news20091222gdn1

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Copenhagen Climate change conference 2009]
Copenhagen treaty was 'held to ransom', says Gordon Brown
Gordon Brown calls for reform of UN climate talks after Copenhagen talks end in weak agreement
David Adam, environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 December 2009 17.56 GMT Article history

Gordon Brown today said a new global treaty on climate change had been "held to ransom" by some countries opposed to a deal in Copenhagen, and called for reform of the way such negotiations take place, including an international body to handle environmental stewardship.

The prime minister said the weak agreement reached in Copenhagen at the weekend after all-night deliberations was a "first step towards a new alliance to overcome the enormous challenges of climate change". He called on all countries to show greater ambition as part of a campaign over the coming months to turn the agreement into a legally binding treaty.

"The talks in Copenhagen were not easy and as they reached conclusion I did fear the process would collapse and we would have no deal at all," he said. "We must learn lessons from Copenhagen and the tough negotiations that took place. Never again should we face the deadlock that threatened to pull down these talks. Never again should we let a global deal to move towards a greener future be held to ransom by only a handful of countries."

Brown added: "One of the frustrations for me was the lack of a global body with the sole responsibility for environmental stewardship. I believe that in 2010 we will need to look at reforming our international institutions to meet the common challenges we face as an international community."

Brown said it was important for the UK and developing countries such as the Maldives and Bangladesh that support a legally binding deal to form an "alliance" to persuade sceptical nations including China to sign up. British officials said they misjudged the attitude of the Chinese government, which took a harder line than expected in Copenhagen and vetoed efforts to introduce carbon targets and a deadline to make the deal legally binding. Ed Miliband, energy and climate change secretary, said in yesterday's Guardian that China had led a group of countries that "hijacked" the negotiations.

China's premier, Wen Jiabao, insisted his government had played an "important and constructive" role.

Other nations, including Venezuela and Bolivia, tried to block the agreement being passed by the wider conference.

Miliband told a meeting in London today that the world could still agree on an ambitious and legally binding treaty by the end of the year. "It is important to convince China that it has nothing to fear from a legal treaty."

But he echoed Brown's criticisms of the process, and said the world needed to reassess the way the UN climate talks work. "The majority of countries want a legal treaty but unfortunately the UN doesn't work on a majority."

Ministers should have got involved earlier, he said. The Copenhagen talks spent so long arguing about process that it left little time to negotiate the substance of an agreement. Aides suggested Britain could push for a streamlined negotiation process over the next twelve months, with groups of countries asked to put forward a representative, rather than debate everything between all 193 states.

The Copenhagen deal requires countries to submit pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the end of January. Brown said that if all countries, including China and the US, showed greater ambition, then the promised cuts could leave the world within "striking distance" of limiting global warming to 2C.

He said: "We will need to harness the best of low carbon technology for the world to continue to grow, while keeping to our pledge made this weekend to limit the increase in global temperatures to 2C."

In a separate report, aid charity Oxfam called for an "overhaul" of the UN negotiating process.

Antonio Hill, Oxfam's climate change adviser, said: "The Copenhagen accord is hugely disappointing but it also reveals how the traditional approach to international negotiations, based on brinkmanship and national self-interest, is both unfit for pursuing our common destiny and downright dangerous."

He added: "There is too much at stake for this politics-as-usual approach. We must act quickly to address the shortfalls of these negotiations so that we can make up for lost time and tackle climate change with the decisiveness and urgency needed. This cannot happen again."

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a global ambassador for the charity, said: "The failure of the political process in Copenhagen to achieve a fair, adequate and binding deal on climate change is profoundly distressing. A higher purpose was at stake but our political leaders have proven themselves unable to rise to the challenge. We must look to the future. Our leaders must regroup, learn and make good their failure for the sake of humanity's future."


[Culture > Art and design Photography]
Loan wolf? Prizewinning photographer faces fakery claims
José Luis Rodriguez accused of using tame, 'model' animal for close-up that won him prestigious £10,000 award
Robert Booth
guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 December 2009 20.01 GMT Article history

It was billed as the moment when a wildlife photographer's remarkable patience was rewarded; an image which won him £10,000 and the year's most prestigious award.

But José Luis Rodriguez is now facing allegations that his startling close-up image of an apparently wild Iberian wolf vaulting a farmer's fence is in fact faked.

The judges of the Veolia Environnement Wildlife photographer of the year competition confirmed tonight they were reconvening to determine whether the Spanish photographer had used a tame and captive "model" animal in breach of competition rules.

They have been sent evidence, apparently from rival photographers, that the pictured animal is a wolf called Ossian who lives at a zoological park near Madrid. A wolf expert, quoted by Finnish nature magazine Suomen Luonto, which revealed the allegations, also said the wolf appears to have been trained to jump the gate, because a wild specimen is likely to squeeze between the bars.

