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March 4, 2011
· Oil prices spur ethanol makers to crank it up
· New growth regulators are more effective
· Tiny wasp puts the big hurt on stink bugs
· Plowing new vegetable ground in S. Africa
· Berkeley project seeks global warming truth
Oil prices spur ethanol makers to crank it up
(Los
Angeles Times) – Corn-based ethanol is the renewable fuel environmentalists
love to hate. But as turmoil in the Middle East and
Plants mothballed during the economic downturn are
reopening. Domestic ethanol production hit record levels last year, topping
13.2 billion gallons, according to the Renewable Fuels Assn. in
The recovery can be seen in
For the plant's owner, Pacific Ethanol Inc., which weathered bankruptcy and is slowly reviving three of its plants, it's a whiff of vindication.
"Ethanol is an important part of the country's energy
picture these days," said Neil Koehler, chief executive of the
That's largely because of Uncle Sam. Concerned about
The liquid is blended into almost every gallon of unleaded gasoline sold in the U.S and accounts for about 10% of the fuel that motorists pump into their cars. That percentage is set to rise as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently approved the use of blends of up to 15% ethanol for newer vehicles.
That's good news for the ethanol industry with oil now
topping $100 a barrel and motorists experiencing sticker shock at the pump. On
Wednesday, the average price for a gallon of unleaded fuel was $3.39 nationwide
and $3.78 in
"At a time of increased energy uncertainty and volatility, domestic ethanol production … is helping create the kind of economic and energy opportunities this country will need to regain control over our future," said Bob Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Assn.
But whether corn ethanol is good for the planet,
Some scientists have concluded that growing corn, harvesting and distilling it, and trucking it to refineries causes as much environmental damage as burning oil. Many environmentalists want taxpayer subsidies devoted to developing next-generation biofuels rather than supporting big agribusiness and the oil companies that are now operating ethanol plants.
Budget hawks also want to end ethanol subsidies at a time
when commodities prices are rising and the
Speaking at an Agriculture Department conference in February, former President Clinton warned about the need to strike a balance between farming for food and biofuels, given political instability in parts of the developing world.
"We have to become energy independent. We don't want to
do it at the expense of food riots,"
Auto manufacturers are concerned as well. They're suing the EPA to stop sales of the 15% ethanol blend, known as E-15, which they said would confuse consumers and damage older vehicles.
Ethanol industry officials said E-15 pumps would be clearly
marked, so consumers would not be misled. And they said political instability
in the
Critics of ethanol aren't deterring investors — 17 idled
ethanol plants have reopened across the
Despite the turnaround, memories of the previous bust still
linger. In the early to mid-2000s, investors poured billions of dollars into
Pacific Ethanol's Koehler recalls that boom-bust cycle too
well. The company was founded by former California Secretary of State Bill
Jones, a political ally of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and backed partly
by Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates' Cascade Investment. During its heyday
in 2006, it operated four plants, including one in
In 2009, as the industry slumped, Pacific Ethanol's
subsidiary that operated the plants filed for bankruptcy protection. Three of
its four facilities, including both
But the company has been resurrected by the recent market shift — and with taxpayer help.
State subsidies, drawn from a $15-million fund for
alternative fuels, helped the company reopen its
Pacific Ethanol is now applying for more taxpayer subsidies
to reopen its plant in
New growth regulators are more effective
(Purdue University
via Medical News Today) – A
Angus Murphy, a professor of horticulture, said the growth inhibitors block the transport of auxin, a plant hormone that, when transported throughout the plant, controls growth processes. Current growth regulators that inhibit auxin transport are inefficient because they also have hormonelike activity or affect other important plant processes. Current growth inhibitors also are often toxic.
Growth regulators are important in ornamental plants and horticultural crops that would require labor-intensive manipulation and pruning. The inhibitors are used to keep plants a desired size and shape and control fruit formation.
"These regulators would be used primarily on ornamental plants, flowers and trees that aren't going to be genetically changed easily," Murphy said. "Growth regulators are used regularly on this type of plant. Inhibition of auxin transport with these new compounds is also an alternative to the use of more toxic regulators like 2,4-D."
The toxicity of growth regulators can be an environmental concern and add safety and monitoring costs to commercial growing operations. They are generally not applied to edible portions of plants or are applied early enough that there is little or no residue on edible portions of plants.
The new plant growth inhibitors are derived from natural and artificial auxins but have a bulky benzoyl group - a chemical conjugate derived from benzoic acid - attached that prevents movement of the inhibitor out of the cell.
"Since it looks like auxin, it will open the door, but it can't get through," Murphy said. "However, these new growth regulators have no hormonal activity themselves."
Murphy worked with scientists from several universities in
Murphy said he would continue studying how to regulate other hormonal pathways in plants and use the new regulator to understand hormonal transport in plants. Companies licensed by the Japanese institutes will continue environmental and toxicity testing of the regulators in greenhouse and field trials.
The Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the U.S. Department of Energy funded the research.
Source:
Tiny wasp puts the big hurt on stink bugs
(The Baltimore Sun) Newark, Del. — Maryland's newest terrorist life form — the brown marmorated stink bug — may eventually meet its archnemesis in the form of a tiny prizefighter of a wasp from Asia.
The parasitic wasps that are being raised in quarantine in a
But they are uncommonly efficient at hunting down and injecting their offspring into stink bug egg masses. In true horror-movie fashion, the larvae consume the stink bugs from the inside out. When the wasps grow into adults, they chew their way out, procreate — and go on the hunt for more stink bug eggs.
Available now -- get the new Baltimore Sun Android app!
"Tests have shown that these wasps will destroy up to 80 percent of the stink bug population," says Kim Hoelmer, the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture scientist in charge of the project. "They're efficient egg-stinging machines. For something so tiny, it's absolutely amazing the behaviors that are hard-wired into their little brains."
Stink bugs aren't a threat to human health. And if they were merely odoriferous and annoying, chances are that the nation's top bug experts wouldn't be going to so much trouble to locate and develop an insect assassin.
But not only do stink bugs
represent an unprecedented threat to
"I've never seen such a serious pest enter the
Populations of stink bugs have been increasing steadily in
"I think we're going to have a bumper crop," says
Michael Raupp, an entomologist at the
Hoelmer and his team have been importing and studying the parasites since 2005.
Because the wasps are not allowed inside the
Inside the quarantine rooms, research technician Kathy Tatman stuck a wad of cotton inside a piece of plastic tubing. She inserted the other end of the tube into a petri dish in which live wasps are kept, and inhaled through the cotton until several female bugs were pulled up into the tube. Tatman moved the tube into a second petri dish containing a fresh layer of pale green stink bug eggs, breathed out, and deposited the mama wasps on a nearby leaf.
Once the wasps find the egg mass, she said, they will almost certainly "sting" every one, eventually killing the embryonic stink bugs inside.
Preliminary indications are that wasps are effective, Hoelmer said, and, just as important, won't attack other, more beneficial bugs.
But establishing the necessary scientific proofs takes time. If all goes well, Hoelmer hopes to have authorization to release the Asian wasps into the environment some time in 2013.
For desperate farmers, two years might not be soon enough.
So last month,
Hoelmer's wasps are part of that proposal. So are a group of scientists in Beltsville who think they have identified the stink bug pheromone, or chemical signal, that causes a large amount of the insects to congregate. If researchers can replicate the pheromone, they could potentially trap and kill the bugs before they damage the fruit.
Researchers also are trying to come up with pesticides that will poison stink bugs, repellants that will deter them, fungi that will attack them, and a various other methods.
"We're taking a cafeteria of different approaches," Lesky said.
"We still don't have any proven tools, but we're way ahead of where we were at this time last year. We have all the pieces in place, and we're working to find solutions as quickly as we can."
Right now, stink bugs are causing the most damage to the mid-Atlantic region. But it's only a matter of time before the epidemic reaches the rest of the nation.
Stink bugs are portable, voracious and formidably adaptable, and populations of the insect have been verified in 33 states.
Brown marmorated stink bugs can walk, and they can fly long distances. They are superb hitchhikers, often traveling unseen inside the door jamb of a car or truck. They can live in wet places and dry. They flourish in hot climates, and in cold ones.
In
Orchard owner Robert Black knows the bug experts are doing everything they can. He just hopes he can hold on long enough for them to find a solution.
Last season, he found stink bug damage on a third of the Catoctin Mountain Orchard's entire fruit crop, and on fully half of his Pink Lady apples.
Though Black can recoup some of his loss by converting damaged produce to applesauce and juice, these items are much less profitable than whole fruit.
"We need help," Black said. "I had 30 to 35 percent damage last season, and I can't handle 40 to 50 percent. That's what I'm scared about."
He warned that if the problem continues unabated for too long, food prices could rise.
"This is a major problem, not just for fruit growers, but for consumers," he said. "I don't mean to scare people, but eventually, this could start affecting the food supply. People can live without gasoline, but they can't live without food."
U.S. Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett will hold a town hall meeting
for farmers in Emmitsburg on March 18 specifically to
discuss the stink bug problem in
"Stink bugs have all the features you'd design in a terrorist bug," he said. "They're an invasive species, and they have no native predators. They eat every plant with a thin skin and sugar. They could inflict a plague of biblical proportions."
Plowing new vegetable ground in S. Africa
(AP via RN-T.com)
WOODBINE,
"He told me, 'We need vegetables because our people are
sick with HIV, and we can't afford medicine. Vegetables are our
medicine,'" said Edalgo,
The agriculture expert, 35, whose position is funded jointly
by the Camden County Board of Commissioners and the
His assignment was to teach villagers in
Edalgo surveyed every stage of the program's production process, from a seedling nursery to the fields and on to a kitchen that dehydrated most of the produce. The food was ultimately put into packages and soup mixes to be sold throughout the region.
The farmland belongs to the university, but the villagers are in charge of farming it. The school rents them some equipment, such as its tractor, but otherwise they must use their own resources.
With a translator at his side, Edalgo taught classes to the villagers and conducted on-site lessons on powdery mildew, weed control and crop rotation.
He found growing conditions in
"The elevation is different, but the climate is quite similar," he said.
But he had to change his thinking by about six months.
Because
When Edalgo visited a field, he found villagers leading two powerful oxen that pulled a harrow to till between the rows of cabbage. But something was wrong: One man had been assigned to follow the group and push mounds of tilled dirt off the cabbage with a stick. Edalgo quickly realized the villagers were tilling too wide a swath between the vegetable rows, which in turn created more disease than it stopped. He showed the farmers how to narrow the harrow forks, which would make the process work as it was intended.
Edalgo also found that the borders between various crops were blurred. He had signs made and showed the farmers how to divide the fields into quadrants that would help them keep track of their plantings. Then, he explained to them, they could begin rotating crops each season.
"By rotating, your disease frequency goes way down because many diseases are host-specific," Edalgo explained. He gave the farmers charts explaining the various vegetable families they should rotate through.
The farmers listened, but they also hesitated when they saw unfamiliar produce on the lists. They had been eating corn, carrots and butternut squash all their lives, but what on earth was okra?
"Okra would be a great producer there, but they don't plant it. They've never planted it," Edalgo said. "They're very focused on eating what they've been eating for generations."
Edalgo urged the farmers to give the new vegetables a try.
"It will be a hard sell for them, at least at the beginning," Edalgo said, "but I think it's an opportunity for a niche market that could really help them."
He also talked to them about weed control and using cover crops instead of allowing fields to overgrow. The weeds attract insects and disease, he explained through his translator.
Edalgo said there is a lot of
potential for commercial farming in
"You've got to remember, it's only been 15 years since apartheid," he said. "The few commercial farms used to belong mostly to the white farmers, but now the land has been redistributed and the government is looking to make larger sections of the country commercial."
The extension coordinator returned to
Edalgo, who lives with his wife
and two children in Folkston, grew up in "watermelon country" in
Edalgo stays in touch with some of
the villagers, and he recently had vegetable seeds shipped to
Berkeley
(guardian.co.uk)
– In 1964, Richard Muller, a 20-year-old graduate student with neat-cropped
hair, walked into Sproul Hall at the University of
California, Berkeley, and joined a mass protest of unprecedented scale. The
activists, a few thousand strong, demanded that the university lift a ban on
free speech and ease restrictions on academic freedom, while outside on the
steps a young folk-singer called Joan Baez led supporters in a chorus of We
Shall Overcome. The sit-in ended two days later when police stormed the
building in the early hours and arrested hundreds of students. Muller was
thrown into
Today, Muller is still on the
For the past year, Muller has kept a low profile, working quietly on a new project with a team of academics hand-picked for their skills. They meet on campus regularly, to check progress, thrash out problems and hunt for oversights that might undermine their work. And for good reason. When Muller and his team go public with their findings in a few weeks, they will be muscling in on the ugliest and most hard-fought debate of modern times.
Muller calls his latest obsession the Berkeley Earth project. The aim is so simple that the complexity and magnitude of the undertaking is easy to miss. Starting from scratch, with new computer tools and more data than has ever been used, they will arrive at an independent assessment of global warming. The team will also make every piece of data it uses – 1.6bn data points – freely available on a website. It will post its workings alongside, including full information on how more than 100 years of data from thousands of instruments around the world are stitched together to give a historic record of the planet's temperature.
Muller is fed up with the politicised
row that all too often engulfs climate science. By laying all its data and
workings out in the open, where they can be checked and challenged by anyone,
the
"We are bringing the spirit of science back to a subject that has become too argumentative and too contentious," Muller says, over a cup of tea. "We are an independent, non-political, non-partisan group. We will gather the data, do the analysis, present the results and make all of it available. There will be no spin, whatever we find." Why does Muller feel compelled to shake up the world of climate change? "We are doing this because it is the most important project in the world today. Nothing else comes close," he says.
Muller is moving into crowded territory with sharp elbows.
There are already three heavyweight groups that could be considered the
official keepers of the world's climate data. Each publishes its own figures
that feed into the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. Nasa's
Goddard Institute for Space Studies in
You might think three groups was enough, but Muller rolls out a list of shortcomings, some real, some perceived, that he suspects might undermine public confidence in global warming records. For a start, he says, warming trends are not based on all the available temperature records. The data that is used is filtered and might not be as representative as it could be. He also cites a poor history of transparency in climate science, though others argue many climate records and the tools to analyse them have been public for years.
Then there is the fiasco of 2009 that saw roughly 1,000
emails from a server at the
This latest point is where Muller faces his most delicate challenge. To concede that climate sceptics raise fair criticisms means acknowledging that scientists and government agencies have got things wrong, or at least could do better. But the debate around global warming is so highly charged that open discussion, which science requires, can be difficult to hold in public. At worst, criticising poor climate science can be taken as an attack on science itself, a knee-jerk reaction that has unhealthy consequences. "Scientists will jump to the defence of alarmists because they don't recognise that the alarmists are exaggerating," Muller says.
The Berkeley Earth project came together more than a year
ago, when Muller rang David Brillinger, a statistics
professor at
For the rest of the team, Muller says he picked scientists
known for original thinking. One is Saul Perlmutter,
the
Robert Rohde, a young physicist who left
The wealth of data Rohde has collected so far – and some dates back to the 1700s – makes for what Muller believes is the most complete historical record of land temperatures ever compiled. It will, of itself, Muller claims, be a priceless resource for anyone who wishes to study climate change. So far, Rohde has gathered records from 39,340 individual stations worldwide.
Publishing an extensive set of temperature records is the
first goal of Muller's project. The second is to turn this vast haul of data
into an assessment on global warming. Here, the
This is where the
Among the trickiest errors to deal with are so-called systematic biases, which skew temperature measurements in fiendishly complex ways. Stations get moved around, replaced with newer models, or swapped for instruments that record in celsius instead of fahrenheit. The times measurements are taken varies, from say 6am to 9pm. The accuracy of individual stations drift over time and even changes in the surroundings, such as growing trees, can shield a station more from wind and sun one year to the next. Each of these interferes with a station's temperature measurements, perhaps making it read too cold, or too hot. And these errors combine and build up.
This is the real mess that will take a Herculean effort to clean up. The Berkeley Earth team is using algorithms that automatically correct for some of the errors, a strategy Muller favours because it doesn't rely on human interference. When the team publishes its results, this is where the scrutiny will be most intense.
Despite the scale of the task, and the fact that world-class scientific organisations have been wrestling with it for decades, Muller is convinced his approach will lead to a better assessment of how much the world is warming. "I've told the team I don't know if global warming is more or less than we hear, but I do believe we can get a more precise number, and we can do it in a way that will cool the arguments over climate change, if nothing else," says Muller. "Science has its weaknesses and it doesn't have a stranglehold on the truth, but it has a way of approaching technical issues that is a closer approximation of truth than any other method we have."
He will find out soon enough if his hopes to forge a true
consensus on climate change are misplaced. It might not be a good sign that one
prominent climate sceptic contacted by the Guardian,
Canadian economist Ross McKitrick, had never heard of
the project. Another, Stephen McIntyre, whom Muller has defended on some
issues, hasn't followed the project either, but said "anything that
[Muller] does will be well done". Phil Jones at the
Elsewhere, Muller has qualified support from some of the
biggest names in the business. At Nasa,
Hansen welcomed the project, but warned against over-emphasising
what he expects to be the minor differences between
Peter Thorne, who left the Met Office's Hadley Centre last
year to join the Co-operative Institute for Climate and Satellites in North
Carolina, is enthusiastic about the Berkeley project but raises an eyebrow at
some of Muller's claims. The
Despite his reservations, Thorne says climate science stands
to benefit from Muller's project. "We need groups like
For the time being, Muller's project is organised under the auspices of Novim, a Santa Barbara-based non-profit organisation that uses science to find answers to the most pressing issues facing society and to publish them "without advocacy or agenda". Funding has come from a variety of places, including the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (funded by Bill Gates), and the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Lab. One donor has had some climate bloggers up in arms: the man behind the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation owns, with his brother David, Koch Industries, a company Greenpeace called a "kingpin of climate science denial". On this point, Muller says the project has taken money from right and left alike.
No one who spoke to the Guardian about the Berkeley Earth project believed it would shake the faith of the minority who have set their minds against global warming. "As new kids on the block, I think they will be given a favourable view by people, but I don't think it will fundamentally change people's minds," says Thorne. Brillinger has reservations too. "There are people you are never going to change. They have their beliefs and they're not going to back away from them."
Waking across the
End Transmission