Why It Matters : Technology and Science

One Point of Light in Bush's Environmental Legacy

Newsweek — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:56:41 GMT

By Anders Rönmark

Few Europeans shed tears for George W. Bush when he left office Tuesday. His handling of the Iraq War and the U.S. failure to ratify the Kyoto environmental treaty were two of the biggest black marks against him. Yet in Sweden, the end of the Bush era marks a bittersweet moment: the last day in office for Michael Wood, the most famous and perhaps most influential U.S. ambassador to Sweden in history. Since Bush appointed his long-time friend to the office in 2006, Wood, a media executive, has been feted by government officials, business leaders and the Swedish media for his groundbreaking work in alternative energy.

Unusually, for an ambassador, Wood has tried to promote Swedish business interests in the United States, rather than just U.S. interests in Sweden. Wood started out by visiting every county of Sweden, meeting with scientists and entrepreneurs and put together a list of the 23 most promising Swedish companies, such as Comfort Window System (which makes energy-efficient window fittings) and Sekab (a producer of cellulosic ethanol), and began promoting them to U.S. investors, both public and private. Wood's List, as it has become known, now numbers 52 companies, and federal agencies and departments in the United States, including the Pentagon, are now investing in and cooperating with Swedish companies. For instance, Swedish Biofuels has received $5 million dollars from the U.S Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop jet fuels containing biological components. Wood's program has also attracted the interest of several U.S. states. In 2007 Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm visited Sweden, on Wood's invitation, and her economic development team has made four trips to the country. Result: Swedish Biogas has opened a plant in Flint, Mich., to create biogas from the city's sewage plant, to power Flint's buses and produce fertilizers; Swedish company Chemrec is now working with a paper mill in Escanaba, Mich., on a technology called black liquor gasification that recycle pulp waste into fuel. All told, Wood's program has resulted in business activity worth approximately $150 to $200 million dollars, he says. "But the potential of the companies on just this one list is huge," he says. "We're talking billions of dollars."

Wood's interest in the alternative energy industry came shortly after his appointment, when he realized that an ambassador to a small country like Sweden was most likely to be successful if he focused on what he calls "one big thing." Nick Burns, the U.S. undersecretary of state, "liked the idea of me working to make Sweden a member of NATO," says Wood. Condoleezza Rice "thought that promoting democracy in the former Soviet states should be my top priority." But Bush, the erstwhile oilman, liked a third option: "He told me 'I bet the Swedes are ahead of us when it comes to alternative energy. Go there and find out what they're doing.'" Many were skeptical. Bush had hardly demonstrated much interest in the industry, and many believed the failure to ratify Kyoto was emblematic of the administration's beliefs about the environment. But Wood's program has been so successful that it has inspired other U.S. embassies, particularly in Scandinavia, to work harder on promoting alternative energy solutions--a small bright spot in a presidential legacy most of the people living there would just as soon forget.

How (Not) to Deal with the Somali Pirates

Barrett Sheridan — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:30:28 GMT

By Barrett Sheridan

Last week, the world cheered a little when an Indian warship said it had encountered a Somali pirate “mother ship” in the Gulf of Aden and, after being fired upon, blew it to smithereens. International shippers needed a reason to celebrate. Earlier that week, Somali pirates had captured their biggest prize yet, a Saudi supertanker carrying $100 million of crude and, with nearly a hundred attempted hijackings so far this year, were making waters around the Horn of Africa about as welcoming as a bed of nails.

Well, now they can put away the champagne glasses. CNN is reporting that the sunken “mother ship” was actually a Thai fishing trawler and that, while pirates were in the process of commandeering it, the vessel still had 14 innocent fishermen onboard when the Indian Navy struck. One of them, a Cambodian, spent six days adrift before being rescued by a passing ship. (One other is confirmed dead; the rest are missing.) The sailor is now recovering in a Yemeni hospital, where he had the chance to inform the Indian Navy of its mistake.

The event underscores the difficulty of tracking pirates in waters where they easily blend in with fishing trawlers or other private watercraft. “The bulk of Somali coastal dwellers are still fishermen,” says Peter Lehr, a lecturer in terrorism studies at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. “They are now caught in the fray and being attacked by western warships. How can you divide a real fisherman and a pirate from one another? They use the same vessels.”