Rodriguez could not be reached for comment, but a spokesman for the Natural History Museum, which runs the prize with BBC Wildlife Magazine, said he strongly denied any wrongdoing or breach of the competition rules.

"The museum is aware of an allegation as to the veracity of the photograph, Storybook Wolf, by José Luis Rodriguez, specifically that an animal model was used in breach of the competition rules," she said. "We are investigating this thoroughly with the judging panel and will report back in the new year once our investigations are completed. Mr Rodriguez strongly denies any wrongdoing or breach of the competition rules."

The rules of the competition, which attracted 43,000 entries, state that "images of captive animals must be declared. The judges will take preference to images taken in free and wild conditions".

Rodriguez had told the judges it took him a long time to find the ideal location, let alone a wolf that would jump a gate.

The text accompanying the winning photograph explained: "His chance came when he found a landowner who was happy to have both the wolves and José Luis on his property, and also had the ideal setting: a copse and an ancient, disused cattle corral.

"José Luis started by placing meat in the corral. Once he knew a male wolf was visiting regularly, jumping the gate, he began to introduce the bits of equipment needed to set up a camera trap … When the first transparencies arrived back from the lab, José Luis was overjoyed to find he finally had the picture he had dreamt of."

One wolf expert, Ilpo Kojola of the Finnish game and fisheries research institute, told the magazine that judging by the pictures provided in evidence against the Spaniard, Rodriguez's wolf appeared to be the tame Ossian. "The dark, scar-like sign under the right eye seems to be a unique mark of this individual," he said.

One judge, Rosamund Kidman Cox, told Luonto judges were looking at details such as differences between images presented of Ossian's right ear and that of the wolf in the photo. The picture of Ossian shows the ear apparently damaged and Kidman Cox speculated this may have been the result of a fight. "But until one bit of evidence can be verified I don't think it's possible to accuse the photographer of cheating," she said. "It's not 100%."

news20091222gdn2

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[News > Science > Plants]
Kew discovers new plant species in one of its own glasshouses
Botanists at Kew unveil a bumper crop of new plant species for 2009 including one that had been growing under their noses for 50 years
Ian Sample, science correspondent
The Guardian, Tuesday 22 December 2009 Article history

The quest to catalogue Earth's rich flora has taken botanists to the farthest flung and most treacherous corners of the world, from the humid rainforests of the Amazon to the highest peaks of Borneo.

Which made it all the more surprising when Iain Darbyshire stumbled upon a species of plant unknown to science while taking a lunchtime stroll around the Royal Botanic Gardens in west London.

Darbyshire, an expert in African botany at Kew, happened upon the foot-tall plant in full bloom, its striking green and grey heart-shaped leaves set off by tiny white and pink flowers.

"I just happened to take a different route through the glasshouse that lunchtime and stumbled across it," Darbyshire told the Guardian. "I knew instantly that it was a new species. It was just sat there waiting for someone to study it."

Record books revealed the plants had been donated by Swedish botanists in the 1990s after an expedition to the Eastern Arc mountains of Tanzania. Unsuspecting gardeners had tended them for more than a decade, using them as tropical bedding in Kew's Princess of Wales Conservatory.

The plant was officially named Isoglossa variegata last month and is among more than 250 new plant and fungus species discovered and described by the gardens' botanists in the past year.

Almost a third of all the species are believed to be facing extinction as their habitats are eroded or destroyed by logging, climate change and other environmental disruption.

In western Madagascar, Kew botanists hiked across extraordinary landscapes of limestone pinnacles and discovered several new species of wild coffee plant, the most traded commodity in the world after oil.

This unique environment has given rise to coffee plants that look nothing like those found elsewhere. Some of the species are conspicuously hairy, and two, Coffea labatii and Coffea pterocarpa, have colourful winged fruit.

The region experiences torrential seasonal downpours that create ephemeral rivers and pools across the stoney forest floor. "These winged fruit float very well, so the feature might be an evolutionary adpatation to aid their dispersal," said Aaron Davis, a coffee expert and taxonomist at the Gardens.

Alternatively, the wings may ensure the fruit are scattered far and wide by making them more visible to lemurs, which feed on the coffee beans.

The hirsute coffee plants might have sprouted hair to protect against harsh ultraviolet rays in the dry season.

"There's a misconception that we've found all the plants there are to find, but we are still in a golden age of discovery," said Davis. "We don't know our planet well enough and we are running out of time. Species are going extinct before we even know about them."

Around 70% of wild coffee species are in danger of extinction.

Elsewhere in Madagascar, botanists noticed two new species of small flowering plants called Gymnosiphon. The bizzare plants draw their energy not from the sun, but from fungi that live underground.

