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30/09/07 Food shock as 'agflation' sees prices rise Stephen Cauchi, The Age Australia Canada US and Europe
Water OS
27/09/07 Ocean pumps a 'radical' strategy for climate change ABC NEWS By Barbara Miller BRITAIN USWater OS
25/09/07 The climate canaries Andrew Darby The Age Antarctica; Australia; NamibiaWaste
21/09/07 It's not too late for climate: Flannery; AAP; World Business Council for Sustainable Development.Forests
21/09/07 - Indonesia leads call for scheme to save forests, Mark Forbes, The Age; Jakarta,Indonesia17/09/07 Conservatives steal the march on green energy policy Liz Minchin, The Age, Opinion Britain
17/09/07 Record lows in Arctic ice raise heat ; Gethin Chamberlain, TELEGRAPH, AP Arctic Circle; Greenland; US; Canada Links
17/09/07 Top labels spy stylish edge in carbon labelling :- Felicia Mello, Boston globe US
Stephen Cauchi, The Age
September 30, 2007
IN THE 1970s it was "stagflation", the simultaneous combination of economic stagnation and high inflation. Now, in the noughties, we have "agflation" price inflation of agricultural products, especially grains and related foodstuffs. Just last week, while announcing the Federal Government's aid package to drought-hit farmers, former deputy prime minister and Nationals leader John Anderson warned of a global food shock.
"This comes at a time of unprecedented concerns globally of very low grain stocks. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that we will see a food shock in the next few years," said Mr Anderson. "We talk about oil shocks. We have gone on assuming that the supermarket shelves will always be loaded this affects everyone from the farmers right through to those people who are dependent on countries like Australia to feed them."
It's a neat analogy. In the 1970s there was stagflation and oil shocks; in the 21st century, agflation and food shocks. Nor is it confined to Australia. "Bread leads the big food price hike" was the headline in London's Sunday Times earlier this month, detailing the doubling of grain prices and the flow-on from that: more expensive bread, pasta, noodles, barley and, because animal feed is grain-based, more expensive meat.
The Independent was even more bearish, headlining "The fight for the world's food": "Population is growing. Supply is falling. Prices are rising. What will be the cost to the planet's poorest?"
With agflation, economists are blaming the rocketing economies of India and China on the demand side; on the supply side, drought in the world's breadbaskets possibly driven by climate change and diversion of grain into biofuels in the United States are the main culprits. "As these two forces combine they are setting off warning bells around the world," said The Independent. "It has even revived discussion of the work of the 18th-century British thinker Robert Malthus. He predicted the growth of the world's population would outstrip its ability to produce food, leading to mass starvation."
Terry Sheales, from the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, said all grain-producing countries Australia, Canada, the US and Europe had suffered drought, cutting output. At the same time importers, such as Egypt, had placed early orders, spiking demand.
"The wheat situation is very serious, as you can see from how prices have escalated. They're about 30 per cent higher compared to last year," said Dr Sheales. "Stocks at the start of the year were pretty low, around 117 million tonnes, (and) overall the expectation is that stocks will be run down further."
Wheat supplies have hit a 26-year low, pushing prices to a record $US9.16 ($A10.35) a bushel last week. Despite the drought, an Australian crop of 13 to 14 million tonnes is tipped, which is better than last year.
The high price is a mixed blessing for farmers: those whose crop has withstood the drought will do very well, those without a crop won't having anything to sell.
But consumers are suffering, their plight worsened by shortages of other grains. The US decision to encourage biofuel made of corn has sent prices of that crop rocketing to $US157 ($A177) a tonne. That in turn has prompted farmers to grow corn at the expense of other crops, including soybeans, pushing up their price as well.
"We haven't had this emphasis on producing biofuels before. That's a new important added factor in the world grains market," said Dr Sheales.
Monash University economist Robert Brooks said: "A number of the large agricultural producers have been in drought conditions for a long time (but) the question that's triggered a lot of the agflation concern is fuel substitution."
