would cut export duties in 2010 on certain forms of three other base metals -- molybdenum, indium and tungsten.

At the same DSB meeting on Monday, the United States was able to block China's request for a panel to rule on U.S. additional duties on Chinese tires imposed in September.

Under WTO regulations it will not be able to block a second request, which China could make at the next meeting of the DSB, set for January 19.

Washington imposed the 35 percent duties because unions had complained that Chinese low-price tires were flooding into the country, destroying jobs.

Global trade rules allow countries to impose temporary duties as a safeguard against sudden surges of imports.

In another development at the DSB session, the Philippines rejected a call by the European Union for a panel to examine Manila's taxes on spirits. If Brussels persists in the case, as expected, a panel will be created automatically in January.

(Reporting by Robert Evans; Editing by Alison Williams)


[Green Business]
KOLKATA
Mon Dec 21, 2009 4:45am EST
India's Tata Steel to reduce carbon emissions
KOLKATA (Reuters) - India's Tata Steel is trying to bring down carbon dioxide emissions to 1.8 tonnes per tonne of steel produced by 2012 from 2 tonnes of carbon dioxide now, a top official said on Monday.

"Our target is to bring it down to 1.8 tonnes by 2012 and to 1.5 tonnes by 2020," Managing Director H.M. Nerurkar told reporters on the sidelines of a CII conference in Kolkata.

He said Tata Steel's carbon dioxide emissions were already below global industry averages of about 2.2 tonnes per tonne of steel.

He said that while it was relatively easy to bring down carbon emissions to 1.7 tonnes per tonne of steel, it would be difficult to lower them below that.

On the prospects for Tata Steel's European unit Corus, Nerurkar said there was a slight recovery in Europe and it was expecting more orders in the infrastructure sector.

Last week Corus got a 350 million euro order ($510 million) contract to supply rail tracks to French operator SNFC.

(Reporting by Niladri Bhattacharjee; Editing by John Mair)

news20091221reut2

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
SEOUL
Mon Dec 21, 2009 10:01pm EST
LG Elec to start producing solar cells in January
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea's LG Electronics Inc said on Tuesday it would start commercial production of solar cells and modules next month at its local plant, as clean energy emerges as the next growth engine for many technology firms.

LG's production line is able to produce 520,000 solar modules using silicon wafers annually, a number capable of producing enough electricity to power 40,000 homes for a year.

LG said it planned to set up another production line for operation by 2011. Total investments for the two lines would reach 220 billion won ($185.6 million), LG said in a statement.

The global market for solar cells is estimated at $11 billion this year, according to LG.

($1=1185.4 Won)

(Reporting by Rhee So-eui; Editing by Jonathan Hopfner)


[Green Business]
LONDON
Mon Dec 21, 2009 10:31am EST
Q+A: What Copenhagen Accord means for prices, markets
LONDON (Reuters) - European carbon prices crashed by almost 9 percent on Monday after UN climate talks ended on Saturday with a bare-minimum agreement between after the U.S., China and a few other emerging powers that falls far short of the conference's original goals.

The European Union said the accord -- weaker than a legally binding treaty and weaker even than the 'political' deal many had foreseen -- was not ambitious enough to persuade it to raise its carbon cutting target to a 30 percent cut by 2020 versus 1990 levels from a 20 percent cut.

The Copenhagen Accord also cast more uncertainty on the post-2012 future of a carbon offset trading scheme under the Kyoto Protocol called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

Market players weighed in on how this will affect prices for EU Allowances, the permits traded under the EU's $92 billion Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), for Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs), the offsets traded under the CDM, and how it will affect the development of global carbon markets in general.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR CARBON PRICES?

* Mark C. Lewis, analyst at Deutsche Bank

"There is now no near-term prospect of the EU raising its 2020 target. As a result, sentiment will be negatively affected and we expect EUA prices to decline over the next few sessions."

