Environment News 2 May 2007

Silent Thais keep cool amid heated debate on global warming
Source : The Nation
A dozen Thai delegates sat mutely during the second day of the closed-door climate change summit, watching officials from European countries hotly debate how best to come up with an effective report to deal with the impacts of the warming planet.
However, the Thais were not alone in their silence. Delegates from other developing countries did not speak much either. Only representatives from four developing nations - Brazil, China, India and the Philippines - actually got a word in at the Bangkok conference. "We did not say a word because we did not make a prior agreement about who should speak," said Jessada Luengjam, a Thai delegate from the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation. He added it was more a problem of unplanned organisation than anything else.
"When we had meetings to discuss the draft report, each related agency made a lot of observations and noted how we should react, but when it came to the actual meeting, nobody was assigned to make a statement, so we were not sure who should speak," Jessada said. Jessada said he wondered why the Thai government did not appoint representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as the country's delegates. "Unlike state officials, many NGOs wanted to debate," he said. Thailand was allowed to have 22 delegates as the host country, while everyone else sent only one or two representatives.
However, only 12 Thai delegates attended the summit yesterday. Almost all of the 22 delegates were senior officials of state agencies related to the issue, including representatives from the Ministry of Energy, the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment. It was not even clear who was the head of the Thai delegation. Kasemsan Jinnawaso, secretary general of the Office of Natural Resources and Environment Policy and Planning, was the most senior official at the conference, but when contacted by The Nation to ask who was in charge, he appeared uncertain, saying: "Me, or not?"
Jessada said that seven pages of the 24-page draft had been discussed as of yesterday evening. Officials from Switzerland, the United States, Austria and Germany were among the most active speakers during the first two days of the summit - and mostly argued about the technical terminology, he said. The summit is to finalise the third and final volume of the scientists' latest assessment on climate change since the formation in 1988 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN panel to assess scientific, technical and socio-economic information, relevant to understanding human-induced climate change.
The European Union yesterday organised a press conference at its office on Wireless Road in Bangkok to call on developing countries to take immediate steps to reduce greenhouse gases. Tom van Ierland, a climate change expert with the European Union and also a delegate of the EU to the summit, said to reach the goal of keeping temperatures from climbing more than two degrees Celsius, an EU ambitious goal, co-operation from developing countries is essential. "We need to ensure that in the coming years the growth of emissions in developing countries is reduced and eventually capped to be in line with our two degree objective," he said.

02/05/2007 : EPA proposes new refinery emission rules
Source : Reuters
The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday said it wants to expand pollution controls on the nation's aging oil refineries, forcing companies to install emission-reduction equipment if they build or expand a facility.
The EPA's proposed changes to the federal Clean Air Act's "new source performance standards" would cost industry about $54 million a year, the agency said. The standards would reduce emissions of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide emissions by nearly 56,000 tons per year over five years and yield nearly $1 billion in benefits, the EPA said. Nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide are precursors of acid rain and smog linked to respiratory diseases like asthma.
The proposed standards would put emission limits on fluid catalytic cracking units, fluid coking units, delayed coking units, process heaters and other fuel gas combustion devices, the EPA said. The rules would also apply to sulfur recovery plants that are constructed, modified, or reconstructed after the date of the EPA's proposal. That widens the applicability of current rules, which apply to fluid catalytic cracking unit catalyst regenerators, fuel gas combustion devices, and Claus sulfur recovery plants.
The proposal would also include workplace practices, where refineries could be required to prepare and follow written plans to reduce emissions during startups and shutdowns, as well as process malfunctions, the EPA said. Refineries would also be required to conduct a root-cause analysis if they release more than 500 pounds per day of sulfur dioxide, the EPA said.

02/05/2007 : China Battles Forest Fire in Northeast Mountains
Source : www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/
China was sending thousands of personnel to battle a forest fire across a 3 km (1.9 mile) front in its remote northeastern mountains on Tuesday, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Nearly 1,000 firefighters had reached the scene of the blaze in the Great Xingan Mountains, near the Russian border in Heilongjiang Province, after the alarm was sounded on Monday. The local meteorological bureau has forecast strong winds in the next few days, which could make controlling the fire difficult, Xinhua said.
A 1987 fire in the heavily forested Great Xingan Mountains, China's worst blaze in four decades, killed at least 200 people and destroyed some 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of timberland in three weeks. The State Forestry Administration said in January that China could face an "extremely serious" threat from forest fires this year because of global warming and the El Nino effect, which is caused by warming of Pacific waters off South America and can disrupt rainfall patterns.

02/05/2007 : Environment Groups Want Fish Protected in WTO Deal
Source : www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/
State subsidies that encourage overfishing should be banned under any World Trade Organisation (WTO) free trade pact, environmental groups said on Tuesday.
Conservationist groups WWF and Oceana urged countries negotiating a new WTO deal to back a US proposal on ending incentives that have vastly expanded the size of the world's fishing industry, pressuring stocks worldwide and threatening extinction for many species. "We are pouring billions of dollars into overfishing today. That is just madness in a world where fish stocks are depleting in every ocean," WWF Senior Fellor David Schorr said. Scientists have warned that the world's fisheries are on a steep decline and could collapse beyond repair within 50 years if current trends continue. More than 1 billion people worldwide depend on fish as their primary source of protein.
Total fishing subsidies, including money for things like research and stock management, are estimated at US$34 billion a year, a third of the value of the sector's overall sales. Capacity-increasing subsidies, including government supports for ships, fuel, or fishing equipment, are believed to add up to about US$20 billion a year worldwide. The US proposal includes a broad ban on subsidies that encourage overcapacity and overfishing, including for the buying of fishing vessels and their running costs. It also sets limits on remaining subsidies and requires countries to disclose the assistance they give to the industry.
"Strong action by the WTO will help control the 'race to fish' that is the core of the problem," Washington's WTO Ambassador Peter Allgeier said in remarks to a two-day WTO negotiating session, which began on Tuesday. While countries with big fishing interests voiced differing views, some such as Japan and Canada showed openness to an eventual deal. Europe did not attack the US proposal outright and the most vocal opposition came from Norway, diplomats said. Any agreement on fisheries would be included in the WTO's long-stalled Doha free trade round, which is bogged down in differences over agricultural and industrial tariffs.
Allgeier dismissed any chance of fishing being negotiated as a stand-alone pact if the Doha round grinds to a halt. "We are working under the assumption that there will be a single undertaking, a successful Doha round, and therefore this will fit into there," he told reporters at the WTO.





02/05/2007 : Hundreds of seals die in Caspian Sea: officials
Source : www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/
Kazakh officials have blamed the deaths of more than 800 seals off its Caspian Sea coastline on an abnormally warm winter and the early melting of sea ice. "The total number of dead seals by late Monday was 819, including 639 adults and 180 pups. A search of the zone is continuing," said a statement on the Kazakh emergency situations ministry website.
Most of the dead Caspian Seals were found in April in the sea's north-eastern Mangistauskaya region near the Kalamkas oil field, the statement said. Preliminary reports suggested the cause was not pollution but the unusually early ice melt, which disrupted the birthing season, the ministry said. A similar problem in 2000 resulted in the death of some 20,000 seals, according to a report on the website of the Caspian Environment Programme (CEP), an international body set up to protect the oil-rich inland sea.
Many seal pups died when the ice collapsed, while subsequent overcrowding during the birthing season provoked epidemics killing many more, the report said. The Caspian Seal is the smallest example of the species, the CEP said, and the only mammal in the Caspian, which is bordered by Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan. The seal's population decreased from about 1.5 million heads a century ago to less than 400,000 in the late 1980s, the CEP said.