Where do sea serpents come from? Legend and myth, of course. But many scientists think the giant oarfish, which can grow up to 55 feet in length, has been the main inspiration for all those myths over the years. A few oarfish corpses in various unsavory states have washed up on shore over the years, including a 16-footer that was the inspiration for this Harper's Weekly sketch titled "Monsters of the Sea." But no one's ever seen an oarfish swimming in the wild, at least until now. Here's the video:

The fish was recently caught swimming beneath a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico—the camera was provided by oil companies and run by marine scientists. The collaboration, appropriately enough, is called the Serpent project.

Companies have been making misleading claims about the eco-friendliness of their products for almost as long as people have cared about the environment. Back in 2007, the marketing firm TerraChoice went into an unnamed big-box retailer and evaluated the green-advertising claims of more than 1,000 products. Only one actually lived up to its promises. But now, according to Greenwire, the Federal Trade Commission may finally start cracking down hard on this sort of "greenwashing":

David Vladeck, director of FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, told the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection last summer that tougher enforcement and environmental guidelines are a major part of the commission's agenda.

"In response to the explosion of green marketing in recent years, the agency initiated a review of its Green Guides to ensure that they are responsive to today's marketplace," Vladeck said in his written testimony. The commission is looking into topics beyond the scope of the existing guides, he noted, "because many currently used green claims, such as 'sustainable' and 'carbon neutral,' were not common when the Commission last revised the Guides."

The FTC already goes after a few strains of greenwashing—last year, for instance, Kmart got dinged for advertising a line of paper plates as "biodegradable" when they didn't actually decompose. But there are so many different ways to greenwash that the FTC can't go after everything. For instance, a product could claim to use "50 percent more recycled content" in its packaging when that really means a (negligible) increase from 2 percent to 3 percent. Or a product could claim to be "100 percent natural" when some of those "natural" ingredients include hazardous substances like arsenic. TerraChoice has posted a taxonomy of the major greenwashing tactics.

Meanwhile, as Vladeck mentions, there's a whole new set of issues cropping up in response to climate concerns. One big question is whether the FTC will start looking more closely at carbon offsets. It's not always easy for consumers to tell whether a given offset project will actually lead to a real reduction in greenhouse gases. What if the offsets are going toward projects (like reforestation) that would have happened anyway? So the FTC could apply more scrutiny in this field, although industry groups are opposed to the idea—especially since the commission isn't necessarily the ideal agency to set offset regulations. But as long as Congress dithers in passing a climate bill, different agencies are likely to take up different aspects of emissions issues in this sort of ad hoc manner.

Nowadays, it seems like every third Thomas Friedman column is about how the United States is engaged in a green-tech competition with China—one that, much to his chagrin, we seem to be losing handily. His argument's not totally groundless. China really has put more effort (and money) into developing cleaner energy technologies than we have. So have plenty of countries, like Germany and Denmark. And, if you're trying to nudge the United States onto a lower-carbon path, invoking the specter of China isn't a terrible idea, rhetorically speaking.

At the same time, though, this notion that we're in a race with China to see who can develop solar panels and wind turbines the fastest isn't all that useful. If China zooms ahead and figures out how to make really cheap wind turbines, that doesn't hurt anyone—it just makes the enormous task of cutting global carbon emissions that much easier. And, likewise, as Christina Larson reports in a great Yale360 article on the subject, we're just as likely to see specialization: China will likely continue to dominate in low-cost manufacturing, while the United States focuses more on the innovation side—something China's still not well-suited for (at least for the time being):

At present, America still has significant advantages — including the world’s leading university system and the entrepreneurial culture and venture-capital spigots of technology hubs, particularly Silicon Valley. “Intellectual property rights have done a lot to hamper China’s development of green technology,” says Linden Ellis, U.S. director of nonprofit China Dialogue. “People would rather come to Silicon Valley and develop a technology where they know it will be protected by the law, right down to every line, than go to China and try to develop a technology there where maybe the components will be cheaper and there is a lot of interest, but people do not trust that their findings will be protected.”

