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Can farmed fish go vegetarian?

by ManualWakefield Posted on February 20, 2014

Can farmed fish go vegetarian?

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The worldwide aquaculture industry is growing faster than a genetically engineered salmon. By 2030, the World Bank forecasts that 62 percent of the fish eaten the world over will have come from a fish farm — up from about half today.

Aquaculture is an alternative to commercial fishing. But all those farmed fish need to eat, and most of them eat smaller fish harvested from oceans. Which kind of defeats the whole point of aquaculture.

Forage fish like anchovies and sardines are being hauled out of the seas, mixed with soy and other ingredients, turned into pellets, and used as fish feed.

To get away from this practice, which harms oceanic food webs, scientists are trying to figure out how to rear fish on vegetarian diets. QUEST/KQED reports:

To avoid using wild fish in farmed fish diets, the United States Department of Agriculture has spent the past ten years researching alternative diets that include plants, animal processing products and single-cell organisms like yeast, bacteria, and algae.

The USDA has proven that eight species of carnivorous fish — white sea bass, walleye, rainbow trout, cobia, arctic char, yellowtail, Atlantic salmon and coho salmon — can get enough nutrients from these alternative sources without eating other fish. …

[USDA fish physiologist Rick] Barrows said that fish, like people, don’t need specific foods but rather specific nutrients in order to stay healthy. In fact, all animals essentially need the same forty nutrients — a combination of amino acids, fatty acids, vitamins and minerals.

Turning carnivorous fish into vegetarians is not some far-off fantasy. David McFarland raises his trout on algae.

McFarland runs McFarland Springs Trout farm, based in Susanville, California. He was raising trout to stock rivers and lakes. The idea piqued his interest and after two years of testing the diet on a small scale and tweaking the ingredients he started feeding it to the fish.

“I thought if we’re not doing it, who will?” McFarland said. He admits there are drawbacks to using an alternative diet, namely the cost.

McFarland wanted to feed his trout a diet heavy on spirulina, a bacteria-based superfood, but he can’t afford it. Already his vegetarian feed is more expensive than the cheap and nasty fishmeal concoctions used in most aquaculture operations. More on that gunk here:

This chart from the World Bank report shows the growth of aquaculture and the decline of fishing:

World BankClick to embiggen.


Source
The Key to Sustainable Fish Farming? Vegetarian Fish, QUEST/KQED

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Russian enviro who criticized Olympics sentenced to three years of forced labor

by 2Gofman3 Posted on February 15, 2014

Russian enviro who criticized Olympics sentenced to three years of forced labor

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Oleg Kozirev / Human Rights Watch

Yevgeny Vitishko, in happier days.

An activist who coauthored a report cataloging the appalling environmental damage wreaked by Olympic construction will spend the next three years in a Russian penal colony.

Yevgeny Vitishko, a 40-year-old scientist, is ostensibly being punished for the crimes of spray-painting a fence and swearing in public. Vitishko was among seven members of Environmental Watch of the North Caucasus detained on the eve of the Olympics. An appeal of the decision to jail him for three years was rejected during a hearing that he couldn’t attend this week because he was imprisoned.

“The case against Vitishko has been politically motivated from the start,” said Yulia Gorbunova, a Human Rights Watch official in Russia. “When the authorities continued to harass him it became clear they were trying to silence and exact retribution against certain persistent critics of the preparations for the Olympics.”

IOC officials on Thursday sought “clarification” from Russian authorities on Vitishko’s incarceration. “We have raised this case in the past,” an IOC spokesman said.

As members of Pussy Riot recently learned, life in a Russian penal colony means being enslaved in inhumane conditions and forced to work. Nearly 600,000 people are serving sentences in such facilities.


Source
Russia: Justice Fails Environment Activist at Appeal, Human Rights Watch
Sochi Winter Olympics: IOC ask Russian authorities for explanation over Yevgeny Vitishko sentence, The Sydney Morning Herald

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Solar is keeping California’s lights on as hydro dries up

by EdwardJ21zffz Posted on February 14, 2014

Solar is keeping California’s lights on as hydro dries up

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We told you recently that wind turbines kept the heaters working in Texas during a cold snap that shut down several natural-gas power plants. And now we have similar superhero news from that other great renewable energy source — the sun.

