A huge, coal-fired power plant in Belchatow, Poland, pollutes more today than its EU-set CO2-ceiling and has to buy up to 20 million tonnes of CO2 emission permits by 2013. After that, it will produce even larger amounts of CO2 when a new, 858 megawatt block becomes fully operational.
The Belchatow plant in central Poland is the biggest CO2 polluter in the European Union. Last year it released nearly 31 million tonnes of CO2, topping by four million tonnes its EU-set ceiling."Our emissions in coming years of the 2008-2012 accounting period will stand at similar levels. So at the end of the whole period, we will be short some 14-20 million tonnes of CO2 permits," the head of Belchatow, Jacek Kaczorowski says in an interview with Reuters.Belchatow can continue its emissions beyond its EU-set ceiling if it buys CO2 permits on the market. After 2013 Belchatow plans to curb its increase in CO2 emissions by pumping CO2 into the underground.
The capture and storage (CCS) installation is planned to hold one third of the emissions generated by the new block. The CCS-installation might be co-financed by the EU.
"But even if we don't get the EU money, we will have to go on with the project because of the need to cut emissions," Kaczorowski says. "We have to go on developing more CCS to remain competitive."
Monday, August 24, 2009
Africa puts price tag on climate change
According to a draft resolution seen by Reuters on Monday, African leaders will ask rich countries to pay 67 billion US Dollars annually to African countries to mitigate the impact of global warming on the world’s poorest continent. The resolution came out of a meeting held by 10 African leaders in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa to find a common stance ahead of the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December. Africa’s ability to negotiate has been limited seriously in the past because of a lack of a coherent stance on global warming among African governments. "The negotiating team needs to be backed with the political weight at the highest level in the continent to ensure that the African voice on climate change negotiations is taken with the seriousness it deserves," the document said.
Kenya from blue energy to green
Bio fuel from Jatropha crops, biogas from municipal waste, wind power and solar cells are all on the agenda in Kenya. Climate change and other factors have caused rainfall to decrease, which again leads to a decline in hydropower that presently account for 60 percent of Kenya’s electricity supply.
“We are making a big bet on renewable energy so that we are always prepared, even when the rains fail,” Prime Minister Raila Odinga says according to Business Today.
A government task force is to identify green energy projects that can generate 2000 MW of electricity. The figure can be compared to the present installed capacity of 1296 MW. 80 percent of Kenyans live in rural areas with scarce access to electricity. For the country to develop, production needs to be raised.
As water levels in dams producing hydropower are at record lows, Kenya’s reserve margin for power production is non-existent and millions of consumers are experiencing rationing. Rainfall is expected to decrease further, partly due to climate change and partly due to illegal logging which brings down the capacity of soils to catch water.
The government, already faced with a budget deficit, urges foreign investments in the proposed green energy projects.
“We are making a big bet on renewable energy so that we are always prepared, even when the rains fail,” Prime Minister Raila Odinga says according to Business Today.
A government task force is to identify green energy projects that can generate 2000 MW of electricity. The figure can be compared to the present installed capacity of 1296 MW. 80 percent of Kenyans live in rural areas with scarce access to electricity. For the country to develop, production needs to be raised.
As water levels in dams producing hydropower are at record lows, Kenya’s reserve margin for power production is non-existent and millions of consumers are experiencing rationing. Rainfall is expected to decrease further, partly due to climate change and partly due to illegal logging which brings down the capacity of soils to catch water.
The government, already faced with a budget deficit, urges foreign investments in the proposed green energy projects.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
U.S. approves oilsands pipeline (reality trumps AGW religion)
The United States approved Enbridge Inc's $3.3 billion Alberta Clipper pipeline project on Thursday, granting the project, which will deliver Canadian oil to U.S. refineries, a presidential permit, and raising the ire of some environmental groups.
The U.S. State Department said that allowing construction of the 450,000 barrel per day line serves U.S. interests by adding secure oil supplies from outside the OPEC nations at a time when political tensions in some producing regions threaten to interfere with oil shipments. ...
Most of the oil shipped on the line will come from Canadian oil sands producers, which have been under attack from some U.S. environmental groups and legislators for boosting greenhouse gas emissions because of expanding production in the oil sands -- a Florida-sized region of northern Alberta that contains the largest oil reserves outside the Middle East.
The State Department said it took greenhouse gas emissions into account when deciding to issue the permit, saying that the issue is best addressed through the domestic policies of the United States and Canada and through international agreements." "U.S. approves Alberta Clipper pipeline project"
The U.S. State Department said that allowing construction of the 450,000 barrel per day line serves U.S. interests by adding secure oil supplies from outside the OPEC nations at a time when political tensions in some producing regions threaten to interfere with oil shipments. ...
Most of the oil shipped on the line will come from Canadian oil sands producers, which have been under attack from some U.S. environmental groups and legislators for boosting greenhouse gas emissions because of expanding production in the oil sands -- a Florida-sized region of northern Alberta that contains the largest oil reserves outside the Middle East.
The State Department said it took greenhouse gas emissions into account when deciding to issue the permit, saying that the issue is best addressed through the domestic policies of the United States and Canada and through international agreements." "U.S. approves Alberta Clipper pipeline project"
Nile Delta: 'We are going underwater. The sea will conquer our lands'
Maged Shamdy's ancestors arrived on the shores of Lake Burrulus in the mid-19th century. In the dusty heat of Cairo at the time, French industrialists were rounding up forced labour squads to help build the Suez Canal, back-breaking labour from which thousands did not return. Like countless other Egyptians, the Shamdys abandoned their family home and fled north into the Nile Delta, where they could hide within the marshy swamplands that fanned out from the great river's edge.
As the years passed, colonial rulers came and went. But the Shamdys stayed, carving out a new life as farmers and fishermen on one of the most fertile tracts of land in the world. A century and a half later, Maged is still farming his family's fields. In between taking up the rice harvest and dredging his irrigation canals, however, he must contemplate a new threat to his family and livelihood, one that may well prove more deadly than any of Egypt's previous invaders. "We are going underwater," the 34-year-old says simply. "It's like an occupation: the rising sea will conquer our lands."
Maged understands better than most the menace of coastal erosion, which is steadily ingesting the edge of Egypt in some places at an astonishing rate of almost 100 metres a year. Just a few miles from his home lies Lake Burrulus itself, where Nile flower spreads all the way out to trees on the horizon. Those trunks used to be on land; now they stand knee-deep in water.
Maged's imperial imagery may sound overblown, but travel around Egypt's vast, overcrowded Delta region and you hear the same terms used time and again to describe the impact climate change is having on these ancient lands. Egypt's breadbasket is littered with the remnants of old colonisers, from the Romans to the Germans, and today its 50 million inhabitants jostle for space among the crumbling forts and cemeteries of those who sought to subjugate them in the past.
On the Delta's eastern border, in Port Said, an empty stone plinth is all that remains of a statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man who built the Suez Canal; somewhere along the Delta's westernmost reaches, the long-lost tomb of Cleopatra lies buried. With such a rich history of foreign rule, it's only natural that the latest hostile force knocking at the gates should be couched in the language of occupation.
"Egypt is a graveyard for occupiers," observes Ramadan el-Atr, a fruit farmer near the antiquated town of Rosetta, where authorities have contracted a Chinese company to build a huge wall of concrete blocks in the ocean to try to save any more land from melting away. "Just like the others, the sea will come and go – but we will always survive."
Scientists aren't so sure. Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared Egypt's Nile Delta to be among the top three areas on the planet most vulnerable to a rise in sea levels, and even the most optimistic predictions of global temperature increase will still displace millions of Egyptians from one of the most densely populated regions on earth.
The Delta spills out from the northern stretches of the capital into 10,000 square miles of farmland fed by the Nile's branches. It is home to two-thirds of the country's rapidly growing population, and responsible for more than 60% of its food supply: Egypt relies unconditionally on it for survival. But with its 270 km of coastline lying at a dangerously low elevation (large parts are between zero and 1m above sea level, with some areas lying below it), any melting of the polar ice caps could see its farmland and cities – including the historical port of Alexandria – transformed into an ocean floor. A 1-m rise in the sea level, which many experts think likely within the next 100 years, will cause 20% of the Delta to go underwater. At the other extreme, the 14-m rise that would result from the disappearance of Greenland and western Antarctica would leave the Mediterranean lapping at the northern suburbs of Cairo, with practically all of the Delta underwater.
Already, a series of environmental crises are parking themselves on the banks of the Nile. Some are subtle, like the river's quiet vanishing act in the Delta's northern fields; others, like the dramatic collapse of coastal lands into the ocean, are more striking. Major flooding is yet to become a reality but, from industrial pollution to soil salinity, a whole new set of interconnected green concerns is now forcing its way into Egyptian public discourse for the first time.
"The Delta is a kind of Bangladesh story," says Dr Rick Tutwiler, director of the American University in Cairo's Desert Development Centre. "You've got a massive population, overcrowding, a threat to all natural resources from the pressure of all the people, production, pollution, cars and agricultural chemicals. And on top of all that, there's the rising sea. It's the perfect storm."
Follow the Nile north out of Cairo on the old agricultural road, and you find it hard to pinpoint where the city ends and the lotus-shaped Delta begins. Carpeted with redbrick apartment blocks and spliced with streets in every direction, the lush greenery of the Nile's splintered arteries is almost impossible to appreciate in isolation. This is where the urban and the rural get lost in each other, with livestock living in doorways and workers camping out in fields. In the past, literary giants venerated the Delta's wild marshlands; today, any clear-cut divisions between the metropolis and the countryside have long faded away.
Urban encroachment – the steady chipping away at arable land through unauthorised construction – haunts the Delta everywhere you look. Despite a web of legislation outlawing illegal building practices and theoretically "fencing off" agricultural land, in every direction the sweeping vista of wheat fields and rice paddies always ends abruptly in a cluster of half-built homes. There are more than 4,000 people per square mile in the Delta; it's hard to think of any other place where humans and the environment around them are more closely intertwined. With Egypt's present-day population of 83 million set to increase to more than 110 million in the next two decades, the seemingly unstoppable spread of bricks and mortar over the soil is both the most visible symptom of the country's demographic time-bomb and an inevitable response to it.
More people in the Delta means more cars, more pollution and less land to feed them all on, just at a time when increased crop production is needed most. Yet the desertification of land through human habitation is, worryingly, only the beginning of the problem. Although few in the Delta have noticed it yet, the freshwater of the Nile – which has enabled Egypt to survive as a unified state longer than any other territory on earth – is creaking under the strain of this population boom. The world's most famous river has provided the backdrop to all manner of dramas throughout history, real and fictional. Now, around its northernmost branches where the minarets and pylons thin out and the landscape becomes more windswept, another is playing out to devastating effect.
The villain is salinity. I visit one of the worst-affected regions, Kafr el-Sheikh, on a Friday morning when the fields have emptied out for the noon prayer. The streets are eerily silent; with its people gone, the area takes on the appearance of one of Italo Calvino's fantastical string cities, chock-a-block with the shells of human habitation but no living souls remaining. The exception is Maged, who owns six feddan (about six acres) of land near the village of el-Hadadi.
Maged is halfway down a hole when I approach his house. Clambering out apologetically, he explains that German experts visited this area last year and declared that the fresh water being pumped to local villages "wasn't fit for a dog to drink." After months of phone calls to the national water company, none of which were answered, Maged decided to lay down a new set of pipes himself in the hope it would improve the quality of drinking water for his two young daughters. It's hot, exhausting work, which he fits in between his farming duties and a new part-time job as an accountant in a local alfalfa plant. "We don't have much time on our hands at the moment," Maged says, dusting himself off and gulping down some fresh melon juice. "Nobody can make a living solely off the land any more."
On a tour of his fields, I see why. The rich brown soil has greyed out in recent years, leaving a barren salt-encrustation on the surface. The cause is underground saltwater intrusion from the nearby coast, which pushes up through the soil and kills off roots. Coastal farmland has always been threatened by saltwater, but salinity has traditionally been kept at bay by plentiful supplies of fresh water gushing over the soil and flushing out the salt. It used to happen naturally with the Nile's seasonal floods; after the construction of Egypt's High Dam in the 1970s (one of the most ambitious engineering projects on earth), these seasonal floods came to an end, but a vast network of irrigation canals continued to bring gallons of fresh water to the people who worked the land, the fellahin, ensuring salinity levels remained low.
Today, however, Nile water barely reaches this corner of the Delta. Population growth has sapped its energy upstream, and what "freshwater" does make it downriver is increasingly awash with toxins and other impurities. Farmers such as Maged now essentially rely on waste water – a mix of agricultural drainage and sewage – from the nearby town of Sidi Salim.
The result is plummeting fertility; local farmers say that whereas their fathers spent just a handful of Egyptian pounds on chemicals to keep the harvests bountiful, they now have to put aside between 25 and 80% of their profits for fertilisers just to keep their crops alive.
"We can see with our own eyes that the water is no good, it's less and less pure," Maged says. He points out huge swaths of neighbouring land that once glimmered with rice paddies; recently they have been dug up and replaced by fish farms, the ground too barren for crop cultivation. Further out, in the village of Damru, the green fields of 10 years ago are cracked and brown, now put into service as informal football pitches and rubbish dumps.
Experts believe the problem is only going to get worse. "We currently have a major water deficit in Egypt, with only 700 cubic metres of freshwater per person," explains Professor Salah Soliman of Alexandria University. "That's already short of the 1,000 cubic metres per person the UN believes is the minimum needed for water security. Now, with the population increase, it will drop to 450 cubic metres per person – and this is all before we take into account the impact of climate change."
That impact is likely to be a 70% drop in the amount of Nile water reaching the Delta over the next 50 years, due to increased evaporation and heavier demands on water use upstream. The consequences of all these ecological changes on food production are staggering: experts at Egypt's Soils, Water and Environment Research Institute predict that wheat and maize yields could be down 40% and 50% respectively in the next 30 years, and that farmers who make a living off the land will lose around $1,000 per hectare for each degree rise in the average temperature.
The farmers here feel abandoned by the state; there are regular dismissive references to the "New Age," a euphemism for the much-hated regime of President Hosni Mubarak, whose neoliberal reform programmes and widespread corruption scandals have provoked a wave of popular discontent across the country. This disconnect between the state and its people has led to distrust of government scientists who think coastal erosion, rather than freshwater scarcity, is the main reason for the farmers' problems. And, in a worrying twist for Egypt's creaking economy, the erosion isn't only affecting farmers. "Unfortunately, most of our industry and investment has been built on sites very close to the shore," says Soliman. "There's only so much water we can hold back."
Ras el-Bar is a small holiday resort at the mouth of the Nile's Damietta branch. This was the summer paradise that Nobel prizewinning novelist Naguib Mahfouz's well-heeled characters would escape to when the heat of the capital became unbearable; today its squat pink lighthouse and endless boulevards of deserted, low-rise holiday homes have the faded feel of a 1950s Disneyland.
Although still popular in July and August, Ras el-Bar has been overtaken as a seaside destination by the brash consumerism of a new generation of towns: Sharm el-Sheikh, Marina, Hurghada. In place of tourists, however, new factories have arrived here in abundance, including some that nearby residents believe are poisoning the air. The arrival of one industrial plant in Damietta, which coincided with the ministry of environment's last-minute decision not to designate the area a protected nature reserve, is a familiar story of shady backdoor deals, public outrage and the studious disregard of local opinions. In this case, the locals managed to postpone the factory's construction, but other plants remain. "In the morning here you can see nothing but smoke," says Mohammed Fawzia, who is fishing in a canal down by the side of an industrial complex run by the state-owned Mopco company. "Take photos of it for us so we can show who is killing our children. We want the factories gone."
Many Cairo-based experts, however, insist that the task of coping with the dramatic ecological changes faced by the Delta is made harder by the ignorance of people such as Mohammed. They claim the fellahin are too uneducated to change their ways. But they are wrong: while farmers in the southern Delta, where Nile water is still relatively plentiful, have little knowledge of climate change, those in the north are painfully aware of the science behind the death of their land. However, they also have little time to listen to the harrying of a government which is widely seen to preach green rhetoric on the one hand but is only too willing to sell out the environment on the other, along with the local people.
Money talks in Egypt, and sustainable development is forgotten when the interests of the rich and powerful – such as the industrial plants in Damietta or the influential Badrawi clan in Daqahliyah – are at stake. The repression and self-interest of Mubarak's inner circle have left them bereft of any moral authority on environmental issues.
And while scientists, academics and community organisers are making a concerted effort to educate Egyptians about the dangers of climate change, there is confusion over whether the focus of all these programmes should be on promoting ways to combat climate change, or on accepting climate change as inevitable and instead encouraging new forms of adaptation to the nation's uncertain ecological future.
Efforts are further hampered by a popular feeling that this is a crisis made by the west. "We're not responsible for climate change," says Soliman, pointing out that Egypt's contribution to global carbon emissions is an underwhelming 0.5%, nine times less per capita than the US. "But unfortunately the consequence of climate change is no respecter of national borders."
The scale of the crisis – more people, less land, less water, less food – is overwhelming, and has infected discussion of climate change with a toxic combination of cynicism and fatalism at every level. There are senior environmental officials in top scientific jobs here who do not believe climate change is real; others are convinced the problem is so great that human intervention is useless. "It's down to God," one environmental officer for a major Delta town tells me. "If the Delta goes we'll find new places to live. If Egypt was big enough for Mary and Joseph, then it will be big enough for all of us."
Of course, if sea levels do rise significantly, "then the debate is over," says Dr Tutwiler. "The land will be underwater and crop production will be over."
As a result, many now believe that Egypt's future lies far away from the Delta, in land newly reclaimed from the desert. Since the time of the pharaohs, when the Delta was first farmed, Egypt's political leaders have rested their legitimacy on their ability to feed it by taming the Nile. Mohammed Ali, Lord Cromer and Gamal Abdel Nasser all launched major projects to control and harness the river's seasonal floods; now Mubarak is following in their footsteps – not by saving the Delta, but by creating a bewildering array of canals and pumping stations that draw water out from the Nile into sandy valleys to the east and west, where the desert is slowly being turned green.
You can see evidence of these new lands on the Delta's fringes; mile upon mile of agri-business-owned fields peeking out behind the advertising billboards of the Cairo-Alexandria desert road. The billboards depict gated compounds and luxury second homes, escapist dreams for the Egyptian upper-middle class.
The new lands behind them are another sort of escape, this time for the whole country. Their very water-intensive existence is, though, only hastening the demise of the Delta; once the glittering jewel of Egypt and bedrock of its survival, but now a region whose death warrant may already have been signed.
Invasion of the Nile: The Delta's troubled history
• 4,000 – 3,000 BC approx – The Delta is populated by migrants from the Sahara and intensive farming begins in the region
• 1,300 BC approx – According to the Bible, the Delta is home to the Israelites, and miraculously survives God's plague of hail
• 343 BC – The Persians kill Egypt's last native pharaoh, ushering in more than 2,000 years of foreign rule over the Delta
• 332 BC – Alexander the Great invades and founds Alexandria at the tip of the Delta
• 30 BC – Cleopatra and Marc Anthony kill themselves
• 639 AD – Muslim Arabs sweep into the Delta, forcing out the Byzantine rulers
• 1517 AD – The Delta is absorbed into the Ottoman Empire and ruled from Turkey
• 1798 AD – Napoleon Bonaparte begins a three-year French occupation
• 1805 AD – The Albanian pasha Muhammad Ali seizes power but his dynasty falls under the control of the British Empire
• 1952 AD – Gamal Abdel Nasser restores Egyptian rule for the first time in two millennia
• 1970 AD – The Aswan Dam is completed, ending seasonal flooding in the Delta
• 2007 AD – Delta declared among top three areas vulnerable to rising sea levels
Alexandria: An ancient city under threat
Alexandria has been through several reincarnations: as a small Pharaonic town in the 4th century BC, as the capital of Egypt for 1,000 years, and as a cosmopolitan melting-ground in the early 20th century. While most of its former glories are already lying on the seabed, scientists now fear the city's outer fringes could be among the first victims of any rise in sea levels.
A rise of only 1m will leave the city centre cut off from the mainland. If it does disappear, its literary chroniclers may provide some comfort. Lawrence Durrell called it "the capital of memory", a city where recollections stay "clinging to the minds of old men like traces of perfume upon a sleeve". The Greek poet Constantine Cavafy shared Durrell's sense of being trapped by history. In what may prove a remarkable piece of foresight, he wrote in The City:
You'll find no new places, you won't find other shores.
The city will follow you. The streets in which you pace
will be the same, you'll haunt the same familiar places,
and inside those same houses you'll grow old.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't bother to hope
for a ship.
As the years passed, colonial rulers came and went. But the Shamdys stayed, carving out a new life as farmers and fishermen on one of the most fertile tracts of land in the world. A century and a half later, Maged is still farming his family's fields. In between taking up the rice harvest and dredging his irrigation canals, however, he must contemplate a new threat to his family and livelihood, one that may well prove more deadly than any of Egypt's previous invaders. "We are going underwater," the 34-year-old says simply. "It's like an occupation: the rising sea will conquer our lands."
Maged understands better than most the menace of coastal erosion, which is steadily ingesting the edge of Egypt in some places at an astonishing rate of almost 100 metres a year. Just a few miles from his home lies Lake Burrulus itself, where Nile flower spreads all the way out to trees on the horizon. Those trunks used to be on land; now they stand knee-deep in water.
Maged's imperial imagery may sound overblown, but travel around Egypt's vast, overcrowded Delta region and you hear the same terms used time and again to describe the impact climate change is having on these ancient lands. Egypt's breadbasket is littered with the remnants of old colonisers, from the Romans to the Germans, and today its 50 million inhabitants jostle for space among the crumbling forts and cemeteries of those who sought to subjugate them in the past.
On the Delta's eastern border, in Port Said, an empty stone plinth is all that remains of a statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man who built the Suez Canal; somewhere along the Delta's westernmost reaches, the long-lost tomb of Cleopatra lies buried. With such a rich history of foreign rule, it's only natural that the latest hostile force knocking at the gates should be couched in the language of occupation.
"Egypt is a graveyard for occupiers," observes Ramadan el-Atr, a fruit farmer near the antiquated town of Rosetta, where authorities have contracted a Chinese company to build a huge wall of concrete blocks in the ocean to try to save any more land from melting away. "Just like the others, the sea will come and go – but we will always survive."
Scientists aren't so sure. Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared Egypt's Nile Delta to be among the top three areas on the planet most vulnerable to a rise in sea levels, and even the most optimistic predictions of global temperature increase will still displace millions of Egyptians from one of the most densely populated regions on earth.
The Delta spills out from the northern stretches of the capital into 10,000 square miles of farmland fed by the Nile's branches. It is home to two-thirds of the country's rapidly growing population, and responsible for more than 60% of its food supply: Egypt relies unconditionally on it for survival. But with its 270 km of coastline lying at a dangerously low elevation (large parts are between zero and 1m above sea level, with some areas lying below it), any melting of the polar ice caps could see its farmland and cities – including the historical port of Alexandria – transformed into an ocean floor. A 1-m rise in the sea level, which many experts think likely within the next 100 years, will cause 20% of the Delta to go underwater. At the other extreme, the 14-m rise that would result from the disappearance of Greenland and western Antarctica would leave the Mediterranean lapping at the northern suburbs of Cairo, with practically all of the Delta underwater.
Already, a series of environmental crises are parking themselves on the banks of the Nile. Some are subtle, like the river's quiet vanishing act in the Delta's northern fields; others, like the dramatic collapse of coastal lands into the ocean, are more striking. Major flooding is yet to become a reality but, from industrial pollution to soil salinity, a whole new set of interconnected green concerns is now forcing its way into Egyptian public discourse for the first time.
"The Delta is a kind of Bangladesh story," says Dr Rick Tutwiler, director of the American University in Cairo's Desert Development Centre. "You've got a massive population, overcrowding, a threat to all natural resources from the pressure of all the people, production, pollution, cars and agricultural chemicals. And on top of all that, there's the rising sea. It's the perfect storm."
Follow the Nile north out of Cairo on the old agricultural road, and you find it hard to pinpoint where the city ends and the lotus-shaped Delta begins. Carpeted with redbrick apartment blocks and spliced with streets in every direction, the lush greenery of the Nile's splintered arteries is almost impossible to appreciate in isolation. This is where the urban and the rural get lost in each other, with livestock living in doorways and workers camping out in fields. In the past, literary giants venerated the Delta's wild marshlands; today, any clear-cut divisions between the metropolis and the countryside have long faded away.
Urban encroachment – the steady chipping away at arable land through unauthorised construction – haunts the Delta everywhere you look. Despite a web of legislation outlawing illegal building practices and theoretically "fencing off" agricultural land, in every direction the sweeping vista of wheat fields and rice paddies always ends abruptly in a cluster of half-built homes. There are more than 4,000 people per square mile in the Delta; it's hard to think of any other place where humans and the environment around them are more closely intertwined. With Egypt's present-day population of 83 million set to increase to more than 110 million in the next two decades, the seemingly unstoppable spread of bricks and mortar over the soil is both the most visible symptom of the country's demographic time-bomb and an inevitable response to it.
More people in the Delta means more cars, more pollution and less land to feed them all on, just at a time when increased crop production is needed most. Yet the desertification of land through human habitation is, worryingly, only the beginning of the problem. Although few in the Delta have noticed it yet, the freshwater of the Nile – which has enabled Egypt to survive as a unified state longer than any other territory on earth – is creaking under the strain of this population boom. The world's most famous river has provided the backdrop to all manner of dramas throughout history, real and fictional. Now, around its northernmost branches where the minarets and pylons thin out and the landscape becomes more windswept, another is playing out to devastating effect.
The villain is salinity. I visit one of the worst-affected regions, Kafr el-Sheikh, on a Friday morning when the fields have emptied out for the noon prayer. The streets are eerily silent; with its people gone, the area takes on the appearance of one of Italo Calvino's fantastical string cities, chock-a-block with the shells of human habitation but no living souls remaining. The exception is Maged, who owns six feddan (about six acres) of land near the village of el-Hadadi.
Maged is halfway down a hole when I approach his house. Clambering out apologetically, he explains that German experts visited this area last year and declared that the fresh water being pumped to local villages "wasn't fit for a dog to drink." After months of phone calls to the national water company, none of which were answered, Maged decided to lay down a new set of pipes himself in the hope it would improve the quality of drinking water for his two young daughters. It's hot, exhausting work, which he fits in between his farming duties and a new part-time job as an accountant in a local alfalfa plant. "We don't have much time on our hands at the moment," Maged says, dusting himself off and gulping down some fresh melon juice. "Nobody can make a living solely off the land any more."
On a tour of his fields, I see why. The rich brown soil has greyed out in recent years, leaving a barren salt-encrustation on the surface. The cause is underground saltwater intrusion from the nearby coast, which pushes up through the soil and kills off roots. Coastal farmland has always been threatened by saltwater, but salinity has traditionally been kept at bay by plentiful supplies of fresh water gushing over the soil and flushing out the salt. It used to happen naturally with the Nile's seasonal floods; after the construction of Egypt's High Dam in the 1970s (one of the most ambitious engineering projects on earth), these seasonal floods came to an end, but a vast network of irrigation canals continued to bring gallons of fresh water to the people who worked the land, the fellahin, ensuring salinity levels remained low.
Today, however, Nile water barely reaches this corner of the Delta. Population growth has sapped its energy upstream, and what "freshwater" does make it downriver is increasingly awash with toxins and other impurities. Farmers such as Maged now essentially rely on waste water – a mix of agricultural drainage and sewage – from the nearby town of Sidi Salim.
The result is plummeting fertility; local farmers say that whereas their fathers spent just a handful of Egyptian pounds on chemicals to keep the harvests bountiful, they now have to put aside between 25 and 80% of their profits for fertilisers just to keep their crops alive.
"We can see with our own eyes that the water is no good, it's less and less pure," Maged says. He points out huge swaths of neighbouring land that once glimmered with rice paddies; recently they have been dug up and replaced by fish farms, the ground too barren for crop cultivation. Further out, in the village of Damru, the green fields of 10 years ago are cracked and brown, now put into service as informal football pitches and rubbish dumps.
Experts believe the problem is only going to get worse. "We currently have a major water deficit in Egypt, with only 700 cubic metres of freshwater per person," explains Professor Salah Soliman of Alexandria University. "That's already short of the 1,000 cubic metres per person the UN believes is the minimum needed for water security. Now, with the population increase, it will drop to 450 cubic metres per person – and this is all before we take into account the impact of climate change."
That impact is likely to be a 70% drop in the amount of Nile water reaching the Delta over the next 50 years, due to increased evaporation and heavier demands on water use upstream. The consequences of all these ecological changes on food production are staggering: experts at Egypt's Soils, Water and Environment Research Institute predict that wheat and maize yields could be down 40% and 50% respectively in the next 30 years, and that farmers who make a living off the land will lose around $1,000 per hectare for each degree rise in the average temperature.
The farmers here feel abandoned by the state; there are regular dismissive references to the "New Age," a euphemism for the much-hated regime of President Hosni Mubarak, whose neoliberal reform programmes and widespread corruption scandals have provoked a wave of popular discontent across the country. This disconnect between the state and its people has led to distrust of government scientists who think coastal erosion, rather than freshwater scarcity, is the main reason for the farmers' problems. And, in a worrying twist for Egypt's creaking economy, the erosion isn't only affecting farmers. "Unfortunately, most of our industry and investment has been built on sites very close to the shore," says Soliman. "There's only so much water we can hold back."
Ras el-Bar is a small holiday resort at the mouth of the Nile's Damietta branch. This was the summer paradise that Nobel prizewinning novelist Naguib Mahfouz's well-heeled characters would escape to when the heat of the capital became unbearable; today its squat pink lighthouse and endless boulevards of deserted, low-rise holiday homes have the faded feel of a 1950s Disneyland.
Although still popular in July and August, Ras el-Bar has been overtaken as a seaside destination by the brash consumerism of a new generation of towns: Sharm el-Sheikh, Marina, Hurghada. In place of tourists, however, new factories have arrived here in abundance, including some that nearby residents believe are poisoning the air. The arrival of one industrial plant in Damietta, which coincided with the ministry of environment's last-minute decision not to designate the area a protected nature reserve, is a familiar story of shady backdoor deals, public outrage and the studious disregard of local opinions. In this case, the locals managed to postpone the factory's construction, but other plants remain. "In the morning here you can see nothing but smoke," says Mohammed Fawzia, who is fishing in a canal down by the side of an industrial complex run by the state-owned Mopco company. "Take photos of it for us so we can show who is killing our children. We want the factories gone."
Many Cairo-based experts, however, insist that the task of coping with the dramatic ecological changes faced by the Delta is made harder by the ignorance of people such as Mohammed. They claim the fellahin are too uneducated to change their ways. But they are wrong: while farmers in the southern Delta, where Nile water is still relatively plentiful, have little knowledge of climate change, those in the north are painfully aware of the science behind the death of their land. However, they also have little time to listen to the harrying of a government which is widely seen to preach green rhetoric on the one hand but is only too willing to sell out the environment on the other, along with the local people.
Money talks in Egypt, and sustainable development is forgotten when the interests of the rich and powerful – such as the industrial plants in Damietta or the influential Badrawi clan in Daqahliyah – are at stake. The repression and self-interest of Mubarak's inner circle have left them bereft of any moral authority on environmental issues.
And while scientists, academics and community organisers are making a concerted effort to educate Egyptians about the dangers of climate change, there is confusion over whether the focus of all these programmes should be on promoting ways to combat climate change, or on accepting climate change as inevitable and instead encouraging new forms of adaptation to the nation's uncertain ecological future.
Efforts are further hampered by a popular feeling that this is a crisis made by the west. "We're not responsible for climate change," says Soliman, pointing out that Egypt's contribution to global carbon emissions is an underwhelming 0.5%, nine times less per capita than the US. "But unfortunately the consequence of climate change is no respecter of national borders."
The scale of the crisis – more people, less land, less water, less food – is overwhelming, and has infected discussion of climate change with a toxic combination of cynicism and fatalism at every level. There are senior environmental officials in top scientific jobs here who do not believe climate change is real; others are convinced the problem is so great that human intervention is useless. "It's down to God," one environmental officer for a major Delta town tells me. "If the Delta goes we'll find new places to live. If Egypt was big enough for Mary and Joseph, then it will be big enough for all of us."
Of course, if sea levels do rise significantly, "then the debate is over," says Dr Tutwiler. "The land will be underwater and crop production will be over."
As a result, many now believe that Egypt's future lies far away from the Delta, in land newly reclaimed from the desert. Since the time of the pharaohs, when the Delta was first farmed, Egypt's political leaders have rested their legitimacy on their ability to feed it by taming the Nile. Mohammed Ali, Lord Cromer and Gamal Abdel Nasser all launched major projects to control and harness the river's seasonal floods; now Mubarak is following in their footsteps – not by saving the Delta, but by creating a bewildering array of canals and pumping stations that draw water out from the Nile into sandy valleys to the east and west, where the desert is slowly being turned green.
You can see evidence of these new lands on the Delta's fringes; mile upon mile of agri-business-owned fields peeking out behind the advertising billboards of the Cairo-Alexandria desert road. The billboards depict gated compounds and luxury second homes, escapist dreams for the Egyptian upper-middle class.
The new lands behind them are another sort of escape, this time for the whole country. Their very water-intensive existence is, though, only hastening the demise of the Delta; once the glittering jewel of Egypt and bedrock of its survival, but now a region whose death warrant may already have been signed.
Invasion of the Nile: The Delta's troubled history
• 4,000 – 3,000 BC approx – The Delta is populated by migrants from the Sahara and intensive farming begins in the region
• 1,300 BC approx – According to the Bible, the Delta is home to the Israelites, and miraculously survives God's plague of hail
• 343 BC – The Persians kill Egypt's last native pharaoh, ushering in more than 2,000 years of foreign rule over the Delta
• 332 BC – Alexander the Great invades and founds Alexandria at the tip of the Delta
• 30 BC – Cleopatra and Marc Anthony kill themselves
• 639 AD – Muslim Arabs sweep into the Delta, forcing out the Byzantine rulers
• 1517 AD – The Delta is absorbed into the Ottoman Empire and ruled from Turkey
• 1798 AD – Napoleon Bonaparte begins a three-year French occupation
• 1805 AD – The Albanian pasha Muhammad Ali seizes power but his dynasty falls under the control of the British Empire
• 1952 AD – Gamal Abdel Nasser restores Egyptian rule for the first time in two millennia
• 1970 AD – The Aswan Dam is completed, ending seasonal flooding in the Delta
• 2007 AD – Delta declared among top three areas vulnerable to rising sea levels
Alexandria: An ancient city under threat
Alexandria has been through several reincarnations: as a small Pharaonic town in the 4th century BC, as the capital of Egypt for 1,000 years, and as a cosmopolitan melting-ground in the early 20th century. While most of its former glories are already lying on the seabed, scientists now fear the city's outer fringes could be among the first victims of any rise in sea levels.
A rise of only 1m will leave the city centre cut off from the mainland. If it does disappear, its literary chroniclers may provide some comfort. Lawrence Durrell called it "the capital of memory", a city where recollections stay "clinging to the minds of old men like traces of perfume upon a sleeve". The Greek poet Constantine Cavafy shared Durrell's sense of being trapped by history. In what may prove a remarkable piece of foresight, he wrote in The City:
You'll find no new places, you won't find other shores.
The city will follow you. The streets in which you pace
will be the same, you'll haunt the same familiar places,
and inside those same houses you'll grow old.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't bother to hope
for a ship.
5 medical tests that could save your life
There are health tests we need, and those we don't. Pelvic ultrasound? Sounds ultrasuspicious. Occult blood test? Only if it comes with an exorcism. Urinalysis? Great, now I'll be kicked off the tour...
It's tough to know which of these are truly essential, especially when they're packaged with dozens of other tests and called an "executive health exam." And yet thousands of men sign up for these screenings — at an out-of-pocket cost of up to $10,000 apiece — based on the sales pitch that a test may uncover a hidden health condition.
Of course, 10 grand might be worth it if all that random screening actually did any good: But a seminal study by the Rand Corporation found that patients who had the most screenings over 5 years were no healthier than those given less medical attention. This isn't to say executive health exams are scams. They can be quite valuable — if you know which of the procedures are worthwhile. So we asked our experts to create an a la carte menu to bring to your GP. Think of these as the best tests for a recession.
Cardiac CT angiographyThese colorful 3-D images allow radiologists to calculate one of your most important heart numbers: your coronary artery calcium score, a measure of how much plaque is piling up in your arteries. A 2007 study of over 10,000 people published in the journal Atherosclerosis reported that calcium scores alone can predict heart attacks, while a 2003 study found that a high calcium score is associated with a tenfold increase in heart-disease risk. This is compared with a less-than-twofold increase in risk from traditional risk factors such as diabetes and smoking. The test has one significant downside: The radiation exposure from your average cardiac CT is equal to 600 chest x-rays, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. This produces a 1-in-5,000 risk of cancer, another study reveals. Who needs it: Men with some of the risk factors for heart disease whose physicians may be on the fence about starting treatment. "In these medium-risk cases, cardiac CT scans and calcium scoring can provide the extra level of information that we feel we need," says Gerald Fletcher, M.D., a professor of cardiology at the Mayo Clinic. The lower the calcium score, the lower the risk. If you reach 112, your physician might recommend aspirin or statins. Cost: $350 to $900. Most insurance companies will reimburse you if you've previously had an abnormal stress test or chest pain. Bone density scanThink osteoporosis affects only old ladies? Fact is, men begin losing bone mass at age 30. That's why it's important to assess the state of your skeleton now with a dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) scan, which uses low-radiation X-rays to gauge bone mineral density (it can also measure body fat percentage). "DEXA scans allow us to identify people at high risk for fracture so they can start treatment to strengthen their bones before a fracture occurs," says Murray J. Favus, M. D., director of the bone program at the University of Chicago medical center. Your doctor might suggest adding strengthening workouts to your exercise program and supplementing your daily diet with up to 1,000 milligrams of calcium and up to 400 IU of vitamin D.
It's tough to know which of these are truly essential, especially when they're packaged with dozens of other tests and called an "executive health exam." And yet thousands of men sign up for these screenings — at an out-of-pocket cost of up to $10,000 apiece — based on the sales pitch that a test may uncover a hidden health condition.
Of course, 10 grand might be worth it if all that random screening actually did any good: But a seminal study by the Rand Corporation found that patients who had the most screenings over 5 years were no healthier than those given less medical attention. This isn't to say executive health exams are scams. They can be quite valuable — if you know which of the procedures are worthwhile. So we asked our experts to create an a la carte menu to bring to your GP. Think of these as the best tests for a recession.
Cardiac CT angiographyThese colorful 3-D images allow radiologists to calculate one of your most important heart numbers: your coronary artery calcium score, a measure of how much plaque is piling up in your arteries. A 2007 study of over 10,000 people published in the journal Atherosclerosis reported that calcium scores alone can predict heart attacks, while a 2003 study found that a high calcium score is associated with a tenfold increase in heart-disease risk. This is compared with a less-than-twofold increase in risk from traditional risk factors such as diabetes and smoking. The test has one significant downside: The radiation exposure from your average cardiac CT is equal to 600 chest x-rays, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. This produces a 1-in-5,000 risk of cancer, another study reveals. Who needs it: Men with some of the risk factors for heart disease whose physicians may be on the fence about starting treatment. "In these medium-risk cases, cardiac CT scans and calcium scoring can provide the extra level of information that we feel we need," says Gerald Fletcher, M.D., a professor of cardiology at the Mayo Clinic. The lower the calcium score, the lower the risk. If you reach 112, your physician might recommend aspirin or statins. Cost: $350 to $900. Most insurance companies will reimburse you if you've previously had an abnormal stress test or chest pain. Bone density scanThink osteoporosis affects only old ladies? Fact is, men begin losing bone mass at age 30. That's why it's important to assess the state of your skeleton now with a dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) scan, which uses low-radiation X-rays to gauge bone mineral density (it can also measure body fat percentage). "DEXA scans allow us to identify people at high risk for fracture so they can start treatment to strengthen their bones before a fracture occurs," says Murray J. Favus, M. D., director of the bone program at the University of Chicago medical center. Your doctor might suggest adding strengthening workouts to your exercise program and supplementing your daily diet with up to 1,000 milligrams of calcium and up to 400 IU of vitamin D.
Southern governors hear warning on climate change
Global climate change over the next 20 years will cause intense droughts in the Southwest, floods in the Northeast threatening the coastline and urban areas, and significant storm damage along the Gulf Coast, a panel of Southern governors was told yesterday.
Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard Engel, director of the Climate Change and State Stability program of the National Intelligence Council, told the governors that the changes could also affect U.S. national-security interests -- aggravating poverty, degrading the environment and destabilizing fragile government regimes of nations around the world.
He said that although the U.S. will be "less affected and better equipped than the vast majority of nations to deal with climate change," it will still face challenges. Engel said these range from the costs to control emissions and respond to emergencies, to safeguarding against the potential for terrorists to "obtain and utilize" nuclear material and expertise that will increase as more countries pursue nuclear power as an energy source.
The sobering assessment, accompanied by a presentation on energy and climate security from former U.S. Sen. John W. Warner, R-Va., kicked off the Southern Governors' Association's annual meeting at the Kingsmill Resort & Spa near Williamsburg.
Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine is the outgoing chairman of the association, which has 16 states and two territories as members, ranging geographically from Puerto Rico to Maryland to Florida, and west to Texas.
Eleven chief executives showed up for this year's conference, which is traditionally held in the summer at a five-star resort. Financed by state dues and corporations, it is equal parts policy conference and expenses-paid junket for governors' families and top staff.
Northrop Grumman Corp., the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, Altria Group Inc., Dominion Resources Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp., Capital One Financial Corp. and Norfolk Southern Corp. were among the 70 industry groups that bankrolled half the costs of this year's meeting, attended by roughly 400 people.
Notably absent was Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, recently embroiled in a sex scandal with an Argentine woman.
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who was to succeed Kaine as chairman of the SGA next year, also opted out, having announced this year that he will run for the U.S. Senate. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a rising star in the Republican Party rumored to be mulling a run for president in 2012, also did not attend.
Kaine's theme for this year's meeting was climate change, energy and the environment.
"I think that opened all of our eyes," Kaine said after the climate-change presentation. "This is a big issue, where economics, the environment and national security all intersect."
Kaine's mission was to build regional consensus on how the South -- which produces a disproportionate share of the nation's energy for its size -- can develop more cost-effective and efficient ways of generating power while reducing greenhouse gases and mitigating impact on the environment.
Governors were treated to a detailed analysis of 23 climate-policy options and costs for their region compiled by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Climate Strategies.
Transportation, electricity consumption and industrial fuel use account for more than four-fifths of the greenhouse-gas emissions in the region, according to the preliminary results of the analysis.
The reduction in the growth rate of emissions brought on by reduced energy consumption and new fuel-consumption standards is expected to reduce overall emissions by 10 percent between now and 2020.
Specific numbers for each state were not presented, but governors were thankful for having data and cost information from which they could begin to devise an energy policy.
"I think the biggest bang for the buck because you both save money and you remove a lot [of greenhouse gases] is in the conservation and efficiency investments," Kaine said after the presentation.
However, with great diversity among the states in the SGA in terms of size, development and resources -- as well as politics -- agreement on a regional strategy is, as Kaine put it, "a work in progress."
A number of governors expressed concern that costs to make the South more "green" and efficient be shared among other states in the nation that benefit from the energy the region provides.
"Obviously we all agree on the goals of trying to approach this climate-change issue -- that's cleaning up our air and holding down greenhouse-gas emissions," said Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear.
"The issues that we're wrestling with are in the details of how we do that, the cost of doing it and how those costs are distributed."
Last night, Kaine hosted conference attendees with a dinner on the lawn of the Governor's Palace in Colonial Williamsburg, and tonight he'll host a black-tie-optional Virginia State Dinner in the ballroom of the resort.
The conference, which concludes tomorrow, also will brief governors on efforts to upgrade the nation's electricity grid.
Governors will also discuss regional transportation issues and the impact of federal health-care reform, which will feature a presentation by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.
Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard Engel, director of the Climate Change and State Stability program of the National Intelligence Council, told the governors that the changes could also affect U.S. national-security interests -- aggravating poverty, degrading the environment and destabilizing fragile government regimes of nations around the world.
He said that although the U.S. will be "less affected and better equipped than the vast majority of nations to deal with climate change," it will still face challenges. Engel said these range from the costs to control emissions and respond to emergencies, to safeguarding against the potential for terrorists to "obtain and utilize" nuclear material and expertise that will increase as more countries pursue nuclear power as an energy source.
The sobering assessment, accompanied by a presentation on energy and climate security from former U.S. Sen. John W. Warner, R-Va., kicked off the Southern Governors' Association's annual meeting at the Kingsmill Resort & Spa near Williamsburg.
Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine is the outgoing chairman of the association, which has 16 states and two territories as members, ranging geographically from Puerto Rico to Maryland to Florida, and west to Texas.
Eleven chief executives showed up for this year's conference, which is traditionally held in the summer at a five-star resort. Financed by state dues and corporations, it is equal parts policy conference and expenses-paid junket for governors' families and top staff.
Northrop Grumman Corp., the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, Altria Group Inc., Dominion Resources Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp., Capital One Financial Corp. and Norfolk Southern Corp. were among the 70 industry groups that bankrolled half the costs of this year's meeting, attended by roughly 400 people.
Notably absent was Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, recently embroiled in a sex scandal with an Argentine woman.
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who was to succeed Kaine as chairman of the SGA next year, also opted out, having announced this year that he will run for the U.S. Senate. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a rising star in the Republican Party rumored to be mulling a run for president in 2012, also did not attend.
Kaine's theme for this year's meeting was climate change, energy and the environment.
"I think that opened all of our eyes," Kaine said after the climate-change presentation. "This is a big issue, where economics, the environment and national security all intersect."
Kaine's mission was to build regional consensus on how the South -- which produces a disproportionate share of the nation's energy for its size -- can develop more cost-effective and efficient ways of generating power while reducing greenhouse gases and mitigating impact on the environment.
Governors were treated to a detailed analysis of 23 climate-policy options and costs for their region compiled by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Climate Strategies.
Transportation, electricity consumption and industrial fuel use account for more than four-fifths of the greenhouse-gas emissions in the region, according to the preliminary results of the analysis.
The reduction in the growth rate of emissions brought on by reduced energy consumption and new fuel-consumption standards is expected to reduce overall emissions by 10 percent between now and 2020.
Specific numbers for each state were not presented, but governors were thankful for having data and cost information from which they could begin to devise an energy policy.
"I think the biggest bang for the buck because you both save money and you remove a lot [of greenhouse gases] is in the conservation and efficiency investments," Kaine said after the presentation.
However, with great diversity among the states in the SGA in terms of size, development and resources -- as well as politics -- agreement on a regional strategy is, as Kaine put it, "a work in progress."
A number of governors expressed concern that costs to make the South more "green" and efficient be shared among other states in the nation that benefit from the energy the region provides.
"Obviously we all agree on the goals of trying to approach this climate-change issue -- that's cleaning up our air and holding down greenhouse-gas emissions," said Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear.
"The issues that we're wrestling with are in the details of how we do that, the cost of doing it and how those costs are distributed."
Last night, Kaine hosted conference attendees with a dinner on the lawn of the Governor's Palace in Colonial Williamsburg, and tonight he'll host a black-tie-optional Virginia State Dinner in the ballroom of the resort.
The conference, which concludes tomorrow, also will brief governors on efforts to upgrade the nation's electricity grid.
Governors will also discuss regional transportation issues and the impact of federal health-care reform, which will feature a presentation by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.
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