Similar concerns have, for the past two decades, grounded Beijing’s attempts to build a domestic airline industry, considered the pinnacle of high-tech manufacturing. Foreign companies and top-notch engineers have simply been unwilling to share technology with China (Boeing has even avoided building factories in China, for fear of commercial espionage). The result: Planes that fly from Beijing to Shanghai today are still built by Boeing and Airbus. …

Of course, China would like to change this. Beijing is doing its best to both allay the fears of international partners and to nurture its own homegrown innovators. A program known as the “State High-Tech Development Plan,” launched by Beijing in March 1986 and nicknamed the “863 Program,” aims to develop top scientists in China and to incubate cutting-edge technology projects in energy and other sectors. So far, its results have been modest over two decades: birthing a family of computer processors known as Loongson, and some technology used in the Shenzhou spacecraft. While the 863 Program’s track record should certainly dispel Western assumptions that no good research can come from China, it also disproves the notion that money alone can clone a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Sergey Brin.

There are also plenty of areas where the two countries can actively cooperate, like the development of plug-in cars or carbon capture for coal plants. (See Evan Osnos's New Yorker article for an example of a California electric-car designer hooking up with a Chinese battery firm.)

Granted, none of this will really take off until the United States lays down a price on carbon and other policies to give a big jolt to the clean-energy sector. At the very least, the country needs to stop milling around the starting blocks. But once that happens, the push for green tech probably won't turn into some all-out brawl or—since Friedman insists on using the Sputnik analogy—anything resembling the space race in the 1960s.

(Flickr photo credit: zappyday7)

Over on the homepage today, I have a piece looking in more detail at the looming EPA crackdown on greenhouse gases—what it would involve, what the pros and cons are, and whether the EPA, acting on its own, can actually substitute for a proper climate bill from Congress (especially since the chances of the Senate actually passing a cap-and-trade bill this year aren't looking great at the moment).

In recent weeks, a bunch of conservative Senate Democrats have suggested that, instead of trying to go for broke this year with a big climate bill that curbs carbon emissions, Congress should just pass an "energy-only" bill instead.

What would that entail? As Kate Sheppard reports, one possibility is the legislation that passed out of the Senate energy committee last June, which would lavish subsidies on a variety of energy sources, including oil and gas. That bill could probably snag 60 votes, even in this Congress, but it wouldn't put much of a dent in the country's greenhouse-gas emissions. (Indeed, without a cap on carbon, the bill might even end up increasing emissions—especially if the proposed new transmission lines merely gave coal-fired plants access to new markets, allowing them to boost output.)

In any case, President Obama caused a stir yesterday when he said that its "conceivable" the Senate could take this approach while scuttling cap-and-trade. Obama then went on to make a case for pricing carbon, saying that subsidies alone wouldn't provide enough incentives to shift the economy toward cleaner energy. Still, it was hard to shake the nagging feeling that he was talking about a carbon cap the way he once talked about the public option: something he's in favor of, sure, but also willing to abandon if need be.

So is anyone going to mount a full-throated defense of carbon pricing? Actually, yes. Here was Republican Lindsey Graham earlier today:

There was this idea floating around yesterday – don’t know how serious it is – that somehow it would be wise for Congress to do energy bill only. I don’t think that’s wise. The reason I don’t think that’s wise is that it is a kick-the-can-down-the-road approach. It’s putting off to another Congress what really needs to be done comprehensively.

I don’t think you’ll ever have energy independence the way I want it until you start dealing with carbon pollution and pricing carbon. The two are connected in my view – very much connected. The money to be made in solving the carbon pollution problem can only happen when you price carbon in my view. So if the approach is to try to pass some half-assed energy bill and say that is moving the ball down the road, forget it with me.

Graham's right. Ultimately, only a price on carbon, rippling through the economy, will be able to spur all the myriad little changes needed to shift away from dirty energy. Having Congress just draw up a list of its favorite technologies and hand those companies money isn't even close to a workable alternative (subsidies and efficiency standards and new transmission are a good complement to a carbon price, but not a substitute). That said, no one knows yet what Graham's preferred approach actually is, especially since he dislikes the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House last summer. This Greenwire piece tries to make sense of where Graham's at in his negotiations with John Kerry and Joe Lieberman, but the picture's still muddled.