The San Jose Mercury News reports that solar energy is helping to meet California’s power needs amid a drought that has caused hydroelectric supplies to shrivel:

Despite last week’s showers, the lack of rain in California this winter is having a dire impact on the rivers and reservoirs that power the state’s hydroelectricity plants.

But the abundance of sunshine has been ideal for solar power, which is stepping in to fill the anticipated drop-off in hydroelectricity generation.

“We’re going to have enough power to keep the lights on: We are not concerned about blackouts or outages,” said Robert Weisenmiller, chairman of the California Energy Commission. “We are much less dependent on hydropower now than we were in the 1940s. In just the last year, we’ve added more than 1,000 megawatts of solar alone.”

Somebody ought hand renewable energy a cape and be done with it.


Source
Drought threatens California’s hydroelectricity supply, but solar makes up the gap, San Jose Mercury News

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Ocean temperatures spiked in 2013

by NigelG54 Posted on February 3, 2014

Ocean temperatures spiked in 2013

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Perhaps climate skeptics should be forced to walk the plank — so they can feel for themselves where so much of the globe’s extra heat is ending up.

The mainstream media repeatedly uttered the false but reassuring-sounding phrase “global warming pause” last year, a reference to an unexpected decline in the rate at which land temperatures have been recently warming, but meanwhile temperatures in the world’s oceans were spiking.

Just check out this graph from NOAA, which shows the rise in the amount of energy in the top 2,300 feet (700 meters) of the world’s oceans:

NOAA

Click to embiggen.

Skeptical Science puts the chart into some context:

Long-term the oceans have been gaining heat at a rate equivalent to about 2 Hiroshima bombs per second, although this has increased over the last 16 or so years to around 4 per second. In 2013 ocean warming rapidly escalated, rising to a rate in excess of 12 Hiroshima bombs per second — over three times the recent trend.

Rising ocean temperatures might not seem as significant for us humans as rising land temperatures, but they actually affect us in lots of ways. Warming marine environments are disturbing wildlife the world over, driving fish to cooler and deeper waters — and that is affecting fishing industries.

The heating waters can also fuel hurricanes and other wild storms. Water temperatures around the Philippines rose nearly 2 degrees F last year just before Typhoon Haiyan hit, which helped whip up the monster storm.

And it’s worth remembering that water expands when it heats up, which leads to rising seas. In some subtropical areas, increasing water temperatures are believed to be responsible for sea-level rise of as much as a millimeter every year. Here’s the latest NOAA graph showing how much seas are rising, on average, due to warming oceans (this is called steric sea-level rise):

NOAA

Click to embiggen.

So the next time somebody bends your ear about a supposed “global warming pause,” just show them these two graphs.


Source
Global Ocean Heat and Salt Content, NOAA
The Oceans Warmed up Sharply in 2013: We’re Going to Need a Bigger Graph, Skeptical Science

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Teslas drive L.A. to N.Y. in three days, guzzle no gas

by ElissaStrock Posted on February 3, 2014

Teslas drive L.A. to N.Y. in three days, guzzle no gas

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Tesla

In the wee morning hours on Thursday, just a few days after Tesla had installed its 70th Supercharger (it’s pretty much what it sounds like — an electric-car charger that works super fast), a team of the company’s employees departed from Los Angeles for an epic drive to New York City.

By Sunday morning, despite snow and freezing conditions, both Tesla Model S electric sedans had reached their destination.

The Tesla team was aiming to break a world record — not a record for speed, but for shortest charge time for an electric vehicle traveling across the U.S. Guinness officials have yet to rule on whether the team succeeded. While awaiting that verdict, Tesla found other things to brag about.

“By normal standards, most people would have considered the conditions that the Model S cars faced [on] Day Three as extreme,” the company wrote on its blog. “Heavy snowfall turned to sleet; morning ice gave way to afternoon slush; fog restricted visibility. In Ohio, the cars sped on in driving rain. In all cases, the Model S prevailed with ease, as did the newly installed Superchargers along the way in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Ohio.”

Maybe Consumer Reports was right.


Source
Cross Country Rally, Tesla
Cross Country Rally: Day Three, Tesla
Tesla stays chill to finish 3-day cross-country rally, CNET

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Teslas drive L.A. to N.Y. in three days, guzzle no gas

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Bees exposed to neonic pesticides suck at gathering pollen

by Hermine73K Posted on January 31, 2014

Bees exposed to neonic pesticides suck at gathering pollen

By

Johan J.Ingles-Le Nobel

First plant STDs, and now this? Bees these days just can’t catch a break: New research shows that bumblebees that have been exposed to neonic pesticides are hopeless when it comes to gathering food.

British scientists reared commercial bumblebees for two weeks on sugar and pollen laced with imidacloprid, which is one of the world’s most commonly used insecticides. The pesticide concentration mimicked that found in farmed oil seed rape, which is grown for biofuel, vegetable oil, and animal feed. Similar colonies were fed pesticide-free sugar and pollen.

After the colonies were released into Scottish gardens to forage for their own food, the scientists monitored how much pollen and nectar the bees gathered and brought back to their hives. When it came to pollen, which is the main part of the bees’ diet, the differences between the pesticide-fed bees and those from control hives was striking. From the paper, published this month in the journal Ecotoxicology:

Whilst the nectar foraging efficiency of bees treated with imidacloprid was not significantly different than that of control bees, treated bees brought back pollen less often than control bees (40 % of trips vs 63 % trips, respectively) and, where pollen was collected, treated bees brought back 31 % less pollen per hour than controls.

This study demonstrates that field-realistic doses of these pesticides substantially impacts on foraging ability of bumblebee workers when collecting pollen. …

Pollen is the main protein source for bumblebees and is particularly important for the rearing of young to replace older workers. It has been suggested that foraging for pollen is more challenging than foraging for nectar, and it is usually restricted to dry, sunny weather, whereas nectar can be collected in most conditions except heavy rain, so that pollen rather than nectar shortages are more likely to limit colony success

The research was conducted on buff-tailed bumblebees — not on the more familiar honeybees. It’s “quite likely” that neonics have similar effects on the pollen-gathering ability of honeybees, researcher Dave Goulson told Grist. “But, obviously, we can’t say for sure.”

Previous research has shown that honeybee behavior is also affected by neonics — and scientists fear that those behavioral changes could be linked to the growing problem of colony collapse disorder. “Nonlethal exposure of honey bees to thiamethoxam (neonicotinoid systemic pesticide) causes high mortality due to homing failure at levels that could put a colony at risk of collapse,” French scientists wrote in a paper published in the journal Science.


Source
Field realistic doses of pesticide imidacloprid reduce bumblebee pollen foraging efficiency, Exotoxicology
A Common Pesticide Decreases Foraging Success and Survival in Honey Bees, Science

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Free trade deal on solar and wind could hurt the environment

by PatriciaJMD Posted on January 28, 2014

Free trade deal on solar and wind could hurt the environment

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Pssst … hey, foreigner, you wanna buy some green?

Government leaders huddling with business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos agreed on Friday to remove tariffs on so-called “environmental goods.” Unfortunately, that agreement could end up warming the globe and harming the environment.

If a “joint statement regarding trade in environmental goods” that was signed by the U.S. and 13 other countries evolves into a binding World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement, then the container ships and trucks that crisscross the globe could start hauling more solar panels, wind turbines, and other such goodies from factories to consumers across international borders.

“We are convinced that one of the most concrete, immediate contributions that the WTO and its Members can make to protect our planet is to seek agreement to eliminate tariffs for goods that we all need to protect our environment and address climate change,” the joint statement says.

We’re talking about some serious green here. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which describes such an agreement as a high priority for the U.S., says total global trade in environmental goods is worth $955 billion a year — and that 86 percent of that involves the signatories to the joint statement. Some countries apply tariffs of more than a third to such products.

On the face of it, that could seem to make some sense. So why isn’t everybody buying it?

For starters, it’s worth remembering that continuing to limit such trade would help green-collar jobs flourish closer to where the environmental goods are actually used. That would help communities everywhere embrace their own renewables revolutions, while also reducing carbon emissions from shipping and trucking.

But the problems go deeper than that. The protectionist government of India sees the agreement as a straight-up ruse — an effort to boost free trade that’s masquerading as environmental do-goodism. India’s position starts to make sense once you consider the broad list of products that would be included under the agreement. Here’s Ilana Solomon, the Sierra Club’s Responsible Trade program director, with the details in a blog post:

[I]f you dig into the list of products whose tariffs would be reduced or eliminated — the starting point for the WTO negotiations — you’ll see that many would actually harm the environment.

