Association of Energy EngineersNew York Chapter www.aeeny.org

May 2009 Newsletter Part 2LETTERBloomberg and Wind Energy - Keeping the Mayor HonestFrom: "Anthony Pereira" <anthony@altpower.com> Tuesday - May 5, 2009 4:54 PM

YOU ARE CORRECT - In fact, one of my customers where we installed a 10kW wind system on a roof top (we are careful and it is safe) is being asked to take it down. I also received a call from the PR team running his campaign and creating his ads looking for an employee who recently was hired to sit in on a commercial with him about PV and green jobs created by his policies. I told them straight out that the property tax abatement which came into effect in March has yet to create jobs and that in fact we have laid off  some folks and will likely not hire until some policy starts to get things rolling. I am in Spain right now. Last year they installed over 2,600 mWs of PV while NYS did 2MWs. We are so far behind it is a joke. And still energy efficiency is the low hanging fruit and should be primary in any effort and even there little progress. We need intense amounts of incentives to change the economy around, not into a green economy but a healthy, secure and safe economy that is sane!  The green things is killing me at this point, so much hype and little action.anthony

-----Original Message-----From: Richard Koral [mailto:rkoral@CityTech.Cuny.Edu]

You're right, Fred. Now, what do you want us to do?

Fredric Goldner, C.E.M." <fgoldner@emra.com> Look, in general, I truly think what the Mayor is doing is great, BUT I believe that he (and his team) need to be called out on this one: I just for the 2nd time in as many days saw the following commercial on TV:

Intro to the commercial is: "From the streets to the rooftops, Mike's Five Borough Economic Opportunity Plan creates thousands of green jobs for New Yorkers by harnessing solar and wind power in new ways, retrofitting buildings, and developing new green technologies."   He then goes on to stand on a rooftop and state "what do you see when you look at these rooftops, I see solar and wind energy ..." Watch a copy of the television ad here: http://mikebloomberg.com/index.cfm?objectid=015A69B0-219B-8B95-7C452B8E4C7F05AD The issue here is HIS Buildings Dept. (at least the one that reports to him), from what I'm told, will NOT allow wind turbines to be put up on any buildings they have authority over.  Now we can have an internal discussion on the technical/economic viability of doing so, but the market & those who want to be innovators should be the arbiter of that. The real bottom line is he needs to be called out so he feels the need to use his executive force/powers to make the "our

way or the highway" beaurocrats at the building dept change their ways/rules. By copy of this email to Anthony P., I'm requesting that he confirm my understanding of the Bldgs Dept "no wind" rule. I'm not sure how we as a Board/organization push the Mayor on this, but I'm certain we need to.

       Fred

PS: All that the Mayor is doing is laudable, and just his message to the general public provides the public awareness that can make a difference. We should not, however, let him take credit for something his Bldg Dept stands in the way of.

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NY State Grants for Energy Frontier Research CentersState Investment Secures 10-to-1 Matching Funds from Federal Government. Governor’s Clean Energy Agenda Continues to Spur Investment, Create Jobs, and Position New York as Leader in Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Technologies

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May 22, 2009 - Governor David A. Paterson today announced that New York will commit $10.5 million in state grants to secure a federal investment of nearly $100 million to finance five energy research centers across the State. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has named five New York institutions Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRC), and each has been awarded DOE grants between $2 and $5 million per year for a planned initial five year period. New York’s five centers were the second most awarded to any state, in large part due to Governor Paterson’s commitment of a 10 percent state match in funding and work to position New York as a national leader in clean energy technology research and development. The EFRCs will bring together groups of leading scientists to address fundamental issues in fields ranging from solar energy and energy storage to materials sciences and superconductors. New York facilities were among 46 chosen nationwide, and include SUNY Stony Brook, Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, Columbia University, Cornell University, and General Electric Global Research in Schenectady. “We are seizing the opportunity to make New York the global capital of the new energy economy. The five laboratories being designated as Energy Frontier Research Centers clearly show that New York has been recognized as a national leader in alternative energy research,” said Governor Paterson. “We are laying the groundwork for the new economy based on research and technology, which will bring private industry into the State and create thousands of jobs.” To secure the EFRC federal grants, Governor Paterson and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) provided letters of support and a promise to provide matching state grants to the projects at a ratio of one state dollar for every 10 federal dollars. Additionally, NYSERDA will provide a $250,000 grant to each academic center. This state-level commitment of matching funds provided a significant boost to the competitiveness of the proposals submitted by institutions in New York. The awards are as follows (with the total five-year commitment):

Columbia University: $16 million; $1.6 million state match; $250,000 NYSERDA grant Cornell University: $25 million; $2.5 million state match ; $250,000 NYSERDA grant General Electric Global Research: $15 million; $1.5 million state match State University of New York, Stony Brook: $17 million; $1.7 million state match; $250,000

NYSERDA grant Brookhaven National Laboratory: $25 million requested; $2.5 million state match; $250,00

NYSERDA grant Significantly, three of the five awards in New York State are for energy storage technology research, complementing the Governor’s Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (known as NY BEST). There were only six centers nationally that will focus on energy storage, and New York State is home to half of them. Governor Paterson recently announced the creation of NY BEST to implement the “battery consortium” called for in his State of the State address. The State has committed $25 million to this effort, which will support research to advance the commercialization of battery and energy storage technologies within the State. This month, Governor Paterson stood with General Electric (GE) Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt to announce GE’s plan to establish a new sodium battery manufacturing facility in New York that will create 350 new jobs. These two announcements, along with the State’s ability to attract Federal funding for three EFRCs demonstrates New York is already recognized as a leader in battery and energy storage technology that will support the transition to a clean energy economy. The state matching grants for the EFRCs come from NYSTAR, through an appropriation of $5 million every year to leverage larger federal grants. NYSTAR’s obligation to these projects is approximately $1.96 million this year. NYSERDA’s grants are in addition to the NYSTAR funding, and amount to $250,000 per project for four of the five projects, totaling $1 million. Congressman Timothy Bishop said: “These funds will make our communities more energy efficient, create

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jobs, and reduce energy costs in the future. We are delivering on our promise to invest in green jobs and clean energy technologies that will help turn our economy around while making America energy independent.” Congressman Maurice Hinchey said: “This new energy research center that's being funded with federal money at Cornell University will provide extraordinary opportunities for academic research and economic growth. I commend Governor Paterson for providing the state resources needed to establish this energy research center and for his commitment to making New York a leader in advanced battery technology. This energy research partnership will leverage the academic resources at Cornell University and combine them with industry partners throughout the region and state, including those in the solar sector. This will enable New York to promote advanced battery research and develop the commercial outlets needed to create jobs and grow the economy.” Congressman Charles B. Rangel said: “Creating a cleaner, more energy efficient America is not going to happen overnight. We have to invest in the technologies that will help us reduce our dependency on foreign oil and make environmental necessities affordable to the average consumer. These centers, and the commitment of the State and federal government to fund them, will go a long way in ensuring that promise of this green revolution is seized by all.” Congressman Paul D. Tonko said: “I applaud Governor Paterson for recognizing the importance of research to our energy future in allocating state funds to maximize the outcome of this important federal program. When you add GE Global Research’s designation as an Energy Frontier Research Center to last week’s announcement by GE of a new advanced battery manufacturing plant in the Capital Region, it’s clear that Tech Valley is quickly gaining the reputation as a leading alternative energy corridor.” Senator Darrel J. Aubertine, Chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Telecommunications and the Legislative Commission on Rural Resources, said: “This state and federal partnership will advance important new technologies to help support our economy’s energy needs and create jobs throughout the State. With the advance of alternative energy research and development, New York’s agriculture, open space and rural

resources will continue to play an

increasingly large role in our energy future. This investment shows our State’s commitment to being a leader in clean energy technologies and rebuilding our economy.”

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At May 2009 Past Presidents Night - From left to right: Walter P. Bishop, P.E., Fellow ASHRAE, 1975-1976 President, Albert M. Nicholas, 1992-1993 President, William F. Ryan, Jr., P.E., 1996-1997 President, Om Taneja, Ph.D., P.E., 2008-2009 President, Alfred C. Finger, Ph.D., P.E., 1985-1986 President, John J. Stiles, 2002-2003 President, Gene Geyer, 2001-2002 President, Mitchell Merdinger, 1999-2000 President, Christopher O. McHugh, P.E., 1998-1999 President, Michel Rimpel, 2007-2008 President, Richard E. Batherman, 1977-1978 President, Joseph F. Azara, Jr., 1988-1989 President.

Green Promise Seen in Switch to LED Lighting By Elisabeth Rosenthal and Felicity Barringer, NYTimes, May 30 09

Jeffrey Sauger for The New York Times

LED streetlights in Ann Arbor, Mich., are expected to cut maintenance and electricity costs.

TO CHANGE THE BULBS in the 60-foot-high ceiling lights of Buckingham Palace’s grand stairwell, workers had to erect scaffolding and cover precious portraits of royal forebears.

So when a lighting designer two years ago proposed installing light emitting diodes or LEDs, an emerging lighting technology, the royal family readily assented. The new lights, the designer said, would last

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more than 22 years and enormously reduce energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions — a big plus for Prince Charles, an ardent environmentalist. Since then, the palace has installed the lighting in chandeliers and on the exterior, where illuminating the entire facade uses less electricity than running an electric teakettle.

In shifting to LED lighting, the palace is part of a small but fast-growing trend that is redefining the century-old conception of lighting, replacing energy-wasting disposable bulbs with efficient fixtures that are often semi-permanent, like those used in plumbing.

Studies suggest that a complete conversion to the lights could decrease carbon dioxide emissions from electric power use for lighting by up to 50 percent in just over 20 years; in the United States, lighting accounts for about 6 percent of all energy use. A recent report by McKinsey & Company cited conversion to LED lighting as potentially the most cost effective of a number of simple approaches to tackling global warming using existing technology.

LED lighting was once relegated to basketball scoreboards, cellphone consoles, traffic lights and colored Christmas lights. But as a result of rapid developments in the technology, it is now poised to become common on streets and in buildings, as well as in homes and offices. Some American cities, including Ann Arbor, Mich., and Raleigh, N.C., are using the lights to illuminate streets and parking garages, and dozens more are exploring the technology. And the lighting now adorns the conference rooms and bars of some Renaissance hotels, a corridor in the Pentagon and a new green building at Stanford.

LEDs are more than twice as efficient as compact fluorescent bulbs, currently the standard for greener lighting. Unlike compact fluorescents, LEDs turn on quickly and are compatible with dimmer switches. And while fluorescent bulbs contain mercury, which requires special disposal, LED bulbs contain no toxic elements, and last so long that disposal is not much of an issue.

“It is fit-and-forget-lighting that is essentially there for as long as you live,” said Colin Humphreys, a researcher at Cambridge University who works on gallium nitride LED lights, which now adorn structures in Britain.

The switch to LEDs is proceeding far more rapidly than experts had predicted just two years ago. President Obama’s stimulus package, which offers money for “green” infrastructure investment, will accelerate that pace, experts say. San Jose, Calif., plans to use $2 million in energy-efficiency grants to install 1,500 LED streetlights.

Thanks in part to the injection of federal cash, sales of the lights in new “solid state” fixtures — a $297 million industry in 2007 — are likely to become a near-billion-dollar industry by 2013, said Stephen Montgomery, director of LED research projects at Electronicast, a California consultancy. And after years of resisting what they had dismissed as a fringe technology, giants like General Electric and Philips have begun making LEDs.

Though the United States Department of Energy calls LED “a pivotal emerging technology,” there remain significant barriers. Homeowners may balk at the high initial cost, which lighting experts say currently will take 5 to 10 years to recoup in electricity savings. An outdoor LED spotlight today costs $100, as opposed to $7 for a regular bulb.

Another issue is that current LEDs generally provide only “directional light” rather than a 360-degree glow, meaning they are better suited to downward facing streetlights and ceiling lights than to many lamp-type settings.

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And in the rush to make cheaper LED lights, poorly made products could erase the technology’s natural advantage, experts warn. LEDs are tiny sandwiches of two different materials that release light as electrons jump from one to the other. The lights must be carefully designed so heat does not damage them, reducing their lifespan to months from decades. And technological advances that receive rave reviews in a university laboratory may not perform as well when mass produced for the real world.

Britain’s Low Carbon Trust, an environmental nonprofit group, has replaced the 12 LED fixtures bought three years ago for its offices with conventional bulbs, because the LED lights were not bright enough, said Mischa Hewitt, a program manager at the trust. But he says he still thinks the technology is important.

Brian Owen, a contributor to the trade magazine LEDs, said that while it is good that cities are exploring LED lighting: “They have to do their due diligence. Rash decisions can result in disappointment or disaster.”

At the same time, nearly monthly scientific advances are addressing many of the problems, decreasing the high price of the bulbs somewhat and improving their ability to provide normal white light bright enough to illuminate rooms and streets.

For example, many LEDs are currently made on precious materials like sapphire. But scientists at a government-financed laboratory at Cambridge University have figured out how to grow them on silicon wafers, potentially making the lights far cheaper. While the original LEDs gave off only glowing red or green light, newer versions produce a blue light that, increasingly, can be manipulated to simulate incandescent bulbs. And researchers at dozens of universities are working to make the bulbs more usable.

“This is a technology on a very fast learning curve,” said Jon Creyts, an author of the McKinsey report, who predicted that the technology could be in widespread use within five years.

So far, the use of LEDs has been predominantly in outdoor settings. Toronto, Raleigh, Ann Arbor and Anchorage — not to mention Tianjin, China, and Torraca, Italy — have adopted LEDs for street and parking garage lighting, forsaking the yellow glow of traditional high-pressure sodium lamps. Three major California cities — Los Angeles (140,000 streetlights), San Jose (62,000) and San Francisco (30,000) — have embarked on some LED conversions.

Ann Arbor adopted the technology early, working with Relume Technologies, of Oxford, Mich., to design LEDs that would fit the globes of downtown fixtures. The $515 cost of installing each light will be paid back in reduced maintenance and electrical costs in four years and four months, said Mike Bergren, the city’s field-operations manager.

Because the light from LEDs can be modulated, in Ann Arbor they have been programmed to perform various useful tricks — to become brighter when someone walks under a light or to flicker outside of a home to guide paramedics to an emergency. And because they do not emit ultraviolet light, they attract no bugs.

People who live around Carolina Pines Park in Raleigh say they are pleased with the park’s new LED lights because they can be directed downward, away from home windows.

The lights are also rapidly moving indoors, where they could have an enormous effect on climate change. About 20 percent of carbon dioxide emissions associated with buildings in the United States and the United Kingdom are related to indoor lighting; in some houses the number is as high as 40 percent.

This month, LED lights were for the first time the centerpiece at two of the world’s major trade shows for lighting, Lightfare International in New York and EuroLuce in Milan. A growing number of builders are starting to fit them into public buildings, offices and homes.

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Ted Van Hyning, director of event technology at the Renaissance Hotel in Cleveland, said the new LED lights in the hotel’s conference rooms use 10 percent of the electricity of the fluorescent lights they replaced. And maintenance costs are far lower: A fluorescent bulb might last 3,000 hours while an LED fixture lasts more than 100,000 hours, Mr. Van Hyning said, adding: “We have six-figure energy costs a year, and these lights could represent a huge saving. Besides, they’re cool and sexy and fun.”

Buoyed by the improvements in the technology, Peter Byrne, a lighting designer and energy consultant for Buckingham Palace, installed the 32,000 custom LEDs in the ceiling of the grand stairwell when older fixtures wore out.

Mr. Byrne recognizes that Buckingham Palace is not the average home. “They need high-quality light — they have a lot of gold,” he said, “and gold tends to look silver if you light it poorly.”

Still he has started using the technology in other projects, for their light and their environmental benefit. He estimates that half of lights in homes, and particularly those in offices and stores can already be replaced by LEDs.

“At this point, LEDs can’t be used in all lights but that’s changing every month,” Mr. Byrne said. “If you go into Wal-Mart, and look at all those twin 8-foot fluorescents above every aisle, you realize that the potential is enormous.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

In Hot Pursuit of Fusion (or Folly) By William J. Broad, NYTimes, May 26 09

Jacqueline McBride

RAYS OF HOPE: The National Ignition Facility in California, to be dedicated this week.

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LIVERMORE, Calif. — Here in a dry California valley, outside a small town, a cathedral of light is to be dedicated on Friday. Like the cathedrals of antiquity, it is built on an unrivaled scale with unmatched technology, and it embodies a scientific doctrine that, if confirmed, might lift civilization to new heights.

“Bringing Star Power to Earth” reads a giant banner that was recently unfurled across a building the size of a football stadium.

The $3.5 billion site is known as the National Ignition Facility, or NIF. For more than half a century, physicists have dreamed of creating tiny stars that would inaugurate an era of bold science and cheap energy, and NIF is meant to kindle that blaze.

In theory, the facility’s 192 lasers — made of nearly 60 miles of mirrors and fiber optics, crystals and light amplifiers — will fire as one to pulverize a fleck of hydrogen fuel smaller than a match head. Compressed and heated to temperatures hotter than those of the core of a star, the hydrogen atoms will fuse into helium, releasing bursts of thermonuclear energy.

The project’s director, Ed Moses, said that getting to the cusp of ignition (defined as the successful achievement of fusion) had taken some 7,000 workers and 3,000 contractors a dozen years, their labors creating a precision colossus of millions of parts and 60,000 points of control, 30 times as many as on the space shuttle.

“It’s the cathedral story,” Dr. Moses said during a tour. “We put together the best physicists, the best engineers, the best of industry and academia. It’s not often you get that opportunity and pull it off.”

In February, NIF fired its 192 beams into its target chamber for the first time, and it now has the world’s most powerful laser, as well as the largest optical instrument ever built. But raising its energies still further to the point of ignition could take a year or more of experimentation and might, officials concede, prove daunting and perhaps impossible.

For that reason, skeptics dismiss NIF as a colossal delusion that is squandering precious resources at a time of economic hardship. Just operating it, officials grant, will cost $140 million a year. Some doubters ridicule it as the National Almost Ignition Facility, or NAIF.

Even friends of the effort are cautious. “They’ve made progress,” said Roy Schwitters, a University of Texas physicist who leads a federal panel that recently assessed NIF’s prospects. “Ignition may eventually be possible. But there’s still much to learn.”

Dr. Moses, while offering no guarantees, argued that any great endeavor involved risks and that the gamble was worth it because of the potential rewards.

He said that NIF, if successful, would help keep the nation’s nuclear arms reliable without underground testing, would reveal the hidden life of stars and would prepare the way for radically new kinds of power plants.

“If fusion energy works,” he said, “you’ll have, for all intents and purposes, a limitless supply of carbon-free energy that’s not geopolitically sensitive. What more would you want? It’s a game changer.”

NIF is to fire its lasers for 30 years.Like the dedication of a cathedral, the event here on Friday at the Lawrence Livermore National

Laboratory is to be a celebration of hope. Officials say some 3,500 people will attend. The big names include Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Energy Secretary Steven Chu (whose agency finances NIF) and Charles Townes, a Nobel Laureate and laser pioneer.

In preparation, workmen here last Thursday washed windows and planted flowers on the lush campus, the day auspiciously sunny.

Dr. Moses, who runs science programs for high school students in his spare time, broke from his own preparations to show a visitor the NIF complex.

In its lobby, he held up a device smaller than a postage stamp. This is where it all starts, he said. From this kind of tiny laser, beams emerge that grow large and bright during their long journey through NIF’s maze of mirrors, lenses and amplifiers.

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The word laser is an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. And each particle of light, or photon, is amplified, Dr. Moses said, to “around 10 to the 25th” photons. Or, “10 million, million, million, million.”

A nearby stand held a thick slab of pink glass about the size of a traffic sign — an example of an amplifier. NIF has 3,200 in all. Dr. Moses said the big step occurred when giant flash tubes — like ones in cameras but six feet long and 7,680 in number — flashed in unison to excite the pink glass. Laser photons then zip through, stimulating cascades of offspring, making the beam much stronger, such amplification happening over and over.

Photons moving in step with one another is what makes laser light so bright and concentrated and, in some instances, so potent. Dr. Moses picked up a mock capsule of hydrogen fuel. It was all of two millimeters wide, or less than a tenth of an inch.

“It heats up,” he said. “It blows in at a million miles an hour, moving that way for about five-billionths of a second. It gets to about the diameter of your hair. When it gets that small, that fast, you hit temperatures where it can start fusing — around 100 million degrees centigrade, or 180 million degrees Fahrenheit.”

Hair nets, hard hats and safety goggles were donned before entering NIF proper. Repeated steps on sticky pads pulled dirt from shoes. Dust is NIF’s bane, Dr. Moses said. It can ruin optics and experiments. He said the 33-foot-wide target chamber was evacuated to a near-vacuum, much the same as outer space — a void where light can zip along with almost no impediments.

Dr. Moses said the team fired the laser only at night and did maintenance and equipment upgrades during the day. “This is a 24/7 facility,” he said. The previous night, he said, the laser had been fired in an effort to improve coordination and timing. The 192 rays have to strike the target as close to simultaneously as possible. The individual beams, he said, have to hit “within a few trillionths of a second” of one another if the fuel is to burn, and be pointed at the target with a precision “within half the diameter of your hair.”

The control room, modeled on NASA’s mission control in Houston, was buzzing with activity, even though some consoles sat empty. Phones rang. Walkie-talkies crackled. The countdown to firing the lasers, Dr. Moses said, took three and half hours, with the process “pretty much in the hands of computers.”

The operations plan for NIF, he added, is to conduct 700 to 1,000 laser firings per year, with about 200 of the experiments focused on ignition. There is no danger of a runaway blast, he said. Fusion works by heat and pressure, not chain reactions. Moreover, the fuel is minuscule and the laser flash extraordinarily short. During a year of operations, Dr. Moses said, “the facility is on for only three-thousandths of a second,” yet will generate a growing cascade of data and insights.

Next on the tour, after more sticky pads, was the holy of holies, the room surrounding the target chamber. It looked like an engine room out of a science-fiction starship. The beam lines — now welters of silvery metal filled with giant crystals that shifted the concentrated light to higher frequencies — converged on the chamber’s blue wall. Its surface was dotted with silvery portholes where complex sensors could be placed to evaluate the tiny blasts.

“When it’s running,” Dr. Moses said, “there’s a lot of stuff at the chamber’s center.”Despite the giant banner outside and its confident prediction, it is an open question whether NIF’s

sensors will ever detect the rays of a tiny star, independent scientists say.“I personally think it’s going to be a close call,” said William Happer, a physicist at Princeton

University who directed federal energy research for the first President George Bush. “It’s a very complicated system, and you’re dependent on many things working right.”

Dr. Happer said a big issue for NIF was achieving needed symmetries at minute scales. “There’s plenty of room,” he added, “for nasty surprises.”

Doubters say past troubles may be a prologue. When proposed in 1994, the giant machine was to cost $1.2 billion and be finished by 2002. But costs rose and the completion date kept getting pushed back, so much

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so that Congress threatened to pull the plug. Today, critics see the delays and the $3.5 billion price tag as signs of overreaching.

Dr. Moses, who was put in charge of NIF a decade ago in an effort to right the struggling project, said that a decade from now, as NIF opened new frontiers, no one would remember the missteps. He compared the project to feats like going to the Moon, building the atom bomb and inventing the airplane.

“Stumbles are not unusual when you take on big-risk projects,” he said.Dr. Moses added that the stumble rule applied to cathedrals as well. Having grown up in Eastchester,

close to New York City, he noted that the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was still under construction after more than a century. Is it worthwhile, despite the delays?

“Of course it is,” he said. Taking on big projects that challenge the imagination “is who we are as a species.”

Company Copyright 2009 The New York TimesSea’s Rise May Prove the Greater in Northeast By Cornelia Dean, NYTimes, May 28 09

In the debate over global warming, one thing is clear: as the planet gets warmer, sea levels will rise. But how much, where and how soon? Those questions are notoriously hard to answer.

Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colo., are now adding to the complexity with a new prediction. If the melting of Greenland’s ice sheets continues to accelerate, they say, sea levels will rise even more in the northeastern United States and Maritime Canada than in other areas around the world.

The researchers, Aixue Hu and Gerald A. Meehl, based their predictions on runoff data from Greenland and an analysis of ocean circulation patterns.

They said that if Greenland melting continued to accelerate, it would alter ocean currents in a way that sends warmer water toward the northeastern and Maritime coasts. Because water expands as it warms, this influx of warmer water would raise sea levels as much as a foot or two more than in other coastal regions by the end of the century.

The researchers are reporting their findings Friday in Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. Their report comes two weeks after other researchers predicted that climate-related ice shifts at the South Pole would raise sea levels on the east and west coasts of North America by yet an additional 1.5 feet.

These rises in sea level, if they occur, would be on top of an overall increase of one to two feet predicted by 2100 as a result of global warming. That prediction, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body, was rendered in a 2007 report that more or less ignored the question of melting glaciers and ice sheets because the process is so hard to forecast. As a result, many researchers regard the prediction as unrealistically optimistic.

The flooding potential of sea level rise depends in part on coastal topography. In places where the coast slopes gently, a rise of a few feet could send ocean waters 100 feet inland or more.

In recent years, Greenland melt rates have been increasing by 7 percent a year, the researchers said. If that continues, they said, the northeastern and Maritime Canadian coasts can expect almost two feet of additional sea level rise by 2100.

They said it was more likely that the melting would accelerate at a rate of only about 3 percent a year. In that event, they said, the region can expect an additional one foot of sea level rise.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

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At Graduation, U. of New Hampshire Applauds Landfill GasBy Lawrence Biemiller, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 26 09

When it was his turn to address graduates and their families at commencement on Saturday, the University of New Hampshire’s president took advantage of the moment to make a claim you don’t often hear at a graduation — that the entire ceremony was powered by landfill gas.

The university earlier this month completed a $49-million system that uses a network of 300 extraction wells to collect methane generated at a landfill in Rochester, N.H. The gas is then purified and transported 12.7 miles in a pipeline to the university’s cogeneration plant, which burns the gas to generate electricity and heat campus buildings. The landfill gas replaces commercial natural gas in the cogeneration facility, and the university will sell renewable-energy credits to pay for the project.

The president, Mark W. Huddleston, devoted his speech to recalling how much progress the university has made toward sustainability in the past four years, and even to reminding guests to dispose of their food waste in compost bins. “Your half-eaten cookie,” he said, “may help grow the food we serve in the dining hall next fall.”

He then called on the landfill’s manager, Al Davis — patched into the commencement sound system on a remote connection — to certify that landfill gas was indeed powering the ceremony. “You bet,” Mr. Davis said. Gore, Hansen Take Sides in Debate Over House Climate BillBy Lisa Hymas, Grist, May 20 09Lisa Hymas is Grist’s senior editor.

Photo illustration by Tom Twigg

The Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill, now moving through the House, is polarizing the environmental community.  Longtime climate crusader Al Gore says we should do all we can to get the legislation passed; top climate scientist James Hansen says we should demand a different, better bill.  Activists and environmental groups are picking sides or staking out positions in the middle.  In This Corner, Al Gore! “I think they’ve maintained the integrity of the bill. In its current form as I understand it, I have no doubt that it will accomplish the result we need to begin this transition toward renewable energy, conservation, efficiency, and renewed U.S. leadership in global negotiations.”Gore says the bill is a good starting point, and that efforts to reach compromise on it have boosted its chances of passing both the House and the Senate.  “The key role of the legislation is to begin that shift [to lower emissions],” he said. “Once it begins, it will be unstoppable.”

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Arguments in Favor of the Bill: President Obama says the bill will lead the country toward a new clean-energy economy David Roberts says the bill is a good step forward Joseph Romm gives the bill a B and says we should support it Paul Krugman says the bill isn’t ideal but is “vastly better than no bill at all”

... and in This Corner, James Hansen! “The revised Waxman-Markey climate bill is too watered down to qualify as a positive step for avoiding catastrophic climate disruption.”Hansen proposes instead a “tax and dividend” approach that would tax fossil fuels at the point of extraction and distribute the revenue from that tax to citizens. That’s just one of many approaches being promoted by bill opponents.

Arguments Against the Bill: Daphne Wysham says the bill offers too many giveaways to industry and just plain “stinks” Mike Tidwell says the bill gives away too much to utilities Charles Komanoff says a carbon tax would be much better than a cap-and-trade system Baruch Fischhoff says a revenue-neutral energy tax is the way to go

 The Middle Ground: Make it Stronger - Many environmental groups are calling for lawmakers to

“strengthen and support” the bill—but if the bill isn’t strengthened, or if it’s actually weakened further, it’s unclear whether they’ll support it.  (Some organizations are simultaneously saying “vote yes” and “fix it,” so we’ve listed them as both on Gore’s team and in the middle; we welcome clarification from any group on its team of choice.)

Back On Track [from Crains NY Business]

NYC's TECH SECTOR has been growing since 2003. In 2007, technology-related jobs were up 8.1% vs. 2006 levels but still short of the 2000 peak, during the dot-com boom.

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With Billions at Stake, Trying to Expand the Meaning of ‘Renewable Energy’ By Felicity Barringer, NYTimes, May 25 09

The definition of renewable energy seems clear cut: The sun continues to shine, so solar energy is renewable. The wind continues to blow, so wind turbines churn out renewable power.

But industries are now pushing to have a growing number of other technologies categorized as renewable — or at least as environmentally advantageous. They include nuclear power plants and the burning of garbage and even the waste from coal mines.

