Blogs / Better Planet

The Government Accountability Office says our weather satellites are in desperate need of upgrades, but the process to rearm the US to ready for environmental alerts is being mismanaged.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is readying a new satellite system at the cost of approximately $7 billion to replace old, and outdated technology. But, “Independent studies show that the estimated program could cost about $2 billion more, and the first satellite launch could be delayed by 2 years. As NOAA works to reconcile the independent estimate with its own program office estimate, costs are likely to grow and schedules are likely to be delayed,” GAO says. “The program has multiple risk watchlists that are not always consistent and key risks are missing from the watchlists.”

I shouldn’t have to point out the importance of having accurate weather tracking and predictability systems. Indeed, even the aviation industry is being hampered by inadequate satellite tracking systems.

Last year, the Naples Daily News reported that QuikSCAT, a satellite used to track and forecast hurricanes is also aging and deteriorating. That satellite — launched by NASA in 1999 — had a life expectancy of three years but has been operating for eight years. There are currently no plans to launch a replacement in the future.

With climate change and weather-related catastrophe in the headlines nearly everyday you’d think the first step would be better defense systems.

Then again, this Administration doesn’t seem to think.

AP

When will an international task force be set up to identify potentially lethal formulas for environmental disaster? The US government knew about the faulty levies off the coast of New Orleans. Tsunami watchers knew the potential dangers in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India and Thailand. Last year the Bangladesh tragedy was also foreseen. Now comes Myanmar. More than 22,000 people dead and 41,000 missing.

Nature’s coastal protectors are mangroves. They are dwindling and weakened worldwide due to environmental destruction. Fell trees, soil erodes and weakens, shorelines recede, mangroves disappear and storms have clearer paths to crash – harder and faster.

Hauntingly the following was reported by AP and featured on the web site for the Mangrove Action Project, which has offices in the US, Indonesia, Asia, and Latin America. Many of the staff come from the Peace Corps and other international human rights organizations (Notice the headline and dateline):

Environmental problems loom in Myanmar

14 October 2007By MICHAEL CASEYBANGKOK, Thailand - Truckloads of illegal timber cross the Myanmar border to sawmills in China, while markets along the Thai border openly sell bear paws, tiger skins and elephant tusks.Further inland, the repressive military regime plans to dam one of Asia’s purest rivers, and allows gold and gem mines to tear up hillsides and pollute groundwater for quick cash.Myanmar has become notorious in the region for ignoring international and its own environmental laws in a single-minded effort to make the money that environmentalists say helps keep the regime in power.”They may have laws on the books but they mean extremely little,” said Sean Turnell, an expert on the Myanmar economy with Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “I would say environmental considerations mean zero to them. It wouldn’t even enter their heads.”After decades of self-imposed isolation, the junta in the late 1980s began courting foreign investors with offers of stakes in gem mines, forest tracts and hydroelectric projects. Foreign investment allowed the regime to double its military to 400,000 soldiers while offering neighbors like China and Thailand access to cheap raw materials and energy to feed their growing economies.A Myanmar government spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on its environmental record. Chinese government officials could not be reached for comment and Thailand denied its investment in Myanmar contributes to the country’s environmental destruction.Hardest hit in the rush to develop the country formerly named Burma have been its rivers and forests, environmentalists say.

Several months ago, in a tall office tower in the center of Mumbai, Debi Goenka, one of India’s most well-known environmentalists, showed me and a small international audience of environmental activists, a film about mangrove destruction in India. Debi, who used to live on the seashore, has moved to miles away to the top of a hill.

He did it, he said, because he knows what’s coming…

It’s time we alert the rest of the world to the places most environmentally tenuous.

 AFP

The Financial Times above-the-fold headline today screams India considers ban on trading in food futures.

It reports, “India’s finance minister said on Monday he was considering a blanket ban on trading in food futures, underlying growing concerns in Asia over the role of hedge funds and financial market traders in the recent surge in commodities prices. If India imposes a ban, it would come only five years after the country introduced such futures trading as part of a broader push to develop India as a leading financial centre.”

