Environment

Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov -- the man behind the world's ugliest statue -- has a new grandiose project, keeping winter snow out of Moscow:

Moscow will blast clouds from the sky this winter to save money on snow removal, a city official said Wednesday, but the plan threatens to anger the surrounding region, which would have to cope with the extra powder. ....

Luzhkov is a long-time proponent of fighting clouds by spraying liquid nitrogen, silver, or cement particles into the cloud mass, which forces precipitation to fall before it can reach the capital and spoil holidays like Victory Day and City Day.

Last month, Luzhkov proposed expanding the technology to fight the snow drifts that snarl traffic every winter.

“What if we force this snow to fall beyond Moscow? The Moscow region will have more water, bigger harvests, while we will have less snow,” he said at an award ceremony for Moscow’s best-kept yard. He said that using the Air Force to prevent massive snowfall would be three times cheaper than using the regular system of trucks and snow-melting stations.

City hall estimates that the project will save the city $10.2 million in snow removal. Needless to say, officials in the surrouding region are less than thrilled with the plan. Locals have also criticized Luzhkov's previous cloud prevention schemes, noting that they make "the cucumbers turn yellow."

Alexander Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images

Today, the International Energy Agency said that global carbon emissions shrank 3 percent in 2009, due to the Great Recession. The Guardian reports that for only the fourth time in the past 50 years, the world emitted less of the greenhouse gas than it had done the year before, because of declining industrial production.

Which means, alas, that the world will likely be back to increasing emissions soon. Indeed, the IEA report notes that to avoid climate change and all the catastrophes it promises, countries don't have to shrink their economies, but do have to "[build] more than 350 new nuclear plants and 350,000 wind turbines in the next 20 years. [It] also estimates that by 2020, three-fifths of cars will need to use alternatives to the traditional internal combustion engine."

The IEA report reminded me of a fascinating study out of the London School of Economics, released last month. It found that promoting contraceptive use could be a lynchpin to combating climate change: fewer babies means fewer carbon-emitters, and fewer carbon-emitters means less climate change. 

That, in turn, reminds me of this. Oh dear.

After a slate of big speeches yesterday at the U.N. climate summit in New York, the jury is still divided on how significant the new carbon mitigation steps announced by China, India, Japan, and other countries are. (There's even a range of opinions on this site. But there seems to be a growing consensus on one thing: the US is increasingly seen as falling behind, isolated.

Funny that, in China, they saw this coming. This summer in Beijing, I spoke with one of the leading private-sector Chinese energy analysts, someone present at the last big round of climate negotiations held in Bonn. In between meetings, he and some of his colleagues had joked about something they called the "Chinese conspiracy." The gist was, as he put it, to view future climate talks as "an opportunity" and "to keep America off the table at Copenhagen."

He was kidding, of course, and even were he serious, he wouldn't have been speaking for the government. But as it happens, something like that scenario may be unfolding.

In the final weeks before Copenhagen, several countries, including China, are rushing to claim the mantle of leadership, to define what "success" means, and to offer their own proposals. At a press conference this morning in Washington, the director general of climate change for Mexico's ministry of the environment was talking about his country's proposal for the architecture of a redistributive "green fund," which would collect money from the world's economic leaders and then steer money toward green-friendly development in poorer countries. Next up, rumors are swirling of a coalition of Latin American countries preparing to offer their own pre-Copenhagen proposals.

As my colleague Joshua Keating noted, there was a great deal of anticipation ahead of Chinese president Hu Jintao’s speech this morning at the UN climate summit in New York. U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer, who has the at times unenviable job of cheerleading for progress in so far ho-hum international climate talks, even went so far as to say China was poised to become “a world leader on addressing climate change.”  A headline in yesterday’s Guardian fanned the flames: “China's president expected to announce radical climate change targets.”

It would have been hard for anything Hu might have said to live up to the hype.

In a speech that lasted less than ten minutes, Hu said that China intended to include “carbon intensity” targets in its next five-year economic blueprint. Hu stressed that China is taking steps to reduce future carbon emissions, at least as compared with business as usual. China is indeed already doing much more to expand renewable energy production than many western observes give it credit for.

But has China achieved, in de Boer’s words, “front-runner” status? Well, that stretches definition.

As Julian Wong, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, said: “Maybe they’re leading in specific policies, but it’s premature to say they’re a leader. Climate leader … I’m not quite sure what that would mean.”

