Prince Charles has cut his global warming emissions by 9 percent in the past year, according to an annual review (printed on recycled paper with vegetable-based ink) of the prince’s accounts. Charles has been carbon neutral since 2005.

More trains trips, less plane trips, and a Jaguar and Land Rover that run on cooking oil have sliced his footprint. He also farms organically, and gets electricity from renewable sources at his Highgrove estate.

Charles and his wife, Camilla, have promised to cut emissions even further. Future plans include converting the royal train to biodiesel fuel (Europe’s first biodiesel-powered passenger train – Virgin Trains – left the station earlier this month, a project of Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson).

Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, praised the prince’s leadership:

"The fact that he reduced his carbon emissions by 9 percent in the last year alone highlights the potential for making rapid cuts in the nation's contribution to climate change.”

Others are more critical. Charles took heat a few months ago when he flew to New York to receive an environmental award. The prince’s principal private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, explained that Charles uses carbon offsets like funding tree planting or renewable energy projects to balance out the travel. “We’re doing it the best way we can at the moment,” he noted.

CNN

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is the true-life chronicle of author Barbara Kingsolver’s decision to move to an Appalachian farm and eat locally produced, organic goods for one year. She explains that her highest shopping goal was to “get our food from so close to home that we’d know the person who grew it.” Her husband and two daughters joined her on this journey.

The family raised an astonishing array of vegetables, fruit, meat, and eggs. They did buy supplies like flour, coffee, and olive oil from the grocery store, but they were able to grow the vast majority of their food at home or buy from locals. Besides Kingsolver’s accounts of the ups and downs of pulling weeds or dodging testosterone-crazy roosters, husband Steven L. Hopp provides fascinating food facts sprinkled throughout the book. He explains that if we all ate just one meal each week made of locally raised organic meat and produce, we could reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil per week. Kingsolver’s nineteen-year-old daughter Camille offers sidebars of meal plans and recipes (my looming zucchinis thank her for the zucchini chocolate chip cookie recipe).

Steven and Camille’s practical commentary provide a good balance to the author’s more subjective arguments for eating seasonally. For example, Kingsolver implies that the reader will have a greater appreciation for food if they can’t eat apples in January, or that hours spent in the kitchen canning vegetables with the family is a happy time that brings you closer. It sounds great to me, but other readers may be swayed less by a touch-feely argument, and more convinced by the scientific health arguments for organic foods and the greater energy independence local foods bring (a typical meal travels 1500 miles to a dinner table). At times, I did get a bit tired of seeing Kingsolver’s world though the rosiest of glasses. Everything appears to be perfect, lush, beautiful, the most delicious, faster, stronger, healthier. I don’t doubt the superior taste and nutrition of locally grown, organic products, but I was waiting for another side to the story – some sort of significant downside or obstacle they had to overcome. The author admits this herself when she recounts telling a friend about a tranquil summer evening spent with Amish friends on a farm. The friend remarks, “What, not even a mosquito to bother heaven?” But perhaps Kingsolver’s point is that it is easier than we think to eat locally. In spite of the endless positive spin, her humor and thorough research were inspiring enough to get me to contemplate making my own mozzarella.

A thought-provoking surprise was Kingsolver’s adamant argument for eating meat – specifically locally bred, organic meat. She aligns herself with a vegetarian position, she says, except that she eats meat. She points out that “every sack of flour and every soybean-based block of tofu came from a field where countless winged and furry lives were extinguished in the plowing, cultivating, and harvest…To believe that we can live without taking life is delusional.” She goes on to explain that the oft-repeated argument that it takes ten times as much land to make a pound of meat as a pound of grain only applies to the kind of land where rain falls abundantly on rich topsoil. Cultures that live on less productive land like the Navajo, Mongols, Lapps, and Masai would starve without their animals. The argument for eating locally produced organic meat is perhaps a more realistic option for individuals who care about where their food comes from and its environmental and energy consequences, but who aren’t going to stop eating chicken or burgers tomorrow.

In the end, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has a little bit for everyone. For those ready to set the loftiest goals, take the Kingsolver challenge of canning all fall and making meals from home seven days a week. For someone like me who has a love of food, gardening, and cooking, but who isn’t prepared to give up Cheerios (are they local if General Mills is located 20 miles from my house?), I walked away with a renewed dedication to my farmers’ market, an intensive search for local foods at my grocery store, and the knowledge that buying food that grew up continents away is as much of an energy decision as leaving the lights on.

Glaciers are considered “global thermometers” and their shrinking numbers are watched closely by climate change scientists. Germany’s glaciers are suffering a faster fate than many, and locals dependent on the Zugspitze glacier for their livelihood are struggling to slow its demise.

In an area known for its winter skiing, and in a nation dependent on glaciers for drinking water, the melting of Germany’s last glacier is spurring some innovative – some say futile – attempts to save it. Giant anti-glare shields have been spread over the glacier each spring for the past 14 years, with tons of loose snow piled on top. The shields deflect the sun, keep the surface cool and shield the glacier from warm summer rain that speeds the melting. During the winter months, workers set off explosives to generate controlled avalanches on surrounding slopes to push snow onto the glacier and fences are erected to slow wind erosion. But the end is still inevitable, said the Zugspitze’s cable car operator, Frank Huber:

"We're doing all we can to preserve it as long as possible, but I'm not God and there's only so much we can do…the other things we're doing are only going to slow the process down a little bit. We aren't going to be able to save it….I grew up with the glacier and it's sad to think one day my children's children won't know what it feels or looks like.”

No one will say how much these efforts cost, other than that the investment is considerable.

Scientists report that rising global temperatures from climate change are causing the melting. The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has also stated that small alpine glaciers will disappear while larger glaciers will shrink 30-70 percent by 2050. The Zugspitze glacier was over 260 feet thick in 1910, compared with less than 150 feet thick today.

In the U.S.’s Glacier National Park, only 27 glaciers are left, down from 150 in 1850. Some estimates predict the park will be without glaciers by 2030.

CBS News
Reuters, via CNN

There’s a lot of talk about China’s staggering amount of planned coal plants, and the narrowing gap between it and the U.S. for the title of Planet’s Biggest Carbon Dioxide Emitter. But China is examining at least one unique way to develop more sustainably.

Welcome to Dongtan, the world’s first CO2-free city. Developers are building this $1.3 billion eco-city just outside of Shanghai. Renewable energy will be used extensively, the layout of the city maximizes walking and biking rather than cars, and transport vehicles will run on batteries or hydrogen fuel cells. Other plans include recycling organic waste, green roofs, and rainwater capture.

Dongtan will cover an area about three-quarters the size of Manhattan on wetlands at the mouth of the Yangtze River. However, Peter Head of Arup, the London-based firm heading the planning, said the wetlands are not at risk from the development. From the Architectural Record:

“‘First of all, water usually discharged into the river will be collected, treated, and recycled within the city boundaries,” he says. ‘There will be a 2-mile buffer zone of eco-farm between city development and the wetlands.’ While farming is water intensive, relatively small amounts of water reach the plants themselves. Head says Dongtan ‘will capture and recycle water in the city and use recycled water to grow green vegetables hydroponically. This makes the whole water cycle much more efficient.’”

But what will the habitants do in this eco-utopia? City officials and consultants expect jobs in education like at the planned Institute for Sustainable Cities, and they anticipate attracting companies pursuing clean technologies, food research and production, and health care. Dongtan is also expected to rely heavily on ecotourism.

Designers hope CO2-free city will serve as a model for the rest of the urbanized world. Its first phase includes a marina village of 20,000 habitants that will be unveiled at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. Nearly 80,000 people are expected to live in the city by 2020, and eventually designers hope to see 500,000 citizens living the good, green life there.

Architectural Record
Jetson Green

In a report released on Monday and on the heels of the first debate in the United Nations Security Council on the issue, 11 retired U.S. military leaders assert that climate change raises risks and tensions in the world’s most volatile areas, and the U.S. needs to start planning and cooperating with other nations to mitigate and respond to those risks. From the Associated Press:

“The report warns that in the next 30 to 40 years there will be wars over water and increased instability from hunger, worsening diseases, rising sea levels and global warming-induced refugees. ‘The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide and the growth of terrorism,’ the 35-page report predicts.

‘Climate change exacerbates already unstable situations,’ former U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gordon Sullivan said. ‘Everybody needs to start paying attention to what's going on. I don't think this is a particularly hard sell in the Pentagon. … We're paying attention to what those security implications are.’

Gen. Anthony Zinni, President Bush's former Middle East envoy, said in the report: ‘It's not hard to make the connection between climate change and instability, or climate change and terrorism.’”

The leaders urged the U.S. to take action now, without waiting for a total certainty on global warming’s impacts. Extreme weather like drought, flooding, rising sea levels, and shifts in habitat for plant and wildlife are some of the expected consequences. Any of these could prompt U.S. military involvement; for example, the U.S. and Europe may have to accept environmental refugees from Latin America and Africa as drought increases and food production declines. Climate change impacts could also make life more difficult in unstable locales like parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, perhaps driving the U.S. more frequently to provide stability before conditions are exploited by extremists.

Although the U.S. is the planet’s biggest emitter of global warming pollution, the report stressed that it does need to develop strong partnerships with other nations like China and India, who will be contributing significantly to the global economy and to its emissions.

The report was published by the non-partisan CNA Corporation think tank.

Associated Press, via the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CNA Corporation
Globe and Mail

For the first time ever, the United Nations Security Council has put global warming on its agenda and will hold a high-level meeting this month to discuss its potential impacts on international security.

We often hear of climate change’s threat to the environment, health, and the economy. But more and more policymakers and leaders are nervous about the global security issues we could face, such as conflicts over water resources and massive numbers of refugees from flooded regions.

Specifically, the April 17th meeting, chaired by British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, will examine how water, agricultural production, famine, and crop surpluses could be effected by climate change. No statement or resolution is expected from the first meeting, which is following on the heels of the recent report on global warming’s impacts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Britain’s U.N. Ambassador, Emyr Jones Parry, is the Security Council President. He said he expects a summit on climate change in September 2008. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hasn’t committed to the summit, although he does want to discuss how best to confront global warming’s impacts with world leaders at a G-8 meeting of industrialized countries in June.

The Associated Press, via MSNBC

Yesterday the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its second report of the year on global warming. Back in February, the IPCC explained the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. This time, we learn the impacts.

For increases in global mean temperature of less than 1-3 degrees Celsius above 1990 levels, impacts may produce benefits in some places and some sectors, and produce costs in other places and sectors. However, some low latitude and polar regions of the world will see net costs rise even with only small increases in temperature. Once the average temperature increases more than 2-3 degrees Celsius in any region, however, it is “very likely” that we wil see declining benefits and instead see an increase in net costs.

The Summary for Policymakers of the Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability reports the projected effects of climate change:

• Costs and benefits of climate change for industry, settlement, and society will vary widely by location and scale. In the aggregate, however, net effects will tend to be more negative the larger the change in climate.

• Crop productivity is projected to increase slightly at mid to high latitudes for local mean temperature increases of up to 1-3 degrees Celsius depending on the crop, and then decrease beyond that in some regions.

• Studies in temperate areas have shown that climate change is projected to bring some benefits, such as fewer deaths from cold exposure. Overall it is expected that these benefits will be outweighed by the negative health effects of rising temperatures world-wide, especially in developing countries.

• Approximately 20-30 percent of plant and animal species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average temperature exceed 1.5-2.5 degrees Celsius.

Each word of the report had to be agreed upon by consensus, but disputes between the scientific authors and diplomatic editors infuriated some scientists. They claim the predicted impacts have been watered down because of political interference. For example, a sentence that originally said scientists had “very high confidence” (greater than 90 percent) that many natural systems would be affected by rising temperatures was changed to “high confidence” (greater than 80 percent) at the insistence of delegates from China and Saudi Arabia.

The report goes on to say that global warming cannot be stopped at this point, only slowed down. However, the most catastrophic effects can still be avoided with swift and decisive global action. The IPCC recommends a combination of adaptation and mitigation measures:

Even the most stringent mitigation efforts cannot avoid further impacts of climate change in the next few decades, which makes adaptation essential, particularly in addressing near-term impacts. Unmitigated climate change would, in the long term, be likely to exceed the capacity of natural, managed and human systems to adapt.

This suggests the value of a portfolio or mix of strategies that includes mitigation, adaptation, technological development (to enhance both adaptation and mitigation) and research (on climate science, impacts, adaptation and mitigation).

The full report will be released next week. It includes more than 2,500 scientists appointed by more than 130 countries.

The IPCC was created by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme to assess the scientific, technical, and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk for climate change, along with its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. Its assessments are based solely on peer reviewed and published scientific/technical literature.

CNN
Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability: Summary for Policymakers
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change