Earth Hour: City plays key role in Earth Hour crusade

Peter Gorrie, The Toronto Star 19 Jan 08;

At least three more – Bangkok, Singapore and Shanghai – are likely to participate.

By simply turning out the lights for one hour on the same day at the same time, citizens and companies around the world are uniting to send a powerful message to sluggish governments

Seven countries, 17 cities (so far) and a growing movement that truly begins at home.

It might seem an inconsequential thing to turn out the lights in your house for an hour on a Saturday night.

With vast clouds of greenhouse gases spewing from vehicles, factories and generating stations around the world, it's like an ant trying to halt the juggernaut of destructive climate change.

But Earth Hour is all about the power of one, multiplied many, many times.

If you, your neighbours and many others take the little step between 8 and 9 p.m. on March 29, not only will the city's electricity consumption drop for 60 minutes, you'll be making a major statement to sluggish governments and industry, and to one another.

"Earth Hour uses the simple action of turning off the lights for one hour to deliver a powerful message about the need for action," says the World Wildlife Fund, a main organizer of what, in its second year, has become a global event.

"It's a potent, very visible symbol of concern and expectation for action," says Julia Langer, global threats director at WWF- Canada.

"It's a celebration of what's been done so far and ratcheting up to the next level of achievement."

Building public awareness of energy use is key to moving the province toward "the conservation culture that the premier is talking about," says Toronto Hydro spokesperson Blair Peberdy.

The lights-out campaign was launched last year in Sydney, Australia. Organizers say 1,950 businesses and government departments, and 60,000 households, participated. For 60 minutes, much of the city's skyline went dark and demand for electricity fell 10.2 per cent. That reduction was double the original target.

Since most of Australia's electricity is generated by burning coal, the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions was equivalent to taking 48,000 cars off the road for an hour, organizers say.

This year, Earth Hour will be an international demonstration of the power of individuals to create change.

Sydney is in again, and the event, so far, has expanded within Australia to include Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, Gold Coast and Melbourne, and beyond the island continent to Toronto; Chicago; Tel Aviv and Haifa, Israel; Manila, Philippines; Suva, Fiji; Christchurch, New Zealand; and four Danish cities – Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense and Aalborg. At least three more – Bangkok, Singapore and Shanghai – are likely to participate. Others are welcome.

A similar action, Lights Out America, will be held in additional U.S. locations.

Toronto's Earth Hour is co-sponsored by the Star, WWF-Canada, the City of Toronto and Virgin Mobile, with co-operation from Toronto Hydro and many businesses.

During the two months leading up to Earth Hour, the newspaper will publish daily green tips. It has launched a blog – thestar.com/blogs – aimed at helping readers cut their consumption of energy and resources of all kinds.

The Star is also taking the campaign to heart by undertaking its own "green" plan at the Vaughan Press Centre and offices at One Yonge St.

And this week, WWF-Canada begins a companion campaign called "The Good Life," intended to help people take positive action on climate change while living happier, healthier lives in harmony with the environment.

It sets up a national system for tracking how we reduce our greenhouse emissions. You'll find details on the group's website: www.wwf.ca.

"It will prove the point that people are taking action and build the expectation for others to do their part as well," Langer says.

For Earth Hour, each city is setting its own goals for reduced electricity demand.

Toronto's is 5 per cent. Although that doesn't sound like much, it would be a substantial achievement and require mass participation by residents and businesses, according to Toronto Hydro.

On the other hand, there's no reason why we can't eclipse what Sydney accomplished last year.

Here's what's involved:

Looked at in the simplest way, lighting accounts for about 15 per cent of the total electricity demand on a typical late-March weekend evening.

During the past three years, the load has amounted to 3,345 megawatts during the equivalent to this year's Earth Hour period, Toronto Hydro says. So, one-third of all the lights in Toronto would have to go dark to reach the goal.

The real situation, though, is more complex.

On weekdays, residential demand accounts for only 20 per cent of the total load, but on a March Saturday night, with many businesses and factories closed, it rises to 30 per cent.

The city has about 600,000 dwellings. Assuming half are occupied on a Saturday night, and each is lit by 10 100-watt bulbs, if everyone at home turned off all their lights, demand would fall by 300 megawatts.

Just like that, we'd cut overall demand by nearly 9 per cent.

The effort can go beyond lights: You can eliminate other power drains, too, including the "phantom" or "vampire" load consumed by TVs, stereos, computers, cellphone chargers and any other gear that appears to be turned off but is eating up watts on standby.

Just pull the plug or switch the power bar to "off." Even better, shut down your gizmos and do something fun that doesn't require electricity at all. Your choice.

With all those options, we'd double the target just by cutting residential demand. But obviously, only with huge participation.

Some of the non-residential half of the load can't, or won't, be cut.

For safety reasons some lights, including traffic signals and 160,000 street lamps, must remain on. Condo and apartment hallways have to be illuminated. Subways and streetcars will keep trundling along.

And water treatment plants – among the city's main power consumers – can't be shut down.

The Leafs are scheduled to play the Montreal Canadiens that evening, and the Air Canada Centre isn't going to be darkened with 20,000 fans and players inside.

The ACC draws up to 10 megawatts when the rink and TV lights are on full blast.

Even so, the business side has plenty of scope to cut its demand, Hydro officials say.

For one thing, the downtown towers, which draw up to 10 to 15 megawatts each, don't need to be as brightly lit as they now are on Saturday nights.

Stores could tone down their outdoor signs; restaurants could serve meals by candlelight.

"The office towers are darker after business hours than they used to be, but there's a lot of room for improvement," Peberdy says.

Toronto's Earth Hour greenhouse gas savings won't be as dramatic as in Sydney because most of our electricity comes from hydro and nuclear stations, which – as long as they're generating power – are emissions-free.

In fact, it's difficult to say what the drop might be.

Over the past two years, Ontario's remaining coal plants have generated only about 18 per cent of the power produced province-wide between 8 and 9 p.m. on March 29.

Separate figures aren't available for Toronto. Assume we match the provincial result, though. Coal plants tend to be shut down first when power demand falls, because nuclear and hydro stations produce the cheapest power and nuclear plants are best left humming along at top speed.

So, we can assume much of the reduction will be at the coal-fuelled plants, but not all.

What will the city look like?

"All of the downtown better go dark," Langer says.

For certain, it won't be like the big blackout of 2003, when, for a time, almost every light was out and, for once, city dwellers could see stars shining brightly in the night sky.

It also won't be a surprise, so there's no need to fear stumbling around in the dark, or having a fridge full of food go bad.

But if enough condo dwellers and businesses participate, much of the skyline will be reduced to a dim silhouette. And if the rest of us join in, neighbourhoods will be dark and peaceful.

Again, Earth Hour is not about solving climate change: It's about people expressing concern and an intention to do something about it.

"Turning out the lights is a symbol of what we can do, and what we want to do," Langer says.

Links

Cities to turn out the lights for climate change: WWF
Yahoo News 13 Dec 07;

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WHO: Chikungunya could spread across Asia, potentially reaching Europe

Jakarta Post 19 Jan 08;

GENEVA (AP): A severe achy-joint fever spreading in Asia via mosquitoes could easily reach more countries in the region and potentially take hold in Europe and the United States, World Health Organization experts warn.

The fever, called chikungunya, is ravaging parts of Indonesia, sickening people with rashes, vomiting, headaches and joint pain so intense it is often too painful for victims to sit or stand.

"It's enormously disruptive ... the outbreaks are very abrupt and intense," said Michael Nathan, a mosquito-borne disease expert at the WHO in Geneva.

"Lots and lots of people are seeking help all at the same time and services struggle to cope with that."

Singapore reported eight suspected cases this week, the first time the virus has spread locally, according to a Ministry of Health statement. Officials were scouring the area to destroy mosquito breeding grounds, and tests were conducted to ensure no one else was infected, it said.

Taiwan also detected three cases in travelers from Indonesia, two in December and another earlier last year.

Nearly 300 people in northern Italy were sickened in 2007 after an infected traveler came from India, the first time an imported case of the tropical disease sparked a local outbreak in Europe.

Although rarely fatal, the virus can lead to death in patients with other underlying health conditions and is especially hard on the elderly.

Symptoms are similar to dengue fever, another mosquito-borne disease, but joint and muscle pain is typically more intense and longer lasting with arthritis-like aches reported months or even years after infection. Dengue is considered more dangerousbecause it can cause internal bleeding that leads to death.

Chikungunya was first identified in Tanzania in the early 1950s and has caused periodic outbreaks in Asia and Africa since the 1960s. (**)

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Simple soybean solution from Indonesian scientists

The Jakarta Post 19 Jan 08;

Tempeh and tofu would not have disappeared from the family dining room, as it did this week, if the country's government had listened to Indonesia's scientists.