Incinerators, for example, are used to burn waste material and release toxic chemicals and byproducts into the air, water, and ground. Secondly, steam generators are found in equipment used in dirty fuel-production processes such as nuclear and coal-fired power plants that pour harmful toxic chemicals into the air we breathe and emit climate-disrupting carbon pollution. Also, centrifuges, which are used to filter and purify water for a variety of reasons, can also be used in the production of oil and tar sands — dirty fuels which should be on their way out as more clean energy comes online in America.

It’s great that the world’s most powerful people say they want to help the environment. But, as Solomon writes, “the key to unlocking clean energy is developing home-grown approaches to renewable energy production and manufacturing that lift up and protect workers within and outside of the U.S.”


Source
Joint statement regarding trade in environmental goods, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative
Trade in Environmental Goods May Not Actually Be So Good, Sierra Club
U.S. Trade Representative Froman, Fellow Trade Ministers Plan New Talks Toward Increased Trade in Environmental Goods, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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U.N. warns us to eat less meat and lay off biofuels, or we’re in for it

by 4q4cv8v Posted on January 27, 2014

U.N. warns us to eat less meat and lay off biofuels, or we’re in for it

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We’re overconsuming ourselves into environmental oblivion.

Farming will eliminate forests, plains, and other wild areas nearly the size of Brazil by 2050 around the world if we can’t mend our agricultural, dietary, and biofuel-burning ways. This unsustainable drive for more growing land will result in rising hunger and more frequent riots as food prices increase.

That’s the salty prognosis in a new report by scientists working for the U.N.’s International Resource Panel.

The amount of farmland has increased 11 percent since the 1960s, as growers struggle to meet growing populations’ ballooning demands for food and biofuel, according to the report. About 1.5 billion hectares, or 3.7 billion acres, is now being used globally to produce crops, and that figure continues to grow. Making matters worse, about a quarter of the world’s soils are degraded, which reduces the amount of crops that can be grown in them.

“Growing demand for food and non-food biomass will lead to an expansion of global cropland; yield growth will not be able to compensate for the expected surge in global demand,” the report states. “Cropland expansion at the cost of tropical forests and savannahs induces severe changes in the living environment with uncertain repercussions.”

What may be hardest for some of the world’s poorest and hungriest residents to stomach is the vast amount of farmland that’s being dedicated to growing crops for biofuels and for animal feed.

“One of our key challenges is overusing agricultural land for growing meat,” said report lead author Robert Howarth of Cornell University. “We don’t need to become complete vegetarians, but to put this into context and to help sustain feeding a burgeoning global population, we need to reduce our meat consumption by 60 percent — which is about 1940s era levels.”

The report lays out the malnourishing consequences of the worldwide shift toward biofuels, which eat into the proportion of croplands that can be used to feed humans. “In light of global efforts to increase food security, markets for food and fuel should be decoupled,” the report says. “This implies, for instance, reducing biofuel quotas.”

If current trends continue, by 2050, when the world population is expected to be greater than 9 billion people, between 320 and 849 million hectares of natural land would have been converted to cropland, according to the report. The upper end of that estimate approaches the size of Brazil. The lower end is twice what the scientists behind the report consider to be safe.

But there is hope. Here are some highlights from the report:

[G]ross expansion of croplands by 2050 could be limited to somewhere between 8 per cent and 37 per cent, provided a multi-pronged strategy is followed for meeting the food, energy and other requirements of the global economy. …

The authors believe global net cropland area could safely increase to up to 1,640 million hectares by 2020. While they recognize there is still great potential in increasing yields in regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, the authors highlight new opportunities to steer consumption towards levels of sustainability, particularly in high-consuming regions.

[T]he improvement of diets to enhance efficiency in biomass use and its substitutes, delinking the biofuels and food markets, the reduction of food loss and waste, the control of biomaterials consumption; with improved land management and restoration of degraded land, may allow us to save 161 to 319 million hectares of land by 2050.