Hu began his remarks by reiterating the principle of “differentiated” responsibilities for developed and developing countries. He didn’t make any pledges about carbon caps, or otherwise indicate a softening on China’s position going into Copenhagen. China still wants developed nations to largely foot the bill for its carbon mitigation efforts – an argument with some merit, but also many critics; in sum, hardly an open invitation to move climate talks forward.

Yet in a sense, the recent hype about China as a climate-change “leader” is less about what China is doing than about what the US isn’t doing.

The US Senate now seems unlikely to pass a climate bill before Copenhagen. Speaking to Bloomberg TV this morning, Senator John Kerry, head of the committee drafting climate legislation, now said he now hoped the Senate would begin to debate a climate bill before December – debate, not act on. Talk about lowered expectations.

And in his first full speech on climate change, delivered this morning in New York, President Obama said that “unease is no excuse for inaction,” but crucially he did not mention any emissions reduction targets or firm financial commitments. Obama’s climate speech was in a way even less remarkable than Hu’s.

The upshot is while China hardly has an undisputed claim to being the world “leader” in fighting climate change, it now seems to have pulled ahead in the global warming PR wars. That’s not a bad thing if it helps pressure Washington into action.

But it could be a bad thing if it gives China much greater leverage to set the terms of the debate and define what “success” means at Copenhagen. And unless the US steps up to the plate in the next three months, that’s exactly what will happen.

It seems telling that President Obama ended his first major address on climate change not with a stirring call to action, but by urging pragmatism and compromise:

But the journey is long. The journey is hard. And we don't have much time left to make it. It is a journey that will require each of us to persevere through setback, and fight for every inch of progress, even when it comes in fits and starts. So let us begin. For if we are flexible and pragmatic; if we can resolve to work tirelessly in common effort, then we will achieve our common purpose: a world that is safer, cleaner, and healthier than the one we found; and a future that is worthy of our children. Thank you.

It sounds a bit like Obama is premptively defending a climate bill that will probably turn out to be less aggressive than the other delegates in Copenhagen might like and like Bill Clinton, is looking to assure environmentalists that any bill is better than none if it moves the ball forward.

Spiegel reports:

This week, two of Germany's most important solar energy projects came online -- the second biggest solar power project in the world and one of the first solar thermal "power towers." The projects are part of the country's plan to provide 20 percent of its energy through renewable sources.

Officials flicked on the switch at two of Germany's most important new solar energy sites on Thursday. In the eastern state of Brandenburg, the world's second-largest solar energy project went online. And halfway across the country, in North Rhine-Westphalia, a smaller scale but perhaps equally important facility launched -- Germany's first solar-thermal power plant.

 

MICHAEL GOTTSCHALK/AFP/Getty Images

A new proposal in Australia plans to slaughter thousands of camels that are wrecking havoc in the outback.

First introduced to the country in the 1840s to help explorers traverse the harsh deserts, feral camels now number more than one million, with a population that doubles in size every nine years. The herds roam unchecked through much of central and western Australia, destroying sacred indigenous sites and fragile ecosystems alike. Traveling in large, intimidating packs, they compete with livestock for food, trample vegetation and ravage residents' homes in search of food and water.

Last month the federal government set aside $15.6 million dollars for a "camel reduction program" that needs to drastically reduce the population down to at least a third of its present size to avoid "catastrophic damage". So far the most practical strategy seems to be a cull, with sharpshooters in helicopters firing on large groups -- an "actually quite humane" plan, according to some. This is good news for certain farmers, who are looking to expand the market for camel meat, reportedly an excellent source of low cholesterol protein.  Alternative suggestions, including exporting the camels or instituting a mass sterilization policy, are thought of as unfeasible given the animals' enormous size and aggressiveness.

Unsurprisingly, animal welfare activists are deeply disturbed by the proposals, but criticism for the government is also coming from an unexpected outlet: the foreign media. American broadcaster CNBC referred to the plans as "camelcide" and dubbed Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd a "serial killer." Similarly, hosts of a program on China's Central TV are calling the government out for its "massacre...of innocent lives." 

Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

India's annual monsoons often lead to flooding. So why is the country now afraid it's going to run out of water?

A combination of water-intensive agriculture, population growth, and -- to a lesser extent -- a drought are to blame for the shortfall, the BBC reports:

Dr Raj Gupta, a scientist working for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), said that the current drought would lead to more groundwater extraction.

"Farmers receive no rains so they are pumping a lot more water than the government expected, so the water table will fall further," he said.

"The farmers have to irrigate, and that's why they're pumping more water, mining more water. The situation has to stop today or tomorrow."

If the trend continues, we could potentially be looking at the first international security crisis due to climate change.

AFP/GETTY IMAGES