"With the selling of surplus EUAs by industrials in early 2010 already a real possibility before the outcome of Copenhagen was known, we would not now be surprised to see sustained EUA price weakness through to the middle or end of February 2010."

* Emmanuel Fages, analyst at Societe Generale

"The mood will be bearish. I do not think many speculators had long positions left - they started being disposed of on Thursday. What we could see is not mainly length sales, but short creation. Prices cannot go down very far. Sentiment is not enough to move prices much as fundamentals will continue driving the scheme for the operators."

* Meg Brown, analyst at Citigroup

"The unsatisfactory outcome of the negotiations now makes it unlikely that the EU's 20 percent target will be changed, in our view, with the most likely reconsideration of the target not until 2015 -- in line with the new accord's timeline."

"This is be negative for EUA prices in the short term, through 2010 and potentially through to 2020. We assume an average Phase 2 (2008-12) EUA price of 20 euros per tonne, rising to 25 euros in 2013 and 30 euros in 2020, based on an expectation of some tightening of the scheme from 2013. Our floor price for periods of low permit demand is 10 euros."

* Trevor Sikorski, director at Barclays Capital

"The impact is likely to be transitory. After this morning's strongly bearish opening, the market is more likely to return to reasonably normal trading patterns. The Copenhagen failure did little to alter the expected supply-demand balance under the EU ETS and it is not likely to have changed the underlying hedging pattern of power sector participants. The impact on the industrial sales is harder to call, as it does mean that some of the potential upside for EU carbon prices has been eroded."

"Q1 is still likely to see a low for carbon prices as, if anything, there is slightly more incentive for industrial length to hit the market. We expect prices are likely to average 11.50 euros in Q1 before strengthening over the remainder of 2010."

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR CARBON MARKETS IN GENERAL?

* David Metcalfe, director at Verdantix

"A non-binding agreement that codifies national commitments and includes voluntary emission reductions of countries like China significantly increases the probability that the Kerry-Boxer (U.S. cap and trade) legislation will be passed."

"Executives responsible for energy and climate change plans should avoid new investments in the Kyoto-based global carbon markets. Badly defined rules, insufficient UN staff and a depressed carbon price conspire to make this a very high risk market. The accord further postpones crucial reform of this dysfunctional market mechanism."

* Mark C. Lewis, Deutsche Bank

"It heightens uncertainty over the continuation of the CDM and JI mechanisms beyond 2012, at least in their current forms ... The development of new CDM projects is likely to slow over the course of next year, and perhaps significantly so."

"This opens up the possibility of ... bilateral deals between the EU and third countries under which emissions reduction projects could be established in to generate credits for use in the EU ETS over 2013-20 (note: any such credits would complement, not replace, Kyoto offsets."

* Meg Brown, Citigroup

"International offset markets were hoping for detail on how CDM would be expanded, perhaps including sector-specific benchmarks and an expansion of the market's size. Heavy industry must wait longer for clarification of emission liabilities and international abatement mechanisms ... This will likely perpetuate carbon market uncertainty post 2012."

* Alessandro Vitelli, director at IDEAcarbon

"Copenhagen is a bottom-up, federal process where sovereign nations contribute their national commitments to the process. Kyoto expressed a similar approach in a top-down fashion, which earned it the enduring enmity of the U.S."

"For the markets, Copenhagen holds the continued promise of interlinked markets in both developed and developing countries."

* Trevor Sikorski, Barclays Capital

"This is a very disappointing outcome that is even below our modest expectations. The news is bearish ... I see nothing here that should drive investment in the carbon commodity and low carbon technology."

* James Cameron, vice-chairman at Climate Change Capital "There are small encouragements in the reform of the CDM which should make the process better - quicker, fairer and more effective at taking tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere."

* Richard Gledhill, head carbon market services, PwC

"President Obama gave a clear message in his speech in Copenhagen - America is going to take action on climate now. If passed by Congress, U.S. climate legislation could create a market three times the size of the EU scheme. That would be a massive boost to the global carbon market, but would also move its focus from London to New York."