That means recent military operations in the region—the European Union and NATO now have forces there—might not be a very adequate defense against the pirates. So what line of defense is left? The ships themselves. Armed guards aren’t an option, because they’re too expensive for ship owners, and firefights are risky onboard ships carrying two million barrels of flammable crude oil. But there are alternatives. Hanging barbed wire around a ship’s perimeter is a simple way to dissuade would-be boarders. Electrified fences also work, but they’re out of the question on ships carrying volatile cargoes. The Long-Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, has become popular after it effectively repelled an attack on a cruise ship in 2005; it blasts a deafening wall of sound at targets up to 300 meters away. Fire hoses also do the trick at shorter ranges. Even simply gunning the engines and picking up speed can deter pirates, who look for easy prey.

It’s worth trying anything to avoid being taken hostage. Although the Somali pirates, which are currently holding 300 hostages, treat their captives fairly well—they are, after all, worth a lot of money to them—negotiations can last weeks or months. The MV Faina, a Ukrainian ship carrying 33 Soviet-made tanks, was captured in late September and is still being held in the port of Eyl, in the Puntland region of Somalia. “These guys are very patient people,” says Stephen Askins, a maritime lawyer at London firm Ince & Co. “One guy may be having a bad day and he’ll say, ‘I want $5 million,’ and the next guy might say, ‘Well, I’m a bit more reasonable than that.’ It’s not like buying a car. It’s a very long, drawn out process.”

Of Sludge and Salad: Wastewater Greens the World's Gardens

Newsweek — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 07:14:52 GMT

You might want to hold your nose for this one.

Photo: IWMI

An intriguing new study is out on the use of wastewater in world agriculture. If you've ever wondered where all that cruddy old water goes when you pull the bathtub plug, brush your teeth, or purge the loo, this is the report you've been waiting for. The short answer: On your salad. The big surprise is, that may not be all bad.

In a survey of 53 cities worldwide, the International Water Management Institute (IMWI), a water research and advocacy group, has found that the vast majority of produce cultivated in urban plots is irrigated with what amounts to tainted water, fetched from polluted streams and lakes or wells. True, only a fraction (say 10 percent) of global agricultural output is harvested in the cities, and only a part of that crop is consumed uncooked. Yet in these cities alone, some 1.1 million farmers produce vegetables and fruit for 4.5 million people. Projecting the numbers worldwide, no fewer than 200 million farmers rely on recycled water to sow 20 million hectares, an area twice the size of Hungary. The findings were released during World Water Week, a summit of sages and policy types gathered in Stockholm through Aug. 23 in an effort to rethink the way the world farms and flushes.

At first whiff, this all seems dire. After all, the water we dump, from sink or commode, back into an ecosystem, carries a galaxy of bugs, bacteria and germs that can cause nasty diseases from diarrhea to hepatitis. Worse, it's a good bet that most families that consume the fruit and vegetables grown with such swill do not properly wash their produce, a sure invitation to illness. Cholera outbreaks in Israel and Chile have been traced to food contaminated with wastewater .

Now it turns out that even the plumbing has a silver lining. Noisome as it seems, dirty water may be the only reason that many people around the world eat at all, especially in the poorest countries. Nearly 200,000 residents in Accra, the capital of Ghana, put produce on the table thanks largely to wastewater. Nearly a quarter of Pakistan's domestic vegetables are nurtured with wastewater. It's no exaggeration to say that "bad" water helps fill the bowls of scores of calorie depleted households around the world.

Add to that the fact that irrigating with waste adds a kind of pro bono fertilizer to the farm and also returns moisture to drying lands. "It's a great way to cope with water stress," says senior IWMI official, Pay Drechsel. The soil is also a great natural filter, "cleansing" dirty water as it seeps into the ground. There may even be a plus for the climate, as sludge-laden water returns carbon to the earth that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere.

More to the point, there may be little alternative. For a time, the World Health Organization, rightly fearing the rampant spread of diseases, cautioned against using tainted water for cropping. But in time, "they realized this would put millions of farmers out of business," says Drechsel. Some 85 percent of the 53 cities studied dump their sewage and wastewater into streams and lakes. In the poorest societies, where clean water is as precious as it is scarce, diverting fresh water to the farm is to rob the drinking glass.

WHO has now adapted its approach, signing off on farming with wastewater in countries where clean water is scarce but with the caveat that authorities move aggressively to treat waste and that families thoroughly wash their produce. "With an ever greater number of emerging economies lacking resources to adequately treat their waste, this situation will continue."

So pull the plug and pass the salad. But wash, first.

The G8: Butting Heads on Climate

Katie Paul — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:07:59 GMT

Finding ways of capping carbon emissions is on the agenda for this week’s G8 Summit, which begins today on the pristine Japanese island of Hokkaido. But if anything is getting capped, it’s expectations for a meaningful agreement on climate change.

A competing jumble of climate change negotiations have turned the forum itself into a debate topic as polarizing as the carbon markets and global targets being proposed. Not one, but two extra groups have joined the G8 at Hokkaido, each with the potential to reach its own set of conclusions. The G8 + 5 group brings major developing emitters like China and India into the fold, and the Major Economies Meeting (MEM), George W. Bush’s brainchild, adds three other big carbon emitters—Indonesia, Australia and South Korea—into the mix. Together, the groups account for 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Washington would prefer to settle the major points at the MEM before tackling the unwieldy 200-country United Nations gatherings, which are coming up against their deadline for a post-Kyoto treaty to be approved in Copenhagen in December of 2009. Coming out of Hokkaido empty-handed will make pre-Copenhagen talks this fall just that much messier.

Still, while none of the three groupings at Hokkaido will likely produce a major consensus on emissions caps, they are producing a lively diplomatic chess match. E.U. members, who want the group to commit to steep cuts in carbon emissions by 2050, are butting heads with Bush over his unwillingness to commit to numerical targets. Meanwhile, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is trying to broker a compromise. With a more green-friendly Obama or McCain administration only months away, Fukuda apparently believes that a tussle with Bush is counterproductive. Instead, he’s pushing for agreements on less-polarizing issues, such as encouraging carbon capture and storage technology for coal power plants, promoting nuclear energy and lowering tariffs on clean technology.

“There are some folks out there who think the rest of the world can settle on their own agreement and expect the United States to then come and join under a new administration,” said Council on Foreign Relations environmental expert Michael Levi on a recent press conference call. “But the Japanese understand that, regardless of substance, the United States is going to have to be part of creating whatever agreement happens if there’s any chance that the U.S. will end up being part of that agreement.”

The Green Wall of China - and beyond

Mac Margolis — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:23:10 GMT

For calloused earth watchers, the latest word on the state of global forests was all too familiar. In the annual Global Monitoring Report 2008, released on April 8, the World Bank concluded that the planet's woodlands are still vanishing at an alarming rate. Between 2000 and 2005, according to the most up-to-date numbers, an average of 73,000 square kilometers of forests fell annually. That is to say, a swath of forest the size of Panama tumbles every year to the loggers' chainsaws, the planters' bulldozer, and the settlers cocktail of kerosene and a match.

More than provoking another round of handwringing, the report is sure to add wood to the already inflamed political row over who is to blame for the worsening assault on the earth's climate. Thanks to the rich world's addiction to fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and coal, developing nations have often been portrayed as innocents in the tale of dangerous climate change. That is no longer the case. The felling of forests accounts for about 20 percent of all the carbon that humans pour into the skies every year, worsening the planetary greenhouse effect and driving unpredictable climate change. Leading the plunder are the developing nations, with top honors going to Brazil and Indonesia, which together (see chart, page 206) destroy nearly 50 million kilometers of woodlands a year. So whether it's burning gasoline or torching rainforests, no society has a monopoly on fouling the earth's atmosphere.

But there are some surprises in the dismal forest tally. First, while the assault against woodlands is a global one, some countries have been quietly getiing greener. In fact, many woodlands are growing back at a pace that has taken the scientific world by surprise, starting with the richest nations. Thanks to a combination of aggressive reforestation, preservation, falling population, and removing marginal farm land from cultivation, countries from Japan to Germany have seen their forests flourish in recent years. In Spain, Ukraine and Finland, tree farming for timber and pulp and paper has clothed once barren plots. Japan has denser forests today than it did before World War II. All told, 22 of the world's most forested nations had become greener between 1990 and 2005, according to a study of international specialists coordinated by the University of Helsinki.

By 2005, according to the World Bank, high income countries boasted close to 1 hectare of forest per person, three times the green space per capita (.29 hectares) in the poorest nation. The gains were particularly startling in Europe, where new forests are helping literally to clear the air, sopping up 126 million tons of atmospheric carbon a year, equal to 10 percent of all EU smokestack and tailpipe emissions.

