UN blue helmets looking into latest rocket firing from Lebanon

United Nations peacekeepers have launched an investigation into a recent incident in which a rocket was fired from Houla in southern Lebanon and struck the vicinity of Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel.

UN agency helps Mozambique organize presidential and legislative elections

More than nine million Mozambicans are expected to vote today in presidential and parliamentary polls after a campaign where the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has helped supply critical equipment, improve election officials’ skills, train journalists, raise public awareness and coordinate the work of international monitors.

UN agency helps Mozambique organize presidential and legislative polls

More than nine million Mozambicans are expected to vote today in presidential and parliamentary polls after a campaign where the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has helped supply critical equipment, improve election officials’ skills, train journalists, raise public awareness and coordinate the work of international monitors.

Zimbabwe blocks visit of UN expert on torture at the last minute

Zimbabwe today withdrew its invitation for a visit by the United Nations independent expert on torture, who was already en route to the country, citing consultations between the Government of National Unity and the South African Development Community (SADC).

80 dead in Pakistan bombing as Taleban welcome Hillary Clinton

 

The blast set scores of shops on fire and sent a cloud of gray smoke over the city. TV footage showed wounded people sitting amid the debris as people grabbed at the wreckage, trying to pull out survivors. One two-story building collapsed as firefighters doused it with water.

 

Clinton, on her first visit to Pakistan as secretary of state, was three hours’ drive away in the capital of Islamabad when the blast took place. Speaking to reporters on her plane, she praised the army’s new anti-Taliban offensive in South Waziristan and promised a new era in relations between Pakistan and the United States.

 

The explosion was in a neighborhood home to many Shiite Muslims, who have often been targeted by Taliban and al-Qaida allied Sunni extremists. It hit a market reserved for families. Many of the dead were believed to be women.

 

Emergency room doctor Zafar Iqbal said 80 people were killed and more than 200 were wounded in what police said was a suspected car bombing.

 

No group immediately claimed responsibility, but Peshawar has been the target of three of 10 major bombings or raids blamed on Islamist militants this month.

 

The attacks have killed more than 250 people. Most have targeted security forces, but at least four bombs have gone off in public places, apparently to sow fear and undercut support for the government.

 

The Taliban have warned Pakistan that they would stage more attacks if the army does not end an offensive in South Waziristan tribal region, where the military has dispatched some 30,000 troops to flush out insurgents. 