(Compiled by Michael Szabo; Editing by Sue Thomas)


[Green Business]
GENEVA
Mon Dec 21, 2009 10:02am EST
Copenhagen provides negotiation model for WTO: Lamy
GENEVA (Reuters) - Behind the scenes negotiating by major economies in Copenhagen to agree a climate accord may be a model for how to wrap up the Doha Round of trade talks, the head of the World Trade Organization said on Friday.

"You don't get to a sort of overall agreement with 153 members without a number of behind the scenes bilateral testing and contacts, and of course, U.S., China, Brazil, India, EU, Japan, who are the sort of biggest players in international trade, have a special responsibility to move this forward," WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy told Reuters Insider.

While the Doha deal would ultimately require the support of all 153 WTO members to be signed, the largest trading nations may first need to agree between them how to cut protective tariffs and subsidies, he said in an interview.

"After what happened in Copenhagen, you can have a sort of geopolitical intuition of what the end game could look like," Lamy said, referring to an albeit unambitious climate deal that set no firm deadline for a legally binding treaty.

Ministers from around the world met in Geneva for a WTO meeting in early December at which they pledged to take the pulse of the eight-year-old Doha Round again early 2010, with the view to push it to a conclusion later that year.

Previous efforts to get a framework deal agreed between the United States, European Union, Brazil and India -- known as the "G4" -- failed because the negotiators could not overcome their differences on sensitive issues such as cutting farm subsidies.

The climate agreement in Copenhagen was not formally adopted by all nations due to opposition by a handful of developing nations who said it ignored the real needs of the poor. The talks almost collapsed amid allegations by Sudan and Venezuela that host Denmark was biased toward the interests of the rich.

(Reporting by Reuters Insider; Writing by Laura MacInnis; Editing by Louise Ireland)

news20091221reut3

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
Timothy Gardner - Analysis
WASHINGTON
Mon Dec 21, 2009 5:56pm EST
U.S. cap and trade looks out of reach in 2010
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers face an uphill battle enacting a climate bill in 2010 that includes a cap-and-trade market in greenhouse gases, after this month's U.N. meeting in Copenhagen failed to hammer out a global pact on emissions cuts.

U.S. climate legislation remains likely as lawmakers feel pressure to help the country lead in production of low-carbon energy sources such as wind, solar and nuclear power.

But the Copenhagen Accord did not include emissions targets. This will make it difficult for lawmakers to argue that the United States should have a cap while China, the world's top emitter of greenhouse gases, and other big polluters are not legally required to act on climate.

"We were previously of the view that cap and trade was becoming an increasingly hard sell in the U.S.," said Paul McConnell, an energy markets analyst at Wood Mackenzie. "But I think the events in Copenhagen have probably made that even more difficult."

Alternatives to cap and trade will emerge, such as mandates and incentives for increasing levels of energy from low-carbon sources like solar, wind and nuclear.

Further delays in launching a trillion-dollar market in U.S. rights to emit greenhouse gases will disappoint potential investors and dealers looking toward a trading scheme that could be several times larger than the one in Europe.

The healthcare debate has delayed U.S. Senate action on climate, and financial industry reform legislation will likely push back the cap-and-trade debate into early next year, analysts said.

The longer the delay, the harder it will be to convince undecided Democratic senators to vote for a cap-and-trade plan.

"For a lot of moderate Democrats who are up for reelection, they don't want to be seen as closely attached to this because of the concerns about job losses and higher energy prices," said Divya Reddy, an analyst at the Eurasia Group in Washington.

Said McConnell: "Cap and trade potentially could have economic impacts, which many senators would be loathe to push onto the U.S. economy right now," as it struggles to recover from recession.

That could make it harder for the three senators working on a compromise climate bill -- Democrat John Kerry, Republican Lindsey Graham and independent Joe Lieberman -- to come up with the 60 votes required to pass the measure with cap and trade. Such a proposal was included in the climate bill that passed narrowly in the House of Representatives in June.

Failure to pass a U.S. cap and trade program could have international implications. It could delay development of a similar market in Canada, which has signaled it will follow the U.S. lead on an greenhouse gas emissions mechanisms.

Lengthy delays could also hamper investments in energy efficiency and low-carbon sources like wind, solar, and nuclear power. Experts say such alternatives would remain more expensive than today's dirtier technologies.

PLAN B

Kerry said in Copenhagen last week that the Senate bill may not contain cap and trade, and other options are being discussed.

So-called "Plan B" alternatives to cap and trade could include carbon taxes and national mandates for power generators to produce higher levels of cleaner energy sources, Reddy said.

A new climate strategy could also include elements of a "cap and dividend" plan recently introduced by two senators. That aims to cut Wall Street's role in emissions markets by auctioning permits to polluters and delivering most of the proceeds to the general public.

But Kevin Book, an analyst at Clearview Energy Partners, LLC, said many senators and many companies, like oil major ConocoPhillips and power generator Duke Energy Corp, are already sold on cap and trade. Some power companies that have invested in low-carbon electricity generation feel they could compete better against companies that burn mostly coal under a cap-and-trade regime.

In addition, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency may become more aggressive on forcing polluters to cut emissions after issuing a finding late this year that greenhouse gases endanger human health.

Still, the lack of a global agreement on emissions cuts will make it hard for U.S. lawmakers to convince the public to accept caps on emissions that get stricter over time.

"There's definitely scope for other solutions," McConnell said. "For the U.S. to put itself under strict and binding emissions targets when other major emitters aren't doing the same thing, represents something of a challenge."

(Editing by Jeffrey Jones and David Gregorio)


[Green Business]
Nina Chestney - Analysis
LONDON
Mon Dec 21, 2009 10:30am EST
EU carbon scheme reels after weak climate deal
LONDON (Reuters) - The credibility of the European Union's flagship carbon trading scheme was dealt another blow on Monday after carbon prices fell to six-month lows as U.N. talks in Copenhagen failed to deliver a strong climate deal.

Traders and analysts say low prices could continue well into 2010, slowing investment in low-carbon technologies which have already been dented by tight financing due to a slow economy.

"(The low price) reinforces the idea that relying solely on the EU ETS to drive investment is probably not the answer at the moment," said Andy Kelly, head of business development at Centrica.

"This does give ammunition to the anti cap-and-trade brigade," an emissions trader said, referring to groups who say emissions trading does not work.

The European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) imposes a cap on carbon emissions from power plants and factories in the 27-nation bloc using a fixed quota of EU Allowances (EUAs).

Prices can directly influence the daily operation of power generators, encouraging them to switch to gas from heavy-carbon coal, or make investments in renewable sources of electricity. Low prices directly benefit fossil fuel energy production.

The scheme is sometimes criticized for not spurring low-carbon investment fast enough. Utilities say they need certainty from a prolonged and sustained rise in carbon prices to invest in new nuclear plants and carbon capture and storage.

Many analysts say EUAs need to rise to 25-30 euros or even higher to spur such investments but prices are not forecast to reach that level until 2012 or beyond.

EUA prices were under 13 euros ($18.63) a tonne on Monday, a far cry from almost 30 euros last summer. So far in 2009 the economic downturn has reduced industrial output, thereby the need for emissions permits.

Whatever the current price, New Energy Finance argues it should not deter utilities from formulating business models based on future prices.

"We don't see much impact from the EU ETS on investments at all under current caps. Utilities will be looking at longer-term prices for their business models, in which case today's price is not very relevant," said Olivier Lejeune, analyst at New Energy Finance.

WEAK DEAL, WEAK CARBON

"Carbon prices could remain depressed until the second or third quarter of 2010. The market will be exposed to the issuance of 2010 allowances and subject to a remarkable economic upturn we face the potential of excess selling," said Andrew Ager, head of emissions trading at Bache Commodities.

Many players expect industrial companies to sell off excess EUAs in January or February, weighing on prices further.

Market participants had hoped that a strong deal in Copenhagen would produce tougher carbon caps, upping demand for emissions permits.

However, the so-called Copenhagen Accord was not ambitious enough to persuade the EU to raise its emissions target to a 30 percent cut by 2020 from 1990 levels from 20 percent.

In the absence of a strong global climate pact, it will be difficult to expect significantly higher prices, some market players said.

"Without a firm agreement, I can't see that much which will boost the price in the short term. Below average temperatures and a booming economy would obviously boost carbon prices. However I am not confident of either," Ager said.

(Reporting by Nina Chestney; Editing by Sue Thomas)

news20091221reut4

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business > Environment]
Yereth Rosen
ANCHORAGE, Alaska
Mon Dec 21, 2009 8:22pm EST
Alaska coast erosion threat to oil, wildlife
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - A portion of Alaska's North Slope coastline is eroding at a rate of up to 45 feet a year, posing a threat to oil operations and wildlife in the area, according to a new report issued by scientists at the University of Colorado.

Warmer ocean water has thawed the base of frozen bluffs and destroyed natural ice barriers protecting the coast, causing large earth chunks to fall each summer, the scientists said.

"What we are seeing now is a triple whammy effect," study co-author Robert Anderson, an associate professor at the University of Colorado's Department of Geological Sciences, said. "Since the summer Arctic sea ice cover continues to decline and Arctic air and sea temperatures continue to rise, we really don't see any prospect for this process ending."

The scientists studied coastline midway between Point Barrow, the nation's northernmost spot, and Prudhoe Bay, site of the nation's biggest oil fields. The erosion, if it continues, could ultimately be a problem for energy companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp and BP Plc.

Findings were presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. They backed up other studies of erosion along Alaska's Beaufort Sea coastline.

A study by U.S. Geological Survey scientists published in February found that erosion along a stretch of Alaska coastline during 2002 to 2007 was twice as fast as in the period from 1955 to 1979. That USGS study also found erosion occurring at a rate of 13.6 meters (44.6 feet) annually from 2002 to 2007.

The three-year University of Colorado study aimed to examine how erosion is occurring, said co-author Irina Overeem, a scientist at the University's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.

The scientists employed time-lapse photography, global positioning systems, meteorological monitoring, and analysis of sediment and sea-ice distribution.

Photographic images snapped every six hours during the around-the-clock sunlight of summer were particularly dramatic, Overeem told Reuters.

"There's a notching effect that just notches, notches, notches and then topples over," she said. "The cliffs are more than half ice -- they're basically dirty icebergs -- so warm water, stronger waves and higher wave action quickly carves them away," she said.

Although the study area holds no communities, there is infrastructure at risk, mostly abandoned military and oil-field sites and their associated waste dumps, the scientists said. Also at risk are ponds and lakes that support migratory shorebirds.

The threat of collapsing military and oil-field infrastructure, including toxics-laden waste, has prompted several government agencies to launch emergency cleanup programs.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management since 2005 has cleaned up three old, erosion-threatened wells and plans to start in on a fourth well later this winter, said Wayne Svejnoha, branch chief for energy and minerals. Each well cleanup takes about two months and costs $12 million to $14 million, Svejnoha said.

Erosion threats to shorebirds were confirmed by another federal manager.

"The erosion is very obvious," said Rick Lanctot, Alaska shorebird coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In some spots, saltwater has inundated lakes and ponds, killing off plants that birds eat, while heavy wave action has displaced driftwood used as nest sites, said Lanctot, who has worked there since 1991.

(Reporting by Yereth Rosen; editing by Bill Rigby, Gary Hill)


[Green Business > Environment]
Laura Isensee
LOS ANGELES
Mon Dec 21, 2009 8:06pm EST
California senator acts to widen desert protection
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced a bill on Monday to set aside over one million acres of California desert for wildlife and scenic conservation, closing those areas to renewable energy companies hungry for sunny, wide-open spaces.

The measure marks the latest move by the California Democrat to protect ecologically fragile tracts of the Mojave Desert, putting conservation interests at odds with the search for large swaths of land suitable for solar power arrays and wind farms.

California has set some of the nation's most ambitious clean-energy goals, including a target to meet a third of the state's electricity needs from renewable resources by 2020.

But Feinstein has led efforts to prevent renewable energy expansion from spoiling pristine lands prized for their scenic values and regarded by scientists as crucial habitat for such species as bighorn sheep and desert tortoises.

"I strongly believe that conservation, renewable energy development and recreation can and must co-exist in the California desert," Feinstein said in a statement. She also was a chief sponsor of a 1994 law that bolstered protection for more than 7 million acres (2.8 million hectares) of desert.

Two energy projects that ran afoul of her efforts were canceled earlier this year -- a 500-megwatt solar thermal plant under development by BrightSource Inc and a sprawling solar complex planned by Stirling Energy Systems. Both concerns are privately held.

"We wanted to be respectful of what she's doing and it didn't make sense for us to develop that project further," said Stirling spokeswoman Janette Coates.

The Stirling project originally was planned for a panoramic stretch of desert called Sleeping Beauty Valley, included as part of the 941,000-acre (381,000-hectare) Mojave Trails National Monument now proposed by Feinstein's bill.

A second 134,000-acre (54,000-hectare) area near Joshua Tree National Park would be designated as the Sand to Snow National Monument. National monuments are similar to national parks and administered by the National Park Service.

The bill also would set aside 250,000 acres of public land as wilderness -- a more restrictive classification barring roads and permanent buildings -- near the U.S. Army's Fort Irwin training center; expand Death Valley National Park by 41,000 acres ; and add 2,900 acres to Joshua Tree Park.

BrightSource and Stirling are not alone. Various companies have filed more than 130 applications with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to build solar arrays or wind turbine farms in California's desert.

To help accommodate such demands, the U.S. Interior Department has designated 670,000 acres of land especially for potential solar energy production in six western states.

And the agency recently fast-tracked the permit process for more than 2.4 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects in California alone, including another Stirling solar venture.

In her bill, Feinstein included provisions to ease the permit process for large wind and solar projects on public and private lands in the California desert.

(Reporting by Laura Isensee, editing by Steve Gorman)


[Green Business > Environment > COP15]
Peter Griffiths
LONDON
Mon Dec 21, 2009 9:27am EST
Gordon Brown says "handful" of states wrecked climate talks
LONDON (Reuters) - A handful of countries blocked a legally binding deal on climate change in Copenhagen and the talks process needs urgent reform to prevent something similar happening again, Britain's prime minister said on Monday.

Gordon Brown said the non-binding agreement achieved after rounds of talks in the Danish capital were "at best flawed, at worst chaotic."

"We will not allow a few countries to hold us back," he told an environmental meeting in London via a videolink from Scotland. He did not name those countries. "What happened at Copenhagen was a flawed decision-making process.

"We have just got to find a way of moving this process forward."

Writing in Monday's Guardian newspaper, British Climate Change and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband blamed China for blocking emissions targets.

He also implicated Sudan, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba in the failure to strike a deal, aides told the paper.

China said it would treat talks on a binding global climate change pact in 2010 as a struggle over the "right to develop," a Chinese official said, signaling more tough deal-making will follow the Copenhagen summit.

China, the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases from human activities and its biggest developing economy, was at the heart of the talks, and bared some its growing assertiveness in grinding late-night sessions.

Miliband later said "four or five countries out of 192" had stood in the way of a deal in Copenhagen.

"My biggest frustration was that we were not arguing about points of substance, we were arguing about procedures," Miliband told the meeting in London.

The summit in Copenhagen ended with a bare-minimum agreement on Saturday when delegates "noted" an accord struck by the United States, China and other emerging powers that fell far short of original goals.

(Additional reporting by William James; Editing by Matthew Jones)