(Flickr photo credit: World Economic Forum)

Sometime around 2050, there are going to be nine billion people roaming this planet—two billion more than there are today. It's a safe bet that all those folks will want to eat. And that's... an incredibly daunting prospect. Right now, an estimated one billion people go hungry each day. So add two billion more people, a limited supply of arable land, plus the fact that rising incomes will boost demand for meat and dairy products, plus the fact that many key natural resources (fisheries, say) are already being overexploited… and it's hard to see the situation getting better. And that's before we get into the fact that the planet's heating up, which is expected to wreak havoc on agricultural yields.

Still, not everyone's convinced that feeding nine billion people—and doing it in a sustainable fashion—is a totally impossible task. A new paper published this week in Science, written by Britain's chief scientific adviser John Beddington along with nine other experts, outlines a way this could actually be done. The catch? Doing so would require "radical" changes to the current global food system. The paper's a great synthesis of a wide range of different food issues, and I'll just pull out the main ideas:

Boosting crop yields: If the supply of farmland is ultimately finite, then boosting yields is the only way we'll get more food. Now, this subject usually gets tangled up in heated debates about the virtues or evils of genetically modified foods—and the study authors do recommend GM crops as a "potentially valuable technology" that "should neither be privileged nor automatically dismissed." (Imagining that fancy technology will just solve all these food problems, though, is likely misguided.) But there are plenty of smaller, more mundane yield-boosting approaches, too—right now, there are plenty of small farmers in the developing world that could get more out of their land right now with better training or access to financing. (This is known as the "yield gap.")

Stop tossing out so much food: The study estimates that 30 percent to 40 percent of the world's food is thrown out each year. In poorer countries, this typically happens because the food-chain infrastructure is shoddy, or storage facilities are inadequate—something that's pretty straightforward to fix. In wealthier countries, the causes of waste are a lot more varied: Cheap food, the craze for supersized portions, the fact that stores throw away perfectly edible food because it's not as visually appealing, an overreliance on use-by dates "whose safety margins often mean that food fit for consumption is thrown away." Fixing all this would require major advocacy campaigns—though, no, it doesn't mean we'd all have to become freegans.

Fewer hamburgers: Can't imagine this one will go over well, but the authors do suggest that people will probably have to reduce their meat consumption slightly to feed nine billion people. This doesn't mean going vegetarian. A recent study from Germany's Potsdam Institute found that if everyone had a diet equivalent to eating meat three times a week, it'd be perfectly doable to feed nine billion people and rein in some of the gruesome excesses of factory farming. But if the whole world adopted a Western meat diet, we'd need to start razing forests for additional land—three million square kilometers all told, an area about two-thirds the size of the current Amazon rain forest. (Or, who knows? Maybe by 2050 we'll all resort to in vitro meat instead.)

A slew of green technical stuff: Of course, all those other measures will only go so far. There are also some serious threats to the long-term sustainability of agriculture lurking out there. Global warming's a big one. But then also water shortages due to over-extraction. Soil degradation due to poor farming techniques. Loss of biodiversity due poor management. The fact that fisheries are being ravaged (so something like a cap-and-trade system for fish could help here). A lot of the fixes here are dry and technical, and they tend to get discussed as wonky enviro ideas that might be nice to do but aren't essential. Except that, as the Science study makes clear, they really are crucial—at least if all those nine billion people want enough to eat.

P.S. Oh yes, forgot one: biofuels! It's probably going to be hard to find enough food for nine billion people if we're still diverting vast swaths of farmland for crop-based ethanol. (Though maybe by then we'll have moved on to algae fuels or electric cars or some other fancy technology.)

(Flickr photo credit: Orhan Tsolak)

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It didn't get a lot of fanfare, but January 31 was the deadline under the Copenhagen accord for the world's countries to formally submit their plans for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and helping to address climate change. So what happened? Well, the deadline came and went, and the vast majority of nations (roughly 130) didn't submit anything at all. On the upside, though, the handful of countries that actually pump out most of the world's carbon-dioxide did submit plans. Here were the major pledges for cutting emissions:

-- United States: 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 (i.e., 4 percent below 1990 levels—and this is pending legislation)
-- European Union: at least 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 (they were promising to go to 30 if other countries did more, but that's looking unlikely)
-- Canada: 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 (i.e. a 2.5 percent rise from 1990 levels)
-- Japan: 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020
-- Brazil: 39 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 (mostly by preventing deforestation)
-- China: reduce carbon intensity by at least 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2020
-- India: reduce carbon intensity by at least 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020
-- New Zealand: at least 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020
-- Australia: at least 3 percent below 1990 levels and as much as 23 percent below them (depending on what other countries do)
-- Maldives: carbon-neutral by 2020

These are all tangible steps, but still minor ones. Add up the promises, and it's not enough to avert serious warming: Ecofys, a consulting firm, estimates that if all those countries actually met to their targets, global temperatures would be on course to rise 3.5°C (6.3°F) above pre-industrial levels. The agreed-upon goal, recall, was 2°C. What's more, even these goals aren't guaranteed: The U.S. pledge, for instance, would depend on Congress passing legislation that looks like the House climate/energy bill, and the prospects in the Senate are growing dim.

So where does that leave things? Dave Roberts has a fantastic post at Grist on the state of play. The most notable part is that the Copenhagen framework moves away from the old notion of a global treaty with legally binding targets. Instead, under the current Copenhagen accord, countries are voluntarily setting their own national targets (usually based on domestic legislation). In some ways, this is a more realistic approach—plenty of countries had obligations to cut emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, but they never actually followed through (the EU was a big exception).

On the other hand, without a legally binding treaty, it's unclear whether there will be any outside pressure on countries if they're not doing enough to tackle the problem. Experts have argued, for instance, that China's carbon-intensity goals are barely an improvement on business-as-usual. Same goes for India. And in the United States, Congress could end up passing even weaker targets than Obama's promised—or no targets at all. What, if anything, could push these countries to go further? Roberts sees two possible incentives for countries: "a) clean energy becomes an economic prize, and b) the impacts of climate change threaten to become crippling." I'd add a third—countries could find that cutting carbon pollution turns out to be easier and cheaper than expected (that's a big reason why environmental legislation has historically started off weak and then been strengthened over time). But that about sums it up.

(Flickr photo credit: metz79)

There's plenty of thrilling budget news today, what with the president's proposal for the 2011 fiscal year now up on the OMB site. On energy matters, the big eye-catcher is the fact that White House wants to scrap some $36.5 billion in tax breaks for fossil-fuel producers over the next decade:

For the petroleum industry, the cuts primarily come from repealing companies' ability to write down depletion of wells and intangible drilling costs such as renting rigs and axing the domestic manufacturing tax deduction. The administration also increased the amortization period for independent producers for some exploration costs, costing the industry $1.1 billion over the next decade. ...

The White House targeted $2.3 billion in similar tax benefits for the coal sector between 2011-2020.

It's not like this idea materialized out of thin air. Last year, the G-20 nations all pledged to start phasing out fossil-fuel subsidies as a step toward reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The White House is proposing to redirect some of that money toward cleaner energy sources: The budget also has $5 billion in new loan guarantees for renewable projects and $36 billion in new loan guarantees for nuclear reactors. Though, granted, the president can propose whatever he wants; what really matters is whether lawmakers follow through. And the tax breaks for oil and gas producers have a lot of support in Congress—last year, in the FY2010 budget, the White House wanted to repeal $31.5 billion worth of fossil-fuel subsidies, and that idea was buried.

Meanwhile, it's worth asking what effect this would actually have on oil and gas production. The petroleum industry responded to the news this morning by predicting doom. But for another view, economist Alan Krueger went before Congress last September and estimated that junking the tax breaks would only decrease domestic production of oil and gas by less than 0.5 percent. Natural gas prices would, in the absolute worst case, nose up by about 1 percent, while world oil prices would hardly budge at all (that's because U.S. oil production is relatively small in the global scheme of things). Of course, that also means that, by itself, repealing the subsidies won't have a huge environmental impact, either.

