Obama gives biofuels the big thumbs up

clipped from www.whitehouse.gov President Obama announced steps to further his Administration’s commitment to advance biofuels research and commercialization a Biofuels Interagency Working Group, to be co-chaired by the Secretaries of Agriculture and Energy and the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency This Working Group will work with the National Science and Technology Council's Biomass Research and Development Board in undertaking its work Develop the nation’s first comprehensive biofuel market development program The President also announced that $786.5 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be provided to accelerate advanced biofuels research and development and expand commercialization by providing additional funding for commercial biorefineries The new categories include: Cellulosic biofuels; Biomass-based diesel; Advanced biofuels; and Total renewable fuel.

On the surface this may seem like a good idea, but the mandate to, by 2022, have up to 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol counted toward the 36 billion gallon biofuel production level will only worsen its effect on food production. We’re at 6-9 billion gallons of corn ethanol now and with all the havoc that has wreaked on agriculture worldwide, the concept of almost tripling that amount over the next 20-odd years is terrifying. What may yet save us is the fact that it will likely prove a simply impossible standard to meet.

And the fact that the administration’s rationale for expanding the use of biofuels continues to be the misplaced desire “to reduce our dependence on foreign oil” is just ludicrous. Addressing climate change WILL reduce our dependence on foreign oil. But simply reducing dependence on foreign oil won’t save the planet—only zeroing out our carbon emissions will do that. So energy policy in this country must be seen through that one, single lens.

Bio-based Butanol as an alternative fuel

Scientists have been feverishly studying many alternative fuels in an effort to break our tether to fossil fuels. Realistically, they are trying to find the next big money maker, but who can blame them.

Nasib Qureshi, chemical engineer, has been trying to perfect a modified method of producing biobutanol from wheat straw since 2003. he reasons that wheat straw is present in abundance and its cost would be lower than corn-glucose dependent feedstock.

Another reason for the interest in using biobutanol as fuel is its several advantages over ethanol. New pipelines are not required for transportation of biobutanol – existing pipelines will do. Biobutanol is less corrosive compared to ethanol. Biobutanol is less prone to water contamination. Biobutanol can be used alone in internal combustion engines or it can be mixed with gasoline. Biobutanol provides more energy per gallon than ethanol.

Biobutanol can also be produced from fermented sugars drawn from corn glucose. But large scale commercial production of such biofuels was not possible due to high recovery costs, low yields and easy availability of conventional fuels. But conditions are different now. Our environment is more polluted, reserves of conventional fuels are not going to last forever and gasoline prices keep fluctuating alarmingly.

Clostridium bacteria is one of scientists favorite means of stimulating fermentation. Preparation of biofuels mainly involves four preparatory steps such as pretreatment, hydrolysis, fermentation and recovery. These steps have to be carried out separately and sequentially. But Qureshi and his team members deviated from this traditional method and combined three of the four steps. They employed a procedure known as “gas stripping” to extract the biobutanol. First the wheat straw has been pretreated with dilute sulphuric acid or other chemicals. Next the material is fermented in a bioreactor containing three different types of commercial enzymes and a culture of C. beijerinckii P260, a strain Qureshi obtained from Professor David Jones of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Here Qureshi has combined the two steps.

The bacteria and enzymes do their jobs simultaneously. First the enzymes hydrolyze the straw and release simple sugars then the bacterias start fermenting those sugars into acetone, butanol and ethanol. Butanol is produced in greatest quantity but other two are also valuable components. “Feb batch feeding” method increased the butanol production. Qureshi says he is planning to scale up production levels in 2009. “Then, we’ll look at the economics of using hydrolyzed wheat straw to see how we’re doing and move this process forward.”

Higher Food Prices and Biofuel Production, There is a Connection

As everyone without the power to do anything about it already knows, the push for biofuels is the leading factor in the increase in worldwide food prices.

Despite what our government has been trying to push off as fact, a new study has proven they are lying to us. And here is why.

Biofuels is a new market with the potential of huge profit for corporate America therefore the American government is doing everything it can to ensure its success, even at the risk of causing millions of world citizens to go deeper into poverty or to die of starvation, even at the risk of costing millions of Americans more money at the supermarket, even at the risk of alienating American voters. Money talks louder than any group of protesters and any group of people writing blogs trying to get the truth out to fellow Americans who refuse to take the time to educate themselves to what is really going on.

