US Congress reaches deal on farm bill

Congressional negotiators on Friday reached a tentative agreement on the farm bill, potentially ending months of deadlock over US agricultural policy amid record profits by farmers and mounting concerns over rising food prices.

The proposed legislation, whose final details will be unveiled next week and still face the possibility of a White House veto, will cost $280bn over five years and largely preserves an extensive programme of subsidies to US farmers.

Under the terms of the deal reached by House and Senate negotiators, a key ethanol tax credit is expected to be reduced from 51 cents per gallon to 45 and the tariff on ethanol imports from outside the US is also expected to be scaled back.

In addition, negotiators broadly agreed on an additional $10bn in funding for national food aid programmes, designed to tackle the threat posed by rising food prices in the US and address fears that millions of poor Americans risk going hungry.

Today the principal farm bill negotiators came together on a bipartisan level to reach a tentative agreement on the agriculture policy that will make the final farm bill a strong one,” said Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who chairs the Senate committee on agriculture, nutrition and forestry.

The House and the Senate had been trying to reconcile their differences for months, but growing concerns about food prices gave added urgency to their efforts. US food inflation rose 4.7 per cent last year and is expected to record a similar jump in 2008.

The Bush administration has threatened on several occasions to block passage of the bill on the grounds that some of the measures amount to tax increases. Its position on the agreement reached on Friday is unlikely to be known until final details are unveiled next week.

A new farm bill is negotiated every five years in Washington, amid massive lobbying efforts by crop growers, environmentalists and food stamp campaigners. In addition, the terms of this year’s bill are being closely tracked by international trade negotiators concerned that they may undercut multilateral efforts in the struggling Doha round to slash agricultural subsidies around the world.

The negotiations in Congress have coincided with a fight between the White House and Democratic lawmakers over the fate of a controversial free trade agreement between the US and Colombia. This week, Hank Paulson, Treasury secretary, appeared relatively optimistic however that a deal might be struck with Nancy Pelosi, House speaker, unlocking the agreement.

“I look forward to...talking to her,” Mr Paulson said in a Reuters interview. “She said she was going to call me back with some ideas. I’m always willing to listen and I would very much like to see Colombia get done.’’

Green roofs’ help take the heat off urban environments

On a mild April afternoon, the sun baked a Bronx, N.Y., rooftop to the tune of over 104 degrees. Just yards away, another rooftop also sat beneath the sun, but only measured about 70 degrees.

The difference? The cooler roof was a green roof, 5,600 square feet of shrubby plants called sedum. And the temperature difference between the two roofs is just one type of data climatologist Stuart Gaffin is gathering in an effort to convince politicians and developers that green roofs are critical to the future of cities.

Gaffin, an atmospheric researcher at Columbia University’s Center for Climate Systems Research, has been studying how green roofs affect the environment since January, when he began gathering data from his rooftop laboratory on the recently constructed buildings of the campus of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a private school in the Bronx. Gaffin is one of a growing number of climatologists who believe green roofs are a powerful technology to help cities confront the threats of global climate change.

“Global warming has been my issue for my whole career,” said Gaffin, and the data he’s collecting is bolstering the case for green roofs. Compared to that other, conventional roof, the green roof stays cooler in the sun, drinks up rainwater, and reflects sunlight that would otherwise heat the roof like a blowtorch on a steel girder.

Cities are hotspots of worry for climate scientists because expansive urban areas, coated in asphalt and belching the summertime exhaust of countless air conditioners, already pose problems for air quality, heat and excess rainfall, which can foul water systems. In the coming years, global warming is expected to make these problems worse. “Two of the biggest predictions for cities is more heat and more rain,” said Gaffin. “Global warming is going to actually amplify both of those things.”

Global warming will increase the intensity, duration and number of heat waves in the United States, said Radley Horton, another climatologist at Columbia. And this is in addition to an existing problem: the urban heat island, a stifling pocket of air saturated with pollutants that surrounds cities on hot summer days. While Horton won’t link global warming to the urban-heat-island effect, he believes the combination of the two poses a dramatic threat.

Heat kills more people than any weather phenomenon except for extreme cold, according to the National Weather Service. An average of 170 people die every year from excess heat, but in some years that number rises drastically. In 1980, 1,250 died from a nationwide heat wave, and in 1994, more than 400 people suffered heat-related deaths in the city of Chicago alone.

Politicians have responded to such disasters by seeking environmental “sustainability,” making the use of environmentally friendly building materials and green roof technology, a policy issue. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley installed 20,000 square feet of green roof on City Hall as an experiment to encourage green development in the Windy City. Seattle, too, has a green roof on top of its City Hall.

Portland, Boston and Baltimore are some of the other cities with policies to promote green roofing for new development. And New York City has proposed a tax incentive for green roof installations in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030 environmental initiative.

Yet in many cities, including New York, green roof production has been slow to gain momentum. “Many mainstream decision-makers have not yet been convinced that high-performance design is good business practice,” said a report by the non-profit U.S. Green Buildings Council. Part of the reason is cost. Installing a green roof in the United States can cost anywhere from 50 to 500 percent more than a normal roof, depending on factors such as the design, height and location of the building.

But Gaffin believes his research will offer convincing proof to policy makers that green roofs could avert summer power outages from strained electrical grids, as well as other problems, by lowering air conditioning needs of buildings, and cooling and filtering the local air. The plants absorb carbon dioxide, the villainous greenhouse gas. They filter pollution from the air, which helps lower air temperatures around the building. And green roofs act as insulation, lowering heating and cooling costs for buildings during the winter and summer months, experts said.

And while a single green roof benefits one building, advocates said a wide area of green-roofed buildings can affect the climate of a whole community.

“Is one roof (going to) make the entire neighborhood better air quality? A little,” said Mark Thomann, a landscape architect at Balmori Associates, a design firm in New York. “Would a whole bunch of green roofs do it? Sure.”

The sedum plants themselves are easy to maintain, experts said, requiring weeding for only the first few seasons until they fill the roof with a dense, verdant carpet. The sedum plant can survive long periods of drought, heavy rainstorms, and severe winds. “They’re tough,” said Kurt Horvath, president of Intrinsic Landscaping, which planted the roofs of Chicago’s transit authority and the Quaker Oats headquarters. “They can take a lot of abuse.”

Horvath argues that green roofs aren’t just good for the environment, but they can also be good business. “People are starting to realize the benefits,” said Horvath. “One of the biggest drivers is the architectural community has grasped this and run with it.”

In the Midwest, interest in green roofs is sprouting up, and entrepreneurs are taking notice. From 2004 to 2005, green roof square footage grew 80 percent in the United States, with Chicago and Washington, D.C. leading the way, according to Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, a green roof industry organization with more than 4,000 individual and 75 corporate members.

While green roof technology is off to a strong start in some cities, it struggles to grow in others. “We’ve had a lot of requests from architects,” said Thomann of the Balmori firm, which created a green roof for The Sopranos studio at Silvercup Studios in Queens, N.Y. “But,” he said, “they just want a deck terrace with a couple of planters.”

Gaffin said even in winter he’s seeing a return on the green roof investment. “These roofs are insulating in the winter,” he said. “They’re keeping the building warmer in the cold weather.”

On a recent morning after a rainstorm, Gaffin noted that the roof had captured 2,000 gallons of water, “2,000 gallons of water that didn’t go into the (sewer) system,” he said, referring to a problem called Combined Sewer Overflow, in which rain floods the sewers and sewage leaks into local waters.

“It’s really the number-one source of pathogens to the harbor,” he said.

Gaffin will begin publishing his data later this spring, but thinks his research is only a start to understanding the potential of this technology. “One of the things about green roofs,” he said, “is there’s really lots to be discovered.”

After Near Extinction, Humans Split Into Isolated Bands

After nearly going extinct 150,000 years ago, humankind split into small groups—living in isolation for nearly a hundred thousand years before "reuniting" and migrating out of Africa, a new gene study says. At one point our species may have been down to as few as 2,000 individuals, probably due to climate change—a longstanding theory bolstered by the new findings.

The research fills a gap in our understanding of what was happening in Africa before humans first left the continent.

"The assumption has always been that the original population [in sub-Saharan Africa] was very small but probably a single population," said Spencer Wells, head of the Genographic Project, which oversaw the study.

"Turns out, that is not the case."

(The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News and funds the Genographic Project.)

The study appears in the current issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Separate Ways

Around 200,000 years ago, modern humans emerged as a distinct species. All people alive today can trace their ancestry back to these humans, according to previous studies.

By the time the first great migrations out of Africa began, around 60,000 years ago, humanity had split into distinct populations with unique genetic lineages.

So what happened between 200,000 years ago and 60,000 years ago?

To find out, Wells and his colleagues analyzed 624 complete genomes of mitochondrial DNA—which is passed down from mothers—from various indigenous populations across sub-Saharan Africa. A genome is a person's complete set of DNA (quick overview of human genetics).

How much your groceries will cost in 10 years

How much is your shopping basket going to cost in 10 years?

Anna Shepard

However much you hope that the food crisis will go away, it's difficult to ignore this week's headlines warning us that the era of cheap food is over. But which of the staples in our shopping basket will be worst hit?

The general picture is that most items will go up, some more significantly than others. With oil at $117 a barrel and rising, so are the costs rising of the three Fs of farming: feed, fuel and fertiliser. “We're in a unique situation in which numerous problems are coming together,” says Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University. We're not just facing rising oil prices and water shortages, but the changing dietary habits of the developing world as it becomes richer, combined with land being used to provide crops for fuel rather than food, and climate change bringing drought to countries such as Australia.

There's no doubt that we're going to have to spend more on food. And yet, compared to other parts of the world, we're lucky. We spend 13 per cent of our household budget on food, down from 30 per cent, 50 years ago. For a family in the developing world, food is likely to be between 50 and 75 per cent of the total, according to the World Bank. What's more, in poorer countries, people buy raw ingredients, so if the price of corn doubles, that seriously affects their buying power.

But there is another side. Not only is the EU already backing down on biofuels, but some economists argue that the price of raw materials will be regulated by market forces. The theory is this: if farmers respond by growing more staple crops and leaving less land fallow, production will increase, thus lowering prices.

Meanwhile, supermarkets will compete to keep prices low. This could have ethical repercussions, cautions Evan Fraser, a senior lecturer in sustainable development at Leeds University. “Consumer instinct is to want to keep food cheap,” he says. “But usually this is achieved by squeezing producers.”

Here we show you what the food is your basket might cost in ten years' time.

CHICKEN

There is likely to be a significant price increase in the traditional centrepiece of the Sunday roast. Chicken, as a 100 per cent grain-fed animal, is at the mercy of soaring grain prices, which have increased 50 per cent in the past six months. The rise is in response to factors such as drought in Australia, the rise in affluence encouraging increasing numbers of consumers in the developing world to eat meat, and crops being grown for biofuels rather than food. As 60 per cent of the cost of a chicken is its feed, grain will have a significant impact on what we pay.

BEEF

The United Nations estimates that it takes an average of 8kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef. As most British beef is fed on pastures during the summer, beef might avoid the worst of rising grain prices, which have doubled in the past year. “Stick with British grass-fed beef and you're making a green choice as well as one that might remain immune to grain prices,” says Evan Fraser, a sustainablility expert at Leeds University. Beef from the United States is likely to be worse hit since it is intensively reared on large quantities of feed.

GM TINNED TOMATOES

Rising food prices may make genetically-modified food more popular. “Until now there has been the sense that we can do without GM methods,” says Giles Oldroyd, of the John Innes Centre. “But with rising food prices, we will appreciate that if this is a way to increase yields and keep prices down, it is worth pursuing.” Drought and insect-resistant crops are being developed that have the potential to combat climate problems in the developing world.

COFFEE

Coffee reserves are at their lowest point since records began, so prepare to fork out more for your morning latte. The first and biggest impact of countries such as China and India growing richer is a switch from a starch-based diet to a meat-based one. Next will be a sharp rise in demand for coffee and chocolate, increasing competition for the global supply. In Vietnam, for example, coffee consumption has risen 200 per cent over the past few years.

APPLES

Once oil becomes scarce, fuel prices will rise significantly and shipping fruit across the world will become less financially viable, encouraging us to eat locally grown produce. Exactly when this will happen is hotly disputed. The oil industry says that peak oil prices may be 30 years away, but some oil experts argue that we've reached them already. Until oil becomes considerably scarcer, it may continue to be as cheap to buy an apple from New Zealand as one from Somerset.

WINE

It is tax that affects the cost of wine, far more than anything to do with the raw ingredients. Even a series of bad grape harvests would have little impact on overall prices. When you buy a bottle of wine, £2.47 is tax, the remaining amount covers the bottling and transportation,as well as ingredients. However, some market analysts believe that thanks to global warming, we may be drinking Yorkshire wine by 2018.

MILK

While this may come as good news to dairy farmers, consumers can expect to be paying more for their pints. Already in the past 12 months prices have risen 20p, again owing to the increased cost of cow feed. In the past decade supermarkets have pushed down the price of milk, which has resulted in an exodus of farmers from the UK dairy industry. So, as less milk is being produced, prices inevitably go up.

EGGS

In the past nine months the price of eggs has increased by 34 per cent in the UK, as they are equally dependent on rising grain prices as chicken feed. The pattern will continue, according to Giles Oldroyd, at the John Innes Centre. He claims that the practice of intensively rearing chickens will continue, but that the days of the £2 chicken are over.

READYMEALS

According to Mintel research, the growth of the readymeals market has slowed over the past few years, due to growing health concerns. This is expected to continue. However, processed foods will have an easier time avoiding price increases. “What you're paying for is mostly packaging, transport, marketing, freezing and other things,” says Fraser. “The raw ingredients are only a fraction of the overall cost.” If they go up, the increase can be absorbed by cutting costs in other stages of the supply chain.

BREAD

The price of your daily loaf will rise, but not as dramatically as you might expect. Global wheat prices have doubled in the past year, but wheat accounts for only 13 per cent of the cost of bread. The rest of the cost is other ingredients (about 20 per cent): packaging, advertising and transportation. Leading retailers who know that it is important to control the price of staples will work hard to absorb higher bread production costs, even if it means squeezing producers.

RICE

Expect to be eating less of this basic foodstuff, says Evan Fraser, of Leeds University. Blame a decline in global exports - global supplies have been outstripping demand for the past few year - which is already under way. The rice-producing countries in Asia, worried that prices will rise and keen to keep their supplies to feed their own population, are clamping down on the amount that they export. Already India exports only basmati rice and Vietnam is cutting back its rice exports.

VEGETABLES

Compared with meat and other grain-related foodstuffs, vegetables may seem relatively inexpensive, says Peter Ayton, of the market analyst Mintel. Research indicates that sales of fruit and veg have been star performers, growing steadily over the past few years. Mintel predicts that this will continue, due as much to our interest in healthy eating as reasonably stable prices. In the longer term, rising oil prices combined with water shortages are likely to increase costs. Most vegetable production needs nitrogen fertiliser, which is energy-intensive, and plenty of water.

Polar bears 'at risk' in Canada

Canada's polar bears are at risk from hunting and melting ice in the Arctic

Polar bears in Canada are at risk from climate change but not threatened with extinction, a panel of experts has advised the Canadian government.

The government should develop a plan to protect the country's estimated 15,000 polar bears, the panel said.

The plight of the polar bear has long concerned environmentalists.

The animals face loss of habitat on two fronts, the panel said - hunting, and melting ice in the Arctic, which is widely blamed on climate change.

While recognising both problems, the panel found that Canada's polar bear population was not declining enough to place it in the most serious category as an endangered species.

Instead, it has been classified as a species of special concern.

'At risk'

"Based on the best available information at hand, there was insufficient reason to think that the polar bear was at imminent risk of extinction," said Jeff Hutchings, the panel's chairman.

"That's not to say that it's not in trouble. A special concern species is a species at risk in Canada and requires legislative action."

Canada's environment minister, John Baird, is obliged to accept the government-commissioned report's findings and address threats to the animal's survival, including climate change.

But a management plan for Canada's polar bears will not be required until 2014 - by which time some scientists believe the summer sea ice in the Arctic may have completely disappeared.

Industry bosses head gas-emissions panel

The province will determine this fall how to meet federal requirements that all new oilsands and coal-fired power plants opening after 2011 must be ready to capture their greenhouse gas emissions and store them underground, Energy Minister Mel Knight says.

He announced Thursday former Syncrude president Jim Carter will head an industry-dominated panel that will sketch a roadmap for carbon capture, a cornerstone of the provincial climate-change plan.

Some energy officials, like Carter's fellow panelist Epcor CEO Don Lowry, have said the Harper government's recent 2012 target seems severe, although some major oilsands firms have already been designing carbon-capture systems as part of their new plants.

The council includes six other current energy-sector leaders including EnCana CEO Randy Eresman, as well as two senior federal bureaucrats, three provincial officials and only one outsider -- Mike Percy, dean of University of Alberta's business school.

After two major panels told the province and Ottawa in recent months how it can forge ahead with taking the technology mainstream, this new one will be more of an implementation team, devising rules, timelines and government incentives to create the capture and underground storage systems. It will also determine where in Alberta the gas should be piped.

The oilpatch and electricity sectors are hoping for massive government investment into the technology, since the capture, pipeline and storage networks will carry multibillion-dollar price tags that companies are loath to shoulder themselves. A recent federal-provincial panel said both levels of government should pay a combined $2 billion.

The government hasn't committed anything, although the budget this week announced $574 million over three years for climate-change measures, mostly from industry emission fines or federal grants. It's widely expected that most of the money will go toward carbon capture, a technique that some other countries use and that many environmental groups embrace.

Carter argued that the governments which reap taxes and economic benefits from energy firms should help.

"Everybody benefits from this -- government and industry -- and we have to see this as a joint effort going forward," he said.

A provincial press release today boasts that carbon sequestration will be "Canada's largest contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions." That's based on the notion that oilsands expansions would lift Alberta's overall emissions much more dramatically if it wasn't capturing the carbon dioxide and piping 139 megatonnes of it underground to substantially cut the sector's emissions levels by 139 megatonnes by 2050.

By that year, the province expects its greenhouse-gas output will be 14 per cent below where it was in 2005, a target Premier Ed Stelmach bills as reasonable but environmental groups and other critics say is woefully inadequate to combat global warming.

US Congress reaches deal on farm bill

Congressional negotiators on Friday reached a tentative agreement on the farm bill, potentially ending months of deadlock over US agricultural policy amid record profits by farmers and mounting concerns over rising food prices.

The proposed legislation, whose final details will be unveiled next week and still face the possibility of a White House veto, will cost $280bn over five years and largely preserves an extensive programme of subsidies to US farmers.

Under the terms of the deal reached by House and Senate negotiators, a key ethanol tax credit is expected to be reduced from 51 cents per gallon to 45 and the tariff on ethanol imports from outside the US is also expected to be scaled back.

In addition, negotiators broadly agreed on an additional $10bn in funding for national food aid programmes, designed to tackle the threat posed by rising food prices in the US and address fears that millions of poor Americans risk going hungry.

“Today the principal farm bill negotiators came together on a bipartisan level to reach a tentative agreement on the agriculture policy that will make the final farm bill a strong one,” said Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who chairs the Senate committee on agriculture, nutrition and forestry.

The House and the Senate had been trying to reconcile their differences for months, but growing concerns about food prices gave added urgency to their efforts. US food inflation rose 4.7 per cent last year and is expected to record a similar jump in 2008.

The Bush administration has threatened on several occasions to block passage of the bill on the grounds that some of the measures amount to tax increases. Its position on the agreement reached on Friday is unlikely to be known until final details are unveiled next week.

A new farm bill is negotiated every five years in Washington, amid massive lobbying efforts by crop growers, environmentalists and food stamp campaigners. In addition, the terms of this year’s bill are being closely tracked by international trade negotiators concerned that they may undercut multilateral efforts in the struggling Doha round to slash agricultural subsidies around the world.

The negotiations in Congress have coincided with a fight between the White House and Democratic lawmakers over the fate of a controversial free trade agreement between the US and Colombia. This week, Hank Paulson, Treasury secretary, appeared relatively optimistic however that a deal might be struck with Nancy Pelosi, House speaker, unlocking the agreement.

“I look forward to...talking to her,” Mr Paulson said in a Reuters interview. “She said she was going to call me back with some ideas. I’m always willing to listen and I would very much like to see Colombia get done.’’