Last week National Public Radio ran a special report on the food crisis and many of the experts interviewed agreed on Wall Street’s role in the increased prices of food worldwide. Bidding up the prices of futures is one thing, but farmers don’t sell futures–they sell real products in the here and now. They don’t get the benefit of those price increases. Rather, they are mired in a market full of price controls. It would make sense, of course, for them to hedge their prices in case of supply issues: Sell at market prices but at the same time buy futures, and get the benefit of price upswings to re-invest in their farms. But they can’t. It’s too expensive for farmers to hedge these days. Besides, the market is so volatile that a downswing in prices on the futures markets means a wipe out of capital in the bank accounts today and no crops for tomorrow.

Elevators are the businesses getting most squeezed. They buy raw products from farmers and distribute them.

As The New York Times explains, “Since 1959, grain producers have been able to hedge the price of their wheat, corn and soybean crops on the Chicago Board of Trade through the use of futures contracts, which are agreements to buy or sell a specific amount of a commodity for a fixed price on some future date.

More recently, the exchange has offered another tool: options on those futures contracts, which allow option holders to carry out the futures trade, but do not require that they do so. Trading in options is not as effective a hedge, farmers say, but it does not require them to put up as much cash as required to trade futures. These tools have long provided a way to lock in the price of a crop as it is planted, eliminating the risk that prices will drop before it is harvested. With these hedging tools, grain elevators could afford to buy crops from farmers in advance, sometimes a year or more before the harvest. But that was yesterday. It simply is not working that way today. Futures, for example, are less reliable. They work as a hedge only if they fall due at a price that roughly matches prices in the cash market, where the grain is actually sold. Increasingly — for disputed reasons — grain futures are expiring at prices well above the cash-market price.”

The disputed reasons The New York Times is alluding to are professional investors. The rise in index funds and commodities traders and vehicles is putting the price of food—survival for many people around the world—into the hands of investors and speculators.

India is on to something, and the rest of the world should follow suit and consider tighter controls for commodities trading.

The New York Times on Monday reported in an article entitled, “In Lean Times, Biotech Grains Are Less Taboo” that “Soaring food price and global grain shortages are bringing new pressures on governments, food companies and consumers to relax their longstanding resistance to genetically engineered crops. In Japan and South Korea, some manufacturers for the first time have begun buying genetically engineered corn for use in soft drinks, snacks and other foods. Until now, to avoid consumer backlash, the companies have paid extra to buy conventionally grown corn. But with prices having tripled in two years, it has become too expensive to be so finicky.”

Today, Grist, the environmental blog, picked up on that and said, “In fact, the few giant companies that dominate the global food system are fattening themselves on higher prices, consolidating their grip over the world’s palate.”

I’m chiming in to say that GMOs shouldn’t be the Band-Aid to the world’s food crisis. Here’s why: We are jumping the gun. The jury is still out on GMOs and their affect on the natural environment.

Remember, GMOs only came around about a decade ago. Sure some have been taken to task for taking to task GMO manufacturers. (Nature had to retract an article on GM maize.)

Meanwhile, organic farmers say, done correctly, their way is just as effective if not more in natural resource savings. (See Michael Pollan’s take on this in The Omnivore’s Dilemma.)

I look at GMOs like I do nuclear energy: A resort — but of the last kind.

The world’s food crisis has reached new levels of alarm.

The World Food Program in an “extraordinary emergency appeal” says it needs $500 million by May 1 to avoid cutting rations to some of the world’s most impoverished regions.  

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says, “The rapidly escalating crisis of food availability around the world has reached emergency proportions,” adding that as many as 100 million people could be pushed further into poverty because of it. 

Food prices have doubled as commodities prices have soared around the world. This puts people on the brink over the edge and may cause widespread starvation and rioting (some of which we’ve already see in Cairo, Mexico City, and the Philippines). The crisis is so bad that this week President Bush released $200 million in emergency food funding to help nations in need. 

Walk through the slums of Mumbai, wonder out into the rural areas of Third World countries, as I have, and you’ll see how little margin for food error there is. This is serious. These are lives.  