Further expeditions to the rainforests of Cameroon led to the discovery of three giant trees that grow to more than 30m high. One, Berlinia korupensis, is a member of the pea family. The tree towers above its neighbours at 42m high and produces foot-long pods that explode when they ripen, propelling seeds far across the forest floor.

Among some of the smallest species identified this year are tiny wood-rotting fungi from Australia that are less than a millimetre wide and cover trees like a thin coating of paint.

"They are small, but they perform a vital role in decomposition of plant material and recycling of nutrients," said Brian Spooner, a Swedish fungus expert working with Kew researchers.

In South Africa, botanists spotted a plant with lumpy wooden tubers that grow up to a metre high. The species was identified as a yam, but only 200 or so are known to exist in the wild. It is under threat from local medicinal plant collectors who use it as a treatment for cancer.

Some 20 new species were discovered in Brazil alone, the most striking being a red passion flower that is probably pollinated by hummingbirds and produces edible egg-shaped fruit. The plant was spotted in an expedition to the Amazon rainforest in Mato Grasso, Brazil.

The largest haul of new species came from Mount Kinabalu, the highest peak in Borneo, where botanists Jeff Wood and Phil Cribb have identified 38 new species of orchid. Nearly 900 different species live in a 1,200sq km area of the island.

Each new species is identified by detailed visual inspections that are often backed up my genetic analyses. To identify all the world's flora could take another 50 years, but the effort is crucial for conserving rare species and reintroducing species that only exist in protected areas.

Stephen Hopper, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, said the speed of discovery and classification of new species is increasing under the organisation's Breathing Planet Programme.

"These new discoveries highlight the fact that there is so much of the plant world yet to be discovered and documented. Without knowing what's out there and where it occurs, we have no scientific basis for effective conservation," said Hopper.

news20091222nn1

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 21 December 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1157
News
How aircraft emissions contribute to warming
Aviation contributes up to one-fifth of warming in some areas of the Arctic.
Rex Dalton

{{Aircraft emissions could be having a dramatic effect on the warming of the Arctic.}
A. Magurean}

The first analysis of emissions from commercial airline flights shows that they are responsible for 4-8% of surface global warming since surface air temperature records began in 1850 — equivalent to a temperature increase of 0.03-0.06 °C overall.

The analysis, by atmospheric scientists at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, also shows that in the Arctic, aircraft vapour trails produced 15–20% of warming.

The results of this analysis are likely to be studied widely as nations attempt to address the impact of commercial aviation on global warming. There are around 35 million commercial airline flights every year. Studies have been conducted in Europe, with airlines coming under increased pressure as European Union leaders consider levying a carbon tax on aircraft emissions. But little research has been conducted on the topic in the United States.

Previous studies have only estimated the impacts of commercial aviation, but this is the first use of actual emissions data — from 2004 and 2006 — to calculate warming from such flights, says Mark Jacobson, a Stanford engineer who presented the analysis on 17 December at the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting in San Francisco, California.

For the latest study, Jacobson and his team developed a model for aircraft emissions that accounts for atmospheric composition, cloudiness and the physical properties of emissions, particularly of black carbon — a major part of soot.

In his presentation, Jacobson explained how the model was applied to a nine-year simulation covering 2004 to 2013, after breaking up flight routes into 300-kilometre-square grids for analysis. The model was able to calculate the characteristics of vapour trails based on the actual particulate size of emissions and their evolution over time.

Cloudy outlook

Many previous studies have assumed that the impact of aircraft emissions was the same everywhere. But the new analysis reveals that aircraft emissions increased the fraction of cirrus clouds where vapour trails were most abundant, and actually decreased the cirrus fraction in several locations by increasing the temperatures in the lower atmosphere, reducing the relative humidity in such locations.

If black-carbon emissions from aircraft could be reduced 20-fold, warming would be halted and a slight cooling would occur from plane-created vapour trails, Jacobson says.

The team's study is being peer reviewed and is expected to be published soon, Jacobson added.

David Fahey, of the Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado — part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — says that studies such as Jacobson's are important to fill the gaps in aircraft-emissions data following the nation's previously "muddled" research course.

Fahey says that now European leaders are calling for carbon taxes to be levied on each commercial airline flight, the United States is being driven to catch up on aircraft-emissions research. Some of the EU proposals suggest taxing a flight for emissions along its entire route. This is "absurd", says Fahey. For a more realistic levy, high-quality research is needed on the actual impact of such emissions, he adds.


[naturenews]
Published online 22 December 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1158
News
Europe's medical researchers team up
Federation of academic societies hopes to influence research policy.
Natasha Gilbert

{{Cancer societies are among the groups forming an association to lobby for medical research in Europe.}
Punchstock}
Medical researchers from across Europe have come together in an effort to get their voices heard in debates on research funding and policy.