The archipelago would have been able to stop importing soybeans from the U.S. and would probably even be exporting a high-yield protein-rich bean to other countries.

"Perhaps we didn't have the time to pay attention to soybeans then," said Endang Sukara, deputy chairman of the natural sciences department of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI).

But in 2004 and after successfully breeding "newly improved" soybeans, LIPI scientists invited then-President Megawati and her agriculture officials to see their high-yield harvest in South Sumatra.

Endang wasn't joking when he said the soybeans had added value.

Kedelai Plus, the new improved variety, was able to produce up to three times the yield compared to regular soybeans and required less than half the amount of fertilizer.

"We told the government all about it, and they were there during the harvesting at Musi Rawas in South Sumatra," Endang said at LIPI's Center for Biotechnology Research in Cibinong, West Java.

"But they never followed it up."

To create Kedelai Plus, a team of scientists, led by Harmastini Sukiman, isolated hundreds of Rhizobiums, a microbe that binds Nitrogen from the ground for soybean roots to absorb.

They then discovered one special string called Rhizobium B64.

"The strain worked really well for soybeans by boosting productivity and improving the plants' resistance to diseases," Harmastini said.

"Soybean plants produce more beans using B64."

The scientists grew Kedelai Plus in many areas across Indonesia, including South Sumatra, North Sumatra, West Java and East Java, with outstanding results.

Farmers in Indonesia can produce on average up to 1.2 tons of soybeans per hectare, but in every harvest Kedelai Plus was yielding 2.4 to 4.5 tons per hectare.

The team discovered a way to inject the microbe into the soybean, which meant farmers no longer had to glue the microbe onto the bean skin, or sprinkle it across the soil.

"Rhizobiums grow abundantly in the soil, so for Rhizobium B64 to survive the competition, we must make sure there are enough B64 cells for the soybean roots to absorb," Harmastini said.

With the help of a special vacuuming machine, LIPI was able to turn any type of soybean variety into Kedelai Plus with similar results.

Endang said he was confident the new technology would see Indonesia end its dependency on expensive, imported American soybeans.

"All the government needs to do now is up-scale the machine and produce Kedelai Plus in various seed centers so that farmers can purchase them at affordable prices," he said.

Endang said he has been dreaming of a day when he could drink soybean milk, snack on soybean yogurt and have a tempeh burger for lunch, all made from domestic soybeans.

But for the time being, farmers wishing to plant "newly improved" soybeans can bring their own seeds to LIPI in Cibinong to be injected with Rhizobium B64 at a cost of Rp 50,000 (US$ 5.30) for 20 kilograms of soybean seed.

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Jakarta takes emergency steps as tensions rise over soyabean price

John Aglionby, Financial Times 16 Jan 08;

Indonesia was yesterday forced to take emergency action to calm street protests over record soyabean prices triggered by US farmers reducing the crop to grow more corn for biofuel.

Rising Chinese demand for soyabeans and bad harvests in Argentina and Brazil have also contributed to the jump, which saw Indonesia suffer the biggest food-related protests since last year's Mexican tortilla crisis.

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the Indonesian president, was forced to announce measures to boost local soyabean supply.

The move came a day after 10,000 people took to the streets in Jakarta to complain about the rising cost of one of the country's staple foods.

The government had already responded to the protests by lifting import controls on a commodity that hit an all-time global high of $13.20 a bushel this week, an increase of almost 90 per cent on last year's level. Indonesian prices have risen even higher.

Henry Saragih, the head of the Indonesian farmers' union, warned: "I think the social situation with soyabeans will probably get worse before it gets better."

The UN has warned that global food inflation could trigger social unrest and force governments to reintroduce price controls to maintain stability.

The social tensions in the world's most populous Muslim country follow unrest this week in Pakistan after shortages of wheat and Egypt's ban on rice exports to maintain local supply.

The rising use of agricultural commodities to make fuel last year unleashed a wave of food inflation and triggered mass protests in Mexico where corn is a staple food.

Indonesia, which imports two-thirds of its soyabeans, has suffered from the impact of rising shipping costs and the long-term neglect of its agriculture sector. Meanwhile, many Indonesian farmers have switched to corn cultivation and other more lucrative crops.

Mr Yudhuyono said he would offer incentives such as free seeds to farmers in a bid to increase production by a half this year to 900,000 tonnes.

Chris de Lavigne, analyst with research firm Frost & Sullivan in Singapore, said that soyabean prices were likely to keep rising this year. "We have only had one year of what is likely to be a long agriculture boom," he said.

Additional reporting by Javier Blas in London

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Tempeh: Unique healthfood of Indonesia eaten by millions

Jakarta Post 18 Jan 08;

Nutritionally, tempeh represents a food rich in protein (the same quantity and nearly the same quality as beef because of its high digestibility) but unlike beef, contains no cholesterol or saturated fats

Part of Indonesia's culinary heritage, and now a healthfood for the West, tempeh is unique amongst soy foods and has been an important part of the Indonesian diet for hundreds of years.

Native to Indonesia, it is found throughout the archipelago and eaten by millions, but until recently was almost unknown out of the country.

Now, research in food science and nutrition has shown this food to be unique amongst vegetarian foods, and already popular among vegetarians in the U.S. and Australia.

Any visitor to an Indonesian market or dinner table will almost certainly come across tempeh, though wonder what on earth it really is. Closely resembling a Camembert cheese in color and texture with a mushroom-like aroma, tempeh is in fact one of the world's first soybean foods. It is composed of cooked soybeans that have been fermented through by an edible fungus which, when mature (like a cheese) becomes an attractive and aromatic white cake suitable for a variety of uses in hundreds of local dishes.

In fact, in a country where meat is expensive and often of dubious quality, tempeh is an excellent high protein substitute to meat or fish, without the need for scrupulous hygiene or expensive refrigeration.

When scientists first began undertaking research in food and nutrition in Indonesia, tempeh revealed itself as an important component of the native diet. Moreover, the method of production was itself considered an ingenious process of applied microbiology and became the focus of attention in several laboratories in the U.S. by both American and Indonesian researchers.

One of the earliest documented records of the nutritional importance of tempeh was its significance during the second world war in Asia. Here, tempeh was known to the prisoners of the Japanese in prison camps in Java, many of whom suffered from dysentery and were unable to digest most of what little food they had. Boiled soybeans were virtually indigestible to them. Only tempeh, with its high digestibility was able to be assimilated and the food reportedly saved the lives of many Dutch and British prisoners of war in Java. It was smuggled through the fence by the local Javanese and those who survived have attributed it to the tempeh they managed to sustain themselves with.

Nutritionally, tempeh represents a food rich in protein (the same quantity and nearly the same quality as beef because of its high digestibility) but unlike beef, contains no cholesterol or saturated fats that current evidence links to heart disease in the "affluent" West. It also contains a certain vitamin (B12) that is normally only found in animal products and milk.

In this respect tempeh is unique as a vegetarian food without the accompanying disadvantages of many unpalatable "meat substitutes" of poor texture and flavor.

It is also very easy to digest due to the fermentation and very suitable in small quantities for babies or those with malabsorption diseases. In fact, one of the latest nutritional findings has been the use of a tempeh-based formula weaning food in Indonesian primary health centers to successfully treat infants suffering from stomach infections and dehydration. A natural antibacterial compound has been identified and is still being studied. Research has found that rabbits fed high tempeh diets show increased resistance to infection and raise their antibody levels, suggesting interaction with the immune system. Basically, tempeh represents a cheap form of good quality protein and other nutrients, many essential to a healthy diet, that is readily available and is therefore well suited to a developing nation as a local high quality food resource that is cheap to buy and use.

The craft of tempeh making is passed on through generations of tempeh making families, in much the same way as that of beer brewing or cheese making. Tempe is manufactured in a way that is more like the work of a microbiology laboratory than a village household; the tropical climate serves well as an incubator with constant temperatures day and night.

Basically, tempeh is made from cooked soybeans that have been inoculated with a special starter culture of fungal spores, packed into banana leaves (although the ever popular plastic bag has taken over from the traditional banana leaves) and then left to ferment. During this time, a luxuriant growth of white mold grows through to knit together the beans and turn them into tempeh.

Fermented foods in Southeast Asia, especially tempeh, have an important role to play in rural development and by providing employment and generating income for investment in the rural economy.

Tempeh-making is a labor-intensive industry; a clear advantage in a country with serious over population and urban employment problems. Nationwide cottage industries like tempeh-making are vital to maintain profitable rural employment opportunities that help to stem rural to urban migration that is so typical a cause of city poverty in tropical developing countries.

Moreover, tempeh manufacture in Indonesia is very well suited to the technological environment of the country, having evolved over hundreds of years and uses all locally available home grown ingredients; domestic skills with no dependence to the purchase of tools or skills from abroad.

In fact, tempeh has been considered as a food for Africa where technology transfer may play an important role. Indeed, what has been a Javanese village tradition since ancient times may yet hold a high potential for the future.

RELATED ARTICLE

Days of cheap tofu, tempeh are gone for Indonesians
Staples disappear off menus because of surging price of soya bean imports
Salim Osman, Straits Times 17 Jan 08;

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Best of our wild blogs: 19 Jan 08

EcoSing
A new website connecting Singapore's professionals for sustainable enterprise.

Celebrating Lunar New Year: Prawns
what is the true price of the prawns on your plate? on the singapore celebrates our reefs blog

First IYOR talk
sharing about the shores with 450 at NUS on the singapore celebrates our reefs blog

Injured purple heron: update
on the bird ecology blog

Creepy crawly in our jungle
too many legs! on the johora singaporensis blog

Adjustments to agriculture may help mitigate climate change on the worldwatch institute website

Twitter, Google, Facebook -Social Networks Join Hands to Help Make the World a Better Place on the daily galaxy blog

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Malaysia: New initiatives on global warming and flooding

Sheridan Mahavera and R. Sittamparam, New Straits Times 19 Jan 08;

KOTA TINGGI: Global warming and climate change will be dealt with more emphatically under the Ninth and Tenth Malaysia Plans, which will feature a chapter on measures to mitigate their effects, the deputy prime minister said. Datuk Seri Najib Razak said initiatives would include stringent regulations on residential projects built in low-lying areas and projects to reduce flooding.

Some of the initiatives have already been started, such as placing sand dredging barges in all major rivers in the country to increase their water carrying capacity during heavy rains.

Others include requiring developers to take account of an area's vulnerability to flooding before housing projects were built and reviewing the designs of houses, Najib said.

A higher priority would also be placed on environmental conservation, he said after the ground-breaking ceremony for a flood resettlement scheme in the Hulu Sungai sub-district (mukim) here yesterday.

During his speech earlier, Najib, who is also chairman of the National Disaster Management Committee, said the floods last December cost the country RM900 million in damages to public infrastructure, private property and agricultural assets.

The floods in December 2006 and January 2007 had caused RM1 billion in damages.

"Imagine that from now on, the government has to deal with RM1 billion in damages every year due to extraordinary floods brought on by global warming.

"So under the Ninth and Tenth Malaysia Plans we will focus on dealing with its effects," Najib said.

It was reported that sand dredging barges had already been stationed in major rivers such as Sungai Johor and Sungai Pahang to deepen beds and widen the banks all year round.

Natural Resources and Environment Minister Datuk Seri Azmi Khalid had also announced that the government was considering reviewing or even cancelling projects that could worsen floods.

Read more!

Philip Pullman: new brand of environmentalism

The Telegraph 19 Jan 08;

People need to feel that civil action, civil society, civil forms of involvement such as Parliament, local councils and so on, are there for a purpose, should be used and can be influenced.

Climate change, say the pessimists, will destroy our world. But in an exclusive interview, acclaimed author Philip Pullman champions a new brand of environmentalism that offers us all hope

Andrew Simms: Environmentalists must engage people if there is to be a mass shift to lifestyles that do not cost the earth.

How do you strike the right balance between telling people the difficult truth about environmental problems and making them feel it's still worth getting out of bed in the morning to tackle them?

Philip Pullman: Frightening people is a very good way to make them passive and supine. You can be terrified into an abject denial of everything and you don't want to know about it: you just shut your eyes and your ears. But the most useful, the most helpful and most energising thing is to say: "You can do this, and this, and this, and you can press your Government to do that."

Environmentalists need to know something about basic storytelling in order to make their words effective. Samuel Johnson apparently said something I find very useful to remember: "The true aim of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it."

Research is much easier than writing, so the temptation is to shove all the research in. But page after page after page of the stuff goes by and, of course, people stop reading.

I suppose the real story, the basic story, the story I would like to hear, see, read, is the story about how connected we are, not only with one another but also with the place we live in. And how it's almost infinitely rich, but it's in some danger; and that despite the danger, we can do something to overcome it.

People feel helpless when they see pictures of devastated forests cut down and the glaciers melting and the poor polar bear sweating on its bare rock in the sea. "What can we do, what can we do?" People need to be told what it is that they can do.

And they also need to feel that civil action, civil society, civil forms of involvement such as Parliament, local councils and so on, are there for a purpose, should be used and can be influenced.

AS: Who influenced you as a storyteller?

PP: Milton was an enormous influence for me. As William Blake said: "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."

You can tell that his imagination, although perhaps not his conscious mind, pretty passionately disliked God, because everything he gives God to say, every action God takes, is whining, carping, moaning, criticising, boasting. It's a very unattractive figure, the God of Milton. The son, Messiah, is slightly more attractive, and Satan utterly compelling.

Environmentalists also tell a story about us and ourselves and our place in the universe. In a sense it's a religious story, because that's the big question of religion. Why are we here? What is here, what does it consist of? What have we got to do now we are here? What responsibilities does being conscious place on us?

And those are questions which the environmental movement, over the past 25 years, and certainly since the global warming issue has come up, has been very much engaged in. What does it mean to us to be conscious of what we are doing to the world?

Some people attempt to maintain a state of denial: "It's not happening", or "It is happening, but it's natural and it's nothing to do with us", or "It's happening but we can fix it with technology." All these are attempts to deny responsibility for it; to deny anything that they might have to do.

So, the questions, the stories that the global warming prophets tell us (let's call them that, to distinguish them from the sceptics), take their place right slap-bang in the middle of the prophetical tradition, along with the prophets of the Old Testament.

But the prophets of the Old Testament were not very successful because they were generally hounded out of the city and cast adrift on the waves. People don't like hearing what prophets tell them: it's generally uncomfortable. It's full of doom; it's full of warnings; it's full of denunciations and threats to mend their ways or suffer for it.

So it's not a popular message. And the struggle that the climate-change prophets have had to undertake to get their message heard, I suppose, is similar. But I've noticed a real change in the past year.

AS: Is there an allusion to climate change buried in your trilogy, His Dark Materials?

PP: The thing that really made me wake up to the seriousness of the problem was one morning, not long before a conference in Oxford on climate change, when I had to get up very early.

The weather conditions were such that the sky was clear and the contrails very distinct against the blue. I counted 17 in the sky over my house - 17, and that was rural Oxfordshire. I thought: all of that stuff is going on all the time, this is just unsustainable, it really can't go on. That was a wake-up moment.

But there are things to be done about it - this is not saying that we are utterly doomed, it's saying that we're doomed unless we look after ourselves, and we can do that.

In His Dark Materials, the characters discover a way of cutting through from one universe to another and, at the end of the first book, there's an explosion that rents the sky wide open. It wasn't a completely unconscious echo.

I've been aware of the terms "global warming" and "climate change" for as long as they've been around. Unfortunately, unlike the characters in my story, we only have one universe to play with. We can't skip through a hole into another one.

Something else which is very salient and connected, because of how we choose to spend our time and the impact that has, is the fragmentation of family life. Especially when all the members of the family have their own energy-burning iPod, their own computer, games console and television, and they don't exist as a unit at all, except by virtue of living in one house.

They all go off and do their own things, they don't talk. Most of their attention is not devoted to the unit, to the maintenance of the happiness of the unit, of the group; it's devoted to the gratification of themselves alone. And I think that's awful.

AS: What gives you a sense of wellbeing?

PP: My first answer would have to be a good day's work. If I have done my thousand words, my three pages, and it's gone well, then nothing else matters - I'm satisfied. If I've done it and it's gone badly, well, I can correct it tomorrow, it's there.

If I combine that with a little bit of exercise, a little bit of play, which for me involves usually making things with wood, or playing music, and if my family is well and happy, and I have something nice to eat - that would be a good day for me.

I am very lucky. And I'm wary of preaching about how we should live, because I know how lucky I am: very few people have the chance to do what they want to do and stop doing it when they want to, and I do. Mind you, for 30 years I didn't. I had to write in my spare time while I was doing other jobs.

So perhaps I am entitled to preach a little bit. I'm entitled to say that in order to do the thing you want to do then you have to do it, whether or not you've got the time. If it means missing Neighbours, then miss Neighbours, or EastEnders or whatever. You must ask which is more important to you in the end.

I also like using tools and making things out of wood. At the moment I'm making a rocking horse, and I've been making it for about two years now. It's in its final shaping stage, I've just got a bit of shaving off its rather fat rump. I used poplar wood for the head and neck. It's quite soft and easy to carve. The legs are made of ash, because they will take a lot of strain and ash is a strong, springy wood.

And soon I shall paint it and then put it on a stand. That should be quite easy to make because it's just joinery, no carving involved. And then it'll be ready for my grandchildren, who have been saying impatiently: "Grandpa, do some more horse!"

AS: Have you done anything to reduce your own environmental impact?

PP: Around the house, all our light bulbs, apart from the ones in the kitchen, are low-energy ones. In the kitchen, there are these bloody halogen things. When we had our kitchen done three or four years ago, I said, "We want low-energy lights" and the designer said, "Oh, these are low-energy." Well, they're not, actually, they're 50 watts each. What he meant was they're low-voltage, which isn't the same thing.

We seldom have the central heating up high, because neither of us likes being particularly hot. In principle, I'd have everything: I'd plaster the house with photovoltaic cells and have wind turbines off every gable.

I've cut out international travel as much as possible. That wasn't hard to do because I hate flying. But I've got to go to America in connection with books and films. I say I've got to, but I suppose I could say "No".

I don't feel too guilty about electricity because we buy it from Good Energy, which supplies it from renewable sources. So I don't feel too bad when I'm playing my electric guitar.

AS: You have said that, as a writer, you are interested in the shape of things. What do you think is the shape of a good life?

PP: What do we mean by "a good life"? Do we mean a life that is pleasant and satisfying, which is what we normally mean by a good life, or a life full of moral purpose? A life may be very satisfying from within, but seem pretty tedious from without.

Or alternatively it may be full of anguish from within, but from the outside it may look inspirational. So lives and the shapes of lives, and life stories and their shapes, depend very much on where you are seeing them from.

The challenge of having to change behaviour so that good lives don't have to cost the earth goes deeper than having the right aspirational model. I think we've evolved in such a way that suited conditions on the savannah 500,000 years ago, a way of life that was acquisitive, territorial and combative.

The degree to which the processes of civilisation, or socialisation, can overcome that depends on the timescale. In the long term, I back evolution - if we survive this crisis that we're in. I was recently reading James Martin's book, The Meaning of the 21st Century. His point was that we are approaching a crisis.

It's like going down a river, approaching the rapids, and about mid-century we're going to go through the rapids, and it's going to be terribly difficult for all of us. But we can survive and if we can get through this, he says, it's going to be wonderful.

AS: How do you feel about life at the moment?

PP: Thinking about wellbeing, right now, I'm feeling pretty good. My health is intact; my family is all intact; my work is going reasonably well. It never goes entirely smoothly, because there are too many things that can go wrong and do go wrong, but then you know you can fix them. It's a continual challenge and a continual interest and a, well, occasional pleasure.

I find myself at the age of 60 quite unexpectedly rich. My mind boggles, because I've been very poor most of my life. My childhood was formed during the austerity years after the war. So I still feel influenced by that. Curious, isn't it, how we were much healthier as a nation after the war when the rationing was on?

In a sense it was easier then because everybody knew there was a war on; you didn't get people like Melanie Phillips or Dominic Lawson saying: "War? Of course there isn't a war. It's just a conspiracy to get money out of us. All the scientific evidence is forged. Real scientists know there isn't any such thing as a war."

AS: Talk to me about polar bears. Their perilous fate has become symbolic of global warming, but you give them a hard time in your own books.

PP: The armoured bears in my trilogy survive. Just. I've got a soft spot for them. I expect many of us have - those who haven't been eaten by one. It was in Edinburgh Zoo that I first became emotionally affected by polar bears. It was a hot day and the bear was just stretched out on the concrete, in a little pen no bigger than this room.

I thought: "This is absolutely monstrous!" An animal like that wants the ice and 50,000 square miles to roam about in. It's worse than slavery, absolutely appalling, to keep an animal in those conditions. This one was lying there looking as though it wished it were dead.

Now, they're all going to be extinct if there's no ice left, unless they put them all in zoos or round them up and put a fence round them and throw them a seal or two from time to time. But that's no life.

If the polar bears leapt from the pages of my fiction into reality and saw what was happening, they'd eat us. Eat as many of us as quickly as they possibly could. And good luck to them.

AS: Do you think there might be a less carnivorous solution?

PP: One less drastic solution we hear talk of is a tradable carbon ration. If you have unused credit, you can sell to somebody else. I think that's wrong. We should have a fixed limit and that's it. This is a crisis as big as war and you couldn't trade your ration book in the wartime.

You were allowed three ounces of butter a week, or whatever, and that was it. And this is what it should be like with carbon. None of this carbon trading. We should have a fixed limit and if you use it all up in October, then tough, you shiver for the rest of the year.

That's what I reckon, but it won't happen because governments are too feeble. Governments are feeble now because all the Western governments have bought into the orthodoxy that the market knows best. And the market bloody well doesn't know best, the market is what got us into this mess.

Every social bond, everything that we thought was firm and established, gets wiped away. It is wiped away by money, by the mighty force, this universal acid of the market system. Magnificent.

Read more!

Singapore transport: Overhaul of bus system for smooth, fast trips

Goh Chin Lian, Straits Times 19 Jan 08;
Government to control planning of routes, bus market to be open to competition

'Our land transport system must be planned and built for people, not vehicles'

BUS travel here will undergo an overhaul to give commuters a faster, smoother and more pleasant ride.

This will happen in two stages over the next few years. First, the Government will take back control of the planning of routes from the two public transport companies.

The aim: to find the fastest and best route for commuters by bus and MRT - not how to make more money.

Then, it will open up the bus market to more competition. The idea is that contest could lead to better ways of doing things, and maybe, even lower costs.

More immediately, transfers will become easier and cheaper, and commuters will get more information on the go, to plan how best to make their journey.

Transport Minister Raymond Lim gave the details yesterday in the first of three key policy speeches he will make this month on how travel by bus, rail and car will change.

This shake-up of the land transport landscape foresees that by 2020, 14.3 million journeys will be made every day on this small island, up from 8.9 million now.

The future will be gridlock and pollution if many more people take to cars, he said.

The thing to do now is to move more people to public transport: Mr Lim's target is 70 per cent for all journeys in the morning peak by 2020, up from 63 per cent now.

But what will it take, he asked, for the majority to choose the bus or MRT over the car?

His ministry's solution for buses combines radical strokes with fine tweaking.

It is the fruit of a year-long study to take stock of a 1996 road-map on land transport and lay out a new one, good for the next 10 to 15 years.

The planners turned to consultants who assessed what worked for such cities as London, Hong Kong and Melbourne, and sought public views.

The 'new philosophy', as Mr Lim calls it, is to plan transport through the eyes of the commuter - from the time he thinks about making his journey to the time he reaches his destination.

'Our land transport system must be planned and built for people, not vehicles,' he said.

'Can people get to a train station or bus stop quickly and comfortably? Are the connections good? How long is the total journey time and waiting time between transfers? How crowded are the buses and trains? Can people get timely and user-friendly travel information?'

The Government will consider such concerns when it plans the bus routes and opens them up to the best bidder to run them, possibly as early as 2010.

It will specify standards for what commuters, in a 2007 official poll released yesterday, see as still lacking in the current system - less overcrowding, shorter waiting times.

If the consultants are right, the market has room for a few more bus operators.

These major changes aside, the planners are also tweaking the system to make transfers seamless.

The fare system will be changed so that commuters do not have to pay when making transfers. They will be charged just for the total distance travelled.

They will get a new season pass for use on all trains and buses, regardless of operator.

And the wait for the connection will be shorter. Buses will be given more priority on the roads later this year.

Some commuters, in welcoming the changes, say they are overdue.

Tampines GRC MP and deputy chairman of the Government Parliamentary Committee for Transport Ong Kian Min expects complaints from commuters whose routes get re-drawn by the Land Transport Authority, but thinks they should not sidetrack people from the overall good the changes bring.

'I hope the minister will have the political will and the support from the people to see this through,' said Mr Ong.

It is not clear yet if bidding for the bus routes will eventually push fares up or down. Mr Lim said new gains by operators as a result of opening the market to competition could be reflected in the formula that caps fare rises.

The two bus operators were optimistic about their prospects when the bus routes are carved up for bidders.

SBS Transit, which has a bigger share, saw the share price of its parent ComfortDelGro fall five cents to $1.61, while its own stayed unchanged at $2.83. SMRT's rose one cent to $1.73.

All eyes are now on the coming announcements. Mr Lim said there will be a need to reduce the vehicle growth rate and raise Electronic Road Pricing charges.

Motorists and aspiring car owners can do their sums then, on whether it makes sense to make their other car the bus or the MRT.

chinlian@sph.com.sg

LAND TRANSPORT REVIEW, SINGAPORE

PUTTING PEOPLE AT THE CENTRE OF LAND TRANSPORT SYSTEM, REVIEW

HEAR FROM THE TRANSPORT MINISTER AND COMMUTERS. CLICK FOR OUR FREE VIDEO NEWS

RADICAL STROKES AND FINE TWEAKING

New targets

Shorter wait

# August 2009: Eight in 10 services to run every 10 minutes or less, down from today's 15 minutes.

Zippier travel

# 2015: Eight in 10 commuters will complete their trip within one hour, up from seven in 10 today.

Catching up with the car

# 2020: Trips on public transport to take no more than 1.5 times that by car, down from today's 1.7 times.

What's ahead

Seamless connections, shorter journeys

# Now: Bus companies plan bus routes.

# By 2009: Government does centralised bus route planning.

More efficient and better service

# Open up bus routes to best bidder, possibly as early as 2010.

# More niche and premium services.

Coming very soon

Faster buses

# By June: More peak-hour and full-day bus lanes.

# By year-end: Motorists must give way to buses leaving bus bays. Buses get priority to turn at junctions.

# By 2009: Bus speeds raised to 20 to 25kmh, from 16 to 19kmh.

More info on the go

# By May: Bus arrivals in real time at another 20 bus stops, raising total to 50.

# By July: SMS for arrival times at some bus stops.

# Journey planner, using Internet or phone, to find best route to take.

# In the works: Interactive electronic public transport map.

Cheaper transfers

# By year-end: Season pass for travel on both bus and rail, regardless of operator.

# By 2009: Fares completely distance-based. No boarding charge for transfers.

# In the works: More air- conditioned transport hubs in Bedok, Jurong East, Serangoon, Joo Koon and Marina South.

A transport policy with the commuter at its heart
Straits Times 19 Jan 08;

Transport Minister Raymond Lim yesterday outlined the key strategies that will guide land transport developments over the next 15 years. Central to all the initiatives is this question: What will it take for the majority of Singaporeans to choose the bus or train over the car? Mr Lim offered some solutions and explained why change is needed
# Why is change needed?

Singapore is the second most densely populated country in the world. Already, roads take up 12 per cent of our total land area and the demands on our land transport system are set to increase by 60 per cent, from our current 8.9 million daily journeys to 14.3 million by 2020.

Making public transport the centrepiece of our land transport system will be crucial to keep congestion in check and protect our environment.

# What needs fixing in the public transport system?

These were the common refrains:

# Long waits

# Erratic bus arrivals

# Circuitous feeders

# Overcrowded buses

# Give us more point-to-point buses because transfers are inconvenient. The waiting time for each leg adds up and the total journey time is much too long.

To be fair, eight in 10 commuters the Land Transport Authority (LTA) polled in its 2007 Public Transport Customer Satisfaction Survey were satisfied with the public transport system as a whole, similar to 2006.

The International Association of Public Transport also named Singapore as one of the top cities for public transport in its 2006 Mobility In Cities report.

However, the LTA's commuter surveys have also highlighted long waiting times and overcrowding as key concerns.

To make public transport as competitive as the car, we agree the system must do even better and, in particular, our review has zeroed in on these problems commuters have highlighted.

# What will change for the commuter when people are put at the centre of transport planning?

Our land transport system must be planned and built for people, not vehicles. This means seeing through the eyes of the commuter from the time he steps out of his house to the time he gets to his destination. In fact, it starts even before that, as soon as he thinks about making a journey.

We will invest in quality, not just system capacity. Simply saying we have planned for enough trains and buses for the increased travel demand in 2020 is not enough.

We need to ask: Can people get to a train station or bus stop quickly and comfortably? Are the connections good? How long is the total journey time and waiting time between transfers? How crowded are the buses and trains? Can people get timely and user-friendly travel information? And so on.

Everything that is important to the commuter needs to be thought through. Only then will we be able to achieve our target of making 70 per cent of all morning peak hour trips on public transport by 2020.

# What improvements in bus services can commuters expect?

Buses are an integral part of our public transport system, serving two-thirds of all commuter trips today.

By 2009, the LTA will also take on the central planning of the bus network, so we have one agency that does all the land transport planning with the people in mind.

By 2015, our target is for 80 per cent of public transport commuters to complete their journeys within an hour, from the point they set off to arriving at their destination, up from 71 per cent today.

We will narrow the gap between public transport and car journey times. By 2020, journeys on public transport should not take more than 1.5 times longer than journeys by car, a reduction from the current 1.7 times.

To shorten waiting times for buses and reduce crowding, bus operators are now required to dispatch buses from the bus interchanges at more frequent intervals. At least 80 per cent of bus services must be run at peak frequencies of 10 minutes or less by August 2009, compared to 15 minutes today.

Going forward, the LTA will ensure there are more frequent and direct feeder services, so commuters get to MRT stations and bus interchanges in less time.

Bus and rail service schedules at the interchanges will also be better coordinated, to cut down on waiting times and facilitate transfers.

Read more!

Batik Thursdays for Malaysian civil servants

Straits Times 19 Jan 08;

KUALA LUMPUR - IT IS a welcome change for civil servants who normally wear a coat and tie to work every day.

Now, they just have to put on a batik shirt to work on Thursdays.

'Batik shirts are cooling and I need not wear a thick suit and tie every day in this hot Malaysian weather,' Public Complaints Bureau director-general Chua Hong Teck said.

The government has made it compulsory for civil servants to wear batik to work on Thursdays. The previous directive was for them to wear batik every first and 15th working day of each month

Secondary school teacher Muhairene Mohammed, 37, said that getting the three major races to wear batik would help to promote the Malaysian image. However, batik clothes are costly, she said.

'The best material for batik is silk and it is quite expensive. It costs about RM200 for each outfit, and that doesn't even include the tailoring fee,' she said. RM200 is about S$90.

THE STAR/ASIA NEWS NETWORK

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What would Singapore Zoo do if animal escapes?

Letter from Ishwar Mahtani, Today Online 19 Jan 08;

I REFER to recent reports about a tiger escaping from the San Francisco Zoo, killing a visitor and seriously injuring two others.

I wonder if the Singapore Zoo has any procedures in place if such a thing were to happen here?

Our zoo is known for its animal-friendly features and open concept, providing a habitat that is as close to nature as possible. Animals there have much space to move about and play.

But how safe is our zoo really? Would the animals be able to escape their enclosures and attack a member of the public?

I hope what happened in the United States does not happen here. But it would be reassuring to know how our zookeepers would handle a similar situation.

Visitor safety top priority
Today Online 25 Jan 08;
Letter from Biswajit Guha
Asst Director, Zoology, Singapore Zoo

We refer to Ishwar Mahtani's letter, "What would zoo do if animal escapes?" (Jan 19).

The Singapore Zoo would like to reassure Mr Ishwar that visitor safety is of paramount importance in tandem with preserving biodiversity and in giving the animals a habitat akin to their natural environment.

For example, the zoo's tiger and lion enclosures were constructed well above international safety standards, as stipulated in the guidelines produced by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Hotwires fronting the fence act as additional protection against the possibility of the animals climbing out of the exhibits.

The water moat within the white tiger enclosure ensures the animals are safely contained within their habitat; a water-soaked tiger in 1.5m-to-1.75m-deep water is unable to obtain a firm footing on solid ground to spring up to the overhang at the visitors' viewing area.

Working with dangerous animals requires vigilance, practical experience and careful attention to detail on the part of our zookeepers.

Apart from having written protocols and standard operating procedures for dangerous animals, the zoo conducts full-scale animal escape drills several times a year to keep all our staff on their toes. These drills are enacted with varying scenarios, where response times are measured to ensure the quick recapture of the escapee.

In extreme cases, our team of five veterinarians and pool of licensed shooters will be mobilised on a need-to basis to contain the animal.

Lastly, we would like to add that all our zookeepers undergo an annual review of current safety procedures and correct practices to keep abreast of the latest developments in working with dangerous animals.

We hope these facts will assure Mr Ishwar and all other visitors that the Singapore Zoo is a safe and enjoyable place to visit.

Zoo tiger attack: Victims taunted animal, say police
Straits Times 19 Jan 08;

The three men had also taken drugs and alcohol before going to the zoo
SAN FRANCISCO - ONE of the three victims of the San Francisco Zoo tiger attack was intoxicated, police said.

He admitted standing atop a railing of the big cat enclosure and waving at the animal that would later maul them.

Mr Paul Dhaliwal, 19, told the father of Mr Carlos Sousa Jr, 17, who was killed in the tiger attack, that they yelled and waved at the tiger. But he insisted that they never threw anything into its pen to provoke the big cat, according to a search warrant affidavit obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle.

The affidavit, which requested a search warrant for the surviving victims' cellphones and car, also cites multiple reports of a group of young men taunting animals at the zoo, the Chronicle reported on Thursday.

Toxicology results for Mr Dhaliwal showed that his blood alcohol level was 0.16 per cent after the attack - twice the legal threshold for drunkenness. Mr Dhaliwal's 24-year-old brother Kulbir's blood alcohol level was 0.04 per cent and Mr Sousa's was 0.02 per cent, according to Inspector Valerie Matthews, who prepared the affidavit.

All three also had marijuana in their systems, Insp Matthews said.

Mr Kulbir Dhaliwal told police that the three had smoked pot and each had 'a couple shots of vodka' before leaving San Jose for the zoo on Dec 25, the affidavit said.

It was on Christmas Day that the tiger escaped from its enclosure and killed Mr Sousa and mauled his friends, the Dhaliwal brothers. It was shot dead by the police.

The zoo shut down for investigations into how a 160kg tiger could have climbed out of its enclosure.

Investigators found that the wall of the tiger enclosure was 3.8m high, nearly 1.2m below the recommended minimum height for zoos in the United States.

Zoo director Manuel Mollinedo admitted that the tiger had climbed out of its open-air enclosure, perhaps by grabbing onto a ledge.

'She had to have jumped,' he said.

'How she was able to jump that high is amazing to me.'

The zoo could face possible fines by regulators and lawsuits by the victims for this lapse.

It could also be stripped of its exhibitor licence and face criminal charges, depending on the outcome of the police investigations.

'All this legal action is likely to impact the financial viability of the zoo,' said Professor Rory Little at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law.

The zoo is already facing a lawsuit filed by zookeeper Lori Komejan, who was attacked last year when she fed the same tiger involved in the deadly escape. The animal mauled her arm.

In October, Ms Komejan sued the city of San Francisco, seeking compensation for lost wages, medical expenses and emotional distress. She accused the city, which owns the zoo property, of 'housing the tigers with reckless disregard for the safety of animal handlers and members of the general public'.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Read more!

Singapore: eating for health (and the environment)

Eat this, it's good for you
Geoffrey Eu, Business Times 19 Jan 08;

Whether you're a fruitarian, vegetarian, raw vegan, low-fat eater, or on an organic or Blood Type diet, or are just plain health conscious, there's now food for all thoughts, BT Weekend reports

VICTOR Chia, owner of Chia's Vegetables Supply, carries at least 150 types of vegetables within the cramped, colourful confines of his Tekka Market stall, which has long been a popular pit stop for everyone from hawkers and housewives to professional chefs and gourmet food lovers.

In the old days, the business, which was started by his grandfather over 30 years ago, featured only a few staples such as sweet potatoes and other root vegetables, mainly sourced from across the Causeway. Now, he stocks celery from the US, spinach from Australia, potatoes from New Zealand, as well as herbs and vegetables from Malaysia.

Mr Chia says that local vegetables from Malaysia are generally fresher and less expensive than imported produce, but a growing number of people are willing to pay more for organically grown tomatoes on the vine from, say, Australia, rather than genetically engineered tomatoes from Cameron Highlands. Products with a questionable provenance, such as certain vegetables from China, are also a tougher sell these days.

'People are more knowledgeable now and more accepting of new products that they can't find in regular markets,' he says. 'Being a vegetable grocer, we are always on the lookout for promising new ingredients, especially since more people are consuming vegetables from a health point of view.'

Mr Chia's experience with consumers - together with related developments such as an increase in the number of organic food stores, for example - is perhaps an indication that the movement towards healthier, more responsible eating habits is gaining ground among a broad-based following and is slowly taking root in Singapore, in keeping with well-established patterns in other parts of the developed world.

Proponents of 'green' cuisine, veganism, raw food, natural hygiene and other environmentally correct diets have been making their cases - in some instances - since the 19th century, but food-loving Singaporeans have been usually content to, well, have their cake and eat it (with full cream and butter, of course) where matters of the stomach are concerned.

Meanwhile, well-known names in the food industry have also been playing their part. Whole Foods, the largest retailer of organic and natural foods in the world, has a self-imposed policy of buying produce that comes from local suppliers located within a certain radius of the supermarket stocking it.

Earlier this week, it was reported in the International Herald Tribune that Michelin-star chef Tom Aikens is opening a fish and chips restaurant in London serving only species that have been sustainably fished. With Whole Foods, Mr Aikens and others, it's more about raising awareness than prices (although their products inevitably cost more), and concern for the environment is a key element in spreading the word about eating in a more socially responsible manner.

Over at Food #3, a recently opened vegetarian shophouse cafe on Rowell Street in Little India, dishes such as beetroot soup, black pepper linguine and tempeh burger are variously marked as being vegan, or onion and garlic-free. The cafe is part of an arts centre project started by a group of artists and designers. 'We are into social entrepreneurship, exploring how art and culture can play a more significant role in Singapore society,' says founder Woon Tien Wei.

'We wanted to do something good and interesting to this street and we thought a vegetarian cafe was a good way to start.' He adds: 'We cater to a community which is not necessarily vegetarian - it's more about feeding the body, mind and soul.'

Mr Woon says that ingredients are deliberately sourced from smaller local markets and the cafe works as much as it can with local ingredients. 'When we can, we try to reduce the carbon footprint by supporting small local enterprises and not buying imported products,' he says.

The menu was devised with help from an Australian artist who was raised in a hippy commune, while the preservative-free breads are baked in-house using recipes from a local German-trained baker. Raw Food chef Paul Yeoh has been a guest chef there. 'We're still figuring out new ways of thinking about food and how to run a food business,' says Mr Woon. 'We need to feed our idealism and strike a balance with the food we serve.'

Jacqui Hargreaves, a yoga instructor with the COMO Shambhala group who has a diploma in raw food nutrition, says that she follows a low-fat, more extreme version of a raw food diet - fruits and salads and none that are high in fats, such as coconut and avocado - for health reasons, mainly to rid herself of allergies and other ailments that can be traced to the type of food she eats. 'For the first time in my life, I've been allergy free,' she says.

'The idea with raw food is to take food in its most natural state,' says Ms Hargreaves, who has experimented with a variety of diets in the effort to find one that suits her body. 'Most cooked food results in acid forming in the body, which is not good when you're trying to free yourself of allergies - the idea is to try to get your body into an alkaline state.' She adds: 'The raw food movement and the cuisine associated with it is a wonderful way of making raw food creative and enjoyable.'

Professional chef-for-hire Ryan Hong buys local produce whenever he can, although he does admit to buying certain speciality items that have been flown in. 'To me, eating healthy is based on common sense - you buy something because it is a good product,' he says.

He says that eating in a healthy and environmentally conscious way usually involves low cooking temperatures and short cooking time. 'Generally, meats are not good for you, so if you follow a balanced diet, with more vegetables than meat, you will feel much better.' He suggests things like less processing of ingredients - keeping the skins on carrots and potatoes, for example - and cutting out fried foods. 'If you cut out beef and beef fats, you may not be very happy - but you'll be healthier.'

Read more!

Threat to medicines from plant extinctions

Paul Eccleston, The Telegraph 18 Jan 08;

Millions of lives could be at risk because the plants which provide the basis of more than half of all prescription drugs face extinction, a new report warns.

The loss of plants and trees which provide natural medicines could provoke a global healthcare crisis, says Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI).

Potential cures for some of the world's deadliest diseases - including currently untreatable cancer - may be lost if the problem is not checked.

In its report London-based BGCI, which links botanic gardens in 120 countries, calls for urgent action to help secure the future of health care across the world.

It says 70 per cent of all newly-developed drugs in the United States, the world's largest and wealthiest pharmaceuticals market, are derived from natural sources and despite major scientific advances, human health is still overwhelmingly dependent on the plant kingdom.

Sara Oldfield, Secretary General of BGCI, said: "We are using up a wide range of the world's natural medicines and squandering the potential to develop new remedies. And yet it is perfectly possible to prevent plant extinctions".

Scientists had predicted that biochemistry would allow most drugs to be produced synthetically in the laboratory but in many cases it has proved impossible to reproduce the beneficial compounds found in plants.

The report cites as an example the world's most widely-used cancer drug, Paclitaxel, which is derived from the bark of several species of yew tree. Its complex chemical structure and biological function has so far made it impossible to produce artificially.
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Until recently it took an average of 6 trees to produce a single dose resulting in the decimation of wild yew populations across the world. In China's Yunnan Province, once famous for its yew forests, 80 per cent were destroyed within a three year period.

"The dramatic decline in a range of yew species, highlights the global extinction crisis that is facing medicinal plant species." said Sara Oldfield.

Poorer countries will be particularly hard-hit if trees and plants continue to be destroyed at the current rate. The World Health Organisation estimates that 5.3 billion people - 80 per cent of the global population - rely on traditional plant-based medicine as their primary form of healthcare, and in many cases collection and sales of these plants provide their only form of livelihood.

But the report says it is in the poorer rural areas where trees and plants are most threatened.

The report's author Belinda Hawkins said: "The loss of the world's medicinal plants may not always be at the forefront of the public consciousness, however it is not an overstatement to say that if the precipitous decline of these species is not halted, it could destabilise the future of global healthcare, putting many millions of lives at risk."

The BGCI has drawn on the work of some of the world's leading botanists, conservationists, healthcare professionals and traditional healers to identify which medicinal plant species are most at risk and what steps are needed to save them.

"Our report calls for co-ordinated global conservation efforts to save medicinal plants working with local communities and drawing on the skills and expertise of botanic gardens that have been involved in medicinal plant study since their first establishment 500 years ago." said Sara Oldfield.

Some of the plants at risk

Hoodia - (Hoodia gordonii)
Origin: Namibia
• Used for centuries by the San Bushmen of Namibia to stave off hunger on long hunting trips.
• The plant has sparked interest for its perceived ability to suppress appetite and is under investigation as a key weapon in the fight against obesity.
• Britney Spears famously took this in the form of lollipops as part of her efforts to loose weight.

With pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer having expressed an interest into the plant's appetite suppressing properties, there has been an explosion of speculation into its use as a 'miracle' weight loss drug.

As a result vast quantities of the plant have been ripped from the wild, decimating entire populations. The catch 22 is that until its properties are proven few will invest in planting the species as a commercial crop, but scientists fear that by the time this is established for sure the plants may be on the verge of extinction.

Hou Po - (Magnolia officinalis)
Origin: South West China
• Contains Honokiol, a chemical that has been proven to be effective in treating previously untreatable cancers.
• Honokiol also helps soften blood vessels, thereby stemming the onset of major cardiovascular disease.
• Also used to treat senile dementia, by improving blood flow to the brain.

One of the most ancient flowering plants, dinosaurs once walked amongst groves of magnolias. Yet despite often held up as the species from which all today's flowers evolved, half of the world's magnolias are now threatened with extinction.

Bark from several different species has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for up to 5,000 years, where it is considered one of the most important therapeutic herbs. It's antioxidant effect, 1,000 times more potent than Vitamin E, has been proven to successfully reverse cardiovascular disease, slow the onset of senile dementia, and even hold promise to treat a variety of previously untreatable cancers.

Magnolia bark extract also has powerful anti-bacterial effects, and when added to chewing gum kills 63 per cent of the bacteria that cause bad breath, in comparison to the traditionally used peppermint oil, which kills just 3.5 per cent.

Caterpillar fungus - (Cordyceps sinensis)
Origin: China and Bhutan
• One of the most important species in traditional Chinese medicine, Cordyceps extracts have been demonstrated to raise the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood.
• This has been used to dramatically reduce the times of Chinese long distance runners, so much so that they attracted suspicions of drug use.
• This same ability has been shown to slow down the decline in aerobic fitness and energy levels that is associated with old age.

Cordyceps is a parasitic fungus that grows in the bodies of various species of insect and insect larvae in the tundra of the Tibetan Plateau. Once infected by the fungal spores, the insect's body becomes slowly filled by the branching fungus. The fruiting body then explodes out of its head, like something from a science fiction film, to distribute its spores into new hosts.

Over collection has drastically reduced Cordyceps populations in the Tibetan Plateau, with its effects increasingly visible on the landscape of this fragile ecosystem.

Autumn Crocus (Colchicum autumnale)
Origin: Europe and North Africa
• Used as an assassin's poison in Ancient Greece.
• Vital to many plant breeding efforts, bearing the ability to make sterile hybrids fertile.
• Recorded as successfully curing leukaemia.
• One of the few effective natural treatments for gout.

In mid September park lawns across the country become dotted with delicate pink flowers, as the Autumn Crocus comes into bloom.

Yet few would recognise it as one of the most deadly poisons of the ancient world. The Ottomans, Romans and Greeks all used an extract of the roots as an animal poison, with some sources citing its widespread use in warfare - for example poisoning wells. In smaller doses it has a variety of therapeutic uses, including the treatment of gout and leukaemia.

Perhaps its most surprising secret is that it is key to many modern plant breeding efforts. The same substance responsible for its toxicity also has the remarkable ability to render highly-manipulated sterile hybrids fertile again, working by doubling the chromosome number.

However the stunning petals of the Autumn crocus may prove its undoing, as it is under grave threat from over-harvest for the horticultural trade and habitat loss.

Chinese Yew (Taxus wallichiana)
Origin: South West China
• The source of the world's most popular anti-cancer drug.
• Sacred to the Celts, as the tree of eternal life.
• Paradoxically all parts of the tree are also deadly poisonous.
• Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth, Tolkein, Agatha Christie and JK Rowling have all sung its praises.

The Ancient Celts planted yew in graveyards and buried its branches with their dead, believing that it had the power to grant eternal life. Many of these trees still exist in the churchyards that were built directly on top of ancient Celtic sites, and are now counted as some of the oldest trees in Europe, with a lower estimate of 2,000 years.

It is a compound extracted from yew that is leading the fight against breast, ovarian and lung cancer. Taxol, found in the leaves and bark of yew trees is the key constituent in many chemotherapy regimes, used in the world's number one selling breast cancer drug.

However since the discovery of this action in the 1960's, there has been a precipitous decline in several yew species. With the bark of 6 trees needed for just a single dose of the drug, the global clear cut felling of these trees for their medicinal properties has left many teetering on the verge of extinction.

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Asia seen hardest-hit by disasters in 2007

Stephanie Nebehay, Reuters 18 Jan 08;

GENEVA (Reuters) - Asia was hardest-hit by natural disasters last year that worldwide killed more than 16,500 people and caused $62.5 billion in damage, a U.N.-backed research group said on Friday.

There was also a marked increase in the number of floods in 2007, a trend the Centre for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters said reflected the threat posed by global warming.

Eight of the worst 10 disasters last year struck Asia. Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh in November claimed the highest toll of 4,234 lives, according to the Belgium-based centre.

"There were no real mega-disasters in 2007, which is the good news, but economic losses were higher than the year before," Debarati Guha-Sapir, centre director, told a news conference in Geneva.

"We see more extreme events overall, not geological ones like earthquakes and volcano eruptions, but very many more windstorms and floods," she said.

Scientists warn that climate change, blamed mainly on human emissions of so-called greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, will bring extreme weather including more heatwaves, droughts, floods and rising seas in coming years.

"Current trends are consistent with the prediction of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, in that Asia and also West Africa are already suffering from more severe and frequent floods," Guha-Sapir said in a statement.

She said there was already a "significant increase" in floods in 2007, creating unsanitary conditions in which diseases such as malaria, dengue fever and cholera flourish.

The 206 recorded floods last year accounted for more than half of the world's 399 natural disasters. This compared with an annual average of 172 floods between 2000-2006.

Nearly 200 million people worldwide were affected by disasters last year, half of them in China, which suffered heavy floods last June-July, it said.

Losses from natural disasters amounted to $62.5 billion in 2007, up from $34 billion in 2006, Guha-Sapir said, partly due to rich countries suffering damage to costly insured structures.

An earthquake in Japan last July cost $12.5 billion and Europe's winter storm Kyrill caused $10 billion in damage, it said. Summer floods in Britain caused $8 billion in damage, while huge wildfires in California cost $2.5 billion.

"These figures are a reminder of what could have been saved if we had invested more in disaster risk reduction measures," said Salvano Briceno, director of the Geneva-based ISDR.

An ISDR spokeswoman said that for every dollar spent on disaster prevention, an estimated $4-7 could be saved in reconstruction costs.

In 2005, global economic losses from natural disasters soared to a record $225 billion, half of it stemming from damage from Hurricane Katrina in the United States.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Jon Boyle)

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Space agency satellites to monitor climate change

Reuters 18 Jan 08;

GENEVA (Reuters) - Space agencies including NASA have agreed to use their next generation of satellites to help monitor climate change, the United Nations weather agency said.

The consensus came at a high-level meeting this week in New Orleans, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said.

"High-tech efforts to better understand global warming have been strengthened after the world's space and meteorological agencies gave their support to a WMO strategy for the enhanced use of satellites to monitor climate change and weather," the WMO said in a statement issued late on Thursday.

The aim is to ensure that satellites launched over the next 20 years constantly record parameters such as sea levels and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Senior officials from NASA, the European Space Agency and space agencies in Japan, China, Brazil and India attended the two-day meeting where WMO presented its strategy.

"Every agency which attended supported it," WMO spokesman Paul Garwood said.

Climate change monitoring requires very long-term continuous measurement, according to Jerome Lafeuille, who heads the space-based observing system division of WMO's space program. Satellites are essential to this, because they give a global picture of changes in the oceans, on land and in the atmosphere.

Scientists blame climate change mainly on human emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and warn it will bring extreme weather including more heatwaves, droughts, floods and rising seas.

At least 16 geo-stationary and low-earth orbit satellites currently provide operational data on the planet's climate and weather as part of WMO's global observation system.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay)

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Forests and carbon capture keys to climate: Norway's PM

Alister Doyle, Reuters 18 Jan 08;

"There is no way that the rest of the world will accept that four percent of the world's population is responsible for 25 percent of the world's emissions,"

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - Protecting forests and burying greenhouse gases are key ways of slowing world climate change, Norway's prime minister said on Friday a day after the Nordic nation set a stiff 2030 goal of becoming "carbon neutral."

Jens Stoltenberg, in South Africa on a stopover before a weekend trip to Antarctica, said about half the world's emissions of greenhouse gases came from deforestation and from burning fossil fuels in power plants and industries.

"Forestry and carbon capture are key to solving the climate problem," he said in a speech in Cape Town of Oslo's strategy for slowing climate change that the U.N. Climate Panel says will bring more floods, heatwaves, droughts and rising seas.

Norway's parliament agreed on Thursday to make the world's number five oil exporter "carbon neutral" by 2030, 20 years earlier than previously planned. Under the scheme, any emissions of carbon dioxide in 2030 will be offset by cuts elsewhere.

Costa Rica and New Zealand are among few countries that have similarly stiff goals to cut their net emissions to zero.

Stoltenberg said deforestation accounts for about 20 percent of total greenhouse gases -- trees soak up carbon dioxide when they grow and release it when they rot or are burnt.

Greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels such as coal or oil in power plants and factories account for almost 30 percent. These could be dealt with by new technologies to capture the gases and pipe them into underground stores, he said.

"There's a long way to go but the potential is there," he told Reuters of burying carbon.

DEFORESTATION

A U.N. climate conference in Bali last month agreed to launch pilot projects to grant poor countries credits for slowing deforestation under a new long-term climate pact beyond 2012. Norway said it would contribute $500 million a year.

But, unlike Norway, few industrialized nations are arguing that their own forests should be included. Nordic forests are expanding, partly because global warming itself is extending the northern growing season.

Stoltenberg said inclusion of forests would benefit Norway's own accounting for emissions. Norway's annual emissions, from sources ranging from oil platforms to cars, exceed 50 million tonnes and well above goals set by the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol.

"If forestry were included then the accounting changes. Suddenly Norway's emissions are not 50 million tonnes but much lower," he told Reuters.

South Africa's Environment Minister Marthinus Van Schalkwyk also said that the United States, the world's top emitter, should do far more to curb its emissions after agreeing in Bali to negotiate a new world climate treaty by the end of 2009.

"The United States' commitment to join negotiations is an important step forward. But it remains a first step -- an infant step," he said in a speech. "What we expect from them is a quantum leap."

He said that the United States, at a meeting of major emitters in Honolulu in late January, should agree to deep cuts.

"There is no way that the rest of the world will accept that four percent of the world's population is responsible for 25 percent of the world's emissions," he said, referring to the United States.

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Global carbon trade rose 80 pct last year: group

Reuters 18 Jan 08;

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Trade in the world greenhouse gas credits market rose 80 percent last year as emissions rules became a concern for more companies, a carbon analysis group said on Friday.

Global carbon credit trade rose to $60 billion in 2007, from $33 billion the previous year, according Point Carbon, an Oslo-based group of greenhouse gas analysts and consultants.

Total traded volume in the global market reached 2.7 billion tons of greenhouse emissions reductions in 2007, a 64 percent jump in the same period.

The U.N.'s climate panel last year squarely blamed human actions for global warming.

Carbon trade allows companies that have cut emissions under a set limit to sell credits representing the reductions to slower-moving players. It is seen as a major way to spur clean technologies that are hoped to slow and then decrease global emissions.

The United States, the world's largest greenhouse gas polluter, has not yet regulated the gases scientists blame for warming the planet. But 10 states on the East Coast plan to start trading carbon dioxide emissions credits from power plants next year, while states in the West and Midwest also plan to trade in regional markets.

Banks, hedge funds and exchanges in the United States, including the New York Mercantile Exchange, last year became increasingly involved in voluntary trading and preparation for possible national carbon regulations.

"This indicates a growing confidence that GHG emission trading will soon take off in the U.S., whether it is at the state or federal level," Point Carbon said in a statement.

Nearly two-thirds of the global trading volume last year occurred on the European Union's emissions trading scheme, with 1.6 billion tons of greenhouse emissions changing hands worth $41 billion. The EU ETS, which kicked off in 2005, covers more than 10,000 power stations and other stationary sources of greenhouse gas pollution.

The other major market was the U.N.'s Clean Development Mechanism, under which 947 million tons of greenhouse emissions were traded, worth $17.5 billion, despite complaints that red tape has delayed projects.

The CDM allows players in rich countries to meet their emissions limits by investing in clean projects in developing countries, such as wind farms and hydroelectric projects, which otherwise would not have happened.

The secondary market in issued CDM credits rose from 40 million tons and $836.2 million in 2006, to 350 million tons and $8.3 billion in 2007, Point Carbon said.

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Internal EU report casts doubts on its biofuel strategy

Yahoo News 18 Jan 08;

An internal European Commission study, seen by AFP Friday, criticises an EU plan to boost the use of biofuels in transport, concluding that their costs outweigh the benefits.

A Commission spokesman downplayed the study and insisted that the use of biofuels remained at the centre of its strategy to cut greenhouse gas emissions in Europe.

The unpublished working paper by the Joint Research Centre, the European Commission's in-house scientific body, makes uncomfortable reading for the EU's executive body ahead of a meeting Wednesday where it is to detail a plan for biofuels to make up 10 percent of all transport fuels in the EU by 2020.

The cost-benefit study looks at whether using biofuels reduces greenhouse gas emissions, improves security of supply and creates jobs and delivers an unenthusiastic opinion on all three counts.

"What the cost-benefit analysis shows is that there are better ways to achieve greenhouse gas savings and security of supply enhancements than to produce biofuels," says the report.

"The costs of EU biofuels outweigh the benefits," the researchers state.

EU taxpayers would have to fork out an extra 33-65 billion euros (48-95 billion dollars) between now and 2020 if the European Commission proposals go ahead, according to the study.

European Commission spokesman on energy Ferran Tarradellas Espuny stressed that the study was just a working paper and one of several opinions being taken into consideration as talks continued ahead of Wednesday's decision.

But he made clear that that the 10 percent biofuels objective for vehicles remained.

"Economically speaking there is only one option, that is biofuels," he told a press conference.

"It is good for the environment, it is good for transport and it is good for European agriculture".

On agriculture however the study warns that the proposed EU measures will require the use of huge swathes of land outside of Europe and it questions whether it will make any greenhouse gas savings at all.

Green groups warn that the EU plans could lead to forest clearances for biofuels or for food crops displaced by biofuel plantations as farmers switch over.

The report concludes that by using the same EU resources of money and biomass, significantly greater greenhouse gas savings could be achieved by imposing only an overall biomass-use target instead of a separate one for transport.

"The uncertainties of the indirect greenhouse effects, much of which would occur outside the EU, mean that it is impossible to say with certainty that the net greenhous gas effects of the giofuels programme would be positive," the study says.

Adrian Bebb, Agrofuels Campaign Coordinator for Friends of the Earth Europe, called it "a damning verdict on the EU's policy for using biofuels."

"The conclusions are crystal clear -- the EU should abandon biofuels and use its resources on real solutions to climate change," he said of the leaked report.

The Commission's plans for biofuels are part of a broader energy strategy to cut down on greenhouse gases to be unveiled on Wednesday.

EU leaders have pledged to increase renewable energy use by 20 percent by 2020, compared to 1990 levels, with biofuels to make up 10 percent of all transport fuels used by then.

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