The lure of the renewable label is understandable. Federal tax breaks for renewable energy have been reauthorized, and quotas for renewable energy production have been set in 28 states, accompanied by extensive new grants, loans and other economic advantages. And legislation is moving through both houses of Congress to establish national quotas for renewable energy sources, including the climate bill passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday.

With billions of dollars at stake, legislators have been besieged by lobbyists eager to share in the wealth. “They’ve been queuing up outside staff offices, everyone with all their ideas as to what should be

included,” said Bill Wicker, the spokesman for the Democratic majority on the Senate energy committee, which is considering a national quota.

In some states, the definition of “renewable” or “alternative” has already expanded. In Pennsylvania, waste coal and methane from coal mines receive the same treatment as solar panels and wind turbines. In Nevada, old tires can count as a renewable fuel, provided microwaves are used to break down their chemical structure.

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About half of the 28 states with renewable mandates include electricity generated by burning garbage (the District of Columbia also has a quota for renewable energy). In Florida, the nuclear power industry is lobbying to be included but has not yet succeeded.

Government incentives for renewable energy were intended to give an economic boost to technologies like wind and solar power that were not yet economically competitive with coal and natural gas, which together provide more than two-thirds of the country’s electricity.

The benefits that go with the designation include renewable energy credits, which promise to be a valuable commodity if a national renewable energy standard becomes law and utilities with high levels of renewable sources can sell credits to those with less.

If a source of electricity already widely used by some utilities — hydropower or nuclear power, for example — is deemed renewable, it allows utilities to meet the new renewable-energy requirements while doing little to add wind or solar power to the electrical grid. House Republicans tried unsuccessfully last week to have nuclear energy included under the climate bill passed by the House committee.

Environmental groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists, Environment America and the Natural Resources Defense Council say they are frustrated by the increasing elasticity of the word “renewable” in legislators’ hands.

“Usually this is a very political process, and not driven in any way, shape or form by any strict scientific or ecological definition of renewables,” said Nathanael Greene of the N.R.D.C.

But some of the industries that have claimed the renewable mantle argue that they deserve it.“A banana is renewable — you can grow them forever,” said Bob Eisenbud, a vice president for

government affairs at Waste Management, which receives about 10 percent of its annual revenues of $13.3 billion from waste and landfill energy generation. “A banana that goes into garbage and gets burned,” he added, is “a renewable resource and producing renewable energy.”

But environmentalists argue that one of the goals of renewable energy is to cut back on the heat-trapping gases emitted from burning most things, whether fossil fuels or bananas. When there is no fire, there are no emissions. The waste-to-energy technology described by Mr. Eisenbud was not included in the original draft of the climate legislation that received House committee approval, but it was contained in the version that moved out of the committee, thanks to language inserted by Representative Baron P. Hill, Democrat of Indiana. A new $227 million waste-to-energy plant was already planned in northern Indiana, outside his district.

On the Senate side, an effort to get the benefits of the renewable designation for advanced coal-burning technologies failed, however.

Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico and chairman of the Senate energy committee, said that if too many new technologies beyond core renewable sources like wind and solar were to be included, “the whole purpose of the renewable electricity standard is defeated.”

The goal, he said, is “to encourage the development of some of these newer technologies and bring the price down.”

He added, “If you throw in everything else” and call it renewable, “then your numbers get way out of whack.”

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Leon Lowery, a Democratic staff member for the committee, said that both environmentalists and industry had tinkered with the common-sense understanding of renewable sources to make definitions fit policy goals.

“If you try to assign a sort of conceptual definition, you find yourself in strange places,” Mr. Lowery said. “Anyone would acknowledge that hydropower is renewable, but do we want to give credits to the Grand Coulee Dam?”

To do so, he added, would give hydropower — which already benefits from rich federal subsidies that make it some of the cheapest energy available — the same status as solar or wind technologies.

Among states that have already adopted quotas for renewable energy, the standards vary from Wisconsin’s, which requires that 10 percent of all power come from renewable sources by 2015, to those of Oregon and Minnesota, which call for 25 percent from renewable sources by 2025. California is raising its mandate to 33 percent by 2020, though its utilities have already indicated that the existing quota — 20 percent by 2010 — will be difficult to meet.

In some states, quotas for renewable energy are paired with mandates for advanced technologies that are not necessarily renewable. For example, Ohio, which currently receives nearly two-thirds of its electricity from burning coal, requires that 25 percent of the state’s electricity must come from renewable or advanced technologies by 2025, but of that, half must come from core renewable sources, and some of the remainder can come from burning chemically treated coal.

Graham Mathews, a lobbyist representing Covanta Energy, another waste-to-energy company, said the political horse-trading on renewable energy legislation was typical of all energy measures. “Energy policy is balkanized by region, and that dictates the debate. The politics become incredibly complicated,” he said.

“Stepping back and looking at it,” Mr. Mathews added, “it sometimes doesn’t make a lot of sense.”Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Wanted: A New Home for My Country By Nicholas Schmidle, NYTimes, May 10 09

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One recent evening at the presidential palace in Malé, the capital of the Maldives, around 100 people showed up to watch a movie. Rows of overstuffed chairs in a gaudy combination of stripes and paisleys faced a projection screen hanging on the front wall of what seemed like a grand ballroom. At the back of the hall, journalists erected camera and microphone rigs: Mohamed Nasheed, the Maldives’ 41-year-old president, was expected to make a major announcement after the film. And ever since Nasheed declared on the eve of his inauguration last November that, because of global warming, he would try to find a new homeland for Maldivians somewhere else in the world, on higher ground, local reporters didn’t miss the chance to see their unpredictable (“erratic” and “crazy” were other adjectives I heard used) president.

Nasheed appeared when a pair of French doors opened and a gust of conversation blew into the room. It was a humid night in March. Several dozen cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, parliamentarians, presidential advisers and other dignitaries trailed the young president, who wore navy slacks and a striped white shirt, open at the neck and sleeves rolled to the elbows. He took a seat in the front row, the lights dimmed and the British feature documentary “The Age of Stupid” began.

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President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives advocates extreme action to save his nation from rising sea levels. Whether his nation could survive the solution is unclear.

The movie opens with hypothetical scenes of environmental catastrophe: the Sydney Opera House in flames; ski lifts creaking above snowless mountainsides; raging seas in the once-frozen Arctic. Set in 2055, the film looks back to our present through a series of environmental-destruction subplots highlighting this era’s collective lack of interest in doing anything; one character concludes that we must be living in the “age of stupid.”

The Maldives is an archipelago of 1,190 islands in the Indian Ocean, with an average elevation of four feet. Even a slight rise in global sea levels, which many scientists predict will occur by the end of this century, could submerge most of the Maldives. Last November, when Nasheed proposed moving all 300,000 Maldivians to safer territory, he named India, Sri Lanka and Australia as possible destinations and described a plan that would use tourism revenues from the present to establish a sovereign wealth fund with which he could buy a new country — or at least part of one — in the future. “We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own, and so we have to buy land elsewhere,” Nasheed said in November.

When the movie ended, Nasheed approached a microphone stand in front of a giant house palm. He has a jockey’s physique, and the fronds of the palm arched over his shoulder. His wonder-boy demeanor might seem naïve, but he spent almost 20 years opposing a dictator and enduring torture; few doubt his fortitude. The

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audience in the ballroom listened closely when Nasheed declared that it was time to act. “What we need to do is nothing short of decarbonizing the entire global economy,” he said, his high voice cracking. “If man can walk on the moon, we can unite to defeat our common carbon enemy.” Nasheed didn’t use notes for his speech; aides say he never does. “And so today,” he continued, “I announce that the Maldives will become the first carbon-neutral country in the world.”

Twenty-two years ago, Nasheed’s predecessor traveled to New York with a mission. Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, then only 9 years into his 30-year reign, stood before the United Nations and warned the world that rising sea levels would eventually erase his country from the map: “With a mere one-meter rise,” he said, “a storm surge would be catastrophic and possibly fatal to the nation.” At the U.N. Earth Summit in Brazil five years later, Gayoom introduced himself as “a representative of an endangered people.” When Gayoom wasn’t abroad predicting that Maldivians could become the first environmental refugees, however, he was crushing dissenters back home. His 30 years in office were punctuated by regular, uncontested elections that he won each time with at least 90 percent of the vote. One of those he jailed — at least 13 times, by the prisoner’s count — was a spunky journalist named Mohamed Nasheed.

Nasheed was born in Malé, the son of a prosperous businessman. He studied abroad — first in Sri Lanka, then in Britain — before returning to the Maldives in the late 1980s and helping found a magazine called Sangu. He wrote investigative reports implicating Gayoom’s regime in corruption and human rights abuses. After the fifth issue, the police raided the magazine’s office and arrested Nasheed. He was 23. He spent 18 months in in solitary confinement. “They wanted me to confess to trying to overthrow the state . . . and they wanted me to do this on TV,” Nasheed told me. “It was very Russian in style. They wanted me to confess for everything that I had done all my life, from my first cigarette to my first kiss.” In 1991, Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience.

Ten years later, after several more stints in jail, Nasheed won a seat in Parliament. He stayed there a few months before being tried, once again, on trumped-up charges and incarcerated. After his release, Nasheed left for Sri Lanka to start the Maldivian Democratic Party. Ultimately, Gayoom’s henchmen found him. Over a span of two days in 2005, Nasheed survived a suspicious car accident and then caught people casing his home in Colombo. He fled to Britain, where, he said, “you could always talk to a Western government about democracy,” and he received political asylum. In 2005, Nasheed gave that up and returned to the Maldives for good.

Late last year, Gayoom agreed to hold the Maldives’ first multiparty presidential elections. On polling day, Gayoom ranked as Asia’s longest-serving president. Nasheed, the perennial inmate, ran against him. By the second round of voting, Nasheed secured support from a handful of smaller opposition parties and won. After three decades of strongman rule, the Maldives, a Sunni Muslim country with, at least officially, no religious minorities, exemplified how a peaceful, democratic transition of power might look in other parts of the Muslim world.

Then Nasheed proposed the mass exodus, an idea that called to mind other outlandish schemes, like one Saudi prince’s thought of supplying drinking water for the Arabian peninsula by towing icebergs from Antarctica. But in comparison, Nasheed has been taken seriously. Three months after his announcement, the president of Kiribati, an archipelagic nation in the Pacific, confessed that he, too, was searching for ways to relocate his countrymen. And in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Al Gore encouraged Congress to pass legislation reducing carbon emissions by citing Nasheed’s initiative as just one example of what could happen if they failed to act. Joe Romm, the author of the blog Climate Progress, told me: “There is no saving the Maldives. They are wise to find a new place.”

Not everyone has thought so. Paul Kench, a coastal geomorphologist at the University of Auckland, has made eight expeditions to the Maldives to research how islands form and evolve. Kench first traveled to Baa Atoll, north of Malé, in 1996, frustrated, he said, “with the perception that sea levels will go up and simply

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drown them. No one had established any real science.” He has discovered since then that both seasonal weather patterns and periodic wave events — like the tsunami in 2004 and, in late 2007, a highly unusual, 20-centimeter surge in sea level recorded throughout the Maldives — alter the surface, the beaches and the height of the islands in unforeseen ways. In particular, he found, “the notion that the Maldives are going to disappear is a gross overexaggeration. Both the tsunami and the sea-level rise lifted sand from the beach, spread it across the island surface and formed a natural buffer.”

Kench has followed news of Nasheed’s planned exodus with dismay. “It’s a political weapon they have,” he says. “It’s a little bit unfortunate, because they don’t know how to deal with the change. . . . If they withdrew from this notion that ‘We are going to have to jump on a plane and fly to northwest Australia’ and that kind of hyperbole, if they seriously confront the problem, they would get a lot more international assistance.” Talk of catastrophe, he continues, “hijacks all the serious work that needs to be done.” He sees it as a distraction from the careful scientific labor that could find ways to protect the islands.

Meanwhile, Nasheed’s political opponents claim that his proposition to move has cost the Maldives international respect. “We are a country so dependent on tourism,” Mohamed Hussain Shareef, Gayoom’s spokesman, told me. “The minute Nasheed says we are about to sink and that we’re moving, my phones started ringing off the hook with tour operators asking questions. We can’t go back to them and to investors now and say, ‘Everything is O.K.’ This man is so hellbent on hogging the media limelight that he is forgetting to do his job, which is to run a country.”

During the 1990s, his second decade in power, Gayoom oversaw the construction of the presidential palace. It occupies a sprawling piece of land in the middle of what ranks, in terms of people per square kilometer, as one of the world’s most crowded cities. Gayoom parked a fleet of luxury cars in the garage and equipped the master bathroom with a gold-plated toilet while, just beyond the white walls, scooters and pedestrians jostled for space on the tangled alleys that wind through Malé.

After the election, Nasheed opted not to move into the palace. He lives in the previous official residence, and he walks to and from work every day, trailed by a handful of guards wearing sunglasses and with black wires in their ears. Nasheed has talked about turning the mansion into a museum or public library. On rare occasions, such as the première of “The Age of Stupid,” he opens the doors.

The screening was followed by a reception in the garden. Dignitaries gathered under a veranda and leaned against white pillars covered with flowering vines. Nasheed meandered through the crowd, welcoming each guest, as tuxedo-clad waiters brushed past holding trays stacked with cups of orange juice. I noticed the minister of the environment deep in a discussion of water temperature and coral growth with one of his advisers. The minister and his colleague, neither much older than 40, were citing the names of scientists and journal articles at high speed.

“The question is whether coral growth can keep up with rising sea levels,” said the adviser. The Maldives consists of four reef platforms and 21 atolls, coral configurations that were produced over millenniums as dead volcanoes in the ocean receded, giving way to coral that grew vertically and formed ring-shaped reefs. The individual islands were formed as wave energy deposited shards of broken coral and shells.

“Really, the danger is an increase in temperature,” the minister countered, “because certain coral can only survive in certain temperatures.” In 1998, an El Niño influx of warm water “bleached” the coral in the Maldives, killing large portions of it. “Sea temperatures are the real culprit here.”

Though wonky, the conversation was hardly irrelevant: all islands and coastlines are formed differently, a fact sure to be explored more in years to come as planners develop more property in areas susceptible to rising sea levels. This is why Kench, the coastal geomorphologist, believes that the Maldives aren’t nearly as doomed as others think. He knew he was on to something big when he returned to the Maldives after the tsunami and found that the wave had actually raised the island surface as much as 30 centimeters, and did so as far as 60 meters inland. “This is actually building the islands vertically, building ridges that will buffer these islands from

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sea-level rises,” he says. “That sand is a permanent addition that is now draped among the coconut trees and is going to stay there.”

Even the idea of “sea level” as a fixed measure is somewhat flawed. Since sea levels vary around the world, sea-level rises are also likely to vary. “Intuition would tell you that sea-level rises are like a bathtub, but it’s a little more complicated than that,” William G. Thompson, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told me. “When it comes to measuring sea-level rises,” he adds, “there are different factors in different places.” Parts of South Asia are being lifted, owing to tectonic shifts in and around the Himalayas. In regions of the Caribbean, similar phenomena are lifting some islands, like Barbados, and sinking others, like the Bahamas.

Steve Nerem, a professor in the aerospace engineering sciences department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, measures sea levels. Since 1993, when he began mapping the oceans using satellite technology, sea levels have risen an average of 3.3 millimeters a year. But around the Maldives, they have risen an average of 2.2 millimeters. There is “all kinds of local variability” in the data, Nerem says. “The bottom line is that we can’t say with any kind of certainty what’s going to happen. But there’s lots of reasons to be concerned that it is going to be a big problem. The data doesn’t rule out a meter of sea-level rise” by 2100, he explains. “The data does rule out zero.”

In 2007, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that by 2100, sea levels could rise by anywhere between 7 and 23 inches. The I.P.C.C. represents the closest thing the scientific community has to a consensus, but nearly every scientist I spoke with placed his or her estimates slightly higher. “Is this an underestimate?” Thompson says. “No real way to tell. It is a conservative estimate. When you are trying to provide guidance to global governments, you don’t want to be alarmist.” Since the I.P.C.C. study, the journals Science, Nature Geoscience and Nature have all published articles featuring estimates that exceed two feet, some saying that rises could be as much as five feet by the end of the century. “The rise to 2100 is just the beginning of a much higher sea-level rise,” says Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of ocean physics at the University of Potsdam. “This is a real long-term effect that we are setting into motion. It will continue.” Rahmstorf says he believes the increase could be as great as 1.4 meters, or four and a half feet, by 2100.

“When we talk about climate change . . . you aren’t talking about gradual things, sea-level rises of a millimeter a year,” Nasheed said to me, using storm surges, strong winds and tsunamis as examples of the kind of cataclysms he expects. “You are talking about the force of things that can go wrong.”

At the reception following “The Age of Stupid,” I asked Nasheed how he planned to follow up on the two blockbuster initiatives so early in his term. He had to be thinking about the practicalities, right? How would he actually implement carbon neutrality or mass exodus? What came next?

“We need to go into direct action now,” Nasheed replied, matter-of-factly. His brown eyes channeled intensity. “We haven’t seen this generation — you know, those who are 18 to 30 years old — go into action yet. It is time.” He added, “I believe change is on the horizon.”

He didn’t give details. Maybe details didn’t matter. Perhaps the symbolism of Nasheed’s pronouncements was enough, and cultivating the image of the mad-scientist president was a strategy. “We are going to attract anyone with a mad idea and an investment plan,” Nasheed told me later in his office. “They can test their things here.” Whether or not the Maldives becomes carbon neutral almost seemed beside the point. If Nasheed’s antics could goad Western countries into more aggressive policies toward curbing carbon emissions, then his mission would be accomplished.

As we stood under the veranda, I asked Nasheed: Is all this a P.R. gimmick to shame the industrial countries into action?

“Sure,” he said. “This is to tell them: ‘No. Not at this cost.’ ” Nasheed’s plans to move and to become carbon neutral are, in many ways, contradictory. One

epitomizes resignation, while the other is more optimistic. But their timing — one in November and the second in March — is not by accident and hews closely to changes in Washington. While the Bush administration’s

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response to climate change was markedly ambivalent, President Obama has pledged action, declaring that his team “will not deny facts; we will be guided by them.” In December, the United States will participate in the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Expectations are high that the conference may produce a global accord to supersede the Kyoto Protocol and curtail greenhouse-gas emissions.

Obama has, moreover, made climate change a national-security issue. Just days after taking office, he described the long-term threat of climate change as one that “if left unchecked, could result in violent conflict, terrible storms, shrinking coastlines and irreversible catastrophe.” This was highly contentious in the past. When the intelligence community went to Capitol Hill last year to request resources to look closer at climate change, one Republican lawmaker exclaimed incredulously, “We are going to take analysts away from looking for Osama bin Laden, and we are going to put them on the ‘March of the Penguins’!”

Nasheed admitted to learning some things from Obama. Connecting with crowds, for instance. He told me that he considered Obama’s election “one of the most impressive things” Americans have done, up there with “the Revolution, democracy, the office of the presidency and ‘Catcher in the Rye.’ ” But he seems to have learned something else from his American counterpart that he never articulated: fatalism doesn’t sell quite like hope. “We cannot change the world,” Nasheed pronounced on the night of the screening, as he stood in the palace built by the man who once tormented him. “But we can begin the process. And if we are ahead of the game, we will win.”

The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 resulted in more than 80 deaths in the Maldives. On the remote island of Dhiggaru, less than 100 miles south of Malé, a powerful wave washed away dozens of homes and killed one child. The destroyed homes were later rebuilt by an American relief mission headed by former presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, along with the United Nations and the New Zealand government. Construction teams outfitted the new homes with tall brick barriers facing the shoreline.

On the day I visited Dhiggaru, I met a woman named Fatima along the footpath that separated her house from a seawall — and then the ocean. The makeshift wall consisted of concrete chunks, coconut shells and scraps of rusted corrugated metal. When I asked if the water had broken through the coconut shells, Fatima gestured at the levy. “Just last week, the sea was splashing against the walls of the house,” she said. On that night, huddled inside and wondering whether the water would continue to rise, Fatima chose not to leave the house.

Fatima said that she had heard the news of Nasheed talking about moving, but that she would only go “if there was no other choice.” Besides, tsunamis and high tides were freak occurrences. Rising sea levels were an-other, one that she couldn’t quite conceptualize. Fatima didn’t think inching oceans posed a serious risk. At least not in her lifetime.

“What about in theirs?” I asked, pointing to two toddlers leaning against her.“Maybe,” she said.

The plight of the Maldives poses an eschatological question as much as an environmental one. When will the world end? How can we prepare for it? In that respect, we are all Maldivians. The islanders just happen to be among the first groups to contemplate these questions seriously. But that’s not to say each and every Maldivian spends his or her day preoccupied with sea levels. Ahmed Abbas, one of Nasheed’s longtime friends and the political cartoonist for the magazine Sangu, told me that Nasheed was overreacting. “We have been here for 3,000 years,” Abbas said as we drank espressos and ate ice cream one afternoon at a cafe in Malé. “Coral is our base. If one millimeter of water comes up, then one millimeter of coral goes up, too. So don’t worry.” His response was downright flippant when the conversation turned to a looming exodus: “Why don’t we all just board a barge? Anni” — Nasheed’s nickname — “can be the captain!” Nonetheless, Abbas was flying the next day to Sri Lanka, where he said he hoped to scout a tract of hillside property for himself.

Nasheed takes the thought of migration seriously and says he is already thinking about the logistics. “No politician has rejected the idea,” he told me when we met in his offices the day after the movie première. We

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were sitting in a boardroom, at the end of a long, glossy conference table. “The Sri Lanka president is quite happy that the cousins can come back,” he added, referring to the fact that Dhivehi, the language of the Maldives, and Sinhala, the dominant language in Sri Lanka, are very similar. The most publicized — and surprising — response came from the mayor of Pyrenees Shire, a small Australian town. “Our community’s a very welcoming community,” Lester Harris, then the mayor, declared in a broadcast. “We’ve got relatively cheap land compared to the major cities or even to regional cities, and I’m sure that we’ve got the type of climate that would make life very agreeable for these people.” I called Pyrenees Shire in March to see if the offer still stood. Harris had left office. The new mayor declined to comment. I heard countless Maldivians express concern that in a relocation, they would be treated as second-class citizens. Ali Rilwan, the executive director of Bluepeace, an environmental NGO in Malé, says he hopes that international laws could be amended to protect environmental refugees in the same way they protect political ones. If not, he wasn’t optimistic. “In Sri Lanka, it would be easy, because we are the same color . . . but I was once on the beach at the Sheraton in Fiji,” a country where, Rilwan said, most Indians were descended from indentured laborers. “I was with some American friends. Security guards came and pulled me to their post. They thought I was a local Indian disturbing the Americans. . . . And one day, one of the black Fijians, the natives, hit me over the head with a corncob and demanded a dollar.”

“They would rather die here,” Nasheed said when I asked how he would persuade people to leave their homes. “You can’t ask them to leave. This is almost an impossible task, unless and until you have doomsday on them. . . . Moving would have to be the very bottom line. If you think about it, in certain eventualities, there wouldn’t be a place to move. Everyone would be running around. I mean, you mention a country that wouldn’t have all sorts of problems — even India or Sri Lanka, all of these countries would have millions of people moving from place to place. We would be lost. Three hundred thousand Maldivians? Who would care about them?”

Moreover, how would they care for themselves? Putting aside for a moment the overwhelming logistical burdens of exile, what about the emotional ones? Would the loss of the country spell the loss of the nation? The Maldives are specks of dry land in the middle of the ocean, stretching over a distance equal to that from New York City to Raleigh; total landmass is less than twice the size of Washington’s. Yet Maldivians speak the same language and call the Maldives home. Would a sense of community disappear in exile? Could Maldivians survive without the Maldives?

I asked Nasheed what his own experiences living in exile told him about how Maldivians would fare in another country.

“Maldivians are fairly cosmopolitan in outlook, and we would probably adapt better, and more easily, than others would,” he said. “But leaving home is a different phenomenon. In Salman Rushdie’s ‘Imaginary Homelands,’ he says you can imagine your home, but then you imagine with words that you know. So, basically, you would always be imagining the beach, imagining the palm tree, imagining the horizon. You can’t be doing that in the middle of Rajasthan.” His voice wavered like that of a man on the verge of tears, and the normally upbeat president looked grief-stricken. “Believe me, we don’t want to go there. We are fine here. Moving will never be easy for anyone.”

Early one morning, I joined Nasheed aboard his yacht for a two-day tour of eight islands in the central Maldives. We left Malé shortly after sunrise while the cargo ships and cruise liners were still quiet in the harbor. We motored across the sea for hours before reaching the first island. A 75-foot, gunmetal gray coast-guard cutter followed in our wake.

The presidential yacht stretched 65 feet. Red, green and white stripes ran above the gunwale, and tinted windows enclosed the cabin. Inside, Nasheed huddled around a table with a handful of advisers who briefed him on the coming islands. An atlas of the Maldives lay within easy reach.

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We visited the island of Magoodhoo, the third of the day, because Nasheed had recently signed a deal with the University of Milan-Bicocca that would bring Italian scientists there to study coral growth. Nasheed wanted to thank the residents in advance for their hospitality and cooperation. If there was any tension between science and Maldivians’ conservative religious values, Nasheed said he hoped to dampen it before the Italians arrived. “For your average fisherman, who feels very insignificant in front of God, they are finding it difficult to understand the connection between climate change and human activity,” he told me. “When people say changes in weather patterns are because of nature and not because of man, you really have to connect that: if humans can become carbon-neutral, then God could act in a different set of ways. But God has to be there in the conversation somewhere.”

After the 2004 tsunami, some reactionary clerics described the waves as a curse. One called the tsunami “a sign to the people brought by Allah for people to take lessons from it and correct their way of life.” Urbanites claim that the influence of archconservative Islam has grown in recent years, especially on the smaller islands. Some point to the increased number of women wearing head scarves. Others cite the bomb blast in September 2007 that injured 12 tourists. Or the incident in January 2008, when a potential assassin charged at Gayoom holding a knife and yelling, “Allahu akbar!” A teenage Boy Scout grabbed the knife and prevented the assassin from fulfilling his mission.

On Magoodhoo, hundreds of islanders were standing in the shade of palm trees, and they applauded when Nasheed stepped onto the red carpet that had been unrolled on the pier. Nasheed toured the island, took special note of the dead coral clumped along the beach and then prayed at the mosque. Next door, schoolgirls filed into the Magoodhoo social center wearing white uniforms and matching head scarves, with red and blue sashes draped over their shoulders that identified them as school captain, vice president of the Dhivehi club or members of the Islam Club. After his prayers, Nasheed followed them inside.

About 100 people assembled under the powder blue ceiling of the social center. Air fresheners emitted a faint aroma of lemongrass, and A.C. units pumped frigid air throughout the room. A young man in a prayer cap and a necktie stood at a lectern draped with sunflowers and recited a passage from the Koran. Nasheed was introduced after that. “I can see that you all are feeling sleepy after that lunch,” he said with a smile. “But you know us politicians can’t leave a mike if we see one.” Everyone chuckled.

After a few minutes describing his government’s plans to improve life in Magoodhoo, Nasheed informed residents that the team of Italian researchers was on its way to study the coral. “The safety of these islands depends on the coral,” he said. “We need to learn more about what’s happening with the earth. The world might not be that safe. We might not survive. We don’t know exactly what will happen. So we have to understand nature. It is God’s will.” Nasheed pushed his hair off his forehead and looked out across the crowd. “If these scientists are not able to save the Maldives,” he said, “then they won’t be able to save the world.”

Nicholas Schmidle’s book “To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan” has just been published. A fellow at the New America Foundation, he last wrote for the magazine about al Qaeda in Mauritania.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

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NY Chapter AEE Board Members David Ahrens dahrens@energyspec.com 718- 677-9077x110Michael Bobker mbobker@aol.com 646-660-6977Robert Berninger       rberninger1@verizon.net 212- 639-6614Timothy Daniels twdaniels44@hotmail.com 212- 312-3770Jack Davidoff     jack@energyconsultingservices.com 718-963-2556Fredric Goldner fgoldner@emra.com 516- 481-1455Bill Hillis      wjhjr.1@juno.com 845-278-5062Placido Impollonia paimpollonia@dcas.nyc.gov 212-669-7628Dick Koral rkoral@citytech.cuny.edu 718- 552-1161John Leffler jleffler@goldmancopeland.com 212-868-4660x218John Leffler         johndelnyc2@juno.com??Robert Meier rmeier@lime-energy.com 212-328-3360Ryan Merkin rmerkin@hotmail.com 212-564-5800 x 16Jeremy Metz jeremy.metz@verizon.com 212-338-6405John Nettleton jsn10@cornell.edu 347-835-0089Asit Patel apatel@aeanyc.org 718- 292-6733x205Dave Westman westmand@coned.com 212-460-6588Chris Young c-young1@att.net 914-442- 4387

Board Members Emeritus Paul Rivet energyx@verizon.netGeorge Kritzler gkritzler@aol.comAlfred Greenberg agpecem@optonline.net 914-422-4387George Birman

Past PresidentsMike Bobker (2003-05), Asit Patel (2000-03), Thomas Matonti (1998-99), Jack Davidoff (1997-98), Fred Goldner (1993-96), Peter Kraljic (1991-92), George Kritzler (1989-90), Alfred Greenberg (1982-89), Murray Gross (1981-82), Herbert Kunstadt (1980-81), Sheldon Liebowitz (1978-80)

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