More remarkably, two of the biggest and fastest developing nations are also reversing the deforestation curse, challenging the notion that development with preservation is an oxymoron. India and China have recorded some of the fastest gains in forest cover on the planet. Indeed, if Brazil is the all too familiar portrait of forests in peril then China has become the unlikely poster child of preservation. China's green thumb arose from environmental disaster. As it happened, predatory wood cutters and farmers had so depleted the stands of trees girdling the lowlands that in 1998 disaster struck; torrential rains swelled the Yangtze river, causing devastating floods that claimed more than 3,000 lives.

Since then Beijing cracked down on bootleg loggers and exhorted the nation to sow the nation with fast growing poplar, eucalyptus and pine. By some count the Chinese plant 5 billion trees a year. Though the new forests are a thin filter for the megatons of greenhouse gases hurled into the skies by China's breakneck development, replanted areas already take up more carbon than the amount released by annual tree felling. (Planted forests in India are drinking up nearly as much carbon as the country's woodcutters and developers can release.)

Environmental purists may argue, with reason, that the soldierly rows of eucalyptus for pulp and paper or exotic pine for construction are poor stand-ins for the majestic old growth forests that once crowned the planet. But in a world choking on the consequences of decades of environmental plunder, the fact that the planet is a little greener is already a breath of fresh of air.

How to Beat the Raging TB Contagion

Mac Margolis — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 11:57:20 GMT

Call it the cough heard round the world. The World Health Organization's Feb. 26 report on how super strains of tuberculosis are on the loose has shaken physicians and policy makers everywhere to the marrow. And rightly so. The study, based on a massive survey of 90,000 patients worldwide, is eloquent testimony to the ravages of a modern killer: multi drug resistant tuberculosis, known as MDR TB in the chilly shorthand of public health, and its even deadlier next of kin, extensively drug resistant tuberculosis, or XTR-TB, which is practically untreatable.

It's no surprise that poor countries, rife with malnutrition, claustrophobic slums, and especially AIDS are super TB's closest ally. Precisely because HIV strafes the human immune system, patients are sitting ducks for infection. That's why almost everywhere that AIDS is prevalent, tuberculosis is soaring. Worst hit are the fragments of the old Soviet Union (led by Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where one in four new tb patients have the super variety) and Africa, with the highest rate of TB in the world and the worst public health statistics (only six nations on the continent managed to report to Geneva). At this rate the Economic Forum at Davos might have to be scrapped in favor of the sanatorium that once crowned that Magic Mountain.

There is one bright spot in the developing world's deathlock with TB: Brazil. That may sound odd. Nearly a quarter of the 185 million Brazilians live below the poverty line, where contagions rage, and some 620,000 have AIDS, a third of all cases in Latin America. But unlike almost every other developing nation, Brazil has not seen the overall TB infection rate spike - much less a runaway outbreak of MDR-TB - among the most vulnerable population. The reason is as simple as it is controversial: free meds for HIV and AIDS patients. In 1996, the Brazilian congress passed a law requiring the government to hand out antiretrovirals to anyone with HIV free of charge. Drug companies were disgruntled, not least because Brazil browbeat them into slashing prices for the three-way cocktail of antiretrovirals, the state of the art medicine used to combat the virus. The same policy encouraged nearly two dozen other developing countries to take on the biggest pharmaceutical corporations as well.

No one ever claimed Brazil was a health spa, of course. After a brief lull, mosquito-borne dengue fever has come raging back, including the killer hemorrhagic variety. An outbreak of micobacteriosis, which causes a nasty hospital infection, leaves lasting surgery scars and can withstand all but the most drastic disinfectants, is on the loose. And while in theory anyone may be treated at the country's public hospitals, chronic underfunding has apparently forced brain surgeons in Rio de Janeiro to resort to common power tools, like home drills, in the operating rooms.

Still, it's hard to argue with success. A team of international scientists recently crunched the numbers and found that Brazilians living with AIDS who reguarly took the three-way cocktail of antiretrovirals had 80 percent lower TB infection rates than did patients who were not treated. (The study reviewed data from 1995 to 2001, but researchers say that the trend holds to this day.) The bottom line is that systematic use of cutting edge HIV/AIDS medicine may be one of the best ways to keep this millennial scourge at bay. That may not be the best news for Big Pharma's shareholders. But it ought to give public health authorites a shot in the arm.

It's later than you think

Mac Margolis — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:46:44 GMT

Judging by all the negative ink on biofuels lately - they're too expensive, energy inefficient, not so green, or so we're told - you'd think the rush to rescue the world from sky-fouling fossil fuels is a sham. That would be a shame. If there's any truth to the latest buzz out on what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will say next month when it weighs in with another major report on the state of the planet, then we're already cooked.

Or so says Tim Flannery, the Australian scientist and author of "The Weathermakers" who has become the rock star of climate scholars. Though not a member of the climate panel, Flannery pored over the official numbers recently and came away shaken.

Speaking to Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Lateline, on Oct. 9, he said that the forthcoming panel report will show that the earth's atmosphere has already passed the danger zone for the levels of gases which are driving planetary climate change. In fact, we passed the threshold two years ago - a decade earlier than had been predicted - when, thanks to acclerated burning of fossil fuels, the concentrations of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane reached 455 parts per million.

That's the level that scientists say will bring on at least a two degree centigrade (3.6 farenheit) hike in averagle global temperatures, after which all manner of environmental havoc is likely. Higher ocean temperatures, for instance, will not only hasten the melting of polar ice sheets and dangerously lift sea levels, but likely provoke megadroughts and wildfires in many of the world's rainforests.

What's causing the emissions to spike? Prosperity, says Flannery. Not just in China and India; economic growth has been the rule in many nations. And what's driving the wheels of progress? Mostly those expensive, inefficient, and not so green fossil fuels. In fact, instead of redcuing their earth-baking greenhouse gas emissions, the fastest growing nations in the developed and developing world alike are "recarbonizing," as energy wonks put it, thanks to the usual suspects: coal and oil.

There's been no official comment so far from IPCC insiders. Maybe they're trying to catch their breath.

Biofuels: good for the environment, not great for food aid in Africa

Silvia Spring — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 13:09:25 GMT

Biofuels are not short of fans. Made from crops maize, sugarcane and rapeseed, they make environmentalists happy because they help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by offering an alternative to conventional transport fuels. But their growing popularity is a cause for concern among African recipients of food aid, most of whom would rather eat maize than see it converted into ethanol.

Over the past three years, venture capital investment in biofuels has increased 800 percent, and the International Energy Agency predicts that production will double by 2011. In the U.S., for example, this has meant a 300 percent increase in the amount of maize used to produce ethanol since 2001. And Africa itself has increased ethanol production from 100 million gallons in 2006 to over 160 million this year.

All this has some humanitarian aid agencies nervous. While biofuels aren't entirely to blame, they have played a part in pushing up the price of maize across sub-Saharan Africa. In South Africa, for example, the price of white maize has jumped 186 percent over the past two years, up to $245 per metric ton. As a result, humanitarian groups can no longer rely on it as a main supplier. This comes at a tough time for southern Africa: the size of what the UN terms the "food-insecure population" has doubled in South Africa in the past year, and there are food shortages in Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The World Food Programme is now scrambling to procure maize from Malawi, which can offer it for less--around $180 per metric ton. But if estimates for biofuel demands are accurate, Malawian prices won't stay low for long.

That cool iPhone may turn into a zombie

Emily Flynn Vencat — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 09:58:18 GMT

Yesterday's news that Apple had sold more than a million iPhones in less than three months--after dropping its price by one third to $399 last week--felt pretty anticlimactic. So, Apple's newest most covetable device is flying off the shelves? So what?

Actually, says one of the world's leading Internet security experts, David Perry, who stopped by Newsweek's London office yesterday, the iPhone's record sales are a "very big deal." While we're all thoroughly accustomed to PC viruses--which are now being circulated at the rate of 15,000 per day, compared to just 5 per month in 1990--to date there has yet to be any major cell phone virus.

That's because of two things, says Perry, who is the Global Director of Security Education for international internet security frim, Trend Micro. First, computers are highly susceptible to viruses largely because we all (for the most part) use exactly the same Microsoft operating system, creating a monoculture that makes us all vulnerable to exactly the same kinds of malicious software (malware). Up until now, people have used too many different types of handsets and cell phone operating systems for virus writers to exploit them efficiently. Secondly, phones haven't been "smart" enough--that is to say, equipped with things like the ability to connect quickly to the internet and download music--to enable malware to work.

The iPhone, with its super slick Internet capabilities and predicted impressive market share--Apple expects to sell 10 million iPhones in 2008, which would see this single model take a full one percent share of America's total mobile phone market--will enable cyber criminals to overcome these traditional cell phone hurdles. As such, Perry predicts that next year we'll witness the world's first serious viral epidemic in cell phones.

The most likely virus: one that makes its way onto iPhone's Safari browser via the web, and then compels the phone to call an expensive 1-900 number repeatedly or download the same costly ringtone again and again--running up a massive bill. As Perry puts it: "Cyber criminals are trying to use malware as a magic spell to turn your cell phone into a zombie that's out to get you."

The Summer, The Sand and The Surge

Christopher Dickey — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 13:07:36 GMT

Photo: John Moore/AP

It was 111 degrees Fahrenheit for Americans in Baghdad today (43 Celsius for the Iraqis), and it's supposed to be hotter - 117 F or 47C - for the rest of the week. That's in the shade, of course, for those who can find it. Such infernal temperatures are pretty much the same every year. Nothing is quite as predictable in Iraq as the summer heat.

But another simple fact is just as evident: the death toll among fighters tends to decline in the dog days, because nobody wants to have to do battle in that stifling air, and those who have to go into combat tend to move more slowly and cautiously.

On the other hand, to the extent public records are available on non-governmental Web sites like iraqbodycount.org and icasualties.org (the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, with which Newsweek did a major presentation on the Internet in December of last year), it seems that the civilian death toll, mainly from terrorist attacks, actually may remain high or rise in the heat of summer. Security forces are thinner on the ground. Roadside bombs can be put out at night and suicide drivers don't usually have to brave the hellish heat for very long before they punch their ticket to Paradise.

All of this needs to be taken into account when we look at the results of what the White House has called "The New Way Forward" in Iraq and what the rest of us call "the surge."

The last official Pentagon report on "Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq," at the beginning of June, largely ignored the impact of the weather. Its historical time lines and graphs were based on political moments that often crossed over seasons, and comparisons were made with "the previous quarter," not the same quarter the previous year. Probably the important new report due from U.S. Commanding General David H. Petraeus in September will take the same air-conditioned approach.

But a look at the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count's statistics and graphs shows that there is usually a decline in the number of Americans killed during the summer - June, July and August -- followed by big, even shocking increases as the weather gets more bearable and the fighting season resumes in October, November and December. If the rule is not infallible, the trends certainly are clear.

The carnage ebbs and flows through the rains of January and February, then, in this case without fail, declines dramatically during March, possibly because this is the annual season of blinding dust storms known as khamsins (as in the March 2003 photograph above). Sure enough, it was at the end of March this year that Sen. John McCain and others proclaimed that the surge was making great advances.

In April and May every year, however, the battle picks up again dramatically before the usual summer subsidence. This year was no exception: 81 Americans killed in March, 104 in April, 126 in May, 101 in June, 79 in July, and 48 thus far in August.

It's probably too much to say that the weather in Iraq matters more than the best-laid plans of the administrations in Baghdad and Washington, but it may be a more reliable indicator of the future.

A Dolphin's Demise: Another alarm bell for China's blighted environment

Melinda Liu — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 12:56:59 GMT

Who cares about Lipotes vexillifer? Or that the freshwater dolphin species is -- er, make that "was" -- more than 20 million years old? If you don't, you should. My colleague Jonathan Adams in Beijing explains why:

For the last few years, scientists have feared that the baiji -- a freshwater dolphin unique to China's Yangtze River -- was critically endangered. Late last year, an international team spent six weeks scouring the river for any remaining baiji. On Wednesday, they published their results: they didn't find squat, despite twice covering the dolphin's range along a1,669-kilometer channel of the Yangtze. That means that -- barring an errant baiji here or there -- the species is, for all intents and purposes, extinct. It now represents the first global extinction of any creature exceeding 100 kilograms for more than half a century.

That fact alone is enough to depress animal-lovers. But the baiji's fate has a far larger significance. It's the latest warning sign that China’s paying an increasingly high price for its breakneck economic development. The baiji's demise was caused in part by overfishing and an increase in ship traffic on the Yangtze -- many of the dolphins got fatally entangled in nets or sliced to ribbons by ship propellers. But another cause was the pollution dumped in ever-larger quantities into the Yangtze, by factories, farms and communities.