Oh, and one more big-ticket item: We need to stop wasting so much damned food! “Reducing unsustainable demand can be achieved in a number of innovative ways,” the report says. “This includes aiding consumers to cut out wasteful and excessive consumption behaviors, improving efficiency across the life-cycle of agricultural commodities, and increasing the efficiency with which land-based resources are used.”


Source
Assessing Global Land Use: Balancing Consumption with Sustainable Supply, International Resource Panel
U.N. report sounds alarm on farming land-use crisis, Cornell Chronicle

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Seashore solar comes to Japan

by zB7bB4yB6a Posted on January 25, 2014

Seashore solar comes to Japan

By

SMA

Japan has been thinking creatively about electricity since the Fukushima meltdown nearly three years ago.

Dozens of nuclear power plants remain in the “off” mode while leaders and citizens tussle over whether nuclear power can ever be safe. That has left the gas-and-oil-poor country heavily dependent on expensive fossil fuel imports. So it has been turning to cleaner alternatives, using subsidies to help get tens of thousands of renewable energy projects off the ground. We told you recently that offshore wind turbines are being built near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, part of an effort to turn the contaminated region into a hub for clean energy.

And now, for another Japanese endeavor into safe, low-carbon energy, look again to the sea. Smithsonian Magazine reports:

[In November,] Japan flipped the switch on its largest solar power plant to date, built offshore on reclaimed land jutting into the cerulean waters of Kagoshima Bay. The Kyocera Corporation’s Kagoshima Nanatsujima Mega Solar Power Plant is as potent as it is picturesque, generating enough electricity to power roughly 22,000 homes.

Other densely populated countries, notably in Asia, are also beginning to look seaward. In Singapore, the Norwegian energy consultancy firm DNV recently debuted a solar island concept called SUNdy, which links 4,200 solar panels into a stadium-size hexagonal array that floats on the ocean’s surface.

Projects like these could help crowded coastal countries and metropolises install expansive solar arrays. Not much good for boating or wildlife, though.


Source
Is Japan’s Offshore Solar Power Plant the Future of Renewable Energy?, Smithsonian Magazine

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Europe wimps out on climate and clean energy

by VeronicaHawks Posted on January 23, 2014

Europe wimps out on climate and clean energy

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The European Union has long been a leader in the battle against climate change, but it’s now shying away from the fight.

New goals proposed by the European Commission, the E.U.’s lawmaking body, fall far short of what’s needed, say many activists, scientists, and leaders of poor countries. The proposal calls for E.U. nations to pump out 40 percent less greenhouse gas pollution in 2030 than they did in 1990, up from the current goal of 32 percent. That might sound pretty good, but it’s not great. Bangladesh’s lead climate negotiator said the bloc of least developed countries had been hoping European nations would commit to a 65 percent reduction.

The E.U., mired in recession and jealous of the fracking boom in the U.S., is backing away not just from aggressive emissions goals but also from an ambitious renewable energy strategy. From The New York Times:

For years, Europe has tried to set the global standard for climate-change regulation, creating tough rules on emissions, mandating more use of renewable energy sources and arguably sacrificing some economic growth in the name of saving the planet.

But now even Europe seems to be hitting its environmentalist limits.

High energy costs, declining industrial competitiveness and a recognition that the economy is unlikely to rebound strongly any time soon are leading policy makers to begin easing up in their drive for more aggressive climate regulation.

On Wednesday, the European Union proposed an end to binding national targets for renewable energy production after 2020. Instead, it substituted an overall European goal that is likely to be much harder to enforce.

It also decided against proposing laws on environmental damage and safety during the extraction of shale gas by a controversial drilling process known as fracking. It opted instead for a series of minimum principles it said it would monitor.

The looser rules on clean energy would clear the way for the U.K. and other countries to build nuclear power plants instead of new renewable energy projects.

The proposal could also make it easier for high-carbon fuels like tar-sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to make their way into European countries.

E.U. officials say the proposal is the best compromise they could come up with. Utilities and heavy industry had been pushing for a lower greenhouse gas cut of 35 percent by 2030. Even this current plan won’t have an easy time getting approval from the E.U.’s 28 member states.

And European countries are still way ahead of the U.S., Canada, Australia, and pretty much the whole rest of the planet.

The U.N. climate chief put a happy spin on the E.U. proposal, saying it helps lay the groundwork for a new international climate treaty that is supposed to be negotiated in Paris in 2015:

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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