New York Biofuel Plant

New York: Will pay for bacteria
Empire State has kicked in nearly $15 million to help build new ethanol plant that lets microbes do the dirty work.

By Michael Kanellos Staff Writer, CNET News.com -->
Published: December 20, 2006, 5:57 PM PST
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Mascoma has landed a $14.8 million grant from the state of New York to build a plant near Rochester that will turn paper sludge, wood chips and other agricultural waste into ethanol.
The 15,000-square-foot facility should be open toward the end of 2007 or early 2008. When it's fully operational, it will churn out about 500,000 gallons of biomass ethanol a year, said Mascoma President Colin South.
That's a drop in the bucket compared to the 150 billion gallons of petroleum that Americans consume every year, South admitted. Around 6 billion gallons of ethanol get consumed in the U.S. annually. But South asserts that biomass ethanol is a very new phenomenon.
"It's a small plant, but it's the first of its kind," he said.
Mascoma, a spin-off of New Hampshire's Dartmouth College, is one of a number of companies trying to make ethanol more economically sound. Ethanol--an alcohol that can be added to car fuel--releases fewer tailpipe emissions than gas. However, in the U.S., ethanol generally gets made from corn, which could also be sold as food. And it takes a considerable amount of water and energy to grow the corn, distill the corn mash into sugar and then turn that sugar into ethanol. (Ethanol production also releases carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.)
Churning ethanol out of waste products significantly lowers the cost of the raw material. South estimated that the biomass used in Mascoma's processes will cost 60 percent or less than the feedstocks for traditional ethanol.
Just as important, Mascoma and others believe that exploiting genetically enhanced microbes to convert corn into sugar, rather than relying on traditional industrial processes, will reduce production costs and factory energy consumption. Microbes, after all, can be viewed as miniature chemical factories. Other microbe companies include Ceres, LiveFuels, Dyadic International, Diversa and Synthetic Genomics.

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Mascoma's twist on the microbe manufacturing formula is that several of the steps required to turn biomass into ethanol can be combined, thereby further cutting costs. The company's primary organism is Thermoanaerobacterium saccharolyticum, which breaks down plant material in a warm environment.
The deal also marks another landmark for the administration of New York Governor George Pataki, who has been working to turn the state into a high-tech hub with tax breaks, R&D incentives and grants. In the past few years, the state has landed deals with, among others, Advanced Micro Devices.
In Rochester, Mascoma will work with Genencor, which specializes in industrial enzymes, and nearby Cornell and Clarkson universities. Enzymes can help accelerate or alter the process of the "cell factories," said Jack Huttner, vice president of biorefineries at Genencor. Genencor has other similar deals in the works, Huttner added.
"It has been the most aggressive state in putting incentives on the table," South said.

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Food for Thought

In Raising the World’s I.Q., the Secret’s in the Salt

Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times
MAKING A DIFFERENCE Salt, excavated from a field at the Aral Tuz salt processing plant in Aral, Kazakhstan, in train carriages. In 1999, only 29 percent of the nation’s households were using iodized salt. Now, 94 percent are.