Around 30 academic medical associations representing many fields including diabetes, cancer and heart disease, met in Stockholm to lay the groundwork for a European federation of medical researchers.

Calls for reform from particular science disciplines or national science bodies are often quashed by policy-makers for being self-interested and lacking vision. The aim of the new federation is to advocate for medical research and lobby the European Union (EU) and national politicians and policy-makers from a common viewpoint.

"There is an absolute need for such a body," says Philippe Halban, a diabetes researcher, and chairman of the Alliance for European Diabetes Research, based in Düsseldorf, Germany, who is involved in getting the federation started. "No one speaks for medical research in Europe. We spend a huge amount of time thinking about science policy, but not much time doing anything about it."

{{“No one speaks for medical research in Europe.”}
Philippe Halban
Alliance for European Diabetes Research}

The federation will represent medical associations, such as the European Cancer Organisation, in Brussels, rather than individual researchers and will only tackle issues that are common to all associations and fields. For example, it will argue for increased funding from the EU budget for medical research across all fields, but will not comment on funding levels for individual disciplines. The federation also hopes to speak out on key political issues, such as swine flu and stem cells, and improve communication with the public.

Halban says this tactic should help to ensure the federation is effective as an organization representing disciplines with competing interests. Speaking with a "unified voice", he says, will also help the federation have the "political clout" that its individual member organizations lack.

Halban hopes that the member organizations will have agreed on the federation's mission statement by mid-January so that it can be up and running by spring 2010 to feed into discussion on the development of Europe's next framework programme for research, which is due to begin in 2013. In the current framework programme, €50 billion (US$70 billion) is up for grabs.

Funding extensions

One key issue the federation will tackle is the need for extensions to EU funding for promising research projects. Ulf Smith, president of the European Association for the study of Diabetes in Düsseldorf, Germany, says money is wasted and excellent research is lost without funding extensions. The nascent federation has been in talks with the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to learn about its Method to Extend Research in Time (MERIT) Awards to help inform the federation's arguments for funding in the EU. NIH-funded researchers who have shown outstanding success can win funding extensions for up to 10 years under the MERIT award scheme.

"We will be conveying the problems as scientists see them. It's a problem that those making the decisions are not in research because they don't see things from the scientist perspective," says Smith who is also involved in setting up the federation.

Hermann Bujard, director of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in Heidelberg, Germany, welcomes the move to create the federation. He says that EMBO, which represents individual molecular biologist across Europe and is influential in research policy debates, would be likely to collaborate with the federation. But he warned that there is a danger that the federation's activities could be slowed by the need for decisions to be individually agreed by its member organizations before being passed.

The federation has set off on the right foot by getting the European Commission on board from the start. Ruxandra Draghia-Akli, head of the health directorate in the research department at the Commission, attended the federation's meeting earlier this month. She told Nature that the Commission would find it "helpful" being given a "clear message" from researchers. It would focus discussions on issues of value rather than losing time to marginal topics, she says.

news20091222nn2

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 22 December 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/462970a News
Fraud rocks protein community
University finds that researcher falsified data supporting 11 protein structures.
Brendan Borrell

The first of the protein structures to be disputed, that for human C3b.Ref. 10The finding by a university misconduct investigation that a crystallographer "more likely than not" faked almost a dozen protein structures has left the field in shock. The fraud is the largest ever in protein crystallography. The disputed structures had important implications for discovering drugs against dengue virus and for understanding the human immune system.

"It's massive," protein crystallographer Wayne Hendrickson of Columbia University in New York says of the investigation's conclusion. "It's the worst possible thing."

In a report released earlier this month, the University of Alabama at Birmingham concluded that H. M. Krishna Murthy acted alone in fabricating and falsifying results that appeared in ten papers^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10} published during the past decade. The disputed papers have been cited more than 450 times.

Murthy denies any wrongdoing. Girish Kotwal, a co-author of Murthy's who was suspended by the University of Cape Town, South Africa, in 2006 owing to charges of professional misconduct (see Nature doi:10.1038/news060703-13; 2006) and now runs Kotwal Bioconsulting in Louisville, Kentucky, says that Murthy "feels defenceless and unfairly treated by some in the crystallography field and his institution". Kotwal sent Nature a statement that he says was e-mailed to him from Murthy indicating that Murthy dis­agrees with the findings of the committee and stands "by all of the reported results in these papers, as well as the experimental origin of the underlying structures".

But for the investigation, Richard Marchase, the university's vice-president of research, says that Murthy did not retain a lawyer and "was not able to produce any compelling evidence as to how he arrived at the structures".

