Why North Carolina wants to tax hybrid, electric car owners

A file photo of a Toyota Prius hybrid. (Toronto Star) 

Some things are hard to believe. Like this one: North Carolina wants to tax hybrid and electric car owners.

Lawmakers in the state are considering a tax on drivers of energy-efficient cars: $50 a year for a hybrid and $100 for an electric car. Very simply put, state politicans say it is a way to make up for the revenue lost when drivers buy less gasoline. The gasoline tax funds highways in the state.

This tax could raise to about $1.5 million each year.

(The state's Senate will consider the measure but hasn’t acted yet.)

Here is how The Daily Beast explains it:

"The state relies on gas taxes to fund highway construction. But gas consumption has been falling, in part because the American auto fleet has been getting more efficient. In effect, people who drive cars that get 50 miles per gallon are contributing only half as much to the upkeep of roads as people who drive cars that get 25 miles per gallon."

Of course, online commentators have had a field day and they have raised vital questions: Should drivers of fuel-efficient gasoline vehicles be charged more because they use less gasoline? Or those who use lots of gas be offered a rebate?

Most commentators have angrily called it the “backward thinking attitude” of the N.C. government. Others have said they will “never” pay the tax.

To be fair, N.C. isn’t the only state embroiled in this.

Similar legislation that may tax hybrid cars is pending in Texas, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Arizona. Washington state added a $100 registration fee in February for owners of all-electric cars.

The bottomline: That’s the thank you drivers get a) for trying to save money on gasoline, b) for reducing carbon emissions.

Raveena Aulakh is the Star's environment reporter. She is intrigued by climate change and its impact, now and long-term, and wildlife. Follow her on Twitter @raveenaaulakh

Lake Chad's shrinking mystery solved

A young boy takes water from Lake Chad  to drink, in Koudouboul, Chad  in this 2006 photo. (AP/Christophe Ena)

Ever wondered what really happened to Lake Chad?

In its glory days during the 1960s, it was 38,000 square kilometres of sparkling blue-green water that nourished humans, animals and plant life in the four countries it straddled: Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria. But the lake is now a speck of what it was -- just 1,300 square kilometres in size.

The prolonged drought of the 1980s was initially blamed for its death and now new research by New University of Washington, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, says that drought was caused in part by Northern Hemisphere air pollution.

The research is yet to be published but Science Daily spoke to researchers who worked on it. 

Previous research has suggested a link between coal-burning and the drought but this is believed to be the first study that used historical observations to find that this drought was part of a global shift in tropical rainfall.

Eventually, when clean-air legislation passed in the U.S. and Europe, the rain band shifted back, and the drought lessened.

Related research by the researchers and their collaborators shows that global warming is now causing the land-covered Northern Hemisphere to warm faster than the Southern Hemisphere, further reversing the pre-1980s trend.

Raveena Aulakh is the Star's environment reporter. She is intrigued by climate change and its impact, now and long-term, and wildlife. Follow her on Twitter @raveenaaulakh

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An aerial view of the flooding in Passau, Germany on Monday. Heavy rainfalls caused flooding along rivers and lakes in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. (AP Photo/dpa, Peter Kneffel)

Can nuclear power control global climate change?

A file photo of Fukushima Dai-ichi in Okuma, Japan. The nuclear power plant melted down in March 2011 after being hit by a tsunami. (AP photo.)

This one will definitely be controversial: a new study shows that global use of nuclear power has prevented almost 2 million air pollution-related deaths and the release of 64 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases.

Yes, it argues that nuclear power is good and can control climate change.

Authors Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen say that nuclear power can help control global climate change and illness and death associated with air pollution. Yes, they admit there are serious questions about safety and disposal of radioactive waste nevertheless they make that argument.

The study is published in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Kharecha and Hansen contend that nuclear power could prevent anywhere from 420,000 to 7 million additional deaths by 2050, and prevent the emission of 80-240 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

“By contrast, we assess that large-scale expansion of unconstrained natural gas use would not mitigate the climate problem and would cause far more deaths than the expansion of nuclear power," it notes.

Those are big numbers. But wait a second, what about the safety of nuclear power, especially since Fukushima blew up after a tsunami?

Here is what the authors say: “Our estimated human deaths caused by nuclear power from 1971 to 2009 are far lower than the avoided deaths. Globally, we calculate 4900 such deaths, or about 370 times lower than our result for avoided deaths.”

(They calculated 1,800 deaths in Europe, 1,500 in the U.S., 540 in Japan, 460 in Russia, 40 in China, and 20 in India.)

Twenty-five per cent of these deaths are due to occupational accidents, the study said.

If the role of nuclear power declines significantly in the next few decades, the International Energy Agency predicts that achieving major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that are required to mitigate climate change would require “heroic achievements.”

Raveena Aulakh is the Star’s environment reporter. She is intrigued by climate change and its impact, now and long-term, and wildlife. Follow her on Twitter @raveenaaulakh

Beauty and crisis: the photographs of Sebastiao Salgado

The Anavilhanas. Amazonas, Brazil. 2009. (Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas images)

 

Are you planning a trip to the Antarctic any time soon?  A sojourn in the jungles of Papua New Guinea? A ramble through the isolated northern Amazon?

If not, set aside a couple of hours for the Royal Ontario Museum’s journey to the ends of the Earth through the lens of Brazilian uber-photog Sebastiao Salgado.

Salgado, 69, began his career as an economist, but abandoned the ivory tower for the grassroots, trekking with his camera kit to meet the people who are on the sharp end of economic policy – the forgotten, the desperately poor, the displaced.

“I tell a little bit of my life to them, and they tell a little of theirs to me,” he says. “the picture itself is just the tip of the iceberg.”

The ROM exhibition, Genesis, is a new chapter for Salgado. Instead of chronicling hell on Earth, he spent eight years recording his view of an earthly paradise for posterity: his “love letter to the planet.”

It was a painful transition. His decades of capturing human misery had left him depressed and exhausted, ready to shelve his cameras. And returning to southeast Brazil in the 1990s he was shocked to see that not only people, but land was in crisis – the lush landscape he remembered withered and dying from unsustainable farming.

He and his wife and collaborator, Lelia Wanick Salgado, created Instituto Terra, a non-profit group that replanted nearly 2 million trees, bringing it back to vibrant life. The result led to project Genesis.

It was a gruelling but rewarding eight-year trek through the pristine beauty of remote places, both inhabited and free from human footprints.

In Russia’s unforgiving Arctic Yamal-Nenets Salgado walked 47 days with reindeer herders, telling the Guardian – with some understatement – “for a Brazilian in temperatures of -35C spending 10 or 12 hours outside wasn’t easy.”

His stark, multi-dimensional black and white photos are almost sculptural in quality. The viewer is drawn into them hypnotically. Missing are the unseen human forces that are destroying the territory they depict: pollution, globalization, overpopulation, climate change.

“I want people to understand that this is the only world we have,” Salgado told CBC. “I believe…we’ve arrived at the break-even point. From here we cannot cross. We’ve already destroyed too much.”

See this while you can.

FURTHER READING AND VIEWING:To the ends of the earth (audio);  The making of Genesis

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to South Asia and the Middle East, winning national and international awards.

'Weather Whiplash' replacing record cold with record heat

North Dakota has seen some wild temperature swings, as has a lot of the U.S.  (Jim Gehrz/Minneapolis Star Tribune/MCT)

Those making bitter mental notes on 2013 as the year spring never came, behold the phenomenon of "Weather Whiplash" that is taking hold in the central U.S., where near-record cold to near-record heat is happening with astonishing speed.

The topsy-turvy changes are especially weird in places like Chicago, which awakened to near-freezing temps Monday morning but is today expected to top out at 30.5 C. And Bismarck, N.D., and Aberdeen, S.D., also saw similarly extreme swings in the span of a single day, rocketing to roasting temps with each passing hour.

The extremes are discussed in detail here by Weather Underground's resident historian Christopher C. Burt, who traces the powerful surge of warm air flowing into the central U.S.

Accuweather.com is tracking the same phenomenon, noting the Midwest heat will lose some of its steam as it shifts east. But the charges are still noteworthy, with the Buffalo area shifting from snow flurries Monday to T-shirt temps tomorrow.

A surge of comments on Burt's post suggest the phenomenon, though rare, is not unique, citing the "long winter" of 1881 that was later described in an episode of "Little House on the Prairie." One commenter adds: "Cynics say you know you're in the midwest when you need both your furnace and AC on the same day."

Mitch Potter is the Star's Washington Bureau Chief, his third foreign posting after previous assignments to London and Jerusalem. Potter led the Toronto Star’s coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he won a 2006 National Newspaper Award for his reportage. His dispatches include datelines from 33 countries since 2000. Follow him on Twitter: @MPwrites

Elephant poachers reported in Cameroon's Dzanga-Ndoki National Park

A photo from August 2010 shows a Kenya Wildlife Services ranger standing guard over an ivory haul as it is moved through Jomo Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi. (AFP)

Bad news about elephants just doesn’t seem to end, does it?

World Wildlife Fund says poachers have entered one of Africa’s unique elephant habitats, Dzanga-Ndoki National Park, in Cameroon.  

A group of 17 armed “individuals” entered the park earlier this week and headed for the Dzanga Bai, locally known as the “village of elephants," a large clearing where between 50 and 200 elephants congregate every day to drink mineral salts present in the sands, said a WWF news release

Reportedly, two WWF-supported local researchers were approached by some members of this armed group in the forest on Monday, asking for food and directions to a viewing tower used by scientists and tourists to observe elephants.

The researchers said they gave a false lead and ran away. But they soon heard gunshots.

It is not exactly clear what happened after.  

“Unless swift and decisive action is taken, it appears highly likely that poachers will take advantage of the chaos and instability of the country to slaughter the elephants living in this unique World Heritage Site,” Jim Leape, WWF international director general said in the statement.

In Bouba N’Djida, Cameroon’s other national park, poachers killed at least 300 elephants in February 2012.

There were up to 5 million elephants in Africa 70 years ago. Today, just several hundred thousand are left and in the past year, an estimated 32,000 elephants have been killed for their ivory.

Black-market ivory sells for about $1,300 (CDN) per pound.

Raveena Aulakh is the Star's environment reporter. She is intrigued by climate change and its impact, now and long-term, and wildlife. Follow her on Twitter @raveenaaulakh

South African company wins prize for plan to feed livestock maggots

Nearly half of the world's wild-caught fish are ground up into fishmeal and fed to farmed fish, cattle and pigs.

It's a huge business. Last year Chile exported at least $535 million worth of fishmeal, while Peru sold a staggering $1.6 billion, The New York Times reported.

As environmental activists warn the world's oceans are fast depleting, an African company has come up with a possible solution to the problem: flies and maggots.

In Cape Town Tuesday night, South African tech firm AgriProtein won a $100,000 prize for "technological innovation" sponsored by the UN. AgriProtein, which is also working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has developed a new product it calls Magmeal.

AgriProtein breeds flies at its production facility near Cape Town. A single female fly can lay between 750 to over 1,000 eggs per week. The eggs will then hatch into larvae, according to a profile of the company written last year by the website TradeInvestAfrica.

"Larvae go through three life stages in a 72-hour period, and are harvested just becoming pupae. The harvested larvae are then dried on a fluidised bed dryer, milled into flake form and packed according to customers’ preferences," according to the report.

Chickens and other livestock should have no problem eating the dried maggots instead of fishmeal, the company figures.

"It is not particularly a very attractive topic but the product is natural and what chickens eat in the wild," AgriProtein says on its website.

AgriProtein was among 900 applications from 45 countries who bid on the 2013 Innovation Prize for Africa Awards.

According to Techmoran.com, some other finalists included: SavvyLoo, an eco waterless toilet that drains liquids from solids for environmental impact; The TBag Water Filter, a filter that cleans polluted water and The Malaria pf/PAN Test Kit, a malaria treatment test that determines within 30 minutes if treatment is effective.

Rick Westhead is a foreign affairs writer at The Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead

 

The race to save cassava in Africa is on

A Nigerian farmer holds cassava roots. Experts have reported new outbreaks of virus that damage the vegetable crop. (AFP photo)

Cassava, the vegetable that could be Africa’s miracle crop, is in trouble.  

Scientists say a disease destroying entire crops has spread out of East Africa and into the heart of the continent and is attacking plants as far south as Angola and now threatens to move west into Nigeria, the world’s biggest producer of the potato-like root that helps feed 500 million Africans.

Claude Fauquet, co-founder of the Global Cassava Partnership for the 21st Century, told The Associated Press that the devastating results are already dramatic today but could be catastrophic tomorrow if nothing is done to halt the Cassava Brown Streak Disease, or CBSD.

He said that Africa is losing as much as 50 million tonnes of cassava each year to the disease.

The tropical root vegetable grows well in poor quality soil and high temperatures, making it resistant to climate change. It requires almost no labour to grow.

That’s not all: its roots are rich in carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals. It is already a dietary staple throughout the continent, and it could feed more. The vegetable can also be used as an industrial starch to produce plywood, textiles and paper.

It is also a vital cash-crop for millions of small farmers.

But now, there are fears that the epidemic is pushing into West Africa, and could reach Nigeria. Fauquet said scientists must act fast to keep it from reaching West Africa.

A group of scientists are meeting in Italy this week to work out a plan to fight the disease that is killing cassava. The conference is "dedicated to declaring war on cassava viruses in Africa."

READ MORE: Does cassava hold the secret to climate change adaptation?

Raveena Aulakh is the Star's environment reporter. She is intrigued by climate change and its impact, now and long-term, and wildlife. Follow her on Twitter @raveenaaulakh

Indian state hopes solar panels covering canals will ease energy, water woes

With a population of 1.2 billion, India is among the fastest-growing countries and is poised during our lifetime to eclipse China as the world's largest.

That well-documented growth has led to a near-unrivalled thirst both for electricity and water. The World Resources Institute has estimated India is planning on building 455 new coal power plants -- four times as many that exists now.

India also recently proposed the building of 292 new dams through the Himalayas, which would double the country's hydropower capacity and perhaps help deal with the power outages that have become daily occurrences in large cities like New Delhi and Mumbai.

Amid worries about how the environment might be impacted by the many changes comes news out of western India of a novel method for dealing with two environmental problems.

In the state of Gujarat, India is building experimental solar panels overtop of irrigation canals.

The panels will produce electricity and also reduce evaporation of the canal water by as much as 237,750 gallons each year, Gujarat's state government says.

India faces a looming water crisis.

I wrote about this in 2009, noting that thanks to global warming and other environmental woes, India's agricultural output may be carved by 40 per cent over the next 70 years, according to the Center for Global Development, a U.S.-based think-tank.

Gujarat guarantees premium prices for the solar electricity, and those subsidies have helped the state become one of the largest renewable energy producing states in the country, according to a report on technology website GigaOM.

The Indian project, which produces 1 megawatt of electricity, covers a small section of the 458 kilometre canal.

Rick Westhead is a foreign affairs writer at the Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead