But as the US Department of energy phases out a number of large-scale forest experiments designed to look at the effects of elevated carbon dioxide levels (see Nature 456,289;
and India, are pouring money into green-energy projects; even South korea, which gets most of its energy from fossil fuels,
plans to funnel some US$40 billion into clean energy over the next several years. Whether developing countries deliver on these promises remains to be seen,
particularly given their reluctance to accept mandatory emissions targets. But existing unilateral actions may have a larger impact than many realize.
and set up financial mechanisms to help pay for clean-energy and other projects in poor countries.
Both groups clash with members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries who worry about falling oil demand as the world shifts towards renewable energy
and who want international aid to diversify their economies. Then there are major developing-world emitters such as Brazil, China, India and South africa.
These nations are big enough to get invited to The major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate organized by the United states
given that the country has more than a billion people who each use relatively little energy today.
which is currently being finalized, is a programme that could produce upward of 20,000 megawatts of solar power by 2020,
Renewable technologies increase energy sprawl: Nature Newsmillions of hectares of land will be needed to meet growing energy demands in the United states over the next two decades, according to new'energy sprawl'estimates.
The researchers behind the study say that biomass production for fuel or electricity generation will have the biggest impact on landscape and habitats.
The broad analysis of potential US energy and climate-mitigation scenarios compared the land and habitat impacts of various energy mixes from nuclear power to biofuels resulting from an array of policy options.
The study is published this week in PLOS ONE1. In a supplement to the paper the authors re-ran their estimates to take account of the likely impact of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, also known as the Waxman-Markey bill.
The bill, which is awaiting approval by the US Senate, includes a cap -and-trade system to regulate greenhouse gases.
The researchers estimate that regardless of whether the Waxman-Markey bill were enacted, the amount of land affected by energy development by 2030 will be between 21-70 million hectares an area
which is, even at its lower bound, about the size of the state of Wyoming. A cap-and-trade bill may have some incremental effect in increasing energy sprawl
but most of the development that's going to happen is because of other laws that are already in place,
Those other laws include the US renewable fuel standard, which requires that the volume of renewable fuel blended into gasoline is increased from 34 billion litres in 2008 to 136 billion litres by 2022.
That increase will require an area of between 19 and 31 million hectares the largest component of Mcdonald's projected energy sprawl
despite the fact that biofuels are expected to comprise less than 5%of the country's total energy budget. The US Energy Information Administration predicts that ethanol derived from corn alone might reach annual production levels of 39 billion litres by 2030.
Mcdonald and his colleagues calculate that this would require more than 9 million extra hectares of land to be planted with corn (maize), an area about the size of the state of Indiana.
Mcdonald notes that not all of this development will necessarily result in habitat loss or affect virgin habitat.
few studies have evaluated the impact of future energy development on land-use and habitat, says Jimmie Powell,
it's important that we do it carefully to minimize the environmental impacts of these new energy resources.
The authors outline several ways of reducing carbon emissions while limiting energy sprawl. These include energy conservation to reduce the need for additional energy and land use;
proper siting of energy projects to reduce their impact on important habitats and endangered species;
and a flexible cap-and-trade system that allows for offsets that would provide incentives for low-carbon-emitting activities.
but adds that boosting energy efficiency is crucial. We can't emphasize enough that energy conservation may end up being one of our cheapest ways to do this.
News briefing: 27 august 2009: Nature Newspolicy Events Business Facilities Environment<br></br>The week ahead Sound bites Number crunch<br></br>Policy Stem cells:
Nuclear monitoring: Iran last week allowed inspectors from the International atomic energy agency to visit a heavy-water nuclear reactor near the city of Arak,
and agreed to changes that will ease monitoring at a uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz.
When completed, it will burn uranium fuel, producing electricity and a range of nuclear isotopes,
including plutonium. Iran denies that the reactor has a military purpose. Chemical regulation: The costs of complying with European union legislation on chemical safety (REACH) are much greater than thought,
Renewable energy: On 20 august, Australia's parliament approved laws that require the country to produce 20%of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020 up from around 8%today.
The renewable-energy target is expected to spur billions of dollars of investment in wind, solar and hydroelectric power,
although methane waste gas from coal mining was classified also as a renewable-energy source under the bill.
%since September 2008, says Jenny Chase of New Energy Finance, a London-based global consultancy firm.
a relative newcomer to solar power, is likely to be the second largest installer of photovoltaics in 2010.
the Spanish government has capped now the amount of solar power eligible for this tariff at 0. 5 gigawatts.
A nuclear reactor in Petten, The netherlands, that supplies radioactive isotopes for use in medical imaging reopened last week after a month's scheduled maintenance partly alleviating a global shortage of the isotopes (see Nature 460,312-313;
says the USGS. Coal-fired power plants are the main source of mercury reaching US waterways.
The team presented their results on 13 august at a meeting on climate science convened at a Beijing hotel by the US Department of energy and China's Ministry of Science and Technology.
Nuclear curbs: The United nations Security council unanimously backed a non-binding resolution to bolster efforts aimed at slowing the spread of nuclear weapons.
It endorsed strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty
(which would outlaw nuclear bomb tests) and improving nuclear security. Emissions reporting: The US Environmental protection agency has announced its nationwide reporting system for greenhouse-gas emissions.
Large facilities will have to disclose their emissions every year, as part of a programme that the agency said should cover 85%of US emissions.
Data collection begins in January 2010, with disclosure for that year happening in 2011. Stem-cell oversight:
Iran had informed the International atomic energy agency in Vienna about the underground facility, near the city of Qom, four days earlier.
Exelon of Chicago, Illinois, the largest US nuclear-power provider, has become the latest company to quit the US Chamber of commerce because of differences over climate change.
the US Department of energy selected Bluefire and five other companies to negotiate for up to US$385 million in funding for commercial-scale plants.
Two of the six companies selected by the Department of energy to negotiate for commercial plant funding have dropped out of the programme,
'which says that petrol for conventional automobiles can contain no more than 10%ethanol by volume.
and petrol consumption at 523 billion litres per year, cellulosic ethanol doesn't have much room to enter the market,
says energy economist Wallace Tyner at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Other countries have continued to lag behind the United states,
which requires that 10%of transport energy come from renewable sources by 2020, has not set a specific goal for cellulosic fuel.
China has restricted maize-ethanol production and aims to produce 2. 5 billion additional litres of ethanol annually from non-food-grain sources by 2010.
says John Romankiewicz, an analyst in the Beijing office of London-based New Energy Finance.
Range Fuels based in Broomfield, Colorado, originally planned to complete the final phase of construction on a Georgia commercial plant in 2011
and the oil industry will see them through the downturn. Verenium based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, secured US$90 million from oil company BP in August 2008,
and the two companies announced a joint venture this year. The joint venture has applied for a loan guarantee from the US energy department to build a commercial-scale plant in Florida,
which is scheduled to begin construction in 2010 and will produce 136 million litres of ethanol a year,
and General motors estimated that cellulosic ethanol could compete with petrol in 2030 only if oil was $90 a barrel or higher.
The price of oil is around $65-70 a barrel. One company looking to bring down costs is based Novozymes
in Bagsv  rd, Denmark. In February, Novozymes launched its first commercially available enzymes for cellulosic-ethanol production,
and oil refiner Sinopec in Beijing to develop a process that uses maize stalks and leaves,
that announced a partnership with Chevron Technology Ventures on 14 september, claims to have engineered microorganisms whose enzymes can break cellulose down into simple sugars
%in response to a request submitted by advocacy group Growth Energy based in WASHINGTON DC. The industry is also waiting to see
member states must submit action plans to meet renewable-energy goals by the end of June 2010,
A Perspective published in Science in August noted that biomass-derived hydrocarbon fuels, such as petrol and diesel replacements, could be more attractive
because they offer higher mileage and do not require new distribution infrastructure (J. R. Regalbuto Science 325,822-824;
people might move on to other fuels such as biobutanol or biomass-derived petrol, says Alexander. And the plant delays are giving alternative technologies a chance to catch up.
But the slowdown could also benefit those who produce cellulosic ethanol, says David Berry, a partner at venture-capital firm Flagship Ventures in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
whose seeds yield a diesel-like oil. Many had seen it as a potential saviour for marginal lands,
More than 130 companies were in the race, dominated by D1 Oils of London, which in 2007 had landed a $160-million deal with oil giant BP.
But this July, BP and D1 announced that their deal was off. And of 140 investments made in biofuels so far this year,
says analyst Harry Boyle of London-based New Energy Finance, only four or five have been in jatropha projects.