All of the disputed structures had been deposited in the Protein Data Bank (PBD). So far, only the dengue virus NS3 serine protease has been both removed from the PDB and retracted by The Journal of Biological Chemistry, where it was first published in 1999 (ref. ¹). The results in that paper sent the hunt for drugs against this protease down a blind alley. Stanley Watowich, a virus expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, says that two of Murthy's structures^1,3,4 were among 14 included in a virtual dengue drug-screening project run over the past year. This modelled how candidate molecules would interact with dengue proteins, using IBM's World Community Grid — a public computing network set up to harness unused computer time for projects of benefit to humanity. "Screening against the Murthy structures took about two months," says Watowich, "and it is unfortunate that this time could not have been more productively spent."

Murthy began his postdoctoral training in the art of protein crystallography — growing crystals and diffracting X-rays through them for clues to structure — as a postdoc at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1981. There, he worked in the lab of Thomas Steitz, a crystallographer who this year shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the structure of the ribosome. Murthy joined Hendrickson's lab in 1985, and struck the senior scientist as being a "very solid guy" who had some bad luck. "He grew his crystals, went to the synchrotron, and they didn't diffract very well so he didn't have any fantastic accomplishments out of this," Hendrickson says. He adds that he believes that Murthy did some genuine work in his lab.

Murthy arrived at Alabama in July 1998 to take up a position as a research assistant professor at the Center for Biophysical Sciences and Engineering. The first questions about his work arose with the October 2006 publication in Nature of the structure of the human C3b complement-system component, part of the cascade of immune-system proteins that destroys invading cells¹⁰. A number of groups had been pursuing the structure, and the journal published Murthy's paper alongside similar papers from Bert Janssen at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and his co-workers, and a group from Genentech in South San Francisco^11,12.

When the structures were deposited in the PDB, Janssen immediately noticed discrepancies between Murthy's and his own, including large 'gaps' in the lattice that were unusual in such a well resolved and ordered structure. Janssen and his supervisor, Piet Gros, enlisted two well known crystallographers, Randy Read of the University of Cambridge, UK, and Axel Brünger of Stanford University, California, to examine it. They agreed that Murthy's structure seemed to be fake. The group sent a brief communication to Nature in December 2006 questioning the structure¹³ and forwarded their concerns to the University of Alabama.

In January 2007, the University of Alabama began a two-year investigation, which reported earlier this month that Murthy had acted alone in fabricating that structure and ten others. How Murthy fabricated data is unclear, but one method he might have used involves grafting the sequences of target proteins onto structures for similar proteins, then using algorithms to back-calculate diffraction intensities, adding realistic errors along the way.

The PDB says it will remove the other ten structures only when editors at the journals in which they were originally published or the authors themselves retract them. Until Murthy's case came along, it had never removed structures from its database for reasons of misconduct.

Shortly after the publication of their Nature correspondence, Read and Brünger formed a validation task force at the PDB to provide an automated and confidential means of verifying structures during peer review. "With this validation," Brünger says, "this information will be given to the reviewer and if there are any questions one can go back and request the data." The next disputed protein structure may not take so long to uncover.

References
1. Murthy, H. M. K. , Clum, S. & Padmanabhan, R. J. Biol. Chem. 274, 5573-5580 (1999).
2. Urs, U. K. , Murali, R. & Murthy, H. M. K. Acta Crystallogr. D 55, 1971-1977 (1999).
3. Murthy, H. M. K. , Judge, K. , DeLucas, L. , Clum, S. & Padmanabhan, R. Acta Crystallogr. D 55, 1370-1372 (1999).
4. Murthy, H. M. K. , Judge, K. , DeLucas, L. & Padmanabhan, R. J. Mol. Biol. 301, 759-767 (2000).
5. Murthy, K. H. M. et al. Cell 104, 301-311 (2001).
6. Kumar, M. S. , Carson, M. , Hussain, M. M. & Murthy, H. M. K. Biochemistry 41, 11681-11691 (2002).
7. Ganesh, V. K. , Smith, S. A. , Kotwal, G. J. & Murthy, K. H. M. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 101, 8924-8929 (2004).
8. Ganesh, V. K. , Muthuvel, S. K. , Smith, S. A. , Kotwal, G. J. & Murthy, K. H. M. Biochemistry 44, 10757-10765 (2005).
9. Ajees, A. A. , Anantharamaiah, G. M. , Mishra, V. K. , Hussain, M. M. & Murthy, H. M. K. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 103, 2126-2131 (2006).
10. Ajees, A. A. et al. Nature 444, 221-225 (2006).
11. Janssen, B. J. C. , Christodoulidou, A. , McCarthy, A. , Lambris, J. D. & Gros, P. Nature 444, 213-216 (2006).
12. Wiesmann, C. et al. Nature 444, 217-220 (2006).
13.Janssen, B. J. C. , Read, R. J. , Brünger, A. T. & Gros, P. Nature doi:10.1038/nature06102 (2007).

news20091222reut1

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
Leonora Walet and Sui-Lee Wee - Analysis
HONG KONG
Tue Dec 22, 2009 12:38am EST
State funding fuels China's global push in wind, sun
HONG KONG (Reuters) - When A-Power Energy Generation Systems secured a deal to supply turbines for a U.S. wind farm project in October, the little-known Chinese firm had an ace up its sleeve to help it clinch the deal.

