Oil palms in Malaysia, image courtesy New York Times.

Just a few years ago, politicians and environmental groups in the Netherlands were thrilled by the early and rapid adoption of “sustainable energy,” achieved in part by coaxing electrical plants to use biofuel — in particular, palm oil from Southeast Asia.

Spurred by government subsidies, energy companies became so enthusiastic that they designed generators that ran exclusively on the oil, which in theory would be cleaner than fossil fuels like coal because it is derived from plants.

But last year, when scientists studied practices at palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia, this green fairy tale began to look more like an environmental nightmare.

Rising demand for palm oil in Europe brought about the clearing of huge tracts of Southeast Asian rainforest and the overuse of chemical fertilizer there.

Worse still, the scientists said, space for the expanding palm plantations was often created by draining and burning peatland, which sent huge amounts of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

Considering these emissions, Indonesia had quickly become the world’s third-leading producer of carbon emissions that scientists believe are responsible for global warming, ranked after the United States and China, according to a study released in December by researchers from Wetlands International and Delft Hydraulics, both in the Netherlands.

“It was shocking and totally smashed all the good reasons we initially went into palm oil,” said Alex Kaat, a spokesman for Wetlands, a conservation group.

The production of biofuels, long a cornerstone of the quest for greener energy, may sometimes create more harmful emissions than fossil fuels, scientific studies are finding.

As a result, politicians in many countries are rethinking the billions of dollars in subsidies that have indiscriminately supported the spread of all of these supposedly eco-friendly fuels for vehicles and factories. The 2003 European Union Biofuels Directive, which demands that all member states aim to have 5.75 percent of transportation run by biofuel in 2010, is now under review.

“If you make biofuels properly, you will reduce greenhouse emissions,” said Peder Jensen, of the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen. “But that depends very much on the types of plants and how they’re grown and processed. You can end up with a 90 percent reduction compared to fossil fuels — or a 20 percent increase.”

He added, “It’s important to take a life-cycle view,” and not to “just see what the effects are here in Europe.”

[Read the full article from the New York Times.]

An alliance of U.S.-based businesses and environmental organizations has called on the federal government to quickly enact strong legislation to achieve significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions so as to avoid consequences that would necessitate steeper reductions in the future.

The nonpartisan U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) consists of market leaders Alcoa, BP America, Caterpillar, Duke Energy, DuPont, FPL Group, General Electric, Lehman Brothers, PG&E, and PNM Resources, as well as four leading non-governmental organizations — Environmental Defense, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and the World Resources Institute. USCAP member companies have a combined market capitalization of more than $750 billion, while their environmental counterparts have global policy influence and more than one million members worldwide.

In a recently released report, A Call for Action (9 pages, PDF), USCAP lays out a blueprint for an economy-wide, market-driven approach to climate protection, with recommendations based on principles that underscore the urgent need for a policy framework on climate change. The group’s recommendations are based on the following principles: acknowledgment of the global dimensions of climate change; recognition of the importance of technology; an emphasis on environmental effectiveness; the need to create economic opportunity and advantage; a desire to be fair to sectors disproportionately impacted; and recognition of the need to encourage early action. The report is the result of a year-long collaboration motivated by the shared goal of slowing, stopping, and reversing the growth of greenhouse gas emissions over the shortest period of time that is reasonably achievable.

“The time has come for constructive action that draws strength equally from business, government, and non-governmental stakeholders,” said General Electric chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt. “These recommendations should catalyze legislative action that encourages innovation and fosters economic growth, while enhancing energy security and balance of trade, ensuring U.S. leadership on an issue of significance to our country and the world.”

[Via Philanthropy News Digest]

Inwood Hill Nature Center, Manhattan

The Inwood Hill Nature Center invites you to join them this Saturday, January 27th, at 11 a.m. for a free special program and lecture called Tools for Urban Sustainability, featuring Toby Hemenway, author of best-selling Permaculture book Gaia’s Garden.

The Inwood Hill Nature Center is located in Manhattan at 218th St. and Indian Road, inside Inwood Hill Park. Please call 212-304-2365 for directions or more information.

The main international scientific body assessing causes of climate change is closing in on its strongest statement yet linking emissions from burning fossil fuels to rising global temperatures, according to scientists involved in the process.

Carbon dioxide water cluster

In fresh drafts of a summary of its next report, the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said that it is more than 90 percent likely that global warming since 1950 has been driven mainly by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases, and that more warming and rising sea levels are on the way.

Some scientists involved in drafting the report confirmed and clarified details but asked not to be identified because it was not finished.

In its last report, published in 2001, the panel concluded that there was a 66 to 90 percent chance that human activities were driving the most recent warming.

The shift in language in the current draft, while subtle, is substantive. If it remains in the final version, scheduled for release in Paris on Feb. 2, it will largely complete a quest that lasted decades to determine if humans are nudging the earth’s thermostat in potentially momentous ways.

Drafts of the report project a most likely warming of 4 to 8 degrees if the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rises to twice the 280 parts per million that it averaged for many centuries before the Industrial Revolution.

The carbon dioxide concentration is now roughly 380 parts per million, and many climate experts say it will be extremely difficult to avoid hitting levels of 450 or 550 parts per million, or higher, later this century, given growth in populations and fuel use and the lack of nonpolluting alternatives that can be exploited at a sufficient scale to replace fossil fuels.

Scientists involved in writing the panel’s three massive scientific volumes and related documents declined to discuss the drafts because many changes could take place before the final version was published.

Because the panel works under the auspices of the United Nations, dozens of officials from governments around the world have been critiquing drafts, and details inevitably begin to slip into the press in the weeks preceding the formal release.

Snippets of earlier drafts have leaked to some newspapers in recent months and some sections of the latest draft were first published in The Toronto Star yesterday.

Scientists involved in writing the report said the leaks were damaging and potentially misleading, mainly because the final statements are likely to go through further changes.

“The language is far from final,” said Kevin E. Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who is a lead author of one section. “You can’t say what the I.P.C.C. says until it actually says it.”

Jerry Mahlman, an emeritus researcher at the same center who was a reviewer of the report’s single-spaced, 1,644-page summary of climate science, said that most of the leaks were from people eager to find elements that were the scariest or most reassuring.

He added in an interview yesterday that such efforts distract from the basic, undisputed findings, saying that those point to trends that are very disturbing.

He pointed to recent disclosures that there is still uncertainty about the pace at which seas will rise due to warming and melting of terrestrial ice over the next 100 years. That span, he said, was just the start of a process of a rise in sea levels that would then almost certainly continue for 1,000 years or so.

[via New York Times]

Several U.S. scientists and evangelical Christian leaders have come together to make a joint effort to protect the environment.

Harvard Medical School

The group, organized under the aegis of the National Association of Evangelicals and the Center for Health and Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, proposes to hold meetings with Congressional leaders from both parties to inform them about its efforts and to convince them to initiate action on environmental issues.

The coalition has come out with an Urgent Call to Action statement signed by 28 noted scientists and evangelical leaders calling for fundamental change in values, lifestyles and public policies required to address the worsening problems affecting the environment before it is too late.

The statement has been sent to President George Bush, House speaker Nancy Pelosi, bipartisan congressional leaders and others, the leaders of the group said at a news conference Wednesday. They said they have joined forces concerned over the human-caused threats to creation, including climate change, habitat destruction, pollution, species extinction, spread of diseases and other threats to the well-being of the society.

One of the objectives of the group will be to advance the dialogue and influence policy regarding global warming. It will also expand the collaboration and encourage action from all sectors of the society. Scientists and evangelicals share a deep moral commitment to preserve the precious gift of air and water we have all been given, said Dr Eric Chivian, Nobel laureate and director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, at the news conference

Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals said science and religion will cooperate, minimizing their differences about how Creation got started, to work together to reverse its degradation.

“We will not allow it to be progressively destroyed by human folly,” he said.

[via EarthTimes]