Jatropha has gone very quiet, he says. What happened? It's difficult to untangle the impacts of the global financial downturn from disappointment with jatropha in particular,
to produce the same amount of oil (W. Gerbens-Leenes et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci.
The split between D1 Oils and BP has hurt jatropha's reputation as a good business investment,
In a statement, BP spokeswoman Sheila Williams said that the decision to pull out of this is purely based on economics
In the meantime, D1 Oils has shifted from planting jatropha to focusing on basic research including starting a breeding programme to develop seeds with high oil yields
For instance, Diligent Energy Systems, a company based in Eindhoven, The netherlands, has set up small-scale operations in Tanzania,
The farmers are guaranteed a price for the oil seeds they produce and so have an incentive to tend the crop
and promotional material from companies but received little to no support, says Jakob Rietzler of the Lao Institute for Renewable Energy in Vientiane.
Zelt says that seeds optimized to produce more oil will be entering the market in the coming months,
Nature Newsthe Obama administration released new automobile standards on Tuesday, proposing regulations that would curb greenhouse-gas emissions and ratchet up fuel-efficiency standards beginning in 2012.
the regulations would effectively increase fuel efficiency standards by nearly 40 percent, to more than 35.5 miles per gallon (about 15 kilometres per litre) in 2016.
EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said the move marks a significant advance in our work to protect health in the environment and move our nation into the sustainable, energy-efficient economy of the future.
not only reduce emissions and save oil but also result in consumer savings of roughly $3, 000 over the lifetime of a vehicle produced in 2016.
The fuel efficiency standards, issued under the Department of transportation, are slightly less stringent and retain loopholes in the current regulatory system.
and to take extra credit for reduced gasoline consumption by'flex-fuel'vehicles, even though those vehicles seldom run on high-ethanol blends.
In addition to increasing overall fuel efficiency, automakers could improve their air-conditioning systems and opt for new chemical refrigerants that contribute less to global warming.
and are estimating that this policy will save 1. 3 million barrels per day of oil in 2020.
Nuclear vision: Germany's new coalition government will extend the lifespan of the nation's nuclear power plants which last year produced around 23%of the country's electricity needs beyond 2022.
But the Christian Democratic Union and its junior coalition partner, the liberal Free Democratic party, will not revise an existing ban on building new nuclear plants.
In a 24 october policy plan, the coalition also agreed to immediately lift a moratorium on evaluating the merits of the Gorleben salt dome, a controversial storage site for nuclear waste.
Funding Energy funding: The US Department of energy has awarded $151 million to 37 research projects through the recently formed Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Based on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
ARPA-E is geared towards high-risk'transformational'energy research that might not be funded through traditional science grants.
Awardees included small businesses, educational institutions and large corporations that focus on everything from liquid-metal batteries
and gasoline-producing bacterial reactors to new methods for making light-emitting diodes and synthetic enzymes for capturing carbon dioxide from industrial emissions.
which spans industries such as alternative energy, conservation, pollution-scrubbing, recycling and power supply, was responsible for more than half of the rise.
$286 million to Solyndra of Fremont (photovoltaics), $82. 5 million to Tesla Motors of San Carlos (electric vehicles) and $60 million to Serious Materials in Sunnyvale (energy-efficient building materials.
the International Energy Agency predicted in a teaser from its upcoming World Energy Outlook 2009 report.
Number crunch 12,000%The potential rise in India's nuclear capacity, from 3. 8 gigawatts today to 470 gigawatts by 2050
The energy and natural resources committee for instance, has passed already energy legislation that will be wrapped into the bill,
and other committees could do the same. It will then fall to Democratic Majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada to pull everything together for a vote before the full Senate.
Leaders are currently fighting for the support of more conservative Democrats from states with strong industrial bases and energy production,
Although Democrats claim the bill will create 2 million new clean-energy jobs, lawmakers from mining states fear job losses as the US economy shifts away from cheap coal.
And many fear that higher energy prices could affect heavy industries, pushing jobs overseas if countries such as China and India are held not to similar standards.
Summing up the feeling on Wednesday, Frank Lautenberg, a Democratic Senator from New jersey kindly asked supporters to reserve a few of those new jobs for those of us who vote for this bill.