A-Power was armed with $1.5 billion in financing from state-run Chinese banks to fund the 600 megawatt project in Texas.

While global peers have limited access to cheap state loans, Chinese renewable energy firms are getting a boost from Beijing as they win clean technology projects around the world [ID:nHKG361180]. Much of that is via low-interest loans from big state banks for their clients to finance their purchases.

This support is giving China's renewable energy firms an edge over Asian rivals such as India's Suzlon Energy, Japan Wind Development and Australia's Infigen Energy, as well as heavyweights like German polysilicon firm Wacker Chemie and Danish wind energy firm Vestas Wind.

"I don't think A-Power could have done this deal without access to cheap financing," said Jacob Kirkregaard, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington D.C, who recently published a paper on wind energy.

"China is clearly the big kid on the block, no doubt about that," he said, referring to the state support for renewable energy. "That's not something many Asian countries can emulate."

Shares of A-Power, which only entered the wind business in 2008, hit a 15-month high last Friday after it said it will supply wind turbines for the Texas project.

Such deals are unfolding as China aggressively develops its renewable energy sector and as its companies play catch-up with bigger, global peers including German solar cell producer Q-Cells AG and Spanish wind farm operator Iberdrola, which have built up solid track records, also with help from more than a decade of government subsidies.

LOAN BOOST

Most of China's alternative energy makers, including solar firms Yingli Energy Holdings and Suntech Power Holdings, and wind gear maker China High Speed Transmission, already have access to low-interest financing from state-run banks to fund their growth as well as client purchases.

Interest rates on loans for wind power generator China Longyuan Power Group, for example, are 10 percent below the prevailing benchmark rate set by the Peoples' Bank of China (PBOC), said Morgan Stanley in a report.

"Chinese banks are motivated by the mandate from the government to develop renewable energy as a national priority," said Zhao Feng at Denmark-based BTM Consult ApS, a consultancy that specializes in renewable energy.

"In Europe, the banks, when they offer loans, tend to assess the project and look at it more closely from a risk perspective."

Such state-backed financing is a common policy tool for governments globally trying to support industries they want to develop. China also provides similar strong support for its energy firms for overseas acquisitions, and its telecoms equipment makers as they try to expand abroad.

Beijing's support comes as Chinese players attempt to create new markets as the cost of developing renewable energy falls and competition intensifies for projects at home.

China's $300 billion sovereign wealth fund, China Investment Corp (CIC), is also helping to bolster the industry.

In the last several months, the fund has pumped about $1.1 billion into the sector, buying stakes in solar firm GCL-Poly Energy, the world's No.3 polysilicon company by capacity, and China Longyuan, the world's fifth-largest wind power company.

But analysts say access to cheap money will only get China's alternate energy firms so far.

"Essentially, you need to get the product right," said Felix Lam, analyst with CCB International. "Cheap loans can't guarantee a project's success, you've got to have the technology.

"It's the technology that will give you that advantage long-term."

(Editing by Doug Young and Ian Geoghegan)


[Green Business]
MADRID
Tue Dec 22, 2009 10:15am EST
Iberian spot power rebounds on weaker winds, cold
MADRID (Reuters) - Iberian spot power prices rebounded from recent year-lows on Tuesday due to ebbing supplies of cheap wind power while demand held steady as cold weather gave way to heavy rain.

Wind power in Spain -- the world's third-biggest producer -- fell from an overnight high of 10,000 megawatts to a low of 5,400 MW on Tuesday, and was seen meandering on Wednesday and Thursday.

Spain's Met Office issued no high risk warnings for Tuesday, but estimated almost half the country was still at risk from bad weather.

Spanish power stations were meanwhile emitting an unusually high 9,617 tonnes per hour of carbon dioxide, but dealers noted that carbon prices were low after last week's Copenhagen conference and not driving power prices.

Dealers expected demand for power to drop sharply as of Thursday and stay low next week.

"Demand has been rock-bottom, so (spot) prices may be particularly low next week," a trader said.

Sliding crude hauled down benchmark forwards which have been weak since September due to low prices for essential fuels like gas.

Calendar-year 2010 traded at 39.60 euros/MWh on the Omip exchange at mid-session, down 0.45 from a day earlier.