The World Bank reports that biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% while our government holds fast to its claims that biofuel production’s effect is only 3%. Any thinking person can look at how much corn has been diverted from food production to biofuel production (over one third) and can reasonably conclude that food prices are going to suffer.

This report was completed in April 2008 and has yet to be published because the World Bank is worried about embarrassing an America President who has attained the lowest approval rating of any past President.

Also, the British government has withheld its own report on the impact of biofuels, the Gallagher Report, which states that plant based fuels have played a “significant” part in pushing food prices up to record levels.

Does anyone out there have any doubt remaining about where the loyalties of the powers that be lie? Those loyalties are certainly not with the voters who put them into office.

The U.S. government doesn’t want the everyday Joe to know that ethanol can be made cheaper from other non-edible substances because if a significant number of Americans know this then the government would look foolish over giving so much in subsidies to corn farmers. But then again the Bush administration has already shown that it doesn’t give a damn about what Americans want, it’s all about how much money corporations can make.

Bush continues his charade of the causation of higher food prices by placing the blame on higher demand from China and India. But the World Bank study disputes that "Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases."

Even successive droughts in Australia, calculates the report, have had a marginal impact. Instead, it argues that the EU and US drive for biofuels has had by far the biggest impact on food supply and prices.

The report points out biofuels derived from sugarcane, which Brazil specializes in, have not had such a dramatic impact. But sugarcane for biofuel production does not create a large enough market as does corn for biofuel and therefore American corporations would not stand to make as much money from using it.

Producing and using ethanol would help ease global warming, to some extent, but why do we have to pay for this in higher food prices and more deaths?

Main Stream Media and the Real Story

Bloggers like to think we are presenting information that is useful to a large number of people. But even if that number is small the information we present should be accurate. In the pre-internet days when news dissemination fell under the purview of main stream media, editors decided what was to be printed or broadcast based on their perceptions of what the public wanted to hear. Today, with an increasing number of news outlets falling under the control of corporations, editors and journalist are forced to temper, slant, or choose their news stories in accordance with corporate agendas. Blogs and websites, not owned by corporate news outlets, are free to present information without regard to what the corporate world wants or does not want to see. We can ‘round out’ news items, fill in the blanks or present information that the main stream just does not touch upon. Granted individuals can and often do have their own agendas but overall we serve to present a balanced more pedestrian view of what is going on in our world.

The environment is a small subset of the ‘big picture’ and environmentalist have been historically regarded as alarmists or ‘nut jobs’ with derogatory nicknames such as ‘treehuggers’, ‘granola eating hippies’, ‘recycling nazis’, that don’t exactly foster respect. We like to point out how plastic is such a danger to wildlife due to its non-biodegradability or how the rush to embrace biofuels to free ourselves from the grasp of foreign oil is creating more problems or even how we are not recycling enough.

Today, I would like to turn our focus to something positive. In an attempt to counter the overwhelming negative reports we see in the news, let’s look at some of the positive results brought about by environmental regulations that has allowed steady and significant progress in reducing almost every form of pollution.

The quality of our drinking water has clearly improved through improved purification methods and the amount of attention we have placed on it to not pollute it in the first place. According to the Council on Environmental Quality, the percentage of water sources that were judged to be poor or severe fell from 30% in 1961 to 5% in the 1990s.

The treatment of industrial and municipal waste has greatly reduced the amount of bacteria that enters our streams, rivers, and lakes. Wastewater plants served only 40 million Americans in 1960, approximately 22%, compared with 190 million today, approximately 70%.

In 1972, only 36% of America’s rivers and streams were suitable for swimming and fishing. By 1994, that percentage was 86. Lakes that were pronounced environmentally “dead” in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Erie and Ontario, are now producing record fish catches.

In 1989 the Exxon Valdez crude oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William sound was a catastrophe of epic proportions that saw 41 million liters of crude oil coat once pristine coastlines and wildlife. Today, American households pour 1.3 billion liters of oil-based products down the drain each year contaminating lakes, rivers, streams, and groundwater. There are safer alternative methods of handling households chemicals. The good news to take from this report is that the number of oil spills have been reduced since the 1970s.

Solid waste in the U.S. more than doubled from 1960 to 1990 but recycling rose by 96%. About 60% of the physical waste now generated by the United States is biodegradable.

We use energy much more efficiently today than ever before. According to calculations by the National Center for Policy Analysis, “the amount of energy needed to produce a dollar of GNP has been steadily declining at a rate of 1% per year since 1929.

The loss of U.S. wetlands fell from 500,000 acres per year in the 1950s to about 50,000 acres per year in the mid 1990s. This rate is still too high, but it is improving.

These facts and figures gives us much reason for optimism for it indicates that we are headed in the right direction.

Even though these great strides in cleaning up our environment have been made public opinion polls indicate that the general public does not seem to be aware of it. Listed below are some amazing poll results that illustrate the extent of mis-information and inaccurate views of the state of the environment.

A Roper poll, taken in 2003, found that most Americans believe they know more than they actually do about the environment.

* 120 million Americans think spray cans still have CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) in them. But CFCs were banned in 1978.

* 120 million think disposable diapers are the leading problem with landfills. They actually represent about 1% of the problem.

* 130 million believe that hydropower is America's top energy source. In fact, it accounts for just 10% of the total.

A 2001 Gallup poll asked “right now, do you think the quality of the environment in the country as a whole is getting better or getting worse?” Of the 1,060 adults who responded,

36% said it is getting better,
57% said it is getting worse,
5% said its about the same

A Newsweek magazine poll in 2000 asked: “Since the first Earth Day was held 30 years ago, how much progress do you think has been made toward solving environmental problems: major progress, minor progress, or no progress, or have environmental problems actually gotten worse?” Of the 752 adults polled,

18% said there had been major progress,

52% said there had been minor progress,

16% said the problems have gotten worse

7% had no opinion.

A Yale University poll in 2005 found that 52% of Americans believe the environment in the U.S. is getting worse. And only 15% thought it was getting better.

This article in the Calgary Herald states similar misinformation and negativity from Canadians.

These more recent polls show that Americans consider environmental issues to be of high importance.

Polls find global warming generating heat – July 2007

Conserving Energy Is Americans’ Top Environmental Action – March 2007

Environmental issues could swing election - 2007

Why is it that when so many people claim to place so much interest on the environment that such a disproportionate number of people doubt environmental success? Main Stream Media is a major reason. Americans are spoon fed by sources with little information, but alternative agendas. The Roper poll respondents were asked where they get their information, 60% cited mostly television and newspapers, 25% credited the government and 33% said radio or environmental groups. (More than one source could be chosen.)

Simply stated, bad news sells more copy and ad space than do success stories. Findings show that a small percentage of people actually follow the news no mater what it presents. But, as Roy Greenslade, professor of Journalism and media commentator for the Guardian points out, peoples’ interest in news is much more intense when there is a perceived threat to their way of life. They want to know what has gone wrong rather than what has gone right.

People just do not bother to inform themselves about what is being done by those who govern them in periods between the eruption of crises. This means that they are not aware of the complexities of problems until it is too late for them to take a coherent stance for or against policy decisions. This situation tends to favor political leaders.

I realize that this post will probably only be seen by those few who actually have a developed curiosity and are civic-minded enough to want to learn more about what goes on around them, but just maybe this post will reach someone who has come to the conclusion that there is more to the story than what the ‘big boys’ of media let on and is willing to subject themselves to a more complete story.

DOE is Finally Getting the Idea

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the issuance of a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for up to $7 million in federal funding over two years (FY 2008 - 2009) for advanced research and development in converting non-food based biomass to advanced biofuels. Combined with a requirement for private minimum funding of at least 20%, approximately $8.5 million would be invested in this research effort.

Last month, DOE announced two Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOA), valued up to $14 million, to better integrate the United States’ universities into DOE’s nuclear research and development (R&D) programs; and contribute to assuring a new generation of engineers and scientists necessary for pursuing nuclear power - a safe, reliable, affordable and emissions-free source of energy. These FOAs support the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) University Readiness and the Nuclear Energy Research Initiative for Consortia (NERI-C). These new awards will bring total Fiscal Year (FY) 2007 funding to universities that support nuclear energy programs to over $54 million.

Last May, DOE announced funding for companies to develop storage solutions, manufacturing approaches, and new system concepts for large-scale concentrating solar power (CSP) plants in hopes of reaching a target of 5-7 ¢/kWh by 2020. This would result in a savings of 36-80 million tons of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere each year relative to coal plants of similar capacity.

Clearly, the United States is not sitting on its laurels waiting for someone else to come up with clean, safe alternative energy sources for our future.

Once the path has been made clear and the door has been opened to a reliable source of renewable energy to wean us off of foreign oil then all of the other pieces of natural energy, i.e., wind power, solar power, wave power, etc, will all fall into place.

In the meantime, DOE is still pursuing exploration and production of domestic resources of natural gas and oil. It is hopeful that very soon a major break-through in alternative research will occur which will alleviate the need for further extraction of gas and oil from geographically challenging areas in such places as offshore deepwater locations and within our national parks.

Now, if only they would halt the misguided and inappropriate use of food crops for biofuel while we research other sources maybe our food prices will come back down.

Biofuel Update: ALGAE

One of the latest attempts at creating a biofuel source has been with algae. Algae are among the fastest growing plants in the world, and about 50 percent of their weight is oil. That lipid oil can be used to make biodiesel for cars, trucks, and airplanes.

A company in Texas, Valcent Products, has created an algae greenhouse to harvest this green fuel that many believe will help ease our dependence on fossil fuel.

Instead of growing algae in ponds, Vlacent uses a closed loop bioreactor system that can produce algae over an extended period. Using long rows of moving plastics bags exposes a larger surface area to the suns rays thereby growing more algae in less space. The system is expected to produce about 100,000 gallons of algae oil a year per acre, compared to about 30 gallons per acre from corn; 50 gallons from soybeans.

More than one type of algae

There are currently 65,000 known algae species, with perhaps hundreds of thousands more still to be identified and researchers are convinced they will be able to target the exact species of algae most perfectly suited to whatever end product is desired. One species may be best suited for jet fuel, while the oil content of another may be more efficient for truck diesel.

Algae as a food source

Seaweeds, e.g., the kelps (kombu) and the red algae Porphyra (nori), have long been used as a source of food, especially in Asia. Both cultivated and naturally growing seaweeds have been harvested in the Pacific Basin for hundreds of years. Kelp are also much used as fertilizer, and kelp ash is used industrially for its potassium and sodium salts. Other useful algae products are agar and carrageen, which is used as a stabilizer in foods, cosmetics, and paints.

Another commercial use is as a health food drink, usually sold as "Spirulina" which claims to increase natural cancer fighting substances in the body.

Algae as a filtering agent

Locating algae facilities next to carbon producing power plants, or manufacturing plants could sequester the C02 they create and use those emissions to help grow the algae, which need the C02 for photosynthesis. An bioreactor built in just the right way can have the added benefit of preventing carbon dioxide emissions, nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide, from entering the atmosphere.

A Sonoma State University biology professor and his graduate student have teamed up with the City of Santa Rosa to investigate the potential use of algae to remove excess nutrients and other contaminants from municipal wastewater effluent.

Algae is considered a better alternative to using corn and soybeans as a biofuel due to three factors, one: algae generates more fuel using less acreage, two: the diversion of corn and soybean from food to biofuel use increases the cost of food products, and three: the high agricultural use of nitrogen based fertilizers for corn and soybeans contaminates the water table and eventually runs off into the oceans adding to the already huge Dead Zone.

A decade ago, the U.S. Department of Energy said that after 18 years of study algae oil could never compete economically with fossil fuels. But that was when the price of oil was about $20. With the cost of a barrel of oil over $100 I think its high time we use plants like algae and switchgrass for biofuel sources and keep food crops out of the gas tank.

Switchgrass instead of corn please

With the price of everything that uses corn going up, we need alternatives to converting corn into biofuel. USDA completed a 5-year study that shows Switchgrass could very well be that alternative.

Here’s the scoop, switchgrass grown for biofuel production produced 540% more energy than needed to grow, harvest and process it into cellulosic ethanol, according to estimates from a large on-farm study by researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The test covered farms from Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota who grew the prairie grass as a biomass fuel source and showed that yields were significantly higher in energy than is consumed in producing and converting the grass into cellulosic ethanol, said Ken Vogel, a U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service geneticist in UNL's agronomy and horticulture department.

This is great news for everybody concerned, with the exception of the people selling all of that fertilizer to the farmers that gets washed down into the Gulf of Mexico.

"This clearly demonstrates that switchgrass is not only energy efficient, but can be used in a renewable biofuel economy to reduce reliance of fossil fuels, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance rural economies," Vogel said.

The study also found greenhouse gas emissions from cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass were 94% lower than estimated greenhouse gas emissions from gasoline production.

Sounds like a major winner to me.

Researchers reported their findings in this week's (Jan.7-11) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research paper is available online for those of you who like to exercise your scientific mind.

In the future, perennial crops, such as switchgrass, as well as crop residues and forestry biomass could be developed as major cellulosic ethanol sources that could potentially displace 30% of current U.S. petroleum consumption, Vogel said. Technology to convert biomass into cellulosic ethanol is being developed and is now at the development stage where small commercial scale biorefineries are beginning to be built with scale-up support from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Now, will you please, return corn to its rightful place as a food source and away from the biofuel fanatics who are driving our food prices up.

Source: Institute of Agricultural and Natural Resources

Related Posts:

First Cellulosic Ethanol Plant Goes Online

Study: Your Car Can Run on 20% Ethanol

Is Biofuel a reasonable answer?

Greed hurts us all again

The rush to make money has once again worsened an existing problem.
The U.N., and others, is warning the world that water resources, already strained by over population, will become even more scarce from the increased production of corn and other crops for biofuels.

Also, since more corn is being sold to biofuel producers, diverting it away from food producers, the price of corn for food is increasing. The price of every other crop that is being diverted away from traditional uses to biofuel production is going up as well.

Winners and losers? In the short term, the winners are the farmers who convert their lands to grow more palm trees, more sugar cane, more of anything that biofuel producers will buy. In the long term, the losers are those very same farmers, along with anyone else who requires food. It may sound like a bit of an over-simplification and melodramatic, but it is true.

These problems and others, such as increased pollution from the increased use of synthetic fertilizers to support the additional crops and the conversion of forests into agricultural lands, have been discussed in length by ecologists, scientists, farmers, food producers, environmentalists and bloggers who can see beyond the need to make an extra buck, for quite some time now.

I don’t mean to get down on those poor countries who are struggling to make more money. They need to eat too. But their shortsightedness is going to affect everyone else. Using more land that hastens the shortage of one of our most limited resources and polluting it even more borders on lunacy.

The use of biofuels is a double-edged sword. It is better for the environment than fossil fuels and it increases energy security for many countries. The pitfalls affect social as well as environmental issues.

New studies from scientists, private agencies and governments are saying biofuels could do more harm than good. Instead of helping the environment, deforestation to grow more energy crops is increasing the threat of global warming.

Converting more land to agricultural use will prevent an ever increasing population from finding land to build homes on.

Pollution from synthetic fertilizers creates the need for more water purification systems which takes up more land.

There needs to be controls put in place to decrease the competition of agricultural lands in order to maintain a percentage of land for food production only. Developing countries will benefit most from this.

We need to look at long term solutions and not jump on the first immediate answer. How many times have individuals been burned in their personal lives by doing exactly this? When are we going to learn from our mistakes. This mistake is global and will have global consequences.

Are we about to witness first synthetic life?

Scientists have built the first synthetic genome by stringing together 147 pages of letters representing the building blocks of DNA.

This is scary stuff from the realms of science fiction. But researches say that within months we can see custom designed organisms, referred to as biological robots. The proposed use is to produce ethanol for biofuel use as well as producing other chemicals in applications we haven’t thought of yet.

Producing biofuels is an immediate and important application because one of the downsides of using food crops as biofuel production is that it drives up food prices.

The technical process involves using yeast to stitch together four long strands of DNA into the genome of a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium. They said it's more than an order of magnitude longer than any previous synthetic DNA creation. The actual building blocks of DNA: Adenine, Cytosine, Thymine and Guanine, are rearranged and linked together to create never-before-seen organisms that will do their bidding.

The next step is to inject this synthetic strand into a cell, sit back and let it multiply.

Just a few years ago this process of synthesizing and linking together these building blocks was impossible. Now, the possibilities seem endless. By linking together millions of base pairs, biomedical scientists can create much more complex organisms.

Some ideas I would like to see this science used for is to create organisms that would eat petroleum to clean up oil spills, another could attack rogue human cells to control cancer and other diseases if not stop them completely, organisms to break down waste products in our water systems to purify our drinking water, organisms to neutralize or eliminate the E. coli bacterium plaguing our food supply, organisms to repair human tissue, the applications are almost endless.

The scary part of this new field is how future scientists handle this knowledge. There always seems to be some ill-intentioned person or even well-meaning person whose experiments go awry and will create something monstrous. Regulation and security is of the utmost importance. Already synthetic biologists are planning to scale up from the simplest organisms to the most complex: human beings. This thinking, in my opinion is a bit premature, but it is better to have rules in place before it happens.

Currently, synthetic biologists follow the National Institutes of Health's recombinant DNA guidelines, which were penned in 1974 for the first experiments in genetic manipulation. Accepted by NIH and industry scientists alike, the rules instruct researchers on how to safely handle engineered organisms in the lab. If they want to release a synthetic organism into the environment, it would be evaluated for safety by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Manmade biological forms can do unexpected things so we need to create a safeguard, perhaps an army of synthetic robots whose purpose is to destroy the offending organism.

New terms are entering into our language, and to help explain these terms here is a Scientific American article on synthetic biology, and a Live Science article on biological robots.

The full implications of creating synthetic life are as yet unknown for the future of mankind, but rest assured Hollywood will continue to come up with creative ways to exploit any fear surrounding it.

I think we should view this latest development as a step forward in helping us clean up after ourselves and keep our environment as healthy as possible.

It will be interesting to hear viewpoints from religious leaders.

Global climate concerns to be addressed in Bali

Creating a new global climate pact will be the subject of a massive UN-backed meeting in Bali, Indonesia, Dec 3 to Dec 14, 2007. 15,000 government officials and environmentalists from 190 nations will meet to discuss the next generation environmental protocol to replace the current 1997 Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012.

The Kyoto Protocol, a world-wide measure to combat the rising global warming threat, was weakened due to several developing nations, including China and India, being exempted from the measure. It was further weakened because the U.S. never signed on. The U.S. is expected to once again balk at proposed key provisions under the expected treaty such as mandatory emissions cuts and targets for limiting the rise in global temperatures. It seems economics will continue to overshadow environmental concerns.

Discussions will range from deforestation and the wiping out of species to the economic destruction caused by natural disasters. A major concern is that poorer countries are replacing their forests with crops such as soy and sugar to take advantage of the emerging agrifuel industry, which is only worsening the climate threat.

Forests are necessary to help combat rising levels of carbon dioxide and if they are replaced by a product that has been shown to be an impractical solution, then it is no solution at all. We are only trading one problem for a host of others, one being that we will need to generate more synthetic fertilizer to increase production of crops that will not meet half of the U.S. fuel requirements by 2025, let alone an entire planet. The current method of composting farm waste back into feeding the soil to produce more crop would be interrupted by using that compost for ethanol production and this depletion of soil fertility would have a devastating effect on future farming. Converting food crop into fuel for automobiles is morally wrong in the face of more than 16,000 children dieing from hunger every day.

This round of talks may have more of a world consensus and more of a sense of urgency to meet the problem head on than the 1997 talks did but since one of the biggest generators of greenhouse gases isn’t willing to heed constructive solutions then other countries will feel little pressure to show their support. These smaller countries will feel more inclined to pursue a short term profit through agrifuel production which will destroy future abilities to produce more biofuels.

World leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and new Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd have all made climate change a top priority.

President Bush has recently signaled willingness by the U.S. in favor of mandatory limits on global warming pollution by citing a final Energy Department report showing U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide declined by 1.5% last year.

This is a very small move in the right but it shows signs of hope that the world can come up with a more meaningful and immediate solution to our shared, looming climate threat.