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By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: December 16, 2006
ASTANA, Kazakhstan — Valentina Sivryukova knew her public service messages were hitting the mark when she heard how one Kazakh schoolboy called another stupid. “What are you,” he sneered, “iodine-deficient or something?”
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On the Brink
The Iodine Solution
This article is part of a series examining diseases that hover on the brink of eradication, and the daunting obstacles that doctors and scientists face to finish the job. A final article will report on the challenges of campaigns that try to offer prevention of a number of diseases at once.
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Joseph Swenkyj for The New York Times
GETTING THE WORD OUT In Kzyl-Orda, Kazakhstan, seventh graders passing information booklets to one another about the importance of iodized salt.
Ms. Sivryukova, president of the national confederation of Kazakh charities, was delighted. It meant that the years spent trying to raise public awareness that iodized salt prevents brain damage in infants were working. If the campaign bore fruit, Kazakhstan’s national I.Q. would be safeguarded.
In fact, Kazakhstan has become an example of how even a vast and still-developing nation like this Central Asian country can achieve a remarkable public health success. In 1999, only 29 percent of its households were using iodized salt. Now, 94 percent are. Next year, the United Nations is expected to certify it officially free of iodine deficiency disorders.
That turnabout was not easy. The Kazakh campaign had to overcome widespread suspicion of iodization, common in many places, even though putting iodine in salt, public health experts say, may be the simplest and most cost-effective health measure in the world. Each ton of salt needs about two ounces of potassium iodate, which costs about $1.15.
Worldwide, about two billion people — a third of the globe — get too little iodine, including hundreds of millions in India and China. Studies show that iodine deficiency is the leading preventable cause of mental retardation. Even moderate deficiency, especially in pregnant women and infants, lowers intelligence by 10 to 15 I.Q. points, shaving incalculable potential off a nation’s development.
The most visible and severe effects — disabling goiters, cretinism and dwarfism — affect a tiny minority, usually in mountain villages. But 16 percent of the world’s people have at least mild goiter, a swollen thyroid gland in the neck.
“Find me a mother who wouldn’t pawn her last blouse to get iodine if she understood how it would affect her fetus,” said Jack C. S. Ling, chairman of the International Council for Control of Iodine Deficiency Disorders, a committee of about 350 scientists formed in 1985 to champion iodization.
The 1990 World Summit for Children called for the elimination of iodine deficiency by 2000, and the subsequent effort was led by Professor Ling’s organization along with Unicef, the World Health Organization, Kiwanis International, the World Bank and the foreign aid agencies of Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, the United States and others.
Largely out of the public eye, they made terrific progress: 25 percent of the world’s households consumed iodized salt in 1990. Now, about 66 percent do.
But the effort has been faltering lately. When victory was not achieved by 2005, donor interest began to flag as AIDS, avian flu and other threats got more attention.
And, like all such drives, it cost more than expected. In 1990, the estimated price tag was $75 million — a bargain compared with, for example, the fight against polio, which has consumed about $4 billion.
Since then, according to David P. Haxton, the iodine council’s executive director, about $160 million has been spent, including $80 million from Kiwanis and $15 million from the Gates Foundation, along with unknown amounts spent on new equipment by salt companies.
“Very often, I’ll talk to a salt producer at a meeting, and he’ll have no idea he had this power in his product,” Mr. Haxton said. “He’ll say ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Sure, I’ll do it. I would have done it sooner.’ ”
In many places, like Japan, people get iodine from seafood, seaweed, vegetables grown in iodine-rich soil or animals that eat grass grown in that soil. But even wealthy nations, including the United States and in Europe, still need to supplement that by iodizing salt.
The cheap part, experts say, is spraying on the iodine. The expense is always for the inevitable public relations battle.
In some nations, iodization becomes tarred as a government plot to poison an essential of life — salt experts compare it to the furious opposition by 1950s conservatives to fluoridation of American water.
In others, civil libertarians demand a right to choose plain salt, with the result that the iodized kind rarely reaches the poor. Small salt makers who fear extra expense often lobby against it. So do makers of iodine pills who fear losing their market.
Rumors inevitably swirl: iodine has been blamed for AIDS, diabetes, seizures, impotence and peevishness. Iodized salt, according to different national rumor mills, will make pickled vegetables explode, ruin caviar or soften hard cheese.
Breaking down that resistance takes both money and leadership.
“For 5 cents per person per year, you can make the whole population smarter than before,” said Dr. Gerald N. Burrow, a former dean of Yale’s medical school and vice chairman of the iodine council.
“That has to be good for a country. But you need a government with the political will to do it.”
‘Scandal’ of Stunted Children
In the 1990s, when the campaign for iodization began, the world’s greatest concentration of iodine-deficient countries was in the landlocked former Soviet republics of Central Asia.
All of them — Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrghzstan — saw their economies break down with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Across the region, only 28 percent of all households used iodized salt.
“With the collapse of the system, certain babies went out with the bathwater, and iodization was one of them,” said Alexandre Zouev, chief Unicef representative in Kazakhstan.

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Faith may need to be Rediscovered

Abuse Claims Are Settled in Washington

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington has agreed to pay $1.3 million to 16 men who said they were sexually abused by eight priests from 1962 to 1982.

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By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 17, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington has agreed to pay $1.3 million to 16 men who said they were sexually abused by eight priests from 1962 to 1982.
Although the men began pursuing the claims three years ago, in many instances the statutes of limitation had expired in the jurisdictions where they said the abuse had occurred, said Peter M. Gillon, a lawyer for the group. In addition, two of the men had already lost legal claims against the archdiocese.
“Our clients were in severe distress, emotionally, psychologically, financially and spiritually, and felt that a settlement was appropriate at this time,” Mr. Gillon said as the agreement was announced Friday.
All eight priests accused by the men have been removed from ministry; seven were prosecuted and one was acquitted.
The settlement, first reported in Saturday’s editions of The Washington Post, provides cash payments of $10,000 to $190,000 to each of the men.
The archdiocese includes more than 560,000 Roman Catholics in 140 parishes in the District of Columbia and five Southern Maryland counties.
The settlements will be covered by insurance reserves and not by other church assets, operating funds or collections, said Susan Gibbs, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese.
Also on Friday, lawyers representing 45 people who sued the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, accusing clergy members of sexual abuse, announced that a $60 million settlement had been finalized and paid, a lawyer for the plaintiffs said.
Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, leader of the archdiocese, had announced the settlement Dec. 1 and said that $40 million of the payment would come from the archdiocese’s operations fund and that the rest would come from religious orders and insurance coverage.

Think About Emissions Control

Gore urges scientists to warn public about global warming
Global warming is going on, says Al Gore, and scientists need to help spread the word.

By Michael Kanellos Staff Writer, CNET News.com -->
Published: December 14, 2006, 3:35 PM PST
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SAN FRANCISCO--Scientists need to come forward and help communicate to the public about the dangers of climate change, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore told an audience of scientists Thursday.
"It is time for the scientific community to consider playing a more active communications role," Gore told an audience of a few thousand at the American Geophysical Union, a weeklong scientific conference taking place here. "We have to find a way to connect the dots and make clear and compelling the basis for dramatic change."
Climate change presents an unusual, and dire, set of circumstances, he noted. For one thing, the effects of global warming appear to be accelerating. Just this week, a report released at the conference predicted that the permanent arctic ice sheet could nearly melt away by 2040. (The earlier estimate was 2060.)
"If we let it go, it won't come back in any time scale relevant to the human species," he said. "I was shocked that (researchers') horizon is now 34 years."

Getting the public to understand the problem, though, and then act upon it is not easy. Humanity will essentially have to make large changes in how it consumes natural resources, and instilling massive societal changes is difficult. Typically, reform movements only begin after an irrefutable disaster.
To top it off, society has become more short-term in its thinking, he asserted. Television has crimped the attention span of the average person. Politicians now concentrate on overnight polls, and financial analysts look at shorter and shorter time horizons. The future doesn't get a lot of attention, he said.
"We have somehow persuaded ourselves that we don't have to concern ourselves much about what we are doing to future generations," said Gore.

He particularly criticized the role of TV. In the past, individuals did more reading, and the printing press allowed a marketplace of ideas to flourish, he said, noting that many of America's Founding Fathers stayed up on the latest scientific advancements. But TV functions differently than print. TV stations, for example, tend to be controlled by a handful of individuals, and that old marketplace of ideas has given way to sitcoms.
"The well-informed citizenry has become the well-entertained audience," he said. "The age of print that began with Gutenberg essentially ended."
He later added: "The Internet, for all of its limitations, is growing, and it offers a hope of a meritocracy of ideas accessible to all," he said.
Gore also told the audience that scientific research appears to be under attack. The Environmental Protection Agency has resisted attempts by Congress to give the public access to files concerning pollution and global warming. A new federal directive will force some scientific research to be submitted for political review, a move that some researchers have compared to censorship.
The general public, he said, is becoming "desensitized" to the issue of scientific censorship.
But the speech wasn't a complete downer. Gore opened up with some jokes. He told a story about how a Nigerian news reporter mistakenly reported that he and his wife, Tipper, were going to open a Shoney's restaurant. (Shoney's is a chain of Denny's-like restaurants, mostly in the South.) Gore also did a short, but fairly spot-on imitation of former President Bill Clinton.
And he concluded by noting that climate problems can be tackled.
"In the U.S., the will to act is a renewable resource," he said.

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Government Makes Gas Tax or Not

Supreme Court to consider climate change rules

The case, set for Wednesday, arises from growing pressure in the U.S. to regulate the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

By Martin LaMonica Staff Writer, CNET News.com -->
Published: November 29, 2006, 4:00 AM PST

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A case set to be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday signals a growing movement in the U.S. to curb greenhouse gases with government mandates that put a price on carbon dioxide.
The court will hear arguments in a case to determine whether the Environmental Protection Agency should regulate emissions of carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Rulings aren't expected until next summer.
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The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a case to determine whether the EPA should regulate carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that has been linked to global warming, as a pollutant.
Bottom line:
The case, which could be a significant environmental ruling, underscores a growing push in the U.S. to lower greenhouse gas emissions through regulations and put a price on carbon dioxide.
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Carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas that contributes to climate change. As concerns over global climate change build, many experts expect the U.S. federal government to put mechanisms in place to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
"The debate has shifted from whether or not there will be federal regulations, to when it will come," said Fred Wellington, a senior financial analyst at the think tank World Resources Institute. "The smart money understands that climate policy is coming."
What is still up in the air is what form regulations will take, and whether state and local efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will be coordinated with any federal policies, Wellington said.
One possibility is a carbon tax that would be paid by large organizations, such as utilities and manufacturers. Another system, already used to reduce other gases in the U.S., is a "cap and trade" system, in which possible polluters are allocated a certain number of units of carbon dioxide emissions. If they emit more than their allocated cap, they can then purchase credits, or "offsets," on carbon-trading markets. These credits can be the surplus emission units from companies that have not reached their set limit.
This sort of trading system was introduced in Europe in January 2005 as part of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. Participants manage and trade carbon dioxide credits like other commodities with varying prices, such as fuels and crops.
This month, exchanges under the European Union's Emission Trading Scheme passed one billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions, which is roughly the annual output of Germany, according to market tracker Point Carbon. Eighteen billion euros, or $23 billion dollars, worth of carbon dioxide have been traded.
"We're seeing an increasing number of participants in the EU ETS (European Union Emission Trading Scheme). The players in the market are major utilities, investment banks and key European industrial companies," said Henrik Hasselknippe, manager of Point Carbon's EU ETS team.
The exact cost of regulations to business will depend on the initial allocations as well as companies' ability to stay under set targets.
States' pressureThe U.S. does not have federally mandated policies to curb greenhouse gas emissions, as Europe does. However, there is growing pressure among states, and even cities, to address climate change by putting a price tag on carbon.
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is a plan endorsed by northeast and mid-Atlantic states to reduce carbon dioxide emissions through a cap-and-trade system.
And California last month passed the California Climate Act of 2006 (click here for PDF), which gives the California Clean Air Commission the authority to put a cap on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other "stationary sources." The state has also mandated reductions of greenhouse gas from trucks and cars.
That oversight could be extended, depending on the outcome of the case being heard on Wednesday. The U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether the U.S. EPA can decline to regulate emissions standards on motor vehicles, as the agency has argued it can do. The court is also supposed to determine whether the EPA has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide as an air pollutant associated with climate change.
The case (click here for PDF) is being brought by 12 states; cities including Baltimore, New York and Washington; and other groups.

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It is a challenge to a decision from D.C. Circuit Court, which sided with the EPA when it argued that the agency lacks the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and that it can decline to do so, according to a summary on the Supreme Court of the United States Blog. The Bush administration favors voluntary programs to reduce emissions.
In addition, there have been hearings in Congress on climate change-related policies.
Sen. Barbara Boxer is set to replace James Inhofe, who has shown skepticism of global warming, as the chair of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee. Earlier this month, Boxer and other senators called on the president to "move quickly to adopt economy-wide constraints on domestic GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions and then work with the international community to forge an effective and equitable global agreement."

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