In other news, Spain's hydropower reserves dipped last week and would be enough to meet average demand for 12.7 days.

Spain's grid is still short of 2,000 MW of nuclear power because the Almaraz I plant is refueling and not due back until this week, at the earliest, and Asco I reactor is offline for maintenance until the New Year.

The remaining six nuclear plants were producing 5,341 MW, or 13.6 percent of the generating mix, according to national grid operator REE.


[Green Business > COP15]
Yvonne Bell
BRUSSELS
Tue Dec 22, 2009 10:18am EST
Copenhagen accord was a "disaster," says Sweden
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Sweden described the Copenhagen climate change summit as a "disaster" and a "great failure" on Tuesday, ahead of a meeting of European Union environment ministers to discuss how to rescue the process.

The European Union went to Copenhagen with the hope of achieving a broad commitment to at least a 20-percent cut in carbon emissions below 1990 levels within 10 years, but that and other firm goals failed to emerge in the final accord.

"Ministers are going to meet today to discuss, of course, how to proceed after this disaster we really had in Copenhagen," Swedish Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren told reporters as he and other ministers gathered for the meeting in Brussels.

Carlgren will chair the talks as Sweden currently holds the EU presidency.

"I expect us to discuss both how to continue ... but also elaborate on possibilities for alternate ways to work now, because it was a really great failure and we have to learn from that."

The two-week, U.N.-led conference ended on Saturday with a non-legally binding agreement to limit global warming to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times, but did not lay out how to achieve that.

Despite months of preparation and strenuous international diplomacy, the talks boiled down to an inability of the world's two largest emitters, the United States and China, to agree on headline fixed targets.

The 27 member states of the EU had gone into the talks with a unified position and with a plan for financing emissions cuts in the developing world, with a commitment to spend around 7 billion euros ($10.01 billion) over the next three years to aid poorer countries.

But those aims were largely sidelined as the talks failed to produce the breakthrough agreement many had hoped for.

"Europe never lost its aim, never, never came to splits or different positions, but of course this was mainly about other countries really (being) unwilling, and especially the United States and China," said Carlgren.

Britain on Monday blamed China and a handful of other countries of holding the world to ransom by blocking a legally binding treaty at Copenhagen, stepping up a blame game that has gathered momentum since the talks ended.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown described the summit as "at best flawed and at worst chaotic" and demanded an urgent reform of the process to try to reach a legal treaty when talks are expected to resume in Germany next June.

But Danish Climate Minister Connie Hedegaard, who quit as president of the Copenhagen talks midway through after being criticized by African countries for favoring wealthier nations in negotiations, said it was no time to get depressed about the process of tackling climate change.

"What we need to do is to secure the step that we took and turn it into a result," she told reporters as she arrived for the Brussels meeting on Tuesday. Asked whether Copenhagen had been a failure, she replied:

"It would have been a failure if we had achieved nothing. But we achieved something. A first step. It was the first time we held a process where all the countries were present, including the big emitters."

(Writing by Luke Baker; Editing by Jon Hemming)

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[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business > Environment > COP15]
Gordon Bell
PRETORIA
Tue Dec 22, 2009 7:19am EST
South Africa says Copenhagen outcome "not acceptable"
PRETORIA (Reuters) - South African negotiators said on Tuesday the outcome of the Copenhagen climate talks was disappointing and unacceptable, largely due to a flawed process that damaged trust among delegations.

Buyelwa Sonjica, minister of environmental affairs, told reporters her government had considered walking out of the meeting but decided against it after consulting other African countries.

"We are not defending this, as I have indicated, for us it is not acceptable, it is definitely not acceptable," she said after returning from Copenhagen.

"Our president consulted ... and the feeling by Africa was it was not a good idea to walk out."

The United Nations summit ended with an underwhelming, and not legally binding, agreement on Saturday that set a target of limiting global warming to a maximum of 2 degrees celsius over pre-industrial times.

South Africa was one of the emerging powers that helped pen the accord.

The world's 12th biggest emitter, dependent on coal for 90 percent of its electricity needs, South Africa had pledged before the meeting to slow the growth of its greenhouse gas emissions by 34 percent below projected levels by 2020, conditional on a broader international agreement.

Sonjica said walking out of the meeting could have led to an even more disappointing outcome.

Direct involvement by South Africa's President Jacob Zuma and other world leaders had meant that political agreement on many issues had been reached, but not all.

BROKEN TRUST

"In Copenhagen, parties were still too far apart, and too involved with process rather than substance, to reach a formal negotiating process," Sonjica said, criticising "some ill-restrained interventions" and poor decisions by organisers.

South Africa's chief negotiator Alf Wills also said Danish conference hosts had "destroyed the trust" of delegates by introducing a draft text which he said was unacceptable.

