Link suite overview on malnutrition, blighted futures, dumb food aid, sachets of hopes, micronutrient magic, microbiology and new markets

Links become part of the TrackerNews searchable database.

There are now, by recent tally, 7 billion people on planet Earth and at least 2 billion of us are hungry. Malnutrition, either from lack of food or too much of the wrong food is a human tragedy on every level imaginable. By the time they are just two years old, malnourished children are permanently stunted, both in body and mind. Illness defines their lives (diarrhea to diabetes). The spark of potential dims.

Translated into the cold hard statistics of economic health, a humanitarian crisis starves the state of GDP. Productivity losses due to chronic famine in western China are estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. In the US, a “Hunger Bill Map” calculates, state by state, the cost of avoidable illnesses, poor educational outcomes and the value of emergency charitable donations.

As goes the “bottom of the pyramid,” so goes the pyramid: human potential, both at an individual level and as a species, squandered.

In world increasingly bound together by global trade and digital communications, lowering tides may not sink, but most certainly threaten, all boats. Whether from compassion or self-interest, malnutrition, a crisis whose vast dimensions have been obscured by images of the most extreme cases—the extended-bellies, toothpick-thin limbs and glassy-eyes of children more dead than alive—must be comprehensively tackled. The alternative is simply too grim to consider.

According to the UN’s 2011 Human Development Report, continued degradation of the environment just about guarantees that all development gains made in the world’s poorest countries will be erased, if not reversed, by mid-century. The issues of pollution, deforestation, soil erosion and climate change are deeply entwined with malnutrition.

Even if all the eco-angles were addressed, it will take more than a better distribution of calories to fix the problem. International aid group Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF / Doctors Without Borders) has been at the forefront of a campaign—Starved for Attention—against grain-based food aid, primarily from the US, that fails to meet the nutritional needs of children. Although a boon to American farmers, shipping tons of corn and soy halfway around the world is a staggeringly inefficient and expensive way to help.

MSF promotes all-in-one “Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Foods” (RUTF) such as Plumpy’Nut, an enriched peanut butter paste that comes packaged in small packets called sachets, which are small enough for even the littlest hands to grasp. Rip open a sachet and a child squeezes out the sweet paste. Supplies can be given to mothers, shortening stays at emergency feeding centers. Another advantage: no water required.

A similar product call Wawa Mum using chickpeas as the base was used in Pakistan as part of the World Food Programme’s (WFP) post-flood emergency response. By incorporating a locally grown crop, the fortified food can also help revive a local economy.

Food giant PepsiCo, partnering with USAID and WFP, has announced a similar effort in Ethiopia that will enlist 20,000 small farmers and develop a nutritional food for young children.

Corporate partnerships have become an increasingly important trend. France-based Danone has collaborated with Bangladeshi microfinance pioneer Grameen to develop an inexpensive fortified yogurt that can last up to week without refrigeration. A cartoon-ish and child-friendly spokes-lion (someone dressed up in a lion suit) is used to help market “Shakti Doi,” which comes in both mango and vanilla flavors. Everything about the production and distribution of the yogurt is designed to generate jobs and strengthen community. Local dairies supply the milk. Thousands of women sell the product door to door.

The network that develops through the Shakti Doi yogurt routes also provides a way to distribute information about health and hygiene. Malnutrition weakens immune systems and people who are sick are more likely to be malnourished.

This hyper-local distribution model offers other advantages as well. In an op-ed piece for Indian broadcaster IBN, Save the Children’s Ananthapriya Subramanian tells the story of a mother who cannot risk leaving her home in an illegal Mumbai slum for fear it will be burgled. The door is a flimsy sack. Help has to come to her or help won’t happen.

THINKING SMALL

Calories and micronutrients can’t help a child with diarrhea. The food doesn’t stick around long enough for its nutrition to be absorbed. An estimated 1.6 million children die annually from diarrhea—a leading cause of death of young children worldwide. Something as simple as a bar of soap can make a difference.

Probiotics (beneficial gut microbes) and prebiotics (substances that help good gut microbes thrive) have been shown to cut the length of a bout of diarrhea in otherwise healthy children. A robust gut biome is also able to absorb more nutrition from food. More research is needed to determine whether pro- and prebiotics could make a difference among those moderately malnourished.

Another small and potentially powerful answer could come in the form of a genetically modified fungus called VitaYeast. Developed by a group of Johns Hopkins undergrads for the iGEM competition (international genetically modified machines), the yeast is wired to produce vitamin A. As the yeast multiplies during bread-making, vitamin A is infused into the dough. Baking kills off the yeast. Still in experimental stages, the approach shows promise. It should be cheaper to add vitamin-enhanced yeast into dough than to fortify grain or grow GMO wheat.

PATH, an international health organization, has taken a slightly different approach, developing “Ultra Rice,” a fortified rice dough. “Grains,” that look just like regular rice are added to regular rice at a ratio of 1:100. PATH recently partnered with drug-maker Abbott to refine the manufacture and distribution of the product in India.

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Hungry Planet is one of the larger TrackerNews link suites, with more than 40 stories. All links on the aggregator become part of the TrackerNews searchable database.

Among the highlights:

• World Food Programme Backgrounder on Hunger (website)

• GAIN / Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (website)

• Honduras: Are high food prices fueling child malnutrition? / Marie Chantal Messier / World Bank blogs

• Hunger Notes / World Hunger Education Service (aggregator)

• Dr. Mehmood Khan taking on the PepsiCo nutritional challenge/ PepsiCo’s Global Nutrition Group / Chicago Tribune

• Price of Potassium Iodate Soars / GAIN

• MixMe™ micronutrient powder from DSM Nutritional Products: an improved solution to combat iron and zinc deficiency / DSM
  

• Sliced Bread Just Got Better / Johns Hopkins University (video)

• It Takes a Banker: Ecosystem Economics, Climate Change & the Poor / J.A. Ginsburg / TrackerNews

Link suite overview: On vector-borne disease and climate change, connecting the infinitesimal and the invisible, Dopey Does DDT, the need for ecosystems thinking & bugs gone borg

Links become part of the TrackerNews searchable database.

It is a midsummer night’s feast and we are on the menu. Nibbled and sipped by winged vampires and  blood-sucking squatters, we scratch, swat and fret. But the bugs, annoying though they may be, are merely messengers. Virus, bacteria, rickettsia, protozoans and helminths—those are the ones turning the whole predator / prey equation on its head.

From a safe distance, preferably behind screens, pants tucked sensibly into socks and doused in parfum-de-DEET, the elegance of the big picture is both undeniable and astonishing. This is the web of life at its webbiest, connecting the fates of the infinitesimal to the invisible—shifts in weather patterns, changes in climate—and everything in between.

A bird flies a little further north than usual one spring, staking out territory in what, for it, is literally new territory.  A warmer, more humid world has brought earlier thaws and later freezes to this particular neck of the woods. Which is also  good news for the bird’s passengers: the ticks on its body, mites on its wings, virus and bacteria in its blood. Occasionally even something as big as a snail manages to survive the journey, berthed in a bird’s gut, likely carrying a parasitic payload of its own.

For everything we can see changing in the landscape—tundra to forest, swamp to sea, lake to desert—there is so much more going on at the edges of detection.

A deer tick finds itself in grasslands favored by voles rather than the forest, where white-footed mice rule the leaf litter. But a blood meal is a blood meal. So the tick latches on and borrelia—the bacteria carried by the tick that causes Lyme Disease—sets up shop in a new animal host. This is the Disease Cycle as jazz, constantly riffing theme and variation. Innovation as making do.

While global trade and travel do a mighty job of mixing up the pot, speeding the spread of pathogens and invasive species, climate change alters the basic recipe. How do you restore a tundra whose permafrost has melted? Or a rainforest weakened by repeated periods of drought? How do you make plans for a world in transition to a “new normal”?

Pollution, carbon emissions, deforestation—all at least hold out the possibility of reversal: things can be done, if only we would do them.

Climate change is a dragon awakened.

BITE!!!

“Bite!,” the new link suite-story on the TrackerNews aggregator, surveys a variety of vector-borne diseases, all on the rise due, at least in part, to climate change: Cold-blooded insects prefer a warmer, wetter world.

It is not their only stroke of luck. Tight budgets in the US have put mosquito abatement districts in the political cross-hairs as an easy target for “saving” taxpayers money, no matter the expense of taxpayer illness. Lose the public abatement districts and there would be no coordinated surveillance for West Nile virus. Or for dengue, which has recently established a foothold in Florida decades after it was eradicated. Or for the next headline horror—chikungunya?—on the horizon. The standard bureaucratic spin about”the best science available” falls flat when the “best” is barely any at all.

Bugs—and the bugs they carry—won’t disappear even if the data do.

Funding actually needs to go up. Way up, according to Peter Hotez, president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, dengue is “a bigger threat than many of the biodefense pathogens that we’re spending huge amounts of money on. Dengue and other vector-borne diseases are a true homeland security threat.”

Really, though, they are a global security threat and public health disaster. For every breakthrough…

• a  recent discovery that a common veterinary drug can be used to protect against malaria

• a better mosquito trap that uses eau-du-sweaty socks as an attractant

…there are setbacks.  Babesia, a parasite carried by ticks—including the tick that transmits Lyme Disease—causing a malaria-like illness, is on the ascent. Diagnosis and treatment an be tricky. There is no vaccine. Further complicating matters, a single tick can deliver both babesia and borrelia.

Humans are hardly the only animal hosts under assault:

• Cow babesia is among the most serious cattle plagues worldwide. Ticks are becoming increasingly resistant to the chemical brews used to keep it at bay. In the US, a team of “tick riders”—cowboys on horseback—patrol the Mexican border, checking cattle and deer along the Mexican border. It is estimated that if tick fever were to take hold again in the US (it, too ,was eradicated decades ago), the damage could easily exceed $1 billion in just the first year.

• Lice are killing up to 90% of young wild salmon swimming past farmed fish pens on their way to sea. Sea lice were wildlife plague that amplified in domestic stocks. The concentrations are so high, the small fish are literally bled to death.

• Moose are facing a similar fate from “winter ticks.” These are ticks that latch onto to moose in the fall, burrow into their coats and feed all winter. It used to be a moose might pick up 30,000 ticks, a horrifying but survivable number. But a shifting climate means snow melts earlier. Ticks fall off onto dry ground in the spring, allowing more to survive. Their breeding season is longer, too. Now “ghost moose” have been found with over 100,000 ticks. Like the baby fish, they are being bled to death.

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DOPEY DOES DDT

Meanwhile, cases of  leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease carried by sand flies, are also on the rise, bedeviling everyone from soldiers in Afghanistan to the  beleaguered residents of the world’s newest country, South Sudan. Efforts in India to eradicate the disease by 2010 failed spectacularly.

Yet simply getting rid of sand flies could lead to other problems: As larvae, they eat garbage.

Single-focus wars-on-fill-in-the-blank-disease rarely work (only smallpox and the cattle scourge rinderpest have been effectively wiped out, and notably neither were vector-borne).

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In the early 1940s, the Walt Disney Company produced a series of short educational films, among them, “Winged Scourge,” in which the Seven Dwarfs (yes, those seven dwarfs) take on Public Enemy Number 1: the Mosquito—”wanted dead or alive”… (HT to epidemiologist and author of the marvelous Aetiology blog Tara C. Smith)

Wrapped in gobsmacking kitsch is a matter-0f-fact portrayal of then state-of-the-art pest control: drain wetlands, coat breeding ponds with oil and waterways with Paris Green, spray copious amounts of insecticide (likely DDT, given the time frame), put up screens, seal building cracks and use bed nets. It worked, too, at least for a while,  if you don’t count the cascade of eco-disasters that followed.

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Not only is there a need for an “ecosystems thinking” approach, but one that can accommodate fast-changing landscapes. What was, isn’t any more. What is, won’t be for long.

The climate dragon is awake, scattering clouds of mosquitoes, flies, fleas, mites, ticks and lice as it yawns, stretches and shakes off a millenia-long slumber.

RELATED:

• Wicked Bugs: The Louse that Conquered Napoleon’s Army and other Diabolical Insects by Amy Stewart / book website

• Under Our Skin, documentary by Andy Abrahams Wilson chronic Lyme Disease / website

• Mites, background & micrographs / Systematic Entomology Lab, USDA / website

• Hybrid Insect Micro Electromechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) / DARPA / website

• Loss of Top Predators Has Far-Reaching Effects / PBS Newshour

• Earth, Land and Ethics: The (still unlearned…) Lessons of Aldo Leopold / TrackerNews “Dot to Dot”

On storms, floods, food prices and foolish farm policies; Redistributing fertility from where it’s needed to where it’s not; Corn, gullies and the Gulf of Mexico dead zone

TrackerNews link suite on the record storms and floods in the US. Links become part of the TrackerNews searchable database.

According to insurance industry consultancy EQECAT, the damage caused by the hundreds of tornadoes that exploded across the southern tier of the US in April rank right up there in Hurricane Katrina territory: $2 to $5 billion. That’s 2 to 5 times the average seasonal toll. Meanwhile, the death count—still not final at 340—is more than four times the seasonal average. And while the outbreak itself lasted several days, individual tornadoes shredded cities, tossed cars, stripped trees and pulverized farms in mere  seconds, the strongest storms packing winds far more powerful than even a “Cat 5″ hurricane.

The before-and-after photos are Hollywood blockbuster extreme: Landscapes scoured beyond recognition. Whole neighborhoods reduced to spiky plywood shards and lumps of fast-molding candy-pink insulation. With almost tornadic speed, a Facebook page was set up in the aftermath to reunite photographs and documents tossed from homes that no longer exist with their owners. The successes only underscore just how much is gone.

Heavy, steady rains and snow melt have combined to swell streams, rivers and lakes from Canada through the Deep South to the highest levels seen in decades. But it is the raging waters of the Mississippi and Ohio drowning America’s breadbasket that have grabbed most of the headlines.Gravid with topsoil-rich run-off,  they are breaking all the wrong kinds of records. To save Cairo, Illinois, a small, historic, hardscrabble city at the southernmost tip of Illinois where the two rivers meet—and was once a critical stop on the Underground Railway—the US Army Corps of Engineers blew a two-mile hole in a levee, turning nearly 200 square miles of rich Missouri farmland flood-plain into an insti-lake.

FARM REPORT

It will be months before the land dries out. Even then, the legacy of  chemical residues and storm debris will likely render the land unusable for some time. The situation is almost as dire throughout farm country. As of the last week of April, only 13% of the corn crop had been planted. Usually, 40 and 60% is in the ground by now. Prospects for the winter wheat crop are also bleak, with over 40% considered to be in “poor” or “very poor” condition. Predictably, commodity prices are soaring, with corn up 99% from a year ago and wheat up 55%. What began as a regional tragedy will become global catastrophe as food costs climb beyond the reach of millions.

At this point, even planting “fence row to fence row” will not be able to make up the losses. In fact, part of the problem has been this  push—supported by government subsidies—to plant every-last-possible–square-inch. Spring rains carve out deep gullies, funneling run-off laced with chemical fertilizers into creeks and streams—hundreds of tons of topsoil literally washed away every season.

Well, not quite away. The Mighty Mississippi will be delivering a mighty mother lode to the Gulf of Mexico in the coming days, where it will fertilize a bumper crop of algae, which will suck so much oxygen out the water, fish will either flee or float. Many predict a record hypoxic “dead zone” this year.

Stormy weather, indeed.

Scientists won’t know for sure whether any of this can be chalked up to climate change—a warmer world is a juicier, rainier one—until, frankly, it is too late to matter. It will take years of wretched weather to establish a proof-positive pattern.

But while we wait, there actually are some fairly simple things that could be done to mitigate damage from future storms. According to “Losing Ground,” a new report by the Environmental Working Group, creating land-cover buffers around creaks, streams and rivers would reduce farm run-off significantly: “97% of soil loss is preventable by simple conservation means.”

Really, why wouldn’t we want to do that?

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RELATED READING  / VIEWING

• “Earth, Land and Ethics: The (still unlearned…) Lessons of Aldo Leopold” / J.A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews “Dot to Dot”

• “Tornadoes! Now coming to a city near you” / Richard Hooke, Living on the Real World

• “Fatal Flood: A Story of Greed, Power and Race “ / PBS American Experience documentary website

• Flood Water After a Disaster or Emergency / CDC tip sheet

• “Housing Issues Nagging at Tornado Victims” /  Esmeralda Bermudez, Kate Linthicum and Richard Fausset / Los Angeles Times

• “Building Blocks: The Shape of Things to Come”  / J.A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews “Dot to Dot”

• “Tornado Alley” / IMAX film website

• “Cry Me a River…and Pass Me a Shovel: On Rain, Snow, Sleet and Ice, Atmospheric Rivers and a World Gone Soggy”  /  J.A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews Editor’s Blog

On the power of humor, one farmer’s stand, birds, bottle caps, better bottles, trash-tracking and why corporations need  to push politicians toward smarter recycling policy

Here at TrackerNews, where our unofficial tagline is “One Damn Thing After Another,” the focus tends to be on the grim. Floods, droughts, plagues, blights, quakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, climate change, pandemics, drug-resistance, fake drugs,  oil spills, nuclear accidents, dead bees, dead trees, melting ice, rising seas, acidic oceans, aging populations, e-waste… Lather, rinse, repeat.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have a sense of humor. Indeed, sometimes humor is the only thing that keeps us going. So when a music video on the evils of single-use plastic bags came flying in through the email transom, we perked right up (thanks Chris Palmer!). “A Plastic State of Mind,” co-winner of  this year’s Eco-Comedy Video Competition (who knew “eco-comedy” was a genre?), blew us away while hitting a bull’s eye on mission: We promise—we really do—to bring our canvas bags into the store, rather than forget them with a means-well shrug in the car. Or this could happen:

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Talk about “ads worth spreading”…

FARM(STAND) POLICY

Taking a more direct approach, farmer Henry Brockman, whose bounty is the stuff delectable legend at the summer market in Evanston, IL, just north of Chicago, charges for recyclable plastic bags, encouraging customers to bring their own re-usable bags instead. Within a single season, he managed to reduce demand 90%, taking 27,000 bags out of the plastic pollution equation. One little farm-stand. One small weekly market. A start.

Still, as his writer sister Terra notes, “recyclable plastic” isn’t exactly a get-out-eco-jail-card–free, so that’s still 3,000 bags too many:

First, we learned there is considerable doubt that biodegradable bags really do degrade under the conditions they are supposed to—including water, sun, and underground (e.g. landfill). Second, the renewable resource used to make most biodegradable plastics is corn, the chemical-intensive production of which has its own set of negative environmental impacts. To add insult to injury, we learned that the corn used to make the bags we purchased was grown in China. Thus, our “green” bags were contributing to soil loss, polluted wells, damaged ecosystems, and food insecurity in China—not to mention all the fossil-fuel use and concomitant pollution that started in a field in China, continued in a bag factory there, and then went on with emissions from trucks, ships, planes, and trucks again to finally get into our hands.

— The Seasons On  Henry’s Farm: A Year of Food and Life on a Sustainable Farm

FOR THE BIRDS

If that isn’t enough for you to give up your errant plastic ways, do it for the birds. Photographers Chris Jordan and Kris Krug are currently on Midway Island,  filming a documentary follow-up to Jordan’s disturbing 2009 photo-essay on albatross killed from feeding in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirl of plastic rubbish in the middle of the ocean. The birds have a fatal fondness for plastic bottle caps, which accumulate in their stomachs, leading to agonizing deaths. Smaller bits of near invisible plastic—some no doubt that started out as single-use bags—threaten the food web itself.

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A BETTER BOTTLE?

Back in the grocery store, cola giants Pepsi and Coke are battling it out for “green” bottle bragging rights. Coke made the first move last year, introducing a 30% bioplastic bottle. Pepsi matched that and then some, announcing a new 100% bioplastic container to be rolled out in pilot trials next year.

With the cost of oil ever-rising, it’s a smart move financially. By some estimates, 200,000 barrels of oil per day are used to create plastic packaging, just in the US. Finding a cheaper, abundant, locally sourced feedstock is double eco-smart: ecological and economic.

Yet unless the recycle rate is vastly improved, there is a limit to the good it will do. Less than a third of all the plastic bottles that could be recycled actually are. The rest? Near-eternal entombment in landfills or swirling for decades in a toxic “ocean patch” vortex of death (every ocean has one…). The task isn’t made any easier when budget-slashing politicians, such as Wisconsin’s Governor Walker, cut municipal recycling funds.

An handful of companies and grocery chains, such as Aveda and Whole Foods, have plastic recycling programs, but it is a drop in the garbage bucket. And, though good-hearted, they take work. Who really wants to collect and schlep bags of plastic bottle caps to the store?

This is an issue that goes well beyond an “Earth Hour” or even a whole “Earth Day,” which, for all the hype and raised awareness, haven’t managed to move the dial nearly far enough. Policy, political will and corporate support must match the technical advances that have been made in materials science. Closed loop design only works if the loop can, in fact, be closed.

In 2009, a team from MIT’s Senseable City lab tagged 3,000 pieces of garbage in Seattle with tracking chips. Then they charted the journeys of each item over a two-month span, creating a mesmerizing data visualization video set to Hayden’s “Farewell Symphony.” An impressive 75% + found its way to a recycling facility and 95% was processed near the metro area. Those encouraging  numbers, however, may reflect skews specific to Seattle’s garbage / recycling pick-up services, the 500 garbage-providing volunteers, or the types of garbage collected. E-waste, for example, traveled an an average of nearly a 1,000 miles, adding a sizable carbon footprint to the process.

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Imagine if every major metro area developed a “garbage profile” to help pinpoint areas for improvement? The “feel-good” of recycling coupled with hard data to drive innovation: “Farewell Symphony”? Meet “Hello Dolly”!

It’s either that or a more “Plastic State of Mind”:

LYRICS
Shoulda brought your own bag
Yeah but you forgot it though
You were busy dreamin of ice cream and
all that cookie dough

Your life is wrapped in plastic
Convenience is your motto
But plastic addiction’s worse
than they want you to know

BP’s oil spill
Almost like we did it -
We use one million grocery-bags
every single minute

Recycling them’s a joke yo
That baggie don’t go anywhere
It turns to little pieces
and then it spreads over everywhere

Into your food supply
Into your blood supply
Not to mention birds and fish and
Cuties you don’t wanna die

Just look at baby Sammy
Dioxins in its milky way,
cuz even her breast milk it’s got
PCB and BPA

OK now you get it
How you gonna stop it though
Banning Single Use Plastic Bags
is the way to go!

Join other states and cities
Kick the nasty habit
Tell your representatives
Ban single-use bags made from plastic…

RELATED ARTICLES / RESOURCES:

• Midway Journal, Chris Jordan &  team / documentary blog (videos, photos)

• “They have just one word for you: plastics” / Scott Kirsner, Boston.com

• Preserve “Gimme 5″ plastic bottle cap recycling campaign

• The Association of Post Consumer Plastic Recyclers

• “2009 United States National Post-Consumer Plastics Bottle Recycling Report” (pdf)

• “Green Circle: Redefining the Extractive Economy” / J.A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews Editor’s Blog

• “The 360 Paper Bottle: On Guilt, Inspiration, a Better Idea, Birds & Oceans“ / J.A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews Editor’s Blog

• “Capt. Charles Moore on the seas of garbage” / TED video

• Terra Brockman’s website

• Pollution song / Tom Lehrer (video)

On 400+ aging nuclear reactors, quake-prone countries, food chains, trade networks and what this means for first responders and social entrepreneurs

TrackerNews link suite on the Japanese nuclear disaster. Links become part of the TrackerNews searchable database.

Let’s get right to the point: What happens the next time a nuclear reactor goes rogue in the wake of a natural disaster? Japan is a worst case scenario in a best case place.

But what if the earth were to quake in Iran, China, Italy or Turkey—all of which are pursuing nuclear-fueled futures? Or Pakistan, where the IEAE  and US just gave their respective stamps of approval for two new Chinese-built plants? Each of those seismically-rocking countries floats precariously at (tectonic) plates’ edge. In fact, one of two reactors planned for Turkey is just a few miles from a major fault line.

The assurances of political leaders such as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are somehow less than reassuring: “I don’t think there will be any serious problem…The security standards there are the standards of today. We have to take into account that the Japanese nuclear plants were built 40 years ago with the standards of yesterday.”

Forty years may seem like an eternity to a politician, but is, in fact, a blink in a time-scale defined by nuclear radiation (see Chernobyl). Inspections have a way of getting missed (see Japan). Human error happens (see Three Mile Island).

In the meantime, major earthquakes striking all of these countries sometime over the projected lifespans of their reactors is a sure thing.

Beyond the issues of nuclear waste storage, the almost inevitable black market trade and surreptitious weapons programs, what happens when the “sure thing” meets the big risk? How does one keep radioactive fall-out from contaminating emergency food rations? Or find safe water? What happens when those best able to help are put in mortal danger if they try?

Is this the kind of border even doctors won’t cross?

No matter. The radiation will eventually come to them, traveling first through food chains, then trade networks. Some produce is already showing levels of radiation several times accepted limits, though authorities insist it is still safe. So far, the milk supply remains uncontaminated. But according the WHO, Japan is a big exporter of baby formula and powdered milk to China and the US. As the crisis drags on and radioactive particles work their way into cattle pastures, that could change.

In short, bad gets worse—much worse—once nuclear is part of the equation.

WAKE UP CALL

The tragedy in Japan should be a wake up call to NGOs, social entrepreneurs and all those working, as they say, “for positive change.” The nuclear issue is not an abstraction to be relegated to politicians, engineers and lobbyists. This threatens your work, potentially reversing years of hard-fought economic gains in poor countries and undoing decades-worth of global public health efforts. This isn’t just about regional clusters of radiation-related illnesses, but also of the loss of infrastructure for disease surveillance and drug distribution that would tip the balance in favor of infectious diseases outbreaks and pandemics.

Finally, the thorniest of ethical questions:  Who makes the call to send staff into disaster zones so dangerous that not only is personal health at risk, but that of future offspring as well? (As a 1950s military film put it: “the ultimate symptom, death itself”)

With more than 400 reactors spread across the globe—many now nearing their “sold-by” date—the next Japan is more a matter of when, not if. Power plants, of course, are not designed as weapons, but that doesn’t make their  fall-out any less lethal.

Humanitarian aid workers: Are you ready?

Global earthquake activity since 1973 and nuclear power plant locations (click through to map web page)

* Addendum 3/31/11:

Hospitals and temporary refuges are demanding that evacuees provide them with certificates confirming that they have not been exposed to radiation before they are admitted….

…The eight-year-old daughter of Takayuki Okamura was refused treatment for a skin rash by a clinic in Fukushima City, where the family is living in a shelter after abandoning their home in Minamisoma, 18 miles from the crippled nuclear plant….

…Prejudice against people who used to live near the plant is reminiscent of the ostracism that survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 experienced. Many suffered discrimination when they tried to rent housing, find employment or marriage partners…

—”Japan nuclear crisis: evacuees turned away from shelters” / The Telegraph

Discrimination based not on race, creed or color, but on a cruel twist of geographic fate: simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It is tragedy compounded, reverberating through generations.

Perhaps we need to add a “futures wrecked” column to graphs purporting to show the comparative benignness of nuclear energy versus that produced by coal and oil. It is a lobbyist’s argument, telling a truth, but not the whole truth.

The whole truth? All of these energy sources are fraught in the present and threaten the future. A warming earth with rising seas and wilder weather will send millions of climate refugees fleeing to higher, safer ground—human migrations on a scale unimaginable.

Radioactive refugees have nowhere to go.

We need to get beyond this devil’s choice fast, to invest in renewables at every scale, macro to micro (e.g., micro-wind). We—as in “We the people,” as in our governments—need to support research and innovation and help ideas scale for practical, commercial use.

One the few hopeful stories this past week was the announcement of an “artificial leaf” that can create energy from photosynthesis. MIT professor Daniel Nocera has been working on ways that essentially cut out the middleman in energy generation. Unlike coal and oil, which are fossilized sunlight—energy banked in the past—or nuclear power, which requires vast investment to tap, Nocera’s inexpensive playing card-size solar chip can harvest enough energy from a gallon of water—stored in a small fuel cell—to power a home in a developing country for a day. The water doesn’t even have to be all that clean, either.

The latest version of Nocera’s technology is of commercial interest because, by integrating the catalyst with the chips, it dispenses with the need for traditional solar panels. That, he says, will cut costs considerably, by eliminating wires, etc. “The price of the silicon of a solar panel isn’t much,” he says. “A lot of the cost is the wiring. What this does is get rid of all that.”

“The real goal here,” he adds, “is giving energy to the poor” – especially, he notes, in rural Africa, India, and China.

Even better, he adds, the device doesn’t need ultrapure water. “You can use nature water sources, which is a big deal in parts of the world where it’s costly to have to use pure water.”

— MIT scientist announces first “practical” artificial leaf / Nature

Recently, Tata Group, an international conglomerate best known as India’s largest automaker, invested $9.5 million in Nocera’s company, Sun Catalytix.

Follow the money. The smart money.

(video: Daniel Nocera explains personalized power / Poptech / 1 of 2)

• Daniel Nocera explains personalized power / Poptech / 2 of 2

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Additional links include:

• Food Contamination Concerns following the Japanese Nuclear Crisis / WHO fact sheet

• Meltdown at Three Mile Island / American Experience, PBS (video)

• Where are the world’s nuclear reactors? / New Scientist, interactive map

• From moving clouds to sowing crops, Chernobyl can help Japan / TerraDaily, AFP

• With Nuclear Power, “No Acts of God Can Be Permitted” / Amory Lovins, Huffington Post

• Long Shadow of Chernobyl (2006, 20 years out) / Gurd Ludwig, National Geographic (narrated slide show)

• China to Sell Outdated Nuclear Reactors to Pakistan / VOA

• Murky past of Japan’s troubled nuclear industry revealed / The Independent

• Infographic of the Day: The Best Radiation Chart We’ve Seen So Far / David McCandless, Fast Company

• Japan: The Big One / J.A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews Editor’s Blog

On making predictions: Groundhogs and weather, distributed computing and climate, commodity markets and poverty and why a better way to keep things cool may help cool off the planet

February 2011, Chicago: What a difference less-than-three-weeks makes; Lake Shore Drive on Groundhog Day; Green shoots poking through dirt

It is hard to quibble with climate change when the freaky weather is freaky good. Less than three weeks after the Great Blizzard of 2011 stopped traffic literally in its tracks on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, it looks like April outside. Mountains of snow have disappeared into the ground and thin air as tree buds fatten and little green shoots of precocious flower bulbs poke up through the dirt. It’s like one giant “nevermind…”  The bill for all the plowing and salting and towing and snow-day-ing hasn’t even come due and the evidence has vanished.

We are flirting with 60 degrees. There are robins. The chill is gone from the wind. Our local groundhog, whose prediction came a day early this year—the zoo was closed on February 2—was right: early spring. Scratch that. Earliest spring.

Yes, it’s going to get cold again. Snow will fall. Water will freeze. But it won’t last. The earth is now tilted in our favor.

So is this really climate change or just a lucky break? Two studies recently published in the journal Nature point to the former. Although focused on “extreme weather events” in the Northern hemisphere rather than extremely nice days in the Midwest, both studies bolster the argument pointing blame at human-generated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The first study focuses the intensity of rain storms and blizzards, analyzing a half century’s-worth of  rain gauge data from 6,000 reporting stations run through a variety of climate models. Weirdly, the models taking into account GHGs tend to low-ball the effects compared to actual changes in precipitation tallies. It other words, it’s soggier in real life.

Notably, the research doesn’t include data after 1999, which is when a significant number of recording stations were shut down. Yet even when the “best science available” isn’t as good as it might have been, it appears, at least in this case, to have been good enough to raise some major concerns.

Still, one wonders whether the missing data could have helped predict this winter’s record snows in Korea, the string of  Nor’easters in New England, or the recent megafloods in Germany and Pakistan. And if data from the Southern hemisphere had been included, would we have seen a pattern leading to the catastrophic storms in Australia and Sri Lanka?

FROM PATTERNS TO PREDICTIONS

The second study is, in a sense, much more ambitious: linking a specific weather event—floods in England 11 years ago—to man-mediated global warming. That kind of pin-point precision usually gets lost in climate study footnote caveats that point to variables surrounding any one particular storm.

…The researchers ran thousands of simulations of the weather in autumn 2000 (using idle time on computers made available by a network of volunteers) with and without the temperature rises caused by man-made global warming. They found that, in nine out of 10 cases, man-made greenhouse gases increased the risks of flooding. This is probably as solid a signal as simulations can produce, and it gives us a clear warning that more global heating is likely to cause more floods here…

…both models and observations also show changes in the distribution of rainfall, with moisture concentrating in some parts of the world and fleeing from others: climate change is likely to produce both more floods and more droughts.

(The Guardian)

Three things are especially worth noting:

1) These calculations were made possible by donations of otherwise idle computer time—40,000 years-worth all told. Even in an era of slashed research budgets, there are ways to make enough sense of available data to drive policy decisions (along with, potentially, lawsuits against power companies and insurance rate hikes).

2) We are all already paying the price—literally. Food costs are up by a nearly a third from a year ago, a spike so severe, the World Bank has voiced concern. According to its calculations, 44 million people  tipped into poverty due to higher food costs since June, 2010. Other commodities such as cotton are also up dramatically. Manufacturers are reigning in earnings estimates, citing weather-related crop shortfalls. Retailers, including Wal-Mart, are also bracing for the fall-out. The only thing going up is demand as global population continues to increase.

3) Soaring food costs, along with soaring unemployment and decades of repression, are fueling protests across North Africa, with global geopolitical ramifications.

Although higher commodity prices should at least be good news for growers, national subsidies have distorted global markets. In Africa, for example, even farmers with high-demand crops such as cotton can find it difficult to eek out a living.

A WIN-WIN AMIDST THE LOSE-LOSE

All in all, pretty bleak stuff. Except for the one little ray of good news / bad news hope that if the shift in climate is indeed driven by fossil fuel emissions—as a growing mountain of evidence indicates—maybe we can still do something about it. It may be too late to get the climate train back on  long-term track, but still possible to slow it down. That’s something.

Last fall, we wrote about some encouraging news on that front: an agreement between Greenpeace and the Consumer Goods Forum, which represents dozens large / multinational manufacturers, mandating a switch to climate-friendlier cooling technologies. The so-called “F-gases” released by traditional refrigerants account for a whopping “17% of the world’s global warming impact,” according to Greenpeace Solutions director Amy Larkin, who helped broker the deal. “That’s not annual emissions. That’s cumulative impact.”

Although several of the biggest companies, led by Coca-Cola, are already well on their way to making the switch, the language in the CGF agreement was softened at the last minute: Instead of requiring members to complete the transition by 2015, they are only required to begin making the transition by 2015.

What are they waiting for? Climate change-driven extreme weather is already taking a toll on bottom lines and shareholder confidence. F-gases may only a piece of the puzzle, but a piece that consumer goods companies can take the lead on: “positive change” that’s good for profits, too. In an era of a lot of lose-lose, that’s a rare win-win.

RELATED RESOURCES / ARTICLES:

• The Climamateprediction.net project

• The Weatherathome experiment

• The World Bank’s Food Price Watch service

• NOAA: Another Spring of Major Flooding Likely in North Central U.S.

• “And Now for Some Rare Good News—Really” (TrackerNews editor’s blog)

• “Trees, Food, Pakistan & the Lessons of Medieval Monks: How Ecosystems Thinking Can (Still) Save the World” (TrackerNews editor’s blog)

• “Cry Me a River…and Pass Me a Shovel: On Rain, Snow, Sleet and Ice, Atmospheric Rivers and a World Gone Soggy” (TrackerNews editor’s blog)

• “Hot, Cold, Wet, Dry: When Weather Becomes Climate” (TrackerNews editor’s blog)

Wintry Buffet: Blizzard, Ice Storms, Tornado Watches & Thundersnow / Feburary 1, 2011

The opening rounds of a potentially record-shattering blizzard swirl outside my office window. It is one thing to report on extreme weather around the globe and quite another to literally be in the howling midst of the story. It is a storm the likes of which has not been seen, at least in the hundred-some years since people have been keeping records.

Two-thousand miles across. A hundred million people in harm’s way. Blizzard warnings in at least nine states. Tornado warnings in others. Ice storms sealing whole cities in shells of slick an inch thick. Snow tallies measured in feet. Snow drifts sculpted into frozen dunes. Winds 30-40-50-even 60 mph driving temperatures into negative double-digit insti-frostbite territory. Twenty-five foot waves on Lake Michigan, powerful enough to turn Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive “into an ice-skating rink” (or, as it turned out, a parking lot…)

And yet we saw it coming, so it won’t be quite so bad. For the past couple of days, people have been stocking up on everything from salt and shovels to groceries and fireplace logs. Snow plows have been pre-positioned, and flights, by the thousands, canceled in anticipation by the airlines. Warming shelters have been opened and schools closed. The entire cast and crew of The Weather Channel is “in position,” ready to freeze for the camera so we don’t have to…

By Thursday, the sun will shine, though won’t make a dent in the mountains of snow now pushed Himalaya-high by the primal forces of snow plow and dump truck. If we’re lucky, thoughtful city crews will seize the opportunity to bury and maim much-hated foreign-leased parking meter boxes, giving us all a brief break from extortion-level fees.

Yes, there will be car accidents, stranded commuters, power outages, busted roofs, broken ankles, frostbitten fingers and toes, electric heater fires, and probably a few death-by-shoveling heart attacks. Municipal budgets, already struggling, will buckle under the costs. But mostly we will be alright.

TrackerNews link suite on global flooding

Not so the victims of floods in Australia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Germany, Italy, Mexico, England, Costa Rica, the Philippines and so many other places where record rains over the last year have led to tragedy beyond imagining. Normally quiet—or at least predictable—rivers have burst their banks, roaring Hulk-like over the land, submerging crops, stranding wildlife and sending millions of people scrambling for shelter, their lives forever altered, their hopes and dreams literally drowned. And when it wasn’t rivers on a rampage, it was the saturated ground itself that gave way, unleashing killer mudslides, burying thousands alive.

The future could be even soggier. In the short-term, Australia’s rain-wracked state of Queensland is currently bracing for Yasi “one of the most devastating cyclones on record.” A little harder to pin down schedule-wise  is something called an ARk storm, due to slam into the California, dumping up to 10 feet of rain over several weeks and costing, when all is said and done, three times as much as a big earthquake: an estimated $725 billion.

ARk storms have happened before, most recently 150 years ago when it rained for nearly two months straight. So many livestock drowned, ranchers traded in branding irons for plows in the aftermath and became farmers. In the USGS scenario, one of the world’s great food baskets, the Central Valley, fills up like a giant bathtub, 300 miles long and 20 miles wide.

Serious flooding also occurs in Orange County, Los Angeles County, San Diego, the San Francisco Bay area, and other coastal communities. Windspeeds in some places reach 125 miles per hour, hurricane-force winds. Across wider areas of the state, winds reach 60 miles per hour… Flooding evacuation could involve 1.5 million residents in the inland region and delta counties.

—Overview of the ARkStorm Scenario

The good news is that an ARk storm is supposed to happen only once ever 500 to 1,000 years. The bad news? A warmer world holds more moisture in its atmosphere, so scientists suspect that those between-storm time frames to shrink. Add in all the “fossil water” that’s been pumped to the hydrologic system from slow-renewing aquifers over the last half century and it’s easy to see that there is more water in Earth’s atmosphere than there has been for quite a long time. (Although fossil water amounts to a tiny percentage of the overall total, even small changes can eventually lead to much bigger ones: the “butterfly effect.”)

The “AR” in “ARk” stands for “atmospheric rivers.” We know them as the Pineapple Express or the Alberta Clipper—conveyer belts of moisture laden air. Now, with more moisture in the air, they, too, have burst their banks. The floods above our heads beget the floods here on the ground.

An intricate weave of ocean surface temperatures driving global weather patterns—La Nina, El Nino and a slew of acronyms only meteorologists can keep straight—combined with man-made changes to the land—deforestation, development, crumbling, inadequate infrastructure—determine how severe damage will be. But clearly more people are in harm’s way. And more harm is on the way.

The climate is in shifting. Climate change is a done deal. Umbrellas for everybody…and some shovels, too.

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All links become part of the TrackersNews’ searchable archive.

On demographic destiny, boomers as geezers, population pyramids, the Singularity, dementias, Simon & Garfunkel, why humanitarian & public health policymakers have even more to worry about and areas ripe for impact investing and social enterprise

“The Age of Old”—  New suite of links on TrackerNews.net

The future, it turns out, isn’t all that hard to predict. No oracles required. Just some actuarial tables and possibly a good stiff drink. The picture that emerges from the tea leaves of data sets looks pretty good, at least until you look a bit deeper: More people are living longer than ever before.

The first American baby boomers turn 65 this year, marking the start of a geezer boom that will see as many as 10,000 erstwhile hippies qualifying for senior discounts every day for the next 18 years (globally, the stat tops 125,000 per day). As all things baby boom, it is a marketer’s dream, complete with an MIT lab devoted to designing products and services to help seniors “‘do things’ throughout the lifespan,” and anti-aging hucksters lining up for a piece of a multi-billion dollar pie.

The bigger story, though, is about demographic distribution, visualized in “population pyramids.”

population pyramids over time

When a population is young, the graph looks like a pyramid, with children at the bottom far outnumbering their elders. Epidemics, wars and natural disasters chip chip away at a pyramid’s profile, but nothing chips more dramatically than contraception. It is no coincidence that the US baby boom ended a few years after “The Pill” was approved by the FDA in the early 1960s. Contraception has also played a key role battling skyrocketing birth rates in developing countries, with collateral benefits for women’s rights and economic improvement.

Yet as intrinsically good as improved health care and family planning may be, it turns out there are some serious unintended consequences.

Journalist Ted Fishman’s new book, “Shock of Gray: The Aging of the World’s Population and How it Pits Young Against Old, Child Against Parent, Worker Against Boss, Company Against Rival, and Nation Against Nation, goes into great jaw-dropping detail about those consequences, noting that two other 21st trends—urbanization and globalization—are actually making things worse.

“A Shock of Gray” is a guide book to a world that’s coming. We are just in the first ten minutes of a demographic denouement that’s been unfolding for 100,000 years. For the first time in history, there are more people over 50 than there are under 17. And that turns the world upside down.

Rarely at TrackerNews have we come across a story with so many tentacles. Like climate change, “the gray tsunami”—as some have termed it—puts a twist on everything.

Globally, the median age is 28, meaning there are just as many people older than that as younger. In less than a decade, there will be more people over 65 than under the age of 5. By 2045, there will be more people over 60 than children, period.

Interestingly, 2045 is also the year futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts for the “Singularity,” the moment  when machine intelligence and technological know-how matches, then surpasses, human capabilities, leading to a “transhuman” future unbounded old fashioned slow-and-steady evolutionary constraints.

The most important perspective in my view is that health, medicine, and biology is now an information technology, whereas it used to be hit or miss. We not only have the (outdated) software that biology runs on (our genome), but we have the means of changing that software (our genes) in a mature individual with such technologies as RNA interference and new forms of gene therapy that do not trigger the immune system. (from Technology Review)

Even without fancy “Borg-ish” interventions, demographers predict there were be 3.2 million centenarians in the world by 2050, a more than 6-fold increase from the current numbers.

Humans are turning into Energizer bunnies that just keep going, though sadly not without operational glitches.

The rates of age-related chronic illnesses—diabetes (exacerbated by an obesity epidemic), cancer, impaired vision and dementias—are spiking upwards with no end in sight. Beyond the incalculable heartbreak, the economics are staggering. According to a new study released by Alzheimer’s Disease International, “the worldwide costs of dementia will exceed 1% of global GDP in 2010, at US$604 billion.”

Even diseases that don’t affect the elderly directly can have a tremendous impact on them. Pandemic influenza, for example, usually takes its biggest toll on adults in the prime-of-life. But since those people are also the caregivers, their loss can easily cascade into another round of tragedy.

Although the problem is one of demographic relativity—the ratio of old to young—the answer is not more babies. The absolute population numbers are still rising—expected to hit 9 billion by mid-century—while limited natural resources are either under siege or running low and food production barely keeps pace with demand.

Kurzweil, ever the optimist, is hopeful that the Singularity will also deliver a bounty of tech solutions for all manner of catastrophic developments.

Meanwhile, the fuse has been lit on a population bomb—albeit an evil twin of the one Ehlich warned about—and the clock is ticking.

“How terribly strange to be 70,” sang Old Friends Simon & Garfunkel in 1968 at the ripe age of 27. This year, they will be 70. Maybe not so strange any more?

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All links become part of the TrackersNews’ searchable archive.

At TrackerNews, we tend to shy away from issues that have “days” as almost a sure mark that the cause, however noble, is all but lost. Awareness is whipped to fever pitch, followed almost inevitably by a “what do we do now?” hang-over, and an ADD sprint onto the next issue du jour. But World Toilet Day (Nov. 19) caught—and kept—our attention. So much so, we used it as the fulcrum of one the largest link suites ever on the aggregator.  —Ed.

“Germs, Soap & Water” – New suite of links on TrackerNews.net

It is as basic—and necessary—as breathing. And, just like breathing, one of the first things we need to be able to do on our own: We poop. But what begins as a triumph of living, quickly devolves into daily problem with deadly implications. Human poop is a happy home for at least 50 pathogens, including cholera, the latest of Haiti’s cascading list of immeasurable woes.

At some point each day, each one of the now more than 6 billion people on that planet will need to “take a moment,” “go to the powder room,” or “be right back.”  For one in six, however, there is no “powder room,” or even a bucket into which to “do one’s business.”  A full third don’t have access to a clean bathroom. Instead, they do as nature designed, find a place to squat and simply “go”—or, in the jargon of the sanitation experts, perform “open defecation” (OD).

It is messy, smelly, wildly dangerous in terms of public health, and dicey in terms of personal safety. Women and children are especially vulnerable to attack and rape. No safety, privacy or dignity.

Journalist Rose George, author of “The Big Necessity” and an expert on the issue, notes that only a small fraction of development funds spent on water projects goes toward sanitation. Yet to seriously move the dial on global public health, safe toilets and hand-washing with soap are required as well. According to one, oft-quoted stat, one child dies every 15 seconds from largely preventable diarrheal diseases. Hand-washing with soap alone can reduce the tally by more than half.

Which is why Clean the World (CTW), a two-year-old charity that steam-cleans partially-used hotel soaps for distribution in poor countries, is one of the best, cheapest, smartest public health efforts to come along in some time. At 50 cents a bar, soap in Haiti is a luxury. Free soap is a literal life-saver. Think of it as a kind of bed-net against germs.

Likewise, Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) delivers dramatic results for almost no cost, using a combination of shock, peer-pressure and incentives to stamp out OD. Villagers are graphically shown how excreta and germs get into water and food via dirty hands, shoes, feet. Not only are latrines quickly built, but a combination of fines and rewards ensure they’re used.

INNOVATION, HISTORY, CULTURE & ART

At TrackerNews, we never met a stray fact we didn’t like and bathrooms, it turns out, are full of them. Consider the latest breakthrough in TP tech: the tubeless toilet paper roll. The center is hexagonal—a biomimicked bee hive cell—which is a particularly strong shape that easily fits over a roller. Not only is every sheet usable, but if the design were to be widely adopted, one that could keep an estimated 17 billion-with-a-”b” cardboard tubes out of landfills annually, just in the U.S.

Although the basic design of the flush toilet hasn’t changed much in the last 150 years, the variety and sheer spectacularness of loo-design has been nothing short of breathtaking. From Golden Plunger award-winners to “Toilets of the World” (book & website), the variations on the theme are inspirational.

All links become part of the TrackersNews’ searchable archive.

At TrackerNews, we have long mulled adding a tagline to our masthead: “One Damn Thing After Another…” But every now and again, we come across stories that gives us hope. The tale of “Greenfreeze” refrigeration technology is one them: a better, more energy efficient answer to cooling and a successful environmental / industry collaboration. Sweet Water Organics, an aquaponics operation in Milwaukee, is another one of our favorites—one we have been following closely for nearly a year and a half.  —Ed.

“When we ring the siren, at some point we do bring the ambulance,” says Amy Larkin, director of Greenpeace Solutions, the environmental organization’s lesser-known division that works with industry to find and implement climate-friendlier answers. We recently caught up with Larkin, and her colleague, engineer Claudette Juska, after they taped an NPR Worldview interview here in Chicago. Their focus: F-gases, a.k.a. “the worst greenhouse gases you’ve never heard of.”

If you have ever used a refrigerator, flicked on an air-conditioner or strolled the freezer aisle in a grocery store in the U.S., you are guilty-by-unavoidable-association of helping to warm the world through F-gas-driven cooling.

It is a very big deal. F-gases account for 17% of the world’s global warming impact, says Larkin. “That’s not annual emissions. That’s cumulative impact.” In other words, they tend to hang around in the atmosphere. The story gets even more jaw-dropping when when you learn that not only are there alternatives, but they been tested and used by hundreds of millions of people in other countries for the last 20 years.

What gives?

In 1992, F-gases called CFCs—chlorofluorocarbons—were banned by the Montreal Protocol after it was discovered that they had punched a hole on the planet’s ozone layer. The chemical industry’s alternative? HFCs—hydroflurocarbons. Although these don’t harm the ozone layer, they still have the “F”—fluorine—a potent greenhouse gas.

Never ones to sit on their hands, in 1993, Greenpeace activists in Germany set about getting a prototype refrigerator built to prove there was another way around the problem using “natural refrigerants” such as isobutane. Then they tried to drum up some interest from manufacturers. Nada. Remarkably undaunted, they then pre-sold 70,000 non-existent refrigerators. As Larkin notes, this was way before Facebook and Twitter were even a glimmer on the cyber-horizon (indeed, Mark Zuckerberg was still in diapers…). Greenpeace went back to the manufacturer of the prototype, who was now happy beyond happy to ramp up a production line. The technology was open-sourced, so now all the major manufacturers make them, too.

Today, hundreds of millions of “Greenfreeze” refrigerators have been sold. Although comparable in cost to HFC models, they are much more efficient, so cheaper to run, too. Still, they remain illegal in the U.S. “The natural refrigerants do not have lobbyists,” explains Larkin. “The chemical industry does.”

But the rules may change soon, due in large part to Greenpeace-mediated industry pressure. Coca-Cola, Unilever, McDonald’s, Carlsbad Group and Pepsico banded together with Greenpeace and UNEP to form Refrigerants, Naturally!, to promote the use of climate-friendlier technologies, including regulatory and political frameworks to encourage investment.

Wal-Mart is also sold on the technology, even making improvements improvements and sharing its data. After electricity, refrigeration and cooling rank #2 on the company’s carbon footprint list. Says Larkin:

Large businesses like to have certainty, like to plan, like to see where they’re going to make a profit, like to see where they’re going to get hammered, like to see the regulation down the road and if they can, avoid a regulatory problem or a big, costly mess that they didn’t anticipate… (If they can make) a product that is more efficient, less costly in terms of energy for themselves or their customers, generally, they will be on our side.

…Part of the reason that businesses like to share this is that when all of the retailers and all of the ice-cream makers transfer their technology at the same time, you can achieve economies of scale.

The EPA and Underwriters Laboratory are currently reviewing safety issues—natural refrigerants are flammable—but given the global track record, it is possible that the first consumer Greenfreeze refrigerators will be available in the U.S. sometime in 2011. And that’s just plain cool.

• Listen to the Worldview segment on F-gases

• Read more about Greenpeace Solutions’ Greenfreeze initiative

• update: 11/29/10: “Greenpeace’s 20-year campaign catalyzes groundbreaking climate commitment on refrigeration by 400 companies” & “Almost a Home Run for Climate”

NOW, WHAT TO PUT IN THE FRIDGE….

Another of our favorite stories here at TrackerNews is fast becoming a favorite story with everybody: Sweet Water Organics, the Milwaukee-based aquaponics start-up inspired by Will Allen’s urban agriculture work. They were recently featured in the New York Times (“Fish Farms, with a Side of Greens”) and on NBC’s Nightly News:

Although some of the facts have gotten a bit sanded for TV—this is not yet a completely closed loop system, but getting there, which is what’s exciting—the progress over the last 16 months has been nothing short of astonishing. When we first walked into the Sweet Water warehouse, just a few blocks from the expressway on the southwest side of town, it was empty, save for three newly-dug fish “raceways,” water burbling away, waiting to be stocked and some wooden structures holding a few dozen basil plants.

Today, every surface is bursting with life. The crops—mostly lettuce—are thriving, as are fish, by the tens of thousands. Staff and volunteers bustle about, while a steady stream of visitors tour the operation, eyes wide, taking notes. The learning curve has been both steep and, delightfully, endless. Tilapia are being phased out in favor of perch, which turn out to be more in tune with Wisconsin palates. New filters and bubblers are being tested to reduce sediment levels, while keeping water a nice perch-preferred degree of murky. Hoop houses are under construction in the courtyard. New vertical planting pots are being put through their paces. Even mulch has gone artisanal in this unique workshop / lab.

There is a palpable sense that something important and potentially world-changing is happening here. It is a story we will continue to follow closely. Stay tuned…