Feed aggregator

 

 

Crop Mob at Community Farm
1829 San Ysidro Crossing, Santa Fe, NM 87507
Sunday, May 19th
1pm – 4pm

Please RSVP for Event

What is a crop mob?  It began in 2008 in North Carolina to grow sweet potatoes (which is great that we are starting at the community farm that had sweet potatoes last year).  A few times per year they come to help farms with planting.  We would like to have 20+ people volunteer at the community farm to help plant the items in the greenhouse.  We will go to other farms and large gardens to help this season.  Look at the COMMUNITY CALENDAR for updates.

Here is a great quote from the main website: “We work together in the spirit of mutual aid and any crop mobber can call a crop mob to do the kind of work it takes a community to do. We work together, share a meal, play, talk, and make music. No money is exchanged. This is the stuff that communities are made of.” 

Come join us this weekend to help.  Volunteering on this day will show you the farm and introduce you to Lois Harvie, Volunteer Coordinator and Linda Marple, Executive Director.

Contact 473-1403 or homegrownnewmexico@gmail.com with questions.

Wenlock Edge: Do peregrine falcons, sparrowhawks, kestrels and tawny owls join in with this collective expression of bird-ness? Or do they see it as an act of their prey's resistance?

Cuck-oo … cuck-oo, unmistakable sounds follow first light through a gap in the curtains. But maybe I am mistaken. Maybe I'm crafting cuckoo song out of the louder fragments of a woodpigeon's call? No, it's a cuckoo, the first I've heard for years so close to home. That would mean the world's all right; that those forces corroding seasonal certainties were weakening; that the spirit of spring has returned, alive and well? The harder I listen, the further I fall into the realisation that my desire to delude myself is stronger than my need to face up to the truth. It's a bloody wood pigeon.

I go outside, step into the dawn chorus. The air is cool and damp. The soft green light is like peering into a pond and the birdsong sounds as if it's coming from underwater. Birds are singing together and their communal power feels greater than individual, clan or tribal identities. Before this changes again and their personal characters return to them, I wonder what effect their chorus has on birds of prey. Do peregrine falcons, sparrowhawks, kestrels and tawny owls join in with this collective expression of bird-ness, irrespective that their manners are, as Ted Hughes said, "tearing off heads"? Or do they see it as an act of their prey's resistance, in defiance of their predatory power?

Maybe the chorus is like a village uprising, shouting at the gates of the murderous feudal landlord – a warning that together they could overpower their oppressor. I suspect the answering glare from treetop or cliff ledge betrays not a jot of intimidation. Nevertheless, there's a reckless kind of confidence in the songbirds that persists through the day. Out in the woods this confidence has an echo in the trees and the late sputtering of wild garlic and bluebells – even flowers of early purple orchid, stubby as betting-shop pencils, struggle through regardless of the colder weather. Spring has its own fierce truth, no matter what we try to make of it.

• Rural affairs
• Birds
• Wildlife
• Animals
• Spring

Paul Evans
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

By the end of the century, ocean levels could rise by 2 or 3 feet. That's enough to flood the colonists' first settlement at Jamestown, Va. And it's putting pressure on archaeologists to get as many artifacts out of the ground as quickly as possible — before it's too late.

» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

The defenders of Africa's rhinos are battling a well-financed and well-informed enemy. Poachers clear $40,000 or more for a single rhino horn. They have cash for the latest weaponry and to pay for inside information from some of the very people whose job it is to protect the rhinos.

» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

Residents of Ochre Beach, Manitoba, were surprised when heavy ice floes were pushed up on their beachfront properties last week, damaging many homes to the point of no repair. The ice event is the first for the area, but the second weather event to wreak havoc after severe flooding in 2011.

» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

Sea-level rises could send storm floods over the barrier if nothing is done to bolster the UK's flood defences

Sea-level rises could send floods driven by storm surges over London's Thames Barrier regularly by the end of the century, if nothing is done to bolster the UK's flood defences, scientists warned on Tuesday.

But around the world sea level rises from melting ice alone are likely to be "in the tens of centimetres" rather than several metres by 2100, as some outlying estimates had predicted, according to Ice2Sea, a project bringing together scientists from around Europe in order to improve predictions of sea level rises under climate change.

The scientists also said there was only a one-in-20 chance that melting ice would contribute more than 84cm to sea level rises by 2100.

Their work has helped to narrow down some of the vast differences in estimates of sea level rises. But their central estimate range is still large – that ice melting is likely to contribute between 3.5 to 36.8cm to global sea levels by 2100, which when added to the likely thermal expansion equates to a sea level rise of about 30cm to 69cm.

However, what matters more than sea-level rises alone is the effect of storm surges from the sea. The power of such surges was shown dramatically 60 years ago in Europe, when a surge in the North Sea killed more than 1,800 people in the Netherlands and more than 326 people in the UK. The waters reached nine miles inland on the UK's east coast on the night of the January storm in 1953, and it was as a result of this that the Thames Barrier was built, finally being finished in the 1980s.

The current barrier was designed to withstand the sorts of floods that occur only once in 1,000 years. But the Ice2Sea estimates show how rapidly these calculations are having to be revised.

According to the report, the sort of sea storm surge that is currently calculated as a one-in-50 year event – coming on top of the sea level rises already in store – would send waters more than 1m above current sea levels by 2100. That would overflow the current Thames Barrier, though there are plans to reinforce it.

Milder storms, which are much more frequent, would also cause more devastation because of higher sea levels, as the waters from sea surges would reach further and overtop defences less robust than the Thames Barrier. The scientists also warned that although their estimates are based on 2100, many of the effects will be felt in varying degrees before then.

Their estimates are also all based on a climate change scenario that many scientists believe is now too moderate. They are based on a mid-range of temperature rises by the end of the century of about 3-5C. Recent studies by the International Energy Agency, the World Bank and others suggest that on current trends the world is on course for a rise in temperatures of about 6C by the end of the century. Such high temperatures would not only raise sea levels even higher, but would be likely to make storms much more intense, and perhaps more frequent.

Jonathan Bamber, professor at Bristol University, said that if temperatures rose higher than the lower estimate, the consequences would be much greater. "This is not linear," he warned.

The wide range of probabilities for sea-level rises produced by Ice2Sea indicates the sheer difficulty of making predictions of such a complex system. Estimates of sea-level rise are enormously complicated, because they must take account of a large number of factors, each of which is complex in itself: the melting of ice from ice sheets based on land, such as Greenland and the Antarctic; thermal expansion of the oceans as temperatures rise; an increased frequency of storms and sea surges, among many other factors. As a result, the estimate contained in the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 was admitted as "incomplete".

• Flooding
• Natural disasters and extreme weather
• Sea level
• Oceans
• Sea ice
• Polar regions
• Climate change
• Rivers

Fiona Harvey
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Former chancellor says decision on airport capacity needed urgently to prevent lost decade of flat economic growth and rising debt

The coalition must move urgently to promote big-ticket infrastructure projects such as a new runway at Heathrow or Stansted airport if it is to prevent a lost decade of flat economic growth and rising debt, the former chancellor Alistair Darling has warned.

Ministers' current plans to postpone a decision on overstretched airport capacity in the south-east until the Sir Howard Davies report is published in 2017 will only delay a decision without resolving any of the existing dilemmas – including the threat to key marginals around both airports, he said.

It has taken seven years to build Terminal 5 inside Heathrow and Britain cannot wait, Darling said: "It is nonsense not to make up our minds."

He told journalists at Westminster that, as transport secretary 10 years ago he had published a white paper backing a second runway at Stansted, for which planning permission existed: "Labour tried to do something about it in far more benign circumstances when airlines were willing to spend money."

The only serious alternative was not "Boris island" in the Thames estuary – costly and vulnerable to bird strikes – but an expansion at Heathrow, he said.

After a 40-year dither by governments of both parties, the Labour government belatedly committed itself to a third Heathrow runway, then backed off as the Tories and Liberal Democrats moved against it on environmental grounds. That remains Labour's official position.

Darling said: "My fear is we could be bumping along the bottom for an entire decade if not longer – look at what happened in Japan."

He added that revived economic activity was also needed to generate renewed confidence and tax revenues, thus curbing the debt legacy of the banking crisis.

But subsidising house purchases inside the M25 – as chancellor George Osborne's budget intends – would only add to the existing bubble because the real problem is a shortage of supply.

The ex-chancellor said his only priority now was to be "totally focused" as chairman of the Better Together campaign to keep Scotland in the union with England – reversing the assumption until quite recently that SNP-led independence was "inevitable".

He ducked questions about his willingness to serve in an Ed Miliband government after 2015, but said Miliband and Ed Balls were right to focus on setting Labour's "priorities and direction of travel" at this stage of the cycle – and not providing detailed policies. That was what Tony Blair did in the mid-90s.

• Alistair Darling
• Heathrow third runway
• Liberal-Conservative coalition
• Economic policy
• London
• Air transport

Michael White
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Ralph Keeling, son of renowned climate scientist Charles David Keeling, reflects on the meaning of carbon emissions reaching record atmospheric levels last week

When the history of humanity's struggle to combat climate change is written, few characters will play as prominent a role as Charles David Keeling. A geochemist, Keeling developed an accurate method of measuring CO2 in the atmosphere, and in 1958 began recording background levels of the gas at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

That was the start of the famous Keeling Curve, which has tracked the steady rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Those levels have soared from 315 parts per million when Keeling began, to a grim milestone reached last week, as atmospheric concentrations exceeded 400 parts per million.

Keeling's son, Ralph, is now the director of the California-based Scripps CO2 Program, which was founded by his father and which recently launched a Web site designed to let the public follow the unsettling rise in carbon dioxide emissions. In an interview with Yale Environment 360 senior editor Fen Montaigne, Ralph Keeling discusses his father's work, reflects on the meaning of CO2 levels climbing higher than they've been in at least 800,000 years, and expresses hope that crossing the 400 ppm mark may play a role in awakening the public to the dangers of runaway climate change. "Bringing about change requires people to be aware of what's going on," said Keeling.

Yale Environment 360: Given your father's work and your continuing work, what do you see as the significance of this milestone of exceeding 400 parts per million of CO2?

Ralph Keeling: Well, people like round numbers, and they remember round numbers. So this is really a moment for human awareness, just like passing a 50th birthday. This is a point to think about where we are in the course of the rise of carbon dioxide. It feels a little bit like we're moving into another era, in that somehow between 350 and 400 parts per million feels like a certain kind of range of CO2, and now we're moving into a different range. It feels like we're moving into the future. Of course, we're doing that all the time, but this is a moment to realize that that's happening and some of the profound implications it might have.

e360: We have been passing other climate milestones, such as Arctic sea ice disappearing and glaciers melting worldwide. What do you think it's going to take to move the public and politicians to finally begin facing up to this problem?

Keeling: Well, it's tough, and part of it is just being aware of the significance of it. I mean, our small role here in measuring CO2 concentrations is to not just track it, but also make people aware of it. The magnitude of what's needed can be expressed in many terms. It can be expressed in terms of what you have to do just to stabilize emissions. One way to put it in perspective is to ask the question, "What would it take to stop CO2 from continuing to grow, but just to stop at 400, not going higher?"

And the answer is that we would have to reduce immediately our burning of fossil fuels by something like 55 to 60 percent. So it's a pretty drastic change. That is clearly not going to happen. If it did happen, it would be an economic catastrophe. So, it's not in the realm of something we should hope for, but it tells you where we have to get to at some point. We have to actually move away from fossil fuel burning in such a way that we practically go fossil-fuel-free within the next half a century or century, if we're going to avoid going above considerably higher levels like 500 parts per million. But even stopping it at 450 or 500 is going to take similar kinds of cuts, although we would have more time to do it if we started now.

e360: Is it known when the earth last had a concentration above 400 parts per million of CO2?

Keeling: The reconstructions before the ice core period, which take us only back 800,000 years, are a lot less secure. In the case of ice cores, we actually have samples of old air. And subject to some small caveats, you can simply analyze those and figure it out. In earlier geologic eras, the reconstruction of carbon dioxide depends on more indirect measurements. The work of people like Mark Pagani at Yale, who is in the business of reconstructing paleo CO2, shows that the last time that CO2 was around this level was probably in the mid-Pliocene, 2 to 4 million years ago.

e360: Let me ask you some questions about your father. Could you briefly describe his achievement and explain how it was that no one before him had accurately measured CO2 in the atmosphere?

Keeling: The interest in the subject of rising carbon dioxide and the potential for climate change was just brewing up in a significant way. At the time he started his career, he was not the first person to measure carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. Lots of previous work had been done, but mostly as an offshoot of other studies, like biologists wanting a baseline for looking at the air composition in some kind of respiratory chamber. But the methods being used before my father started were what you might characterize as wet chemical methods. They involved water and then dissolving and measuring things that are subject to what you would do in a wet chemistry lab.

They were not very precise... And that was paired with the fact that most of these measurements were done in places that were not very pristine. If you're near a city or in a city or if you're in a forest or near a forest, you see fluctuations in carbon dioxide that are potentially quite large. So it was kind of a fog as to what the large-scale atmosphere was really doing. Now, my father started making measurements of carbon dioxide as an offshoot of a project to study carbon in rivers. But the air measurements very quickly became more interesting, and he developed a more precise measurement method.

In the 1950s when he was doing this, liquid nitrogen, this very cold liquid, had become commercially available. And it turns out carbon dioxide is condensable in liquid nitrogen. So he basically was able to use a very simple dry method where you separate out the CO2 with this cold trapping, and then separately measure the amount of air and the amount of CO2. And it was precise to considerably better than one part per million. And he already could see a lot of structure in the variability that had never been seen before. Among the things he saw was that if he got away from a city or away from a forest, he almost always got the same value of carbon dioxide, something around 315 parts per million.