That pollution is exacting a high toll, and not just for the baiji. In a report last month, the OECD said that up to 300 million people are drinking contaminated water in China each day, with 190 million suffering from water-related illnesses each year, and 30,000 children dying annually from diarrhea caused by befouled water. One third of China's rivers and three-quarters of its major lakes are "highly polluted."

China's government appears to be taking notice. The nation's environmental agency last month announced strict new rules on lake pollution, which include banning all projects discharging ammonia and phosphorous, the removal of all fish farms by the end of 2008 and a ban on fish ponds, vegetable fields and flower farms that use fertilizers within one kilometer of a lake.

Yet recently I’ve talked with Chinese environmental activists, and the picture they paint is far from optimistic. Government crackdowns, new regulations and promises are usually only lip service, backed up by weak enforcement, they say. Nor are courts immune to the pressures of politics and cronyism. Central government diktats are often enforced only temporarily, until Beijing's attention turns elsewhere. Then, things go back to business as usual: powerful bosses, in collusion with local government officials, keep the factories and farms churning away. Those officials are at times out-and-out corrupt. But they also have a strong incentive to avoid measures that would slow development: GDP growth is a key yardstick by which their performance -- and so, their promotions and salary -- is measured.

Public activism could pressure local governments, but that's rare due to a culture of fear. Those who speak out publicly against local business bosses or officials are often intimidated and beaten, and are quickly abandoned by friends and family afraid of trouble.

Take Zhang Zhengxiang, 58, an environmental gadfly I met recently in Kunming. For decades now, Zhang has fought to protect his beloved Lake Dianchi from illegal logging, pollutants and mismanagement. He says his land was taken away, his wife and daughter left him, and he had to sell his house. He's been roughed up many times by thugs he says were hired by local village officials or factory owners; in May they beat him and smashed his camera when he was taking pictures of the lake.

He pulled up his shirt to show me one nasty scar on his lower back. Now, he says he's heard that local officials plan to throw him in prison next month. He's agitated, angry, and more than a little eccentric -- living proof that some of the only Chinese brave (and crazy) enough to stand up to powerful local interests are those with little left to lose.

What Zhang says openly and defiantly, other environmental activists say off the record: China's environmental crisis is rooted in local officialdom's skewed incentives, which aren't aligned with the public interest. Grassroots authorities and courts need to be more accountable to their communities, rather than to Communist party bosses who can make or break their careers. Only a more responsive political and legal system is likely to force such officials to better protect China's blighted waters

Britain's Fear of Farming

William Underhill — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 15:38:02 GMT

A single cow is stricken with Foot and Mouth Disease. At once, Britain's new Prime Minister Gordon Brown heads home from holiday. Not to be outdone, Conservative party leader David Cameron postpones a family trip to France. Then there's the export ban, the prohitibion on all cattle movements beyond the farm gate, the roar of comment in the press and the round-the-cock coverage on the braodcast media.

An over-reaction? Okay, it's clear that Foot and Mouth is a nasty disease with sad and expensive consequences. Already more than 100 cattle have been slaughtered to prevent contagion. But these days Britian barely figures as an agricultural nation. As a fraction of the country's economic output farming figures behind tourism or financial services. The ordinary citizen's attachment to the land is almost wholly sentimental.

The polticians know better. When it comes to farm scares, experience separates the British from their fellow Europeans. It will be a long time before the public forgets the mass cremation of cattle that marked the last outbreak of Foot and Mouth in 2001 or the £9 billion cost to the economy. Nor will ministers forget the polticial damage caused by their belated and botched response.

More important, the memory of those heaped pyres of burning carcasses plays to some darker fears. Remember that back in the 1990s it was British agriculture that gave the world Mad Cow Disease. Its legacy: a reinforced mistrust of modern farming methods. The countryside isn't just a peaceful place to escape metropolitan stress; it's also a food factory with a dodgy reputation.

No matter that a slice of meat from a Foot and Mouth victim is harmless to the consumer. When anything nasty stirs in the food chain the British voter wants urgent reassurance. And that means a display of dynamism and concern from his leaders. A smart prime minister won't be back at the seaside any time soon.