Agflation was, however, "a new term for something that's gone around a bit". "Agricultural prices and production goes through cycles at different points in time the extrapolation from that the old Malthus stuff has been proved wrong many times."
John Freebairn, of Melbourne University, said the American policy of encouraging biofuels was "rather stupid". "It's taking corn and wheat and sugar away from food so the price gets ramped up on consumers, and burning biofuels creates nearly as much greenhouse gas as burning petroleum."
But no economist The Sunday Age spoke to thought there was a looming catastrophe. Markets tend to be self-correcting, as high prices induce suppliers to produce more and encourage consumers to look for substitutes. "We went through this in the mid-'70s, where we had a big boost in prices and then prices went down again, especially in real terms," said Dr Sheales.
Professor Brooks said: "Most of the previous Malthus-style predictions have been proven wrong by significant technological improvements in agricultural production. GM (genetically modified) crops are just a continuation on a theme that's run for a long time. Anything that leads to a technological improvement in agricultural production deals with supply-side issues."
Nevertheless, according to the United Nations' most recent food report, of the world's 6.7 billion people, a billion are undernourished. The UN has two hunger objectives, the World Food Summit Target and the Millennium Development Goal, which aim to halve the number of undernourished people to 500 million by 2015, from a world population of 7.4 billion. How much of a hurdle will agflation be?
If climate change really sets in, said Professor Freebairn, "it is going to require big changes in the way we organise food production". But that was not necessarily a problem. "The technological potential (of GM) is quite enormous (and) if food really went expensive we'd shift from resource-intensive meat products and become more fruit and vegetable types."
The major obstacle to feeding the developing world, he said, remained political and not economic. "If you look at China and India, I think you can be optimistic if you look at Africa and Latin America it's easy to be pessimistic. They're just not going to get their economic house in order."
Liz Minchin, The Age, Opinion
September 17, 2007
John Howard and Kevin Rudd could learn much from Britain's Tories.
SOMETHING extraordinary is happening in politics: conservatives are becoming the new world leaders on climate change. It's just a pity someone forgot to tell John Howard and Kevin Rudd.
Late last week, the British Conservative Party released a 523-page environmental policy document packed with ideas that put Australia's major parties to shame.
As well as proposals to improve energy efficiency, offer incentives to people making their homes greener and broaden the way Britons think about the health of their economy by adding social and environmental measurements, the Tories' Blueprint for a Green Energy Economy declares that to have the best chance of avoiding potentially disastrous consequences including the death of the world's rainforests and a major rise in sea levels Britain and other wealthy countries should work to cut their greenhouse emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050.
The Conservatives also reaffirmed their commitment to rolling short-term targets, including a legally binding target to reduce emissions by 25 per cent by 2020.
This is light years ahead of anything released by the major contenders for government in Australia. The federal Coalition and the Labor Party have already signalled that they won't decide on key climate change policies until after the election, meaning voters will have to take them on trust on many crucial issues such as setting short-term emission targets and spelling out how emissions trading systems will work.
One of the foundations of the Tories' vision is a recognition that "economic growth, like all human activities, operates within environmental limits".
It is clear that forward-looking conservatives are moving on from tired arguments about "jobs versus the environment", having finally twigged that a damaged environment makes it hard to have a decent life, let alone a decent wage.
The British Tories aren't alone. They follow in the footsteps of several other conservative leaders around the world, including California's Republican Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Germany's Christian Democratic Union Chancellor, Angela Merkel, both of whom have managed to work constructively with political rivals on climate change.
Living up to his reputation as a Hollywood action hero, "the Governator" has enacted legislation with the backing of the Democrats that commits California to cutting its greenhouse emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, and by 25 per cent by 2020.
To kick-start that effort, California has introduced a raft of other initiatives targeting high-polluting industries, promising to put solar panels on a million roofs, and launching major energy efficiency programs.
Merkel, a former environment minister, has taken a similar approach in Germany, leading a "grand coalition" government with two other parties that has resulted in major energy reform as well as an ambitious goal of reducing greenhouse emissions by 36 per cent by 2020. The German Chancellor is also credited with pushing US President George Bush to make several key concessions at the Group of Eight nations summit in June.
Bush agreed that the US would "seriously consider" a long-term target of halving greenhouse emissions by 2050 (a stronger commitment than was agreed at this month's APEC summit).
Perhaps more significantly, Merkel also gained Bush's agreement that the United Nations was the best place to work towards a global climate treaty for beyond 2012.
While Howard and Rudd both claim to want to lead the way on climate change, it's hard to be convinced that either of them is really serious.
Having refused to listen to what he considered the "gloomier" predictions about climate change, Howard now finds himself caught between responding to public demands for greater action and being reluctant to rethink his opposition to things such as binding greenhouse targets, a position he shares with Bush.
As for Labor, while the opinion polls may put it streets ahead of the Coalition on climate change, judging from the policies it has released to date it is only aiming for incremental improvements in many areas, rather than pushing for the much bolder action being considered by the British Tories.
But the mood among Australians is changing fast, with people from all walks of life not just "greenies" wanting a more comprehensive vision for climate change action than either party is currently offering.
And if our leaders still aren't convinced, perhaps they might heed a prophetic warning given in 1990 by then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher about the need for rapid cuts in greenhouse gases.
"The costs of doing nothing, of a policy of wait and see, would be much higher than those of taking preventative action now to stop the damage getting worse.
"And the damage will be counted not only in dollars, but in human misery as well. Spending on the environment is like spending on defence. If you do not do it in time, it may be too late."
Liz Minchin is environment reporter. The British Conservative Party's Blueprint for a Green Energy Economy can be read here.
A boat sails by an iceberg in the Jacobshavn Bay, near the town of Ilulissat, Greenland.
Photo: Getty Images
Gethin Chamberlain, TELEGRAPH, AP
September 17, 2007
SATELLITE images of the elusive North-West Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans have ignited a diplomatic battle between Canada and the US.
The discovery that the entire passage is now ice-free, for the first time since records began, has started a scramble for control of one of the world's most potentially lucrative shipping lanes.
Images released at the weekend by the European Space Agency reveal a dramatic increase in the melting of sea ice. US scientists said it suggested the whole of the Arctic could be ice-free by 2030, far sooner than previously predicted.
The steady melting of the north polar icesheet has already provoked international tensions over the possibility of gaining access to the vast reserves of oil and gas believed to lie beneath the seabed.
Now the realisation that the route between Europe and Asia should be navigable by commercial shipping has put Canada and the US on a collision course.
Canada insists it has sovereignty over the passage, which in several places runs close to Canadian territory. It could earn billions of dollars in fees from ships wishing to knock 9000 kilometres off the journey between Asia and Europe.
The European Space Agency said nearly 200 satellite photos taken this month showed an ice-free passage along northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland, and ice retreating to its lowest level since such images were first taken in 1978. The waters are exposing unexplored resources, and ships could cut thousands of kilometres off the sea journey from Europe to Asia by bypassing the Panama Canal. The seasonal ebb and flow of ice levels has already opened up a slim summer window through which some ships can pass.
Leif Toudal Pedersen, of the Danish National Space Centre, said Arctic ice had shrunk to about 3 million square kilometres. The previous low was 4 million square kilometres, in 2005.
Russia, Norway, Denmark, Canada and the US are among countries in a race to secure rights to the Arctic that heated up last month when Russia sent two small submarines to plant its national flag under the North Pole. A US study suggests as much as 25 per cent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas could be in the area.
TELEGRAPH, AP
IMPACTS - ARCTIC, ANTARCTIC AND ICE SHEETS
Felicia Mello, Boston globe
September 17, 2007
CUSTOMERS buying Timberland shoes now have something to think about other than style, comfort and price global warming.
The US-based company's autumn collection includes a grey fabric sneaker, priced at $US49.99 ($A59.40), and a wool-lined leather clog for $US105.
