The Financial Times had a great series of articles the other day in a special report on Energy-Efficient Buildings.  The FT team on this, led by environmental reporter Fiona Harvey, covers topics from design, climate-proofing, and microgeneration to supply chains and waste reduction.  Look at the interactive graphic, as an amuse gul:  a blueprint for sustainability.

Even the ads are cool.  One is from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) describing some of the findings in the new report from their four-year, $15 million Efficiency in Buildings research project, which they describe as “the most rigorous study ever conducted on the subject.”  Their release says the central message of the study is “…energy use in buildings can be cut by 60 percent by 2050 - essential to meeting global climate change targets - but this will require immediate action to transform the building sector.”

Meanwhile, over at the New York Times today, there’s a special section on the Business of Green:  Smarter Tools.  Matt Wald and Kate Galbraith lead the reporting here with articles on the smart grid, advances in solar PV, ocean power, and improving the performance of aircraft, among other topics.  There’s a nice smorgasbord of graphics, slide shows, and a podcast - the entertaining and informative “Back Story” feature.  (I’ve had some articles out there my ownself on the smart grid and on sustainability at airports.)

Get over to these special reports and dig in for some truly edifying stuff.

As a complement to the UNFCCC process that is building toward agreement in Copenhagen in December (I fervently hope), President Obama called for a series of meetings of the world’s major economies.  These economies include the world’s largest contributors to climate change, including the top four of China, the US, Indonesia and Brazil.  (Remember that because of deforestation, Indonesia and Brazil are three and four overall.)  The reports out of the first meeting in Washington this week were generally positive.

President Bush called a similar series of meetings that were, by contrast, universally decried.  I noted here last April, for instance, that German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel’s press release at the time was titled “Gabriel criticises Bush’s Neanderthal speech. Losership, not Leadership.”  Gabriel had a different take this time around.  Deutsche-Welle’s report quotes him here as saying “…the Americans are no longer standing aside but are participating actively in negotiations about climate protection.”  Italian Environment Minister Stefania Prestigiacomo noted a change from China.  “Usually the attitude of China was more the attitude of a country asking for something.  This time (there) was…a willingness to give a contribution to the process.”

US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered substantive remarks at the meeting.  She said “…the crisis of climate change exists at the nexus of diplomacy, national security and development. It is an environmental issue, a health issue, an economic issue, an energy issue, and a security issue.”  She also said “…I would hope that we could develop through this mechanism concrete initiatives that leaders of the major economies can consider when they meet in Italy in July. We have to come up with specific recommendations. Breakthroughs can and should come from anywhere and everywhere. That’s why creative diplomacy and genuine collaboration is called for.”  (You can see the video of Sec. Clinton here.)

Prestigiacomo, as reported in the Deutsche Welle article, “…said Clinton’s words ‘erased all doubts’ about the willingness of the Obama administration to support the climate fight.”

This summary of the meeting from the State Department notes, among many other things, that there will be another meeting in France in May prior to the leaders’ summit in July.  Reuters says U.S. climate talks make progress, with some gaps.  This companion piece lays out the participants’ GHG goals.

I noted here what Robert Orr, the Assistant Secretary-General of the UN for Strategic Planning and a key advisor on climate change to the SG, said recently at a forum at the Earth Institute, that having worked with world leaders for several years on this issue, in his view they now have “dramatically increased consciousness.”  That’s a nice note, as are the quite positive signals from the first meeting of the Major Economies Forum.

I’ve written about the truly heinous practice of mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia a number of times, most recently here and here.  An amazing activist, Maria Gunnoe, is featured in both the superb documentary, Burning the Future, and in the magisterial book Big Coal.  Now Gunnoe has garnered international recognition for her work by winning the 2009 Goldman Environmental Prize.  Read this interview with her and this profile of her in the indispensable Gristmill.

Photo: Tom Dusenbery

It is fitting that another champion of the forest who has had to fight against mining interests, Marc Ona Essangui of Gabon, has been similarly honored.

There’s a scene near the end of Burning the Future when Gunnoe and some of her colleagues are in New York for the Sustainable Development Commission meetings at the UN, and they visit Times Square at night.  She starts howling that all these gaudy signs and flashing lights are killing her community.  You can make the connection quite well by this point in the film and it’s a pretty bone-chilling moment.  I can’t go by Times Square anymore without thinking of her and the 500+ mountains they’ve destroyed.  We can do better - a lot - and because of folks like Gunnoe and Essangui, we will.  You can take that to the bank.

In Black Carbon in Waxman-Markey here from a few weeks ago, I noted that “The summary of Waxman-Markey says that black carbon ‘…is a major contributor to warming in the Arctic. EPA is directed in the draft to use its existing authority under the Clean Air Act to reduce emissions of black carbon domestically and study opportunities for reductions internationally.’”  On March 26th, the Black Carbon Emissions Reduction Act of 2009 was introduced and then referred to Ed Markey’s Subcommittee on Energy and Environment.  It is a smart, far-seeing bit of legislation and, hopefully, it will find its way into the final climate change and energy package that reaches the President’s desk, hopefully this year.

Meanwhile, on the Senate side, Democratic Senators Carper, Kerry and Boxer and - wait for it - Jim Inhofe, everybody’s favorite Denialist, have cosponsored their own black carbon bill.  See this press release and Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth post from yesterday.  Whatever it means for the politics, it certainly got a lot of attention when Inhofe got on board with this.  Does it mean he is actually admitting there’s a problem?  I’m one of those scratching my head on this one.  In any event, there’s a real sense in Congress - and at the EPA - that we’re behind the eight ball on black carbon and need to do something positive.

In response to my last post, I heard from some folks who’ve done an ad for Earthjustice which highlights their new initiative:  Stop Soot.  Here’s the terrific ad they’ve whipped up.

What could be a more quintessentially human activity?  Our food tastes better and is usually much safer to eat when it’s cooked.  (There is something to be said, don’t get me wrong, for the raw foods approach too.  I’ve been a vegetarian for … what year is this? … a long time and I do take various “non-traditional” approaches to food and nutrition seriously.)

The question remains for most of the 6.5 billion of us:  How do you cook?  In much of the developing world, in hundreds of thousands of villages, people gather biomass - scrub wood and dung mostly - and cook over open fires.  This leads to massive exposure to smoke by the mostly women and children who are around the fires.  It requires a lot of time and effort to gather the biomass.  When you are clearing scrub or forest for firewood, you are destroying valuable local cover that holds the soil and provides windbreaks, among other things.  And, it turns out, you are making a massive contribution to climate change.  The black carbon - soot, or particulate matter - that is the major component of the smoke, not only ruins the health of those immediately exposed to it, it also is a powerful source of “radiative forcing,” second only, it now appears, to carbon dioxide.

I wrote about the question of black carbon and low-tech approaches at “Teach us delight in simple things …” I met Elisabeth Rosenthal, the “NY Times” environmental reporter based in Europe, at an event in February.  We spoke a bit about getting at low-tech solutions and she’s been very much on that for awhile.  She wrote an important article last week, Third-World Stove Soot Is Target in Climate Fight.  She said what more and more scientists and climate activitists have been noting about black carbon with “….recent studies estimating that it is responsible for 18 percent of the planet’s warming, compared with 40 percent for carbon dioxide. Decreasing black carbon emissions would be a relatively cheap way to significantly rein in global warming - especially in the short term, climate experts say.”  Here is an excellent slide show from the “NY Times” on The Threat of Black Carbon.

How do you reduce black carbon?  I wrote about the Kyoto Box winning an international contest recently.  This is a simple, cheap “solar box cooker.”  Rosenthal looks at some of these cookers here at a follow-up at DotEarth, the excellent “NY Times” blog.  As always, some of the most stimulating content here is in the comments.  For further reference, see the fascinating “Design for the Other 90%” exhibition from a couple of years ago, and the good folks at Solar Cookers International, the truly superb NGO that has been spreading the word and the technology both among international aid agencies and on the ground in the developing world for a number of years now. See this powerpoint show for an introduction and use their website to learn more.

I have a very high regard for the reporting at the venerable “Economist.”  (Somewhat less so for the editorial writers.)  In a perfectly informative, relatively important article recently on water quality and quantity issues worldwide, I thought the writer overstepped the bounds of reason on one particular point.  For the record, here is my letter to the Editor:

Sir,

In your otherwise thorough and penetrating article on water shortages (”Sin aqua non, April 11^th, 2009), one sentence jumped off the page at me, striking me as singularly wrongheaded:  “The shift of diet will be impossible to reverse since it is a product of rising wealth and urbanisation.”  Given the burden on health from an inordinately meat-based diet; the pressure on food prices and water resources that you so accurately describe; the further thoroughly documented contributions that animal agriculture, particularly beef production, makes to global climate change owing to devastating land-use practices, the build-up of nitrous oxide from the inorganic fertilizers used to grow feed, and the methane from manure and the animals themselves; not to mention the extraordinary toxic soup of pesticides, steroids and antibiotics that are increasingly used in the production of meat; then one would have to assume that societies around the world would choose a different path to “affluence.”  It would not only not be impossible for developing nations to “leapfrog” into diets that are more traditional and infinitely healthier for their populations and local environments, it would be, given the dissemination of knowledge about smarter, cheaper and healthier ways to eat and a reduced obedience to the relentless marketing of interests that promote this behavior, preferable.

My colleague, Elizabeth Balkan, writing the other day at the FPA blog on Energy, had a good update on the state of affairs on REDD, forestry and climate change:  Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Shaping Financing to Prevent Deforestation.  She looks particularly at the Waxman-Markey draft and how it embraces this critical aspect of getting at addressing climate change.

As you remember, Dorothy and Toto got blown a little off course.  Some coal-fired power plants have had a similar trial.  See Coal Plants Blocked here from October 2007 and a follow-up story at Coal Takes Some Lumps from a year ago.

It turns out that the company trying so desperately to site its plants in Kansas has given up.  See this from the “Lawrence Journal-World.”  They quote a spokesman for Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association:  “The delays in permitting the Kansas project make it unlikely to be available in the near-term.”

Great story for the climate.  Huge kudos for Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius and her Department of Health and Environment Secretary, Rod Bremby.

I was surprised to learn that the White House science advisor, John Holdren, who I have lauded here, along with most of the other Obama appointees working on energy, the environment and climate change, has said that geoengineering should not be “off the table.”  See Obama climate adviser open to geo-engineering to tackle global warming from “The Guardian.”  John Holdren and his colleagues are a Murderer’s Row.  They should keep their eye on the ball and smash out some solid singles and extra-base hits, run hard, and generally stay focused.

I am, you’ll excuse the expression, a skeptic when it comes to massive high-tech, high-cost ideas that may - or may not - counteract the dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system that we’ve been wreaking.  First things first:  mitigate the inputs by doing all the many things - at hand today! - that we can do to reverse our slide toward climate chaos.  Next, adapt whenever feasible to the impacts that we’re experiencing now and are going to further experience.  Get our house in order in the US and in Copenhagen in December.  Spending hundreds of billions to launch sun-reflecting mirrors into space doesn’t seem like the proper focus at all.  (Don’t get me started on hundreds of thousands of highly engineered, expensive little carbon sequestration devices.  By the way, they have this thing called a tree……)  As I tell my eight-year-old daughter:  “No messing around, until you’re squared away.”  Geoengineering really strikes me as sci-fi fun and frolic.

For more on this red herring, see the Terraforming Earth series and Geoengineering Megaprojects are Bad Planetary Management from “WorldChanging.”

There are a series of UNFCCC meetings this year leading up to the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties - the 15^th COP.  As you know, Copenhagen is where the post-Kyoto agreement is going to be finalized.  The first of the five planned negotiating sessions leading up to the COP wrapped up in Bonn last week.  (There is also the “Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate” that President Obama is convening in Washington at the end of April.)

The UNFCCC reported that “Progress was made on technology transfer, and agreement reached on the need to boost funding for adaptation. UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said “…more clarity was still needed on industrialized country commitments to produce the scale of finance required for both mitigation and adaptation. He added that real negotiations based on negotiating texts would take place at the next meeting in June.”

Here is a succinct version of de Boer’s press statement.