(Flickr photo credit: mikebaird)

Over at Dot Earth, Andy Revkin has a smart story about the growing pressure to change how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) operates, especially after the recent scandal over glaciers. (In the IPCC's 2007 report, there was a line about how glaciers in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035; it turns out that line had zero basis in peer-reviewed science, yet still got past reviewers.) This is a worthy topic: The IPCC has done terrific work over the years, and its reports are considered the best summaries of the state of knowledge about climate change, but they're not perfect and could stand to be improved.

For one, the safeguards obviously need to be strengthened. That glacier line should've never made it through the review process. Same thing, it seems, goes for this bit about rainforests. Better safeguards are especially crucial for the sections on potential impacts of global warming. This is an area of keen interest, but it also involves some of the murkiest research and can span multiple disciplines—sometimes even social science. (By contrast, the IPCC's Working Group 1 report, which deals with the physical basis for climate change—how we know that greenhouse gases are warming the planet, etc.—is more straightforward and gets the heaviest scrutiny from the physical-science community.)

Another criticism of the IPCC, raised by UC San Diego's David Victor, is that the panel is overly cautious and doesn't deal with outliers very well. Case in point: The IPCC's 2007 report projected that, at most, sea levels would rise 26 to 59 centimeters by 2100. Except the problem was the IPCC explicitly left out the full range of potential effects from melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, because that ice-sheet behavior can be difficult to model. Leaving out those sorts of uncertainties may make for a stronger "consensus," but it can also give a misleading picture of the risks we're actually facing. Since the 2007 report, plenty of research has suggested (e.g., 1, 2, 3) that the IPCC seriously low-balled its sea-level prediction.

Beyond that, there's another critique of the IPCC that Revkin doesn't mention, but which seems important. The IPCC moves very slowly, and it's usually a few steps behind the leading edge of climate research. The panel stops taking scientific input a year or two before the report comes out, and the lag often shows: Apart from sea levels and ice sheets, the 2007 IPCC reports badly underestimated the rate at which greenhouse gases were rising, because it didn't incorporate recent rapid growth in countries like China and India. So the emissions scenarios were obsolete almost as soon as they were published.

Looking ahead, there's another dilemma: The next IPCC reports won't be out until 2013 and 2014, even though a number of major policy decisions on greenhouse gases will likely need to be made before then. Now, it's understandable why the IPCC takes so long to assemble its big reports, since it needs to do a careful review of all the relevant science, survey a bunch of complex and often heated debates, and put everything in context. Plus, the scientists working on the IPCC are volunteering their time, and its a lot of work and a diversion from their own research. Still, the sluggish pace is out of sync with both the needs of policymakers and the rapidly advancing state of climate science.

(Flickr photo credit: kimberlyfaye)

Nothing like a major breakthrough in fusion-power research to enliven a Friday afternoon:

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported Thursday they have taken a major step toward harnessing the forces that power the sun in an effort to create unlimited energy on Earth.

In experiments at the lab's National Ignition Facility, the scientists successfully fired an array of 192 laser beams at a helium-filled target no larger than a BB shot and instantly heated it to 6 million degrees Fahrenheit. The gas vanished in a tiny explosion.

The scientists said that result marked the most important advance yet in more than 10 years of work at the $3.5 billion facility.

The main purpose of this laser array will be to create miniature thermonuclear reactions that can be used to test the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. But, of course, there's that other elusive goal—figuring out how to create safe fusion reactions that could, in theory, create unlimited amounts of clean energy. Then again, that's been the dream for going on 50 years now.

Speaking of fusion, New Scientist recently took a nice look at "the next big thing in nuclear fusion research"—the $10 billion ITER facility in southern France, set to be built by 2018. The piece outlines some of the considerable obstacles to fusion power, though the best part is that ITER will rely on coconuts—tons and tons of coconuts—to make a key substance in the reactor's vacuum pumps that will scoop up waste helium. For whatever reason, charcoal made from coconut shells seems to work best—particularly 2002-vintage Indonesian coconuts. Good thing they have a stockpile.

(Photo credit: Lawrence Livermore National Lab)

Guess Obama wasn't kidding when he gave all those shout-outs to nuclear power in his State of the Union address on Wednesday. According to Bloomberg, Obama's 2011 budget will request $54 billion in loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors—triple the previous amount. Here's the industry's case for expanded loan guarantees:

Industry groups such as the Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute have said the loan guarantees are critical to reviving the industry because most companies can’t afford the capital investment in a facility that can take a decade to complete. The institute in a December report put the cost of a reactor at as much as $9 billion.

And the case against comes from the Union of Concerned Scientists, which argues that big nuclear projects have historically been very risky—prone to delays and cost overruns—and that the default rate on these loans can be quite high, sticking taxpayers with the bill. Instead, says UCS, it'd be better to direct that money toward cheaper, more reliable options for reducing emissions—efficiency or waste-heat capture or even wind power. At which point nuke supporters sometimes reply that if we can just get this first new wave of reactors built, costs will start coming down. (No new reactors have been ordered in the United States since 1978.) 

Now, this argument tends to go round and round—see here for a recent roundtable with a variety of views on the subject—although do note that it would help if we had a price on carbon and could lean more heavily on the market, rather than federal subsidies, to sort out these disputes. But that option's bogged down in Congress right now.

Meanwhile, costs aren't the only hold-up with nuclear power. There's also the waste question, especially now that Yucca Mountain's been nixed. But it seems like the government's creeping forward on that, too: On Friday, the Energy Department announced a new commission to study waste disposal. They even got the ubiquitous Lee Hamilton to head the thing (you might remember him from his stints on the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group, among other blue-ribbon specials). It's not clear that yet another commission can resolve a volatile issue like how we should handle our radioactive waste, but it's a first step, at least.

(Flickr photo credit: *helmen)

So the White House has finally announced the full list of where that $8 billion in stimulus money for high-speed rail is going. Here are the two big, headline-grabbing projects:

* Florida will get $1.25 billion for a high-speed line between Tampa and Orlando, which is expected to cost about $3.5 billion all told. Read Adie Tomer's critical take on the Tampa-Orlando project below.

* California will get $2.25 billion to help with a planned high-speed line between Anaheim and San Francisco. (Schwarzenegger was hoping for twice that amount—that line is expected to cost $42 billion in all).

And then there's a smorgasbord of lesser projects—for example:

* Illinois will get $1.1 billion to upgrade tracks so that three of the five trains running between Alton and Dwight can travel at speeds of 110 mph. (The state will also get a smaller amount to study a new high-speed corridor between St. Louis and Chicago.)

* Wisconsin is getting $810 million to upgrade trains between Madison and Milwaukee.

* Washington and Oregon are getting $590 million to improve the lines between Seattle and Portland.

And so on. See a full map here. Essentially, the money's getting sprinkled around in a fairly diffuse fashion. The only truly massive high-speed rail project that's edging close to reality is the Tampa-Orlando line, which could have trains up and running by 2014. The big California project, by contrast, still needs a lot of work—and funding.

And the smaller projects, while worthwhile, aren't going to lay a foundation for a serious high-speed rail network in the country. (Many of the proposed trains will only top out at 90 mph, such as a new line between Cleveland and Cincinnati.) We're not going to see, for instance, bullet trains rocketing between major U.S. cities at speeds of 150 mph or more, the way there are in Europe and China—at least not anytime soon, and not without bigger investments. See Elana Schor's report for more on this: She quotes Rep. John Mica (R-FL), a big HSR booster, who laments that the administration's not being ambitious enough.

Though granted, a vast new HSR network isn't the only goal of this spending. The administration was also seeking out projects that would create jobs in relatively short order. Plus, as my colleague Jon Cohn points out over e-mail, spending on rail seems like good politics—voters obviously know what trains are for, it's easy to see how it'll create jobs, and so forth. Indeed, it's sort of striking that there are so few other big, highly visible projects in the Recovery Act—there's little else that's comparable to, say, the Hoover Dam during the New Deal. (Then again, that might be an argument for taking another look at trains when Congress puts together a second jobs package this year.)

(Flickr photo credit: George Goodnight)