Solar-Power Innovator Who Weathered Booms and Busts

By STEPHEN MILLER
Using his family as human guinea pigs, George Löf created two of the first solar-heated homes in America. A voluble apostle for all things sun-powered, he was known to hand out plastic Fresnel lenses — the kind used to start fires with the sun — imprinted with his name like a business card.
Mr. Löf, who died Oct. 12 at the age of 95, conducted his first experiments with solar-power homes during World War II. The heat-transfer technologies he pioneered are part of many of today’s solar-heating systems.
Colorado State University
Mr. Löf had to dismantle the solar-heating system on his first house in order to sell it.
Mr. Löf built two solar-heated homes for his family at a time when such systems were all but unheard of. For decades, Mr. Löf’s solar research found little practical application beyond the homes he constructed himself. It wasn’t until the 1970s, when soaring oil prices spurred interest in alternative energy, that he sought to commercialize the technology he had developed.
His first forays into solar research were financed by U.S. War Production Board grants, a wartime effort aimed at oil conservation. He relied on those grants to add a solar-heating system to his home in Denver in 1945. It consisted of a large glass roof panel and a series of pipes that led to a cache of gravel in the basement. Energy from the sun produced hot air that then heated the gravel. The gravel stored the heat, which was then used to heat the house. Mr. Löf reported that his oil use dropped about 30%.
Mr. Löf next built a home around the technology instead of retrofitting an old one, and reported even higher fuel savings. But solar heating was so unusual that he ended up having to dismantle the system on his first house in order to sell it.
Still, Mr. Löf saw a bright future in solar power, and in 1955 he predicted that within two decades 13 million homes would be solar-heated. The actual number turned out to be a tiny fraction of that — perhaps around 5,000, according to one estimate.
Born in 1913 in Aspen, Colo., when it was still a mining town, Mr. Löf was the son of a country doctor who had emigrated from Sweden. He studied chemical engineering at the University of Denver and earned a doctorate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mr. Löf taught chemical engineering first at the University of Colorado and then for two decades in the 1950s and 1960s at the University of Denver, where he was director of an industrial research institute.
In 1967, Mr. Löf moved to Colorado State University, where he went on to found the Solar Energy Application Laboratory. Led by Mr. Löf, scientists on the project built a series of demonstration houses that they said were the first to be both heated and cooled by the sun. Cooling works by using solar-heated water to drive a chemical refrigeration unit, or by chilling a pebble bed with cool night air.
The SEAL project allowed engineers to compare the efficiency of different solar technologies and develop industry standards. The scientists found their research to be in hot demand, as interest in solar heating surged in response to the oil shocks of the 1970s. Federal tax credits authorized during the administration of President Jimmy Carter added to the boom.
“There were a lot of hucksters out there selling bad systems,” said Byron Winn, a Colorado State engineering professor who worked with Mr. Löf. “George was a gentleman in every sense but not at all reluctant to point out when there was snake oil out there.”
Eventually, Mr. Löf decided to pursue commercial applications of his research, founding Denver-based Solaron Corp. in 1974 to design and install solar-heating systems in homes and farms.
More than 100,000 homes nationwide had solar-heating systems by 1980, according to U.S. Department of Energy statistics, and it looked like the industry was set to take off. But the tax credits were allowed to lapse in 1985 as oil prices retreated, and demand for solar panels withered. Mr. Löf’s Solaron filed for bankruptcy in 1987.
While Mr. Löf focused primarily on home heating, he sought to develop other applications for his research, including, most notably, a solar cooker. Crafted from metallized plastic sheeting and shaped like an umbrella, his solar cooker’s precise parabolic form focused the sun’s rays, creating enough heat to broil a steak. Mr. Löf joked that it would cook in the sunshine, and act as an umbrella in the rain. But the “Umbroiler,” as he dubbed it, was a commercial failure.
Mr. Löf worked on other solar cookers that were distributed in developing countries by Unesco, and he patented a system for using solar heat to distill freshwater from seawater.
The family home Mr. Löf built in Denver became a model for emerging solar home heating systems and attracted engineers from around the world.
Other than replacing occasional cracked glass panels on the roof, the system needed virtually no maintenance, and was still going strong at Mr. Löf’s death, more than half a century after he had installed it, his son, Larry Löf, said.
Write to Stephen Miller at stephen.miller@wsj.com

Key Democrat Cites Concerns on Climate Bill

By SIOBHAN HUGHES and IAN TALLEY
WASHINGTON — Sen. Max Baucus said Tuesday he has “serious reservations” about climate legislation unveiled by his Democratic colleagues, signaling trouble for a proposal that is stronger in certain respects than a bill passed by the House.
Mr. Baucus made his comments at a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which took up climate legislation written by Sens. John Kerry (D., Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.). The bill calls for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions 20% below 2005 levels by 2020. That is tougher than a House-passed version, which calls for a reduction of 17%.
The Senate bill also protects the authority of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions using the Clean Air Act, powers that were stripped by the House.
Mr. Baucus, a Montana Democrat who is chairman of the Finance Committee, will be a key player in shaping any final bill, as that panel also has jurisdiction over some elements of climate legislation. His views are closer to those of other Democrats from heartland and coal-dependent states whose support will be essential to passing a climate bill.
“I have some concerns about the overall direction of the bill,” Mr. Baucus said at the start of hearings Tuesday. “I have serious reservations with the depth of the midterm reduction target…and the lack of pre-emption of the Clean Air Act.”
As proposed, the bill risks moving legislators “further away from that achievable consensus on common-sense climate-change [legislation],” Mr. Baucus said.
Ms. Boxer said Mr. Baucus might adjust his position when she explains that the 20% target is easier to achieve since U.S. greenhouse-gas levels have fallen in recent years. “We’re going to be talking with him about that,” she said.
Other Democratic members of the committee also hinted they would like to see a more moderate bill. Sen. Arlen Specter (D., Pa.) expressed concern that emission-intense industries such as oil refining or coal-production might be hurt. Pennsylvania industry relies heavily on coal-generated power.
Supporters of the climate proposal can ill afford to lose any Democratic votes in the Senate, given stiff Republican opposition. GOP panel members have said they will try to keep the bill from passing out of committee if there isn’t a comprehensive review of costs by the EPA and the Congressional Budget Office. Republicans say the Kerry-Boxer bill as drafted could hurt the economy.
Several cabinet officials appeared at the hearing to encourage passage of a bill to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. The Senate bill, like the House measure, would require companies across the economy to hold government-issued permits to emit greenhouse gases — including carbon dioxide — which scientists have linked to a long-term rise in global temperatures.
Like the House measure, the Senate bill aims to ease costs to industry by initially giving away for free permits to certain industries, such as electric utilities and makers of steel and cement. Over time, the government would reduce the number of permits issued, bringing down emissions, while letting companies trade the valuable permits among themselves.
Write to Siobhan Hughes at siobhan.hughes@dowjones.com and Ian Talley at ian.talley@dowjones.com

Planting the seeds of environmental disaster

The expansion of oil palm cultivation is driving global warming
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
The typical image used to represent the process of global warming is a power station, belching out black smoke. But an equally valid image would be an oil palm sitting serenely under a tropical sky. Rainforests are being cleared across south-east Asia, West Africa and South America to make way for palm oil plantations, which produce the world’s cheapest vegetable oil. Yet deforestation is one of the greatest drivers of climate change. The destruction of the planet’s rainforests is responsible for 20 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions, as hardwood trees that have locked up carbon for decades are felled and burned.
Tropical deforestation might feel like something that is remote from our daily lives in Britain. But the reality is that the consumer choices millions of us make every day are contributing to the destruction of these forests. Half of all packaged food products sold by our supermarkets are made with tropical palm oil.

But this is not an exclusively British phenomenon. Food manufacturers across the world are helping to drive demand for palm oil. And in so doing they (and we) are adding to the forces of destruction assailing our precious, carbon-storing rainforests.
Palm oil cultivation does not need to involve such rampant destruction. If planted on marginal land, its environmental impact can be minimal. And many Western companies signed up three years ago to a commitment to use Asian palm oil from sustainable plantations, rather than the variety produced by rainforest clearance. But as we reveal today, their record in following through on these commitments has been miserable. Relatively few have made serious efforts to ensure that their palm oil is sustainably sourced. Although British manufacturers have generally been better than those in the rest of Europe, their achievement is nothing to boast of. The food industry as a whole has failed to make a decisive shift to sustainable palm oil.
Failure threatens on other fronts too. As we reported this week, the fate of a global deforestation treaty that will be presented to international delegates at the Copenhagen climate change summit in December is hanging in the balance. As presently framed, this treaty would grant Western subsidies to poor nations that cut down virgin rainforests and replace them with palm oil plantations. This is the opposite of what is required. Subsidies from rich countries to encourage developing nations to preserve their rainforests are undoubtedly needed. They will encourage sustainable economic growth in some of the poorest nations in the world while protecting a common international environmental resource. But there can be no question of subsidising palm oil plantations.
If this treaty is ratified in its present form it would be a disaster. Its effect would be to encourage the destruction of rainforests and accelerate the catastrophic release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that such felling would entail. Responsible governments need to ensure this treaty is modified before it reaches Copenhagen. But relying on high politics is not enough. Consumer pressure is also needed. At the moment, many food manufacturers are paying little more than lip service to their environmental commitments. Shoppers in the rich world should increase the pressure on such firms by boycotting products made with unsustainable palm oil.
The threat of environmental disaster that hangs over us comes in many shapes; and few loom larger than the shape of the oil palm.

Australians ‘could be forced to evacuate seaside homes’

Anne Barrowclough in Sydney

Australia’s fabled beachside life of sea, surf and sundowners overlooking the ocean is under threat from rising sea levels. Those living in coastal areas most at risk could be ordered out of their homes for their own safety, while construction in other sensitive seaside areas may be banned.
A government report on climate change says that urgent action is needed to protect thousands of miles of coastline and to maintain an Australian way of life.
The issue is already coming to a head in several areas. At Byron Bay, a popular resort on the northern New South Wales coast, owners of luxury homes are fighting council plans to force the demolition of properties under threat from erosion.
The concentration of people and infrastructure on the coast makes the country “particularly vulnerable to the coastal erosion and inundation that will accompany increases in sea level”, according to the report from the bipartisan Lower House Environment Committee. It notes that for each 1cm rise in sea level, the shoreline could be pushed back by 1m.

Sea levels are expected to rise up to 80cm (32ins) globally this century, according to forecasts by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, posing a significant threat to coastlines. While most Australian states accept these forecasts, the New South Wales state government commissioned a separate report from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and is projecting a global sea level rise closer to one metre.
Australia’s principal cities are all in coastal areas and 80 per cent of Australians live near the sea, with about 711,000 homes within 3km (2 miles) of the ocean. The committee,which spent 18 months examining the impact of climate change on the country’s coastal areas, recommends that authorities consider “the possibility of a government instrument that prohibits continued occupation of the land, or future building due to sea hazard”.
Alan Stokes, from the National Seachange Taskforce, which represents local councils in coastal areas, said that the committee’s recommendations should be treated as a blueprint for the future. “There are areas around the coast that are vulnerable to such an extent that there can be no guarantee that people can live there in the future in a sense of security,” said Mr Stokes. “What we are looking at is the prospect of losing those coastal attributes that people find so attractive.”
In Byron Bay, the Byron Shire Council, which is controlled by the Green Party, published a planning policy recently advocating “planned retreat”, allowing natural erosion of the coastline, to the extent of preventing homeowners from building rock defences to protect their property from rising sea levels. Should the council succeed in enforcing this law any house under threat of erosion would be demolished.
Several residents have already been stopped from building walls to protect beachfront homes from storm surges but after mounting a legal battle they hope for a reprieve after the state government announced its own objections to the council’s move.
Sydney’s northern beaches have also proven vulnerable, with insurance firms refusing to cover some beachfront homes. The situation at Byron Bay has led to a call for greater clarification of the rights of property owners to protect homes from climate change.
The report also includes recommendations for a national coastline plan, greater co-operation between different authorities, and a revised building code to cope with storm surges and soil erosion.

The Sketch: It’s a climate of confusion, for sure

Simon Carr
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
Things are so complicated it’s a wonder anyone knows what’s going on. But then, no one does. No one can. There’s too much to know. Not that Lord Turner of Ecchinswell put it like that. He’s climate change. It’s his job to project omniscience in the face of the unknowable.
He told the Environmental Audit Committee that reducing emissions by 80 per cent will lead to a 50-50 probability of keeping world temperature increases below C. How wonderfully authoritative that sounds. What certainty it offers, by specifying the degree of uncertainty. What precision. What exactitude.
At the cost of several trillion dollars, we will achieve a global goal that sceptics assume is unachievable. This amazing effort may or may not have the predicted effect. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. Is that a little casual? By the same token, he told us that with the 80 per cent reduction, the chance of world temperatures increasing by 4C is just 1 per cent.
But we live in a world where temperature claims on both sides are supported by conflicting statistics and where the economic cycle makes a mockery of politicians’ predictions – but here is Lord Turner applying his definitive probabilities to a multi-trillion-dollar bet and assumes he will carry the country with him.
He also said that if we wanted to increase the probability to 99 per cent we would have to start de-industrialising immediately. But then if we did de-industrialise and we still breached the C he would rightfully say: “I did warn you there was one chance in a hundred it would happen.”
These unknowables are matched by the more ordinary mysteries of administrative life.
What’s the likelihood of getting three nuclear power stations through planning and construction by 2020. Is that going to happen? “It is… absolutely… not impossible,” Lord Turner said. He didn’t specify the improbability.
Now, as you’re a well-informed climate change specialist you can almost certainly explain the difference between a carbon credit and a carbon offset and why a credit is better than an offset. But did you know that your virtuously-procured EU Emissions Trading credits contain offsets? Ah ha!
But even if you’re expert in the field to the extent of being on the EAC you might be confused about whether new power stations really had to be clean-coal-compliant. You thought there was wriggle room? No the policy changed in February.
And even if you’re the minister you might not know whether some target for 2020 was 2 per cent or 20 per cent – the ministerial preference. It was 2 per cent in the minister’s document but it’s certain there is a probability factor that everyone was right.
simoncarr@sketch.sc