Coal-fired power companies are pushing for as much protection as possible, but the nuclear industry, and to a lesser extent the natural-gas industry, see opportunities in the push toward low-carbon energy.
Similarly, major companies such as The Dow chemical Company and General electric are pushing for legislation as part of the US Climate Action Partnership.
Could President Barack Obama still act through the Environmental protection agency (EPA? Yes, and he has opened already the door to direct regulation under the Clean Air Act.
In the household energy and food and agriculture sectors, the proposal with the biggest impact on both climate change and public health was a 10-year programme in India to replace 150 million indoor biomass-burning
Wilkinson found that improving household energy efficiency in the United kingdom would save more energy 0. 6 megatonnes of carbon dioxide per million people over a year
The genetic secrets of maize, one of the world's most widely grown grains, should accelerate efforts to develop improved crop varieties to meet the world's growing hunger for food, animal feed and fuel.
It also advocated cutting subsidies for environmentally harmful fossil fuels. See also page 277. Security screen: Five gene-synthesis companies in a new International Gene Synthesis Consortium have adopted practices that are intended to address the biosecurity risks of the technology.
But Rede-Clima estimates that another 320 million tonnes could come from the energy and agriculture sectors,
or reflectiveness so absorbs more of the Sun's energy and contributes to warming at the surface.
On 4 december, the US Department of energy announced $979 million for three demonstration projects to capture carbon dioxide from power plants and store it underground.
which is harder to transport than petrol and is made from crop plants such as maize (corn)
including molecules that mimic standard petrol, and could be expanded to work on tougher cellulosic materials, the researchers say.
or crop waste directly into fuel, filling gas tanks without raising global food prices or increasing hunger and deforestation in far-flung locales.
and produces higher-energy fuels that are interchangeable with current petroleum products. The next step is to scale the process up
enabling them to convert precursor molecules directly into fuels and other chemicals. The team then inserted genes from other bacteria to produce enzymes able to break down hemicellulose.
and South San francisco-based Solazyme, LS9 struggled for funding in 2008 and early 2009 because of the drop in oil prices and the economic downturn,
including a strategic partnership with oil giant Chevron last September. The company plans to open a commercial-scale demonstration plant later this year.
including clean-energy legislation or a scaled-back climate bill that focuses on power plants and possibly on other major industrial sources of greenhouse-gas emissions.
is like cutting down trees for firewood. You're taking whales out of the population
The large Brazilian ethanol producer ETH Bioenergia announced on 18 february that it would take over the debt-ridden Brazilian Renewable Energy Company (Brenco) to create a world-leading company to make ethanol from biomass.
Nuclear guarantees: The US Department of energy on 16 february issued an US$8. 3-billion loan guarantee for a pair of nuclear power plants in Georgia,
potentially clearing the way for the first new commercial reactors to be granted permits in more than three decades.
in case of loan default, allowing a consortium led by Southern company, based in Atlanta, Georgia, to secure lower-interest commercial loans from skittish Wall street banks.
Euclid, to measure dark energy and dark matter; Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO), to detect extrasolar planets
The company developing South africa's pebble-bed nuclear reactor said on 18 february that it is contemplating shedding three-quarters of its 800-strong staff after losing government funding.
The agency says that the Russian launch rocket that will carry Cryosat-2 into its required orbit did not have enough spare fuel in its second-stage engine.
Lei says as happened with the recent introduction of a fuel tax, which bypassed the NPC by being tagged onto the existing consumption-tax legislation.
%formally qualifying it as a'renewable fuel'for a federal mandate that requires the use of 136 billion litres of biofuels in 2022.
The mandate requires refiners to produce nearly 57 billion litres of renewable fuels by 2015.
In 2004, Bement, previously a nuclear engineer at Purdue, was appointed by then-President George w bush to a six-year term at the NSF,
) The week ahead 11 february US Department of energy secretary Steven Chu is questioned on his agency's proposed 2010 research and development budget by the House Committee on Science
Nature Newsthe burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil releases carbon dioxide that alters the balance of carbon isotopes naturally found in the environment an effect that is now being found in food,
is released that carbon from the burning of oil or coal, which has very little carbon-13 compared to that found naturally in the atmosphere,
says Jane Long, associate director for energy and environment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
But any larger experiments, in which the goal is to effect even small shifts in incoming solar energy at the global scale,
On 13 april, Fusion for Energy (F4e), the European union's organization administering the project from Barcelona,
The US Department of the interior has requested a scientific review of the possible ecological impact of drilling for oil and gas in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas in the Arctic.
the firm has engineered strains of yeast to produce hydrocarbon fuels and other chemicals from sugarcane feedstocks.
Diet will also be a major determinant in our capacity to nourish the world animal products require considerably more energy and land than plants.
Nature Newspolicy Business Research Events People Business watch The week ahead Sound bites News maker Policy Fossil-fuel drilling:
US President Barack Obama announced plans on 31 march to expand offshore oil and gas drilling,
Wind-energy companies have struck a compromise with the UK Ministry of Defence, which was blocking the development of five wind farms on England's east coast.
The project would supply 3 gigawatts of wind power. Business watch Brushing off what may have been a seasonal blip late last year,
The sector includes renewable-energy generation and storage, waste and water treatment, and materials and infrastructure for greater energy efficiency.
Electric-vehicle companies led the charge, with Better Place a company based in Palo alto, California,
if wind generators were connected electrically, fluctuations at each site could be smoothed out so that the total power provided changes slowly and never drops to zero.
On 30 march, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located outside Geneva, Switzerland, began colliding protons at energies of 7 teraelectronvolts more than three times the power of the Tevatron in Batavia
which in January forced out director Susan Greenfield. 12-13 april US President Barack Obama hosts a global summit on nuclear security in WASHINGTON DC.
The meeting follows a review of the United states'nuclear policy. 12-16 april Weather, water and climate services in Africa are under the spotlight at the First Conference of Ministers Responsible for Meteorology in Africa, in Nairobi,
dripping around 2 tonnes of oil and destroying coral.
Ardi may be more ape than human: Nature Newsa fight has broken out over attempts to drag'Ardi'-the oldest hominid skeleton found-out of the woods where her discoverers say she lived.
The oil spewing into the Gulf of mexico was stemmed partially this week, after BP managed to force a siphon tube into the leaking wellhead pipe.
But the political fallout intensified as Congress sought answers about the explosion of the Deepwater horizon rig.
separating safety and environmental operations from its oil-leasing arm. For more on the spill, see pages 274-275.
Much of the current focus is on emissions from fossil fuels, which account for more than half of the global greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere annually,
Essentially all of the carbon in fossil fuels winds up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide after combustion,
and so carbon dioxide emissions can be calculated directly from a country's fuel consumption. Emission inventories from industrialized northern countries with reliable energy statistics have relatively small uncertainties
but there is still more guesswork than many care to acknowledge. In developing countries, where data remain sparse
says Gregg Marland, a scientist with the Energy department's Carbon dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) in Oak ridge, Tennessee.
so to gain an accurate picture of the contribution of fossil-fuel burning, researchers are developing new tools to differentiate between'natural'and fossil-fuel carbon in the atmosphere.
One technique relies on the radioactive isotope carbon-14, which occurs in trace amounts in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
but fossil fuels have no carbon-14 because it has a relatively short half-life and they have been buried for millions of years.
researchers can work out how much of the carbon dioxide comes from the biosphere and how much from fossil-fuel emissions.
Nature Newsto many people, modern agriculture, with its industrial-scale farms and reliance on petroleum-based fertilizers, may seem a necessary evil one that has fed a growing human population while causing
and found that increasing yields could reduce emissions as much as could energy technologies such as wind and solar (M. Wise et al.
Nature Newspolicy Events Research Business Funding Awards Business watch The week ahead Number crunch News maker Policy Nuclear agreement:
An international conference in New york to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has reaffirmed nations'commitments to disarmament
which also called for a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the middle East and global ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.
Just three days later, the International atomic energy agency, based in Vienna, reported that Iran now has enough low-enriched uranium to convert into weapons-grade material for two nuclear weapons.
BP's latest efforts to staunch the flow of oil from its wellhead in the Gulf of mexico have failed,
prompting White house energy adviser Carol Browner to admit that the leak may not be stopped before August,
The'top kill'operation pumping mud into the gushing well was followed by a'junk shot'to block the oil leak with debris. Neither attempt worked.
-osc. no/9 june The 2010 Millennium Technology Prize will be awarded in Helsinki. go. nature. com/Eknzdu Number crunch 2 million-3 million The number of litres per day of oil
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