BBC Environment — The presence of prairie winds and rich soil makes Iowa literally fertile ground for developing alternative energy sources from wind turbines and biofuels. But the landscape is also a reminder that achieving energy independence is a formidable challenge and making an agricultural economy green is not easy.

Farm workers cannot take subways to work, farmers have to drive long distances into the fields to sow and harvest their crops and to deliver them to markets.

Farm animals themselves, not to put too fine a point on it, produce methane – a powerful greenhouse gas – that is trapped in the atmosphere.

Those challenges have not stopped the state setting itself ambitious goals. The Iowa Climate Change Advisory Panel recently wrote a report for Governor Chet Culver setting out how the state can reduce carbon emissions by 90% by 2030. The state has set up an Office of Energy Independence – surely the perfect place, I thought, to test how easy it will be for President Obama to achieve energy independence for the whole of America. …

Iowa hopes that wind energy will deliver more than just electricity – and that investment in wind technology will help to transform towns depressed by unemployment. Towns like Newton, which is just to the east of the capital, Des Moines. Nearly 2,000 people lost their jobs in Newton when the town’s biggest employer, Whirlpool, shut its doors in 2007.

Ethanol processing plant Is ethanol really a clean alternative to fossil fuels? Hundreds of those same workers, who once made washing machine parts, now make blades for wind turbines at the TPI factory. But the jobs did not come cheap.

The state gave the manufacturer $6m in subsidies and tax breaks – in return the company promised to hire 500 people.

Larry Crady worked at Whirlpool for 23 years, making coin-operated laundry machines. “It just wows you when you see a blade open and close,” Larry says. “When you pull that blade out of the mould it’s exciting, I feel like I’m doing something more than just building a washing machine, I’m building something for everyone to capitalise on.”

Mr Crady’s sense of wonder is understandable – the plant certainly has the “wow” factor. The turbine blades are as long as a 747 jet and the factory is longer than an aircraft carrier. It is fitting, then, that – according to the plant’s manager – so many of those that work there feel that making the blades is as much about national security as it is about electricity.

“A lot of us in this company and in wind energy have a sense of calling to this,” Crugar Tuttle says. “I think in the interview process it comes out with a lot of our veterans that this is about weaning us off foreign oil.” But wind energy is a long way from delivering independence for Iowa any time soon. It provides just 8% of Iowa’s energy needs. If it is to go any way towards making the rest of the country energy independent, a distribution grid would be needed. …

Many Iowans think the solution is biofuels (as do most presidential candidates – albeit only while they are campaigning in the crucial Iowa caucuses).  Refineries across the state produce 1.5 billion gallons of ethanol a year – enough to replace 10% of the petrol in America’s cars.  But biofuels are controversial.  A UN report says they drive up the price of food.  And is ethanol really clean?  We visited POET’s ethanol plant in Hanlontown in the northern part of Iowa.  The plant, like most in the state, is powered by fossil fuels. …

The trouble is, many of Iowa’s ethanol refineries use coal – the dirtiest fuel of all.  It is one of the reasons why Iowa will soon be building another coal-fired power plant.  More than half of all the electricity produced by the new plant is expected to be used to fuel the state’s ethanol refineries.  King coal  Another problem is that Iowa gets very cold in winter.  How many Americans would risk living in a place where January temperatures hover around -18F, if they had to rely on sun or wind power for heat?  What happens when the sun goes down and the wind dies?  That is why, despite the push for ethanol and wind power, coal is still king when it comes to powering Iowa.  It currently provides 85% of the state’s energy needs. (02/03/09)
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BBC Weather Science – If you look at the numbers, it is hard to see how many East African communities made it through the long drought of 2005 and 2006.

Among people who study human development, it is a widely-held view that each person needs about 20 litres of water each day for the basics – to drink, cook and wash sufficiently to avoid disease transmission.

Yet at the height of the East African drought, people were getting by on less than five litres a day – in some cases, less than one litre a day, enough for just three glasses of drinking water and nothing left over.

Some people, perhaps incredibly from a western vantage point, are hardy enough to survive in these conditions; but it is not a recipe for a society that is healthy and developing enough to break out of poverty. …

Why do some communities have so little access to water? And how will the current picture change in a world where the human population is growing, where societies are urbanising and industrialising, and where climate change may alter the raw availability of water significantly?

The UNDP is unequivocal about the first question. “The availability of water is a concern for some countries,” says the report. “But the scarcity at the heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality, not in physical availability.”

Statistics on water consumption appear to back the UN’s case. Japan and Cambodia experience about the same average rainfall – about 160cm per year. But whereas the average Japanese person can use nearly 400 litres per day, the average Cambodian must make do with about one-tenth of that. …

In some regions, “the scarcity at the heart of the global water crisis” could become one of physical availability, especially in places where consumption is already unsustainably high.

“There are several rivers that don’t reach the sea any more,” says Mark Smith, head of the water programme at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). “The Yellow River is one, the Murray-Darling (in Australia) is nearly another – they have to dredge the mouth of the river every year to make sure it doesn’t dry up.”

A changing climate is only one of the factors likely to affect the amount of water at each person’s disposal in future. A more populated world – and there could be another 2.5 billion people on the planet by 2050 – is likely to be a thirstier world.

Those extra people will need feeding; and as agriculture accounts for about 70% of water use around the world, extra consumption for growing food is likely to reduce the amount available for those basic needs of drinking, cooking and washing.

Industry can also take water that would otherwise have ended up in peoples’ mouths. (02/03/09)
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BBC Environment — Google has lifted the lid on its first major upgrade to its global mapping software, Google Earth. The upgrade expands this map to include large swathes of the ocean floor and abyssal plain. Users can dive beneath a dynamic water surface to explore the 3D sea floor terrain.

The map also includes 20 content layers, containing information from the world’s leading scientists, researchers, and ocean explorers.

Al Gore was at the launch event in San Francisco which, Google hopes, will take its mapping software a step closer to total coverage of the entire globe. In a statement, Mr Gore said that the update would make Google Earth a “magical experience”. “You can not only zoom into whatever part of our planet’s surface you wish to examine in closer detail, you can now dive into the world’s ocean that covers almost three-quarters of the planet and discover new wonders that had not been accessible in previous versions.”

Approximately 70% of the world’s surface is covered by water, which contains nearly 80% of all life – yet less than 5% of it has actually been explored. Google Ocean aims to let users visit some of the more interesting locations, including underwater volcanoes, as well as running videos on marine life, shipwrecks and clips of favourite surf and dive spots.

Conservation organisations hope the tool will improve awareness of issues facing undersea life. “With this, everybody can see the unbelievable beauty of our marine life and how incredibly threatened it is,” said Carl Gustaf Lundin, head of the global marine programme at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). “We hope this major technological innovation will get the public more involved in marine conservation and encourage governments and businesses to stop driving ocean species to extinction.”  (02/03/09)
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