And this is a discovery that I think only in hindsight we can see as actually a key turning point in the field. He never published that as a discovery, but he used it to inspire people who could basically put together larger programs to actually track CO2 levels in the atmosphere. And the idea was that the only way you could have this stability in the concentrations if you were far away from forests and cities was if there was actually a large bit of the atmosphere that was nearly homogenous. And the setting up of the instrument at Mauna Loa, and the beginnings of measurements out there was really inspired by this idea of trying to track what was happening to this background over time. So he had a vision that it could work because he already realized there was a stable background, and then the question was, "How was it changing?"

e360: Your father passed away in 2005, and he was obviously seeing this very rapid increase in CO2 levels. What was he saying in his later years about what was happening because of this increase in CO2? And how do you think he would react to this 400 part-per-million milestone?

Keeling: It's hard to say how he'd react, but he was for most of his life a little bit conservative about saying too much about the implications for climate. After all, his work pertained to measuring carbon dioxide itself, and other people's work was the basis for concerns about impacts on climate. But one thing that happened to the whole scientific community through the period between about 2000 and 2010 is that there was a much larger involvement of people in reviewing the work of others and writing it up in reports such as the reports for the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. So the community as a whole developed a larger ownership of the whole message. I do know that towards the end of his life, just before he passed away suddenly, he was moving towards being more outspoken about the seriousness of the problem.

e360: Do you see your role as one that should be more public?

Keeling: I think it's important that the science we do be something that the public can access and understand. What I'm putting out there on the Web is focused on materials that are close to what we do. So there isn't an in-depth discussion about implications for climate per se because that's really someone else's job to put that out there. But the fact that CO2 is rising, the fact that we're crossing a milestone, the fact that it's accelerating, and some appreciation for the magnitude of what is going on is something that really falls within the realm of what we do. And it's an incumbent on us to make that clear to people.

e360: If emissions continue at this trajectory as we move deeper into the 21st century, how quickly do you think we could pass milestones like 450 parts per million, 500, or a doubling of CO2 from the pre-industrial era, which would be about 550 parts per million?

Keeling: Well, I would say at the pace things are going, we'll hit 450 probably in 20, 25 years or so, and similarly we'll hit 500 in a similar time frame after that. And if we continue accelerating, it will come even quicker than that. That is more or less an estimate based on current rates of growth. So it all plays out pretty quickly if we don't change course. As to the doubling milestone, it's important to point out that carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas that we're emitting. It's also methane and nitrous oxide. So the doubling milestone will be upon us considerably sooner than the doubling of CO2. And depending upon how you figure the different contributions, we're not that far from it even today.

e360: That's what is known as total equivalent CO2?

Keeling: Yes, exactly.

e360: And that's about 478 right now?

Keeling: Yeah, I think that's right.

e360: So you think by mid-century or before we could hit that real doubling, if you add in other greenhouse gases?

Keeling: Oh, I think it's almost for sure we will.

e360: What steps would you recommend be taken fairly soon to begin to rein in emissions?

Keeling: Again I'm not the person to think in detail how this can work or what the constraints are. But clearly we have to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. That requires developing renewable sources of energy, and we need a marketplace that allows that to happen. As long as fossil fuels are too cheap, that's going to be hard to see. So we need some system in which the cost of the damage caused by CO2 emissions is paid at the gas pump or at the point of extraction and not by generations living later.

e360: Given this sobering milestone, is there anything out there that gives you hope?

Keeling: I'm surprised at the level of attention this is getting. It's nice to see that people are paying attention in this way. And I think that bringing about change in the first place requires people to be aware of what's going on, and people are seemingly quite aware. So that's hopeful.

e360: The next step is action, but obviously that's the hard part.

Keeling: Yes. But if you don't see that it's happening, it's hard to act on it.

• Climate change
• Carbon emissions

guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

A new report makes the case that insects may be essential to feeding a planet of 7 billion people. Why? They're nutritious, better for the environment than other protein sources and can generate jobs, according to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization.

» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

Shale oil has rapidly boosted oil production in the US, presaging a revolution in oil to mirror that in gas production

Developing countries have overtaken the industrialised world for the first time in their thirst for oil, according to the world's leading energy authority.

This transformation in the demand for oil has come as production of the fuel has boomed in the US, "sending ripples through the global markets", the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Tuesday.

Shale oil – the technique of blasting apart dense rocks under high pressure to release fossil fuels trapped within – has rapidly boosted oil production in the US, presaging a revolution in oil to mirror that in gas production.

The US pioneered shale gas production in the past decade, resulting in a gas glut in the country that has sent gas prices plunging and led to a massive switch from coal to gas for electricity generation.

As with shale gas, the newfound oil supplies are likely to be used first to slake demand for fuel in the US's home market, making the economy – previously the world's biggest oil importer – less dependent on overseas supplies. Those supplies are increasingly flowing to Asia.

At the same time, developing countries are massively increasing their capacity to refine crude oil, which is changing the pattern of trade and is part of "a broad restructuring of global refining capacity". The IEA said this would result in a continued squeeze on European refiners, caused by increasing US product exports and the new Asian and Middle Eastern refineries.

The IEA said that the shift would "not only cause oil companies to overhaul their global investment strategies, but also reshape the way oil is transported, stored and refined". In addition, the same techniques that have been brought to bear on shale gas in the mainland US could be transferred to depleted conventional oilfields, opening up new possibilities for extraction.

The US is likely to overtake the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) as the world biggest source of oil within about five years, the IEA said last year. But Opec is still an important bloc, the agency said.

The vast expansion of oil production that could follow the US shale oil boom also spells bad news for emissions. The IEA has warned that on current trends, the world is in for 6C of warming, a level scientists warn would cause chaos.

Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the IEA, told the Platts Crude Oil Summit in London: "The good news is that this is helping to ease a market that was relatively tight for several years. The technology that unlocked the bonanza in places like North Dakota can and will be applied elsewhere, potentially leading to a broad reassessment of reserves. But as companies rethink their strategies, and as emerging economies become the leading players in the refining and demand sectors, not everyone will be a winner."

• Oil
• Energy
• Fossil fuels
• Shale oil
• Oil
• United States

Fiona Harvey
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

As the ice melts, erosion, flooding and extreme storms are threatening a way of life for many indigenous communities

Guardian US interactive teamFeilding CageGabriel DanceRichard SprengerSuzanne Goldenberg

Though Sarah Palin has reversed her policy since she was governor, it is undeniable that Alaska is changing fast

Guardian US interactive teamFeilding CageGabriel DanceRichard SprengerSuzanne Goldenberg

Despite their disruption, can dams help the organisation work towards ending poverty while keeping carbon emissions down?

The World Bank is making a major push to develop large-scale hydropower, something it had all but abandoned a decade ago but now sees as crucial to resolving the tension between economic development and the drive to tame carbon use.

Major hydropower projects in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Nepal and elsewhere – all of a scale dubbed "transformational" to the regions involved – are part of the bank's fundraising drive among wealthy nations. Bank lending for hydropower has scaled up in recent years, and officials expect the trend to continue.