South Africa said the level of ambition of developed countries' targets to cut emissions remained too low.

"Certainly, it was not the breakthrough that the world expected and the climate needed," Sonjica said. "But with some key issues resolved among world leaders represented (it) should help move forward."

(Editing by Dominic Evans)


[Green Business > Environment > COP15]
Bappa Majumdar
NEW DELHI
Tue Dec 22, 2009 7:54am EST
India says to better cuts in gas emissions growth
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India could improve upon its aims to slow the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, the environment minister said on Tuesday after returning from climate change talks in Copenhagen.

India said it was willing to rein in its "carbon intensity" -- the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted per unit of economic output -- by between 20 and 25 percent by 2020, from 2005 levels.

"(It) is not only eminently feasible, but can also be improved upon to the benefit of our own people," Jairam Ramesh, the environment minister, said in parliament.

India will prepare a roadmap for a low carbon growth strategy in another four months, he told a news conference later.

The climate change meeting ended last week with a non-legally binding political agreement at the last moment between the United States and the big developing countries -- China, India, Brazil and South Africa.

Ramesh said the BASIC group of countries comprising Brazil, South Africa, India and China was successful in thwarting global pressure to agree to a legally-binding emissions cut.

"It was at this crucial meeting that the BASIC group was able to get agreement on its proposals .... To ensure that the Copenhagen Accord was not legally binding and there was no mention of a new legally binding instrument in the accord," Ramesh said.

Talks on a binding treaty are to extend throughout next year before the next November/December climate change summit in Mexico.

But Ramesh said the BASIC countries along with other developing nations will stick to the negotiating framework as laid out in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Bali Action Plan and the Kyoto Protocol as negotiations continue until the next summit in Mexico.

"We are not rewriting UNFCCC, we are not rewriting Bali Action Plan or the Kyoto Protocol. Yes, we now have a fourth animal called the Copenhagen Accord. What this animal comes out to be is up to us," Ramesh said.

"It (Copenhagen Accord) is not a legally binding document, it is not a document to replace the Kyoto Protocol and this is not a document to replace the framework convention," he said.

Ramesh said India came out well at Copenhagen and successful in safeguarding national interest.

"For India, climate change is a developmental issue and my mandate was to protect India's right to faster economic growth."

(Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Sugita Katyal)


[Green Business > Environment > COP15]
Tue Dec 22, 2009 10:17am EST
FACTBOX-Main points of the Copenhagen Accord
(Reuters) - Sweden described last week's Copenhagen climate change summit as a "disaster" and a "great failure" on Tuesday.

The climate talks ended with a bare-minimum agreement when delegates "noted" an accord struck by the United States, China and over 20 other nations that fell far short of the conference's original goals.

Here are key points from the "Copenhagen Accord," which can be read in full at: here

* LONG-TERM GOALS

"Deep cuts in global emissions are required according to science...with a view to reduce global emissions so as to hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius."

* LEGALLY BINDING DEAL?

A reference in an earlier draft to adopt a legally binding climate agreement by next year was missing in the final draft. This upset the EU and a number of other nations, such as the Pacific island country of Tuvalu, which fears being swamped by rising sea levels.

* FINANCING FOR POOR NATIONS

The text says developing countries will receive: "scaled up, new and additional, predictable and adequate funding," to support both adaptation and mitigation.

Developed countries have committed to stump up $30 billion for the 2010-2012 period. Adaptation funds will be prioritized "for the most vulnerable developing countries, such as the least developed countries, small island developing States and Africa."

There is also a slightly less firm long-term goal.

"Developed countries commit to a goal of mobilizing jointly $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries. This funding will come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral," the accord says.

* EMISSIONS REDUCTION:

The accord does not contain any concrete emissions reduction goals, even though targets for 2020 or 2050 were a key aim of almost all major parties going into the talks.

Two separate appendices are attached, to be filled in with individual national goals by 31 January 2010, one for developed country targets for 2020 and one for the voluntary pledges of major developing countries.

* VERIFICATION

A sticking point for a deal, largely because China refused to accept international controls, the section on monitoring of developing nation pledges is one of the longest in the accord.

It says emerging economies must monitor their efforts and report the results to the United Nations every two years, with some international checks to meet Western transparency concerns but "to ensure that national sovereignty is respected."

* FOREST PROTECTION

The accord says "We recognize the crucial role of reducing emission from deforestation and forest degradation and the need to enhance removals or greenhouse gas emission by forests," and agrees to provide "positive incentives" to fund such action with financial resources from the developed world.

* CARBON MARKETS

Mentioned, but not in detail. The accord says: "We decide to pursue various approaches, including opportunities to use markets to enhance the cost-effectiveness of and to promote mitigations actions."

(Reporting by Emma Graham-Harrison; editing by Dominic Evans)