The World Food Bank reports that its reserves are the lowest they have been in about 30 years. Rice and wheat have become so expensive that nations have stopped exporting them. This causes panic and problems the likes of which the world has never seen. Meanwhile, recent health reports show the obesity rate for US adults stands at 64%. The Environmental Protection Agency says one of the most common items at landfills is tossed food. 

There is a strange imbalance in the world that needs correcting. And we needs policies to create sustainable results…now, before the crisis worsens.       

Lots of people are chasing torchbearers these days in protest of China’s oppressive policies toward Tibet. But few are asking why China really wants Tibet in the first place.

A glance through history and you’ll see the hegemonic reasoning for China’s  confiscation of Tibetan land. But today’s rationale for Tibetan control is likely due to China’s need and huge appetite for natural resources to keep its fast growth growing.

The Himalayan Mountains provide freshwater to more than half the world’s population, and that includes the Chinese. Gushing water there also gives a boost to China’s need for energy: about 30% of China’s hydroelectric power comes from Tibet. Moreover, a new hydroelectric plant being considered along the Yarlung Zangbo River would become the world’s largest hydroelectric power station, if engineering reports are to be believed. Beyond water, Tibet is already China’s biggest provider of geothermal energy, and holds a heaping of peat, which can be used as alternative energy source.

And that’s not all. A new mineral reserve found under the Tibetan Plateau is worth billions, as much as $128 billion, according to some estimates. Tibet is rich in mineral deposits, currently holding China’s fourth richest reserves of muscovite, a mineral important to its huge electronics industry, as well as its defense industry. Muscovite is used as fireproofing.

Then there is wasteland. China uses Tibet as a massive dumping ground for its waste.

In short, the campaign to control Tibet and its people is less about lamentable political philosophy and more about land grab.

Given this reality, it might be more productive for the Tibetan people, and their apparently active followers around the globe, to begin politicking around resource access and allowances (carving out land titles) than to try and stomp out Olympic torches.

The Dalai Lama, the religious leader of most of the Tibetan people, has already let it be known that he would attend the Olympics in Beijing, if invited. And he has implored protestors to stop hassling those carrying the Olympic torch.   

Maybe it’s time to focus on the core of the conflict between Tibet and China. Although that may become uncomfortable for many: Those natural resources are largely used to produce products for the West. Europe is China’s biggest trading partners followed by the US.

Activists might do better by the planet by changing their clothes than by forcing changing upon the Olympic relay routes.

Each US presidential candidate touts his or her record on the environment. Indeed, I am often asked: “Who has the best environmental program?” The good news is that all three candidates give relatively strong consideration to the environment. Yet until recently, I had to blush and say that John McCain was the one with the best program, if only because his plan included specifics.

I wasn’t the only one to point this out. Surrounded recently at a dinner with NGO leaders, Washington insiders, and one of the three registered lobbyists for the environment on Capitol Hill, the topic came up and I voiced my opinion; all agreed. But my opinion, and I am sure others by now too, has changed.

Newsweek this week tries to answer the question of “who’s the greenest of them all” and in doing so points out: that McCain last year missed 15 votes on environmental issues. However, it says, “the League of Conservation Voters, which influences mainstream environmental groups, are still undecided on which candidate to endorse.”

Newsweek says, ”Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are considered strong environmental candidates. Meanwhile, John McCain, who had a 2007 league rating of zero because he missed all 15 votes, is still a strong candidate since his lifetime LCV rating is 26 percent, compared to an average of 16 percent for all Republicans.”

Perhaps this coverage will help raise the profile of the environment during the election. So far, if you’ve been paying attention, the issue has been in the back row. With Earth Day approaching, the environment will certainly move closer to the front of the stage, which is better than where the Bush Administration has kept it: Outside.

For the best rundown on where they stand, check each of the candidates’ web sites (hillaryclinton.com, johnmccain.com, barackobama.com). Click on the issues tab, and the environment header appears. Sure, it’s not on the front page — yet.

But I am confident that it will be.