Such projects were shunned in the 1990s, in part because they can be disruptive to communities and ecosystems. But the World Bank is opening the taps for dams and related infrastructure as its president, Jim Yong Kim, tries to resolve a quandary at the bank's core: how to eliminate poverty while adding as little as possible to carbon emissions.

"Large hydro is a very big part of the solution for Africa and south Asia and south-east Asia ... I fundamentally believe we have to be involved," said Rachel Kyte, the bank's vice-president for sustainable development and an influential voice among Kim's top staff members. The earlier move out of hydro "was the wrong message ... That was then. This is now. We are back."

It is a controversial stance. The bank backed out of large-scale hydropower because of the steep trade-offs involved. Big dams produce lots of cheap, clean electricity, but they often uproot villages and destroy the livelihoods of the people the institution is supposed to help. A 2009 World Bank review of hydropower noted the "overwhelming environmental and social risks" that had to be addressed but also concluded that Africa and Asia's vast and largely undeveloped hydropower potential was key to providing dependable electricity to the hundreds of millions of people who remain without it.

"What's the one issue that's holding back development in the poorest countries? It's energy. There's just no question," Kim said in an interview.

Advocacy groups remain sceptical, arguing that large projects, such as Congo's long-debated network of dams around Inga Falls, may be of more benefit to mining companies or industries in neighbouring countries than poor communities.

"It is the old idea of a silver bullet that can modernise whole economies," said Peter Bosshard, policy director of International Rivers, a group that has organised opposition to the bank's evolving hydro policy and argued for smaller projects designed around communities rather than mega-dams meant to export power throughout a region.

"Turning back to hydro is being anything but a progressive climate bank," said Justin Guay, a Sierra Club spokesman on climate and energy issues. "There needs to be a clear shift from large, centralised projects."

The major nations that support the World Bank, however, have been pushing it to identify such projects – complex undertakings that might happen only if an international organisation is involved in sorting out the financing, overseeing the performance and navigating the politics.

The move toward big hydro comes amid Kim's stark warning that global warming will leave the next generation with an "unrecognisable planet". That dire prediction, however, has left him struggling for how best to respond and frustrated by some of the bank's inherent limitations.

In his speeches, Kim talks passionately about the bank's ability to "catalyse" and "leverage" the world to action by mobilising money and ideas, and he says he is hunting for ideas "equal to the challenge" of curbing carbon use. He has criticised the "small bore" thinking he says has hobbled progress on the issue.

However, the bank remains in the business of financing traditional fossil-fuel plants, including those that use the dirtiest form of coal, as well as cleaner but carbon-based natural gas infrastructures.

Among the projects likely to cross Kim's desk in coming months, for example, is a 600-MW power plant in Kosovo that would be fired by lignite coal, the bottom of the barrel when it comes to carbon emissions.

The plant has strong backing from the United States, the World Bank's major shareholder. It also meshes with one of the bank's other long-standing imperatives: give countries what they ask for. The institution has 188 members to keep happy and can go only so far in trying to impose its judgment over that of local officials. Kim, who in his younger days demonstrated against World Bank-enforced "orthodoxy" in economic policy, now may be hard-pressed to enforce an energy orthodoxy of his own.

Kosovo's domestic supplies of lignite are ample enough to free the country from imported fuel. Kim said there is little question Kosovo needs more electricity, and the new plant will allow an older, more polluting facility to be shut down.

"I would just love to never sign a coal project," Kim said. "We understand it is much, much dirtier, but ... we have 188 members ... We have to be fair in balancing the needs of poor countries ... with this other bigger goal of tackling climate change."

The bank is working on other ideas. Kim said he is considering how the bank might get involved in creating a more effective world market for carbon, allowing countries that invest in renewable energy or "climate friendly" agriculture to be paid for their carbon savings by industries that need to use fossil fuels. Existing carbon markets have been plagued with volatile pricing – Europe's cost of carbon has basically collapsed – or rules that prevent carbon trading with developing countries.

"We've got to figure out a way to establish a stable price of carbon," Kim said. "Everybody knows that."

He has also staked hope for climate progress on developments in agriculture.

Hydropower projects, however, seem notably inside what Kim says is the bank's sweet spot – complex, high-impact, green and requiring the sort of joint public and private financing Kim says the bank can attract.

The massive hydropower potential of the Congo river, estimated at about 40,000MW, is such a target. Its development is on a list of top world infrastructure priorities prepared by the World Bank and other development agencies for the Group of 20 major economic powers.

Two smaller dams on the river have been plagued by poor performance and are being rehabilitated with World Bank assistance. A third being planned would represent a quantum jump – a 4,800MW, $12bn giant that would move an entire region off carbon-based electricity.

The African Development Bank has begun negotiations over the financing, and the World Bank is ready to step in with tens of millions of dollars in technical-planning help.

"In an ideal world, we start building in 2016. By 2020, we switch on the lights," said Hela Cheikhrouhou, energy and environment director for the African Development Bank.

It is the sort of project that the World Bank had stayed away from for many years – not least because of instability in the country. But as the country tries to move beyond its civil war and the region intensifies its quest for the power to fuel economic growth, the bank seems ready to move. Kim will visit Congo this month for a discussion about development in fragile and war-torn states.

Kyte, the World Bank vice president, said the Inga project will be high on the agenda.

"People have been looking at the Inga dam for as long as I have been in the development business," she said. "The question is: Did the stars align? Did you have a government in place? Did people want to do it? Are there investors interested? Do you have the ability to do the technical work? The stars are aligned now. Let's go."

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from the Washington Post

• Hydropower
• Energy
• Renewable energy
• Carbon emissions
• Environmental sustainability
• World Bank

Howard Schneider
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Membership of the European Union has been a boon to the UK's wildlife and habitats – and human health is better as a result

The UK's membership of the European Union has rocketed up the political agenda in recent weeks, but if Lord Lawson and Nigel Farage get their way, a go-it-alone Britain would be far from green and pleasant.

An analysis for Friends of the Earth, published today by the EU policy expert Dr Charlotte Burns from the University of York, provides a damning critique of UK environmental performance over decades, and highlights the huge risks of EU withdrawal.

The UK really was once the dirty man of Europe. We had the highest level of sulphur dioxide emissions in Europe, resulting in acid rain that devastated Scandinavian forests. Our seas were akin to open sewers as we pumped human effluent in them as part of a "dilute and disperse" approach to pollution – the result of which I vividly recall from family holidays. And our drinking water was contaminated with a cocktail of chemicals.

British politicians consistently used the mantra of "sound science" as an excuse to dither and delay, often only taking action when incontrovertible damage could be proved – and sadly, in many cases, already done. This backward, discredited approach to policy making – which proved so damaging in the case of BSE – is still favoured by many UK politicians and civil servants, as demonstrated by the government's refusal to back recent EU restrictions on neonicotinoid pesticides linked to bee decline.

The EU's approach to policy making is fundamentally different. Informed by the precautionary principle, and institutionalised within the environmental provisions of the Lisbon treaty, it requires that laws be introduced if there's a potential risk to human health or the environment – at least until evidence demonstrates otherwise. This is an approach – largely due to the efforts of our more progressive continental cousins in Scandinavia, Germany and the Netherlands – that is still not properly understood by many UK politicians and civil servants (as George Monbiot explained recently).

As a result we enjoy cleaner drinking water, cleaner bathing beaches, and cleaner air. The laws that gave those benefits to us were strongly resisted by the UK government.

British wildlife has also benefited from EU membership. Wildlife habitats are highly valued by UK citizens, as the forests sell-off fiasco testifies. Furthermore, they also provide important "environmental services" in the form of flood defences, carbon sequestration, pollination, food, water and materials.

However, yet again, successive UK governments have consistently been forced to play catch-up on wildlife protection, when compared with the EU approach. It's European legislation such as the habitats directive and the birds directive that safeguard our finest habitats, and some of our very best sites have only been protected after the European commission brought proceedings against Westminster.

The painful truth is that the UK has a poor track-record on supporting progressive environmental policy and continues to do so. From bees to energy efficiency to resource efficiency targets to green farming, this self-proclaimed "greenest government ever" continues to say no, no, no. Fortunately much of the rest of Europe says yes, yes, yes.

Cameron will say he wants to renegotiate our relationship with Europe, not leave it. According to a YouGov poll earlier this month, the most favoured option among voters is for the UK to be part of the EU free trade area.

What if this is the new accommodation that Cameron achieves?

Burns's analysis tells us that while the UK would still be covered by the majority of EU environmental laws we would no longer be covered by the bathing beaches directive, the birds directive, and the habitats directive. Nature lovers – and anyone with small children that like to play on the beach – beware.

Membership of the European Union has been a boon to the UK's environment, and our health is better as a result. Leaving the EU – fully or partially – would in the words of Burns be an "astounding piece of political folly".

We can't ignore the evidence of the environmental consequences of abandoning EU membership. But the climate-sceptic stance of many of those pushing to leave Europe shows that evidence-based policy making is not always their strong point.

• Wildlife
• Birds
• Animals
• Endangered habitats
• Conservation
• European Union
• European commission
• Europe
• Pollution

Craig Bennett
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

French schooner returns to north as scientists research effects on organisms that form basis of marine ecosystem

Tara will soon set sail for the Arctic again. The famous schooner will cast off from Lorient in Brittany on Sunday 19 May for a seven-month expedition via the Northeast Passage along Russia's Arctic coast, returning through the Northwest Passage.

The goal of the 25,000km Tara Oceans Polar Circle Expedition, with some 15 scientist on board, is to search for planktonic organisms, including viruses, bacteria, protists and metazoans, all vital resources that need to be studied in their own environment while there is still time.

"This is a vital and urgent task," said Chris Bowler, a biologist at the École Normale Supérieure graduate school and research centre, and head of research at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). "The Arctic is one of the most productive planktonic regions on the planet, so we have to get there before humans start interfering."

The ship is returning to the area where it let itself be trapped by pack ice in September 2006, when it drifted for 500 days to cover the distance between Siberia and Greenland. That was half the time taken by a previous Norwegian expedition, which took between 1,894 and 1,896 days, because the shrinking ice floes have since opened up new sea routes – and with them the potential for exploiting oil and gas resources, fishing and tourism.

The ship's oceanographers and biologists will be examining the impact of these changes in microscopic detail. A litre of seawater contains between 10bn and 100bn living organisms and they want to learn more about this biomass. Because plankton forms the basis of the food chain it is vital to the marine ecosystem, and its organic biodiversity plays a determining role in the major biogeochemical cycles of nitrogen, carbon and oxygen. Half the oxygen we consume on earth comes from the oceans, and the sea is the planet's leading carbon sink.

"Phytoplankton feeds the zooplankton, which is rich in lipids and eaten by cod and whales alike. That is the Arctic's first gift to man," said Lars Stemmann, a researcher in the Laboratory of Oceanography at Villefranche-sur-Mer (CNRS, Paris-VI University). "Then the detritus and excrement feeds the deep-sea population and forms a carbon sink on the sea bed."

The question they will try to answer is how will plankton react to the consequences of climate change. In the summer of 2012, the ice floes had melted to an extent scientists had never seen before. The ice not only covers less of a surface area but is far less thick, so it melts even faster in the spring.

According to the oceanographer and physicist Jean-Claude Gascard, emeritus head of research at the CNRS, the ice floes have lost three-quarters of their volume in just a couple of decades. Plankton thrives around the edges of the floes, under the shelter of the ice with good exposure to light. That is the precise frontier zone on which the Tara team will focus its research.

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde

• Polar regions
• Marine life
• Oceans
• Biodiversity
• Climate change
• Glaciers
• Microbiology
• Climate change
• France

Martine Valo
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The US State Department has sadly joined the push to distribute GM crops around the world, whether people want them or not

If you have a feeling that genetically modified (GM) foods are being forced upon the population by a handful of business interests and vociferously defended by the scientists that work in the agriculture industry or at the research institutions it funds, you might be onto something.

The zeal with which GM proponents evangelize transgenic seeds (and now, transgenic food animals) is so extreme that they are even pouring vast sums of money to defeat popular efforts to simply label GE foods – like the nearly $50m spent to defeat the popular 2012 ballot measure to label GE foods in California, Proposition 37. What's more, it's not just happening in the United States. I am the head of Food & Water Watch, and we have spent months looking at the extent to which the US State Department is working on behalf of the GM seed industry to make sure that biotech crops are served up abroad whether the world wants them or not.

Our report analyzes over 900 State Department diplomatic cables from 2005 to 2009 and reveals how far the US government will go to help serve the seed industry's agenda abroad, knowing that resistance to GMOs worldwide is high.

Here are some of the tidbits gleaned from our comprehensive look at the cables:

• Between 2007 and 2009, annual cables were distributed to "encourage the use of agricultural biotechnology", directing US embassies to "pursue an active biotech agenda".

• There was a comprehensive communications campaign aimed to "promote understanding and acceptance of the technology" and "develop support for US government trade and development policy positions on biotech" in light of the worldwide backlash against GM crops.

• Where backlash was high, some embassies downplayed efforts. In Uruguay, the embassy has been "extremely cautious to keep [its] fingerprints off conferences" promoting biotechnology. In Peru and Romania, the US government helped create new pro-biotech nongovernmental organizations.

• The State Department urged embassies to generate positive media coverage about GE crops. Diplomatic posts also bypassed the media and took the message directly to the public; for example, the Hong Kong consulate sent DVDs of a pro-biotech presentation to every high school.

• The State Department worked to diminish trade barriers to the benefit of seed companies, and encouraged the embassies to "publicize the benefits of agbiotech as a development tool".

Monsanto was a great beneficiary of the State Department's taxpayer-funded diplomacy, helping pave the way for the cultivation of its seeds abroad: the company appeared in 6.1% of the biotech cables analyzed between 2005 and 2009 from 21 countries. The embassy in South Africa even informed Monsanto and Pioneer about two recently vacated positions in the agency that provided biotech oversight, suggesting that the companies advance "qualified applicants" to fill the position. Some embassies even attempted to facilitate favorable outcomes for intellectual property law and patent issues that would benefit the company.

The cables also show extensive lobbying against in-country efforts to require labeling of GM foods. In 2008, the Hong Kong consulate "played a key role" in convincing regulators to abandon a proposed mandatory labeling requirement. One in eight cables from 42 nations between 2005 and 2009 addressed biotech-labeling requirements.

What's more, the US government is now quietly negotiating major trade deals with Europe and the countries of the Pacific Rim that would force countries to accept biotech imports, commercialize biotech crops and prevent the labeling of GM foods.

The vast influence that Monsanto and the biotech seed industry have on our foreign affairs is just one tentacle of a beast comprised by a handful of huge corporations who wield enormous power over most food policy in the United States.

It's no accident that we're here: a farm policy of "get big or get out" that has been going on for decades has only benefited big companies that are becoming more and more consolidated. They wield unprecedented power over the market, at times putting small and midsized farmers out of business and favoring factory farms and the cultivation of GM commodities that fuel them – GM corn and soy, which are also the cornerstone of junk foods produced and sold worldwide.

Thanks, Monsanto. And thanks, State Department. Not only are you selling seeds, you're selling out democracy.

• GM
• Food & drink industry
• Food
• Genetics
• Barack Obama
• George Bush

Wenonah Hauter
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Alice Bell recalls an interview with Joe Farman, who helped discover the hole in the ozone layer and died this weekend

Joe Farman died this weekend. Obituaries appeared on the BBC and Telegraph on Monday night.

As one of the scientists who helped find the "hole" in the ozone layer, Farman was part of what was arguably one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 20th century, even if it took a slightly different hue from earlier discoveries, a little less triumphant perhaps, being more a matter of humans incrementally learning what we had done to the Earth rather than simply digging deeper around themselves. More "er, um, I think, possibly, oh" than "eureka".

For the last few years the British Library has been undertaking an Oral History of British Science. The interview with Farman is lovely. There seems to be a fault on the sound file half way through, but the library has a link to the full transcript that makes for a very absorbing read. This interview is full of warmth, gossip and humour, with detail about the science told alongside a sense of some of the politics of science.

It takes you from his childhood memories improvising radio equipment with the Scouts and reading the popular science of the 1920s, to putting that 1985 ozone paper in the post to Nature on Christmas Eve. You get a sense of the technological and cultural changes in science over the century, as well as its immense increase in size and complexity. It's also a neatly context-filled insight into the development of an area of scientific measurement in the late 20th century; it reminds you how much of science is really a matter of working out new and more intricate ways to measure. And it's a great story of the gradual and sometimes tricky mingling of mathematics, meteorology and chemistry in the history of climate science.

You want page 251 for references to how much he enjoyed pulling James Lovelock's leg. Or page 237 where he tries not to be too scathing about how much science the Americans were doing at the McMurdo Antarctic Station, but notes they had brought a nuclear generator down there which ended up under the sea ice (they got it back a few years later apparently, in case you were wondering).

There's a touching bit in which he remembers getting angry when he discovered the wastefulness of CFCs used in the fast food industry (page 297), and I was interested to read that the idea of a "hole" in the ozone layer came from the pages of the Washington Post, probably after a Nasa press release, though no one owned up to being the first to use the word (page 294).

The juiciest bit, perhaps, is when he recalls telling his colleagues about the hole in the ozone layer and "there were several people there who we shall not name I should think who ought to have reacted but didn't … ". He goes on to say he later learned that the head of his division had tried to suppress that paper, writing to the Met Office to say it shouldn't be published "cause it'd be very embarrassing if my inferences were wrong" (page 281).

I highly recommend letting yourself be pulled into reading the whole thing. Not just as a tribute to a man who did some world-changing research, but also to get a sense of how complex, slow and just plain silly the progress of science can be.

Here's one of my favourite snippets as a taster, when he was asked to remember the early 1980s, when they were just beginning to receive low results for ozone levels in the spring (pages 277-8 of transcript):

"Their job was to keep an eye on things as they came in. And so actually I heard about this a little bit late and my first reaction, as anyone should be in essence, is if your observations of ozone start to change you should be – the first question you should ask is has something gone wrong with the instrument. And so you have to go through all the procedure of the calibrations and comparisons and so on and so forth, and convince yourself that it's not instrument or the people operating it but is actually something real.

By the time this was sorted out the sudden [inaud] observations we looked at just had got considerably lower, hmmm, and it was then fairly obvious that you had to believe it or not and if you believed it you had to publish it pretty quickly because it was fairly clearly important.

One of the odd things about the whole of the ozone story I suppose is it demonstrates, you know, how shall we put it [laughs], in a rather worrying way how compartmentalised science can get. Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina had given this warning that chlorine could be important, etc, etc. Hmmm … they clearly, by the time we talked to them, had no idea what incredibly low temperatures are reached in the Antarctic stratosphere. I mean when I started to do a very crude modelling of what might be expected, if you look in the recommended reaction rates for – air rates for some appropriate reactions you discover to your horror they had never been measured at the sort of temperatures you can get in the Antarctic winter [laughs].

And so it goes on. It shows very clearly, almost the same in the Met Office, that there was this huge gulf between people who wrote papers and the poor people who made observations, there was very little feedback, you know, by the people who regarded the data as important to the people who were making it. So you get this terrible situation where you get young men, even in the Met, old men, being paid to do something of which they've got really no idea why they're doing it and they don't really understand how important it is to take every effort to stop doing silly things, impossible to completely eliminate [laughs] and so on.

But, you know, it's much the same with the theoretical chemists. They really have no idea what the real Antarctic atmosphere was like and so I suppose it's not surprising that no one really sort of thought Antarctica was a place where you ought to be looking for this, but when you look back with hindsight it is perfectly obvious. And I suppose I'm as guilty as anyone, I knew perfectly well about stratospheric clouds – in the winter pole the stratospheric clouds. They even got good pictures of them and so on and so forth but since the chemists had sort of issued their blanket statement that there can't ever be enough particles in the atmosphere for chemical reactions on them to be important you [laughs] – until you're sort of pressed and are struggling to find something to latch onto – you know, it's difficult when people tell you don't think about this to suddenly say, 'Oh damn it, you have to, look.' [laughs]

Dr Alice Bell is research fellow in the Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex. A recovering historian of science, she has never really got over the delight of stumbling across archives of scientists gossiping about each other

• People in science
• Science policy
• Ozone layer

Alice Bell
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Namibia sighting suggests much-hunted whales are regaining ancient migratory routes, or may be down to climate disruption

Astonishing news from Walvis Bay, Namibia, where scientists from the Namibian Dolphin project on Tuesday confirmed the sighting of a grey whale. Not only has this north Pacific species been extinct in the Atlantic since the 18th century, it has never been seen south of the equator.

The significance of this sighting is creating excitement among marine biologists. It may suggest good news – that the great whales are recovering from the disastrous hunts of the 20th century. Or it may indicate that the changing climate is disrupting their feeding habits – with unknown consequences.

A unique sighting of a grey whale in the Mediterranean in May 2010 – the animal got as far as Israel – has overturned many preconceptions, with some scientists speculating that this much-hunted great whale – reduced to near extinction in the 20th century – is regaining ancient migratory routes.

John Paterson, of the Walvis Bay Strandings Network, says the whale was first sighted by tour boats on dolphin watch on 4 May. The "strange whale" was confirmed as a grey, and photographed, by a member of his team on 12 May.

"The question is now, what is origin of this whale?" says Paterson. The photographs prove this is not the same individual that turned up in the Mediterranean, he says. "Is it another individual that has traverse the North-west Passage, or perhaps travelled around the southern tip of South America and across the Atlantic? Unfortunately, we'll never know the route it followed to get here."

Known as "devil fish" for the ferocity with which they fought the whalers (usually because the hunters targeted the calves, which the mothers fiercely defended), grey whales now permit themselves to be petted by tourists from whalewatch boats off Baja California. Their historic range included the Atlantic, with convincing historical evidence that Icelandic people hunted them. The whales may have migrated south to the Mediterranean to calve in the warmer waters of the Mediterranean, where they would also be relatively free from attack by orca, their only natural predators.

As shore-hugging, bottom-feeders, grey whales may have also been once common off British shores. A vertebra in the collection of the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, found in Cornwall, has been identified as belonging to a grey whale. The last records of grey whales in the Atlantic appear to coincide with the start of modern whaling off the coast of New England in the early 18th century, with the appearance of "scrag whales" off the island of Nantucket.

The southern African grey whale joins other whales where they should not be. In Cape Cod Bay off New England last year, an aerial reconnaissance team from the Provincetown Centre for Coastal Studies surveying the north Atlantic right whales feeding in the bay were amazed to find a bowhead whale – a strictly Arctic cetacean – among their number. Climate change and shifting ice have been attributed to its surprise appearance – with the same conditions possibly accounting for the Mediterranean grey whale, which may have crossed from the north Pacific to the Atlantic via the opened-up North-west Passage.

In his forthcoming book, Feral, George Monbiot cites a contemporary proposal to reintroduce grey whales to the Irish Sea by airlifting 50 animals there from California. Today's news from southern Africa (Walvis Bay translates as Whale Bay) indicates that the whales may be about to achieve their own reintroduction without the need of airpower.

• Whales
• Marine life
• Namibia
• Africa
• Animals

Philip Hoare
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

New hydrocarbon sites will all be offshore, but campaigners fear contentious oil and gas development in Amazon will still go ahead

Peru has announced a bidding round for new oil and gas concessions but, contrary to what was initially expected, none of them are in the Amazon rainforest.

Nine concessions are to be auctioned, energy company Perupetro declared recently, but all of them are offshore along Peru's Pacific Ocean coast.

This constitutes a significant change of plan by Perupetro which last September issued a statement that before the end of 2012 36 new concessions would be established.

According to a presentation made to the World Heavy Oil Congress in Aberdeen in Scotland the same month, 27 of these concessions – totaling millions of hectares – would be in the Amazon.

In November Perupetro's then chairwoman, Rosa Maria Ortiz, said the establishment of the lots would be postponed until this year, but when the bidding round was declared on 25 March only nine of the 36, all of them offshore, were included.

Perupetro's new chairman, Luis Ortiga Cuneo, who took over from Ortiz in December, told Peruvian press the reason for the postponement was a 'prior consultation law' approved by Congress in 2011.

The law's stated aim is to give "indigenous or native peoples" the right to be previously consulted about development projects or "administrative or legislative" measures affecting their collective rights to their "quality of life, cultural identity or physical existence."

Ortigo Cuneo, sitting in his office in Lima's San Borja district, says now:

We went ahead with the offshore lots because we don't need to do prior consultation. It's a new thing so we don't know how long it will take. We're identifying the communities we need to talk to. We haven't talked to them yet, but we're going to begin next month. We could be ready by the end of the year, but that will be difficult.

The projected concessions include scores of indigenous communities and the buffer zone of one of Peru's largest 'protected natural areas', while four of them border reserves established for indigenous peoples in 'voluntary isolation.'

Amazon Watch's Andrew Miller, currently in Peru, says the "sustained campaigns of local indigenous communities, their federations and international allies appear to have changed the government's calculus. Whereas in the past they promoted the oil rounds to international companies without advising communities, now they have to comply with the consultation law."

But others remain extremely skeptical.

"The government has been granting concessions without doing consultations for 40 years and it'll be difficult to change now," says Jesus Castro Suarez, from Lima-based NGO Eco-Dess. "I suspect they'll find some legal device to avoid consulting people. This can't or shouldn't be described as a civil society victory."

Others express concern about the prior consultation law itself and what the consultation process will involve. Although the law states that the government must seek the consent of potentially affected indigenous peoples, it is not required to obtain it.

According to Juan Carlos Ruiz Molleda, a lawyer at Lima's Institute for Legal Defence, the law and the 'regulations' to implement it violate Peru's constitution and international jurisprudence in numerous ways.

"They are important achievements but contain dangerous provisions," he says. "I'm referring in particular to their omission of obtaining indigenous peoples' consent" – a right recognized by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights whose rulings are legally binding on Peru.

Ortiga Cuneo, for one, is adamant that Perupetro will establish the concessions in the Amazon at some point – whether indigenous communities like it or not.

Asked what would happen if communities said they were against oil or gas concessions, Ortiga Cuneo says:

That's not possible. It's not for them to decide the destiny of Peru. What we have to do is tell them what's going to happen, how it's going to happen, and reach an agreement. This is not a question asking them 'yes' or 'no.' Prior consultation is not consultation because, imagine it, it'd be like having one country inside another. It's so they're well-informed and know what's planned.

Carmen Rosa Sandoval Muñoz, a Lima-based human rights lawyer, calls Ortiga Cuneo's position "extremely concerning."

"There's a growing public discourse that maintains that prior consultation isn't really about consultation at all, but just bringing indigenous peoples closer to the centres of decision-making or keeping them informed," she says. "But that's what's called participation, which is just one part of consultation."

AIDESEP, an indigenous organization representing 1,500 communities in the Amazon, recently expressed its 'suspicion' about the consultation process. In February the government created a special commission to oversee it, but failed to appoint any indigenous representatives.

"And indigenous peoples? None," AIDESEP responded. "Their absence is cause for a great deal of suspicion."

Perupetro's announcement in late March is just the latest of several postponements of new Amazon concessions. In February 2012 it stated that a Bidding Round 2012 "will be launched in the coming months", and companies like ExxonMobil, BP, Total and Chevron were interested in investing.

But two months later Perupetro announced that 22 new concessions would be "launched in the last quarter of 2012" – 18 in the Marañon, Ucayali and Madre de Dios basins in the rainforest, according to the then chairman Aurelio Ochoa – yet none were put to tender.