A close look at the labels reveals, however, that the clog is a bargain when it comes to greenhouse gases that cause global warming: 66 pounds (30 kilograms) of carbon dioxide and other gases were emitted in producing the clog, compared with 88 pounds (40 kilograms) for the sneaker.
Timberland is among a growing number of companies seeking to capitalise on growing consumer concern about climate change by developing "carbon labels" for everything from shoes to shampoos.
Though mostly in use in Britain, the labels are gaining ground in the US. Corporations such as PepsiCo and Wal-Mart are conducting inventories of their products' carbon emissions and considering labelling.
But climate experts say today's complex, transnational supply chains make it challenging to accurately assess a product's carbon footprint the total emissions generated during production and transportation. And no national standard exists to verify such assertions.
Timberland ranks its shoes on a climate-impact scale of 0 (less than 5.5 pounds/2.5 kilograms of greenhouse gases emitted) to 10 (220 pounds/100 kilograms or more emitted). That information appears on shoe tags and leaflets in shoe boxes, and is combined with resource consumption and chemical use data to calculate a shoe's overall Green Index rating.
"Hopefully this will become a competitive advantage for companies who are aggressively demonstrating a reduction in their carbon footprint," said Betsy Blaisdell, manager of environmental stewardship for Timberland.
Some marketing specialists doubt the labels will drive consumer choices, other than among a small number of committed environmentalists.
"There's certainly a heightened awareness for these issues because of all the media attention and notoriety of such films as An Inconvenient Truth," said Blaine Becker, director of marketing for the Hartman Group, a market research firm that focuses on natural products. "But when it comes down to how all of this translates into purchasing behaviour, there's still a long way to go." Carbon emissions were too abstract a concept to resonate with most consumers, he said.
For now, customers will have to trust Timberland that the information on the label is accurate: Rankings are computed in-house using a complex formula that measures everything from the amount of leather in a shoe to the energy used by a particular factory. But Timberland is trying to recruit other companies to develop a standardised method for verifying carbon emissions, and is discussing the issue with outdoor apparel companies including Nike, The North Face, and REI.
Calculating carbon emissions was simple enough when you're talking about buying a tank of gas, said Jonathan Pershing, director of the climate program at the World Resources Institute, which developed a widely recognised method for companies to figure their overall greenhouse gas emissions. But it gets tricky for a more complex product, such as a pair of jeans.
"You have to ask, where was that pair of jeans made?" Pershing said. "Was it made with hand labour or a machine, and what was powering the machine? Where did the cotton come from, the United States or Egypt? If it was from Egypt, was it grown with an irrigation system or (rainwater)? All of a sudden, the analysis becomes, at the moment, beyond what we can do."
A small but growing number of consulting businesses have formed to help companies cope with these challenges.
Many rely on industry averages to make their calculations, or concentrate only on the manufacturing process and ignore pollution caused by obtaining raw materials and by distribution. Transportation, in particular, poses a difficulty; a last-minute decision to ship a product by air rather than over ground can dramatically boost emissions.
The British Government is supporting pilot projects by three companies including Walkers potato chips, a PepsiCo subsidiary that this year became the first company to place carbon labels on all its products.
The goal was to establish a national, independently verified carbon label, said Euan Murray, carbon footprint manager at the government-funded Carbon Trust.
Nicki Lyons, a spokeswoman for PepsiCo, said the labelling effort had helped the company take steps to reduce its products' carbon footprint.
For example, the company discovered that more carbon was emitted in farming the potatoes for the chips (44 per cent) than in manufacturing or transporting them (30 and 9 per cent), Lyons said.
As a result, it asked farmers to produce potatoes with less moisture, which require less energy to store.
While there is no comparable government-sponsored effort in the US, several major companies are gathering information about carbon emissions in their supply chains, information that may one day show up on labels.
Computer company Dell now requires all its suppliers to publicly report their emissions and work to reduce them.
Wal-Mart this year hired consultants to calculate the carbon emissions created by several of the products on its shelves. BOSTON GLOBE