"In the case of the off-shore concessions Perupetro doesn't have the prior consultation law problems, so they can go ahead," says Ochoa now. "For the 27 other concessions, they need to do the consultation. This will take time. It could take a year, a year and a half."

According to Perupetro, there are already 40 oil or gas concessions in the Peruvian Amazon in the exploration or production phase, covering approximately 20m hectares.

Social conflicts or environmental problems are endemic. In March the Environment Minister, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, declared a 'state of emergency' in the Pastaza region in the north following "40 years of oil exploitation and contamination", as indigenous federation PUINAMUDT describes it.

The contract for one of the concessions in this region, called 'Lot 1-AB' and operated by Pluspetrol, will expire in August 2015. Perupetro has announced it will re-offer the concession as 'Lot 192' and do prior consultation with affected communities, but leaders are insisting on various conditions, including environmental clean-up and land-titling, to be met first.

"If there's no clean up, there won´t be any consultation," leaders from indigenous organization FECONACO told Pulgar-Vidal during a visit to the region in late April.

In recent months the prior consultation law has generated intense controversy and fierce debate, particularly over who it applies to. Publication of a database listing those supposedly protected by it has been long delayed, and two weeks ago the government official in charge, Ivan Lanegra Quispe, resigned.

A few days before that president Ollanta Humala Tasso gave a TV interview implying that the majority of communities in the Peruvian sierra – inhabited by approximately 3.8 million Quechua and 100,000s of Aymara, according to the indigenous Andean federation CAOI – wouldn't be covered by the law.

"The problem is defining who are indigenous communities and who aren't," the president said.

• Amazon rainforest
• Trees and forests
• Peru
• Oil
• Gas

David Hill
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

More than 83,000 hunting birds are killed by windfarms each year but no wind energy company has been fined

The Obama administration has never fined or prosecuted a windfarm for killing eagles and other protected bird species, shielding the industry from liability and helping keep the scope of the deaths secret, an Associated Press investigation has found.

More than 573,000 birds are killed by the country's windfarms each year, including 83,000 hunting birds such as hawks, falcons and eagles, according to an estimate published in March in the peer-reviewed Wildlife Society Bulletin.

Each death is federal crime, a charge that the Obama administration has used to prosecute oil companies when birds drown in their waste pits, and power companies when birds are electrocuted by their power lines. No wind energy company has been prosecuted, even those that repeatedly flout the law.

Wind power, a pollution-free energy intended to ease global warming, is a cornerstone of President Barack Obama's energy plan. His administration has championed a $1bn-a-year tax break to the industry that has nearly doubled the amount of wind power in his first term.

"It is the rationale that we have to get off of carbon, we have to get off of fossil fuels, that allows them to justify this," said Tom Dougherty, a long-time environmentalist who worked for nearly 20 years for the National Wildlife Federation in the West, until his retirement in 2008. "But at what cost? In this case, the cost is too high."

Documents and emails obtained by The Associated Press offer glimpses of the problem: 14 deaths at seven facilities in California, five each in New Mexico and Oregon, one in Washington state and another in Nevada, where an eagle was found with a hole in its neck, exposing the bone.

One of the deadliest places in the country for golden eagles is Wyoming, where federal officials said windfarms had killed more than four dozen golden eagles since 2009, predominantly in the southeastern part of the state. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to disclose the figures. Getting precise figures is impossible because many companies aren't required to disclose how many birds they kill. And when they do, experts say, the data can be unreliable.

When companies voluntarily report deaths, the Obama administration in many cases refuses to make the information public, saying it belongs to the energy companies or that revealing it would expose trade secrets or implicate ongoing enforcement investigations.

Nearly all the birds being killed are protected under federal environmental laws, which prosecutors have used to generate tens of millions of dollars in fines and settlements from businesses, including oil and gas companies, over the past five years.

"What it boils down to is this: If you electrocute an eagle, that is bad, but if you chop it to pieces, that is OK," said Tim Eicher, a former US Fish and Wildlife Service enforcement agent.

The Fish and Wildlife Service says it is investigating 18 bird-death cases involving wind-power facilities and seven have been referred to the Justice Department. A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to discuss the status of those cases.

In its defence, the wind-energy industry points out that more eagles are killed each year by cars, electrocutions and poisoning than by turbines. Dan Ashe, the Fish and Wildlife Service's director, said that his agency always has made clear to wind companies that if they kill birds they would still be liable.

"We are not allowing them to do it. They do it," he said of the bird deaths. "And we will successfully prosecute wind companies if they are in significant noncompliance."

Windfarms are clusters of turbines as tall as 30-story buildings, with spinning rotors the size of jetliners.

Flying eagles behave like drivers texting on their cell phones – they don't look up. As they scan for food, they don't notice the industrial turbine blades until it's too late.

Former interior secretary Ken Salazar, in an interview with the AP before his departure, denied any preferential treatment for wind. Interior Department officials said that criminal prosecution, regardless of the industry, is always a "last resort".

"There's still additional work to be done with eagles and other avian species, but we are working on it very hard," Salazar said. "We will get to the right balance."

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has proposed a rule that would give wind-energy companies potentially decades of shelter from prosecution for killing eagles. The regulation is currently under review at the White House.

The proposal, made at the urging of the wind-energy industry, would allow companies to apply for 30-year permits to kill a set number of bald or golden eagles. Previously, companies were only eligible for five-year permits.

"It's basically guaranteeing a black box for 30 years, and they're saying 'trust us for oversight'. This is not the path forward," said Katie Umekubo, a renewable energy attorney with the Natural Resources Defence Council, who argued in private meetings with the industry and government leaders that the 30-year permit needed an in-depth environmental review.

But the eagle rule is not the first time the administration has made concessions for the wind-energy industry.

Last year, over objections from some of its own wildlife investigators and biologists, the Interior Department updated its guidelines and provided more cover for wind companies that violate the law.

Under both the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, the death of a single bird without a permit is illegal.

But under the Obama administration's new guidelines, wind-energy companies don't face additional scrutiny until they have a "significant adverse impact" on wildlife or habitat.

That rare exception for one industry substantially weakened the government's ability to enforce the law and ignited controversy inside the Interior Department.

"US Fish and Wildlife Service does not do this for the electric utility industry or other industries," Kevin Kritz, a government wildlife biologist in the Rocky Mountain region wrote in internal agency comments in September 2011. "Other industries will want to be judged on a similar standard."

The Obama administration, however, repeatedly overruled its own experts. In the end, the wind energy industry, which was part of the committee that drafted and edited the guidelines, got almost everything it wanted.

"Clearly, there was a bias to wind energy in their favor because they are a renewable source of energy, and justifiably so," said Rob Manes, who runs the Kansas office for The Nature Conservancy and who served on the committee. "We need renewable energy in this country."

• Birds
• Energy
• Wind power
• Renewable energy
• Wildlife
• Animals
• Obama administration
• United States
• US politics

guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds