THE DAILY HUG™  

U.S. Needs Wide Use of Emission-Offset Projects, Group Says

in-en.com  2008-7-29 11:43:58

-- U.S. climate-change policy should include a trading market that allows the wide use of emission- offset credits given to projects that cut greenhouse gases, said the Offset Quality Initiative, a group favoring new regulations to address global warming. The use of verifiable offset credits gives emitters a less expensive option for meeting gashouse-gas reduction requirements, while also providing an incentive to build projects like capturing greenhouse gases at landfills or building wind energy farms, according to a report. An offset represents the reduction, removal or avoidance of greenhouse-gas emissions at one project to compensate for output elsewhere. The group's report outlines how the credits could be used in a cap-and-trade market in which industries will be required to meet emissions-reduction targets. The use of offsets is controversial because of concerns about the credibility of projects and whether their use moves investment dollars outside the areas where the emissions-caps were imposed. ``Establishing confidence in the environmental integrity of offsets is critical for the successful launch and acceptance of future cap and trade regulatory systems,'' Gary Gero, president of the California Climate Action Registry, a group involved in the study that has established offset-verification standards in California, said in a statement. The report calls for a more robust use of offsets than was favored last week by California, six other U.S. Western states and four Canadian provinces. The 28-page report was released today by the coalition of nonprofit groups including the Climate Trust, Climate Group and Pew Center on Global Climate Change. Western Climate Initiative The Western Climate Initiative released details of a regional emissions-trading market that said emitters may be allowed to account for 10 percent of their required carbon reductions by buying offset credits awarded to projects that cut greenhouse gases. It also suggests allowing a limited number of offsets from projects outside the region. Otherwise, emitters would need permits granted or sold by the states and provinces. The Offset Quality Initiative report said climate policies shouldn't restrict the use of offsets -- either by location or by limiting their use to a certain percentage --because they will reduce the cost for companies looking to meet emission- reduction mandates. ``Because the location of an emission reduction is immaterial to its climate change impacts, offset eligibility should not be restricted by geographic source,'' the report said. Those in favor of limiting offsets say their use gives companies too much leeway in how they meet emission-reduction targets. Limitations ``Offsets should be limited to a small fraction of the reductions in a cap-and-trade program so that that emissions reduction will actually occur and to a significant degree, within the capped sectors themselves,'' the Union of Concerned Scientist said in a report last week. ``Such a policy will encourage investment in clean technology, creation of green jobs, and attainment of clean air.'' The recommendations were released today in San Diego at a meeting of the Western Climate Initiative, the regional partnerships first established in 2007 in an effort to restrict greenhouse-gas emissions because of the lack of a federal policy. The report suggests creating integrity standards to ensure projects are creating measurable reductions in greenhouse gases. Developers of offset projects need to show that the emissions reductions wouldn't have occurred without the incentive created by the credit, the report said. Monitoring All the projects should have monitoring systems in place defining ``how, when and by whom data will be collected and emissions quantified,'' the report said. Regulators should maintain a list of approved independent third-party verifiers to ensure the credibility of projects, according to the report. The United Nations issues emissions-offset credits under guidelines established by the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The credits, most of which are given for projects in China and India, are also used in the EU's carbon permit trading program, the world's biggest greenhouse gas market.

MIT: Europe's Cap-and-Trade System Working Well

June 30, 2008

In a bid to control greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change, the European Union has been operating the world's first system to limit and to trade carbon dioxide. Despite its hasty adoption and somewhat rocky beginning three years ago, the EU "cap-and-trade" system has operated well and has had little or no negative impact on the overall EU economy, according to an MIT analysis.

The MIT results provide both encouragement and guidance to policy makers working to design a carbon dioxide (CO2)-trading scheme for the United States and for the world. A key finding may be that everything does not have to be perfectly in place to start up similar systems.

"This important public policy experiment is not perfect, but it is far more than any other nation or set of nations has done to control greenhouse gas emissions and it works surprisingly well," said A. Denny Ellerman, senior lecturer in the MIT Sloan School of Management, who performed the analysis with Paul L. Joskow, the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor in the economics' department.

Ellerman and Joskow performed an in-depth study of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to date.

Already, the EU ETS is far larger than either of the U.S. programs for sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. Further, the EU ETS operates internationally. Allowances are traded by facilities in 27 independent nations that differ widely in per capita income, market experience, and other features. As a result, "I think the EU ETS has a lot to tell us about how a global system might actually work," Ellerman said.

The European experience shows that the economic effects -- in a macroeconomic sense -- have not been large. Second, permitting "banking and borrowing" will make a cap-and-trade system work more efficiently. Within the EU ETS, facilities can bank (save some of this year's allowance for use next year) or borrow (use some of next year's allowances now and not have them available next year). Many facilities took advantage of the opportunity to trade across time. But they always produced the necessary allowances within the required time period. Concerns that facilities would postpone their obligations indefinitely have proved unwarranted. A third lesson is that the process of allocating emissions allowances is going to be contentious and yet cap-and-trade is still the most politically feasible approach to controlling carbon emissions. In a cap-and-trade system, those most affected -- the current polluters -- receive some assets along with the liabilities they are being asked to assume.

Supply chain managers map out route to validated model for carbon

Lloyd's List, April 28, 2008 Monday - CARBON emission mapping of complex global supply chains will play an increasingly important role in logistics decision making. That was the clear message from the Green Logistics conference at last week's Multimodal 2008 event held in Birmingham, writes Roger Hailey.

Keynote speaker James Hookham, policy director of UK shippers' lobby the Freight Transport Association, told an audience of industry experts that a "tipping point" was reached 18 months ago in environmental thinking with the publication of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change.

Mr Hookham said: "Stern looked into the economics and indicated where we should invest in order to head off the effects of climate change."

Essentially, Stern foresaw an investment of 1% of GDP in addressing climate change ndash; ironically, more than twice the amount spent by the UK government on transport overall.

The government's policy response to Stern, the Climate Change Bill, is working its way through parliament and has set a target of a 60% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. The government has also set up the Office of Climate Change.

Stern, was followed by the now famous Eddington Report, described in glowing terms by Mr Hookham, which set out the role of transport infrastructure in a modern, developed economy.

The policy outcome of the Stern and Eddington reports will be a Green Paper by summer, inviting contributions from industry, and then a White Paper by Christmas, if Transport Secretary of State Ruth Kelly keeps to her ambitious timetable.

Mr Hookham reminded the audience that freight transport accounted for 6% of the UK's total carbon emissions of 152m tonnes in 2004. Of that, trucks made up 78.5% of the freight transport total.

Between 1990 and 2005, the number of kilometres per litre rose 11%, due to more efficient engines, better vehicle styling and driver training. During the same period, the tonne km per litre increased 22%, which Mr Hookham described as "promising trends".

As a ready reckoner, one litre of diesel produces 2.63kg of CO , while 1,000 km covered by a truck equals 250 litres of diesel or one tonne of CO .

The audience was also reminded that one tonne of carbon amounts to 2.8 tonnes of CO .

Alan McKinnon of Heriot-Watt University produced an interesting slide on three different trends for CO emissions from road transport in the UK from 1990 until 2005.

Depending on which measure you used ndash; and all three were reputable sources ndash; the amount of CO either increased by 37% or 5%, or went down 4% in the period under review. Prof McKinnon indicated the 37% figure may be due to a greater increase in hire and reward road haulage during those 15 years, as unprofitable in-house logistics were outsourced to third-party truckers. The problem is that the figures did not take into account the compensatory decrease for in-house trucking.

But what is the cost of one tonne of CO ? Here again, prices vary dramatically, ranging from 15p to £15.50 ($30) under the European emissions trading scheme, £14.60 for offsetting a flight by British Airways, £26.50 per tonne under UK government figures, a social cost of £72 under Stern or a £130 charge under a European fuel duty escalator.

But while the estimates vary enormously, Prof McKinnon said: "Carbon migration is not a managerial fad but will be an enduring priority. Carbon intensity will be a major criterion in selecting suppliers and logistics providers."

At a practical level, the sustainable development manager of the Boots retail group Ian Barnes highlighted the extent to which carbon mapping has taken place in maritime supply chains between southeast Asia and the UK.

Boots, along with supply chain provider Maersk Logistics, conducted a fundamental review of its Asia to UK product flows to measure and then reduce the carbon cost.

The decision was taken to measure the carbon footprint for a container from the port of departure in China until delivery at the UK distribution centre.

The journey from the Chinese manufacturer to port was not assessed, said Mr Barnes, because "this was very difficult to measure and very difficult to influence".

Among the conclusions reached was the greater use of 40 ft containers, rather than 20 ft boxes, the introduction of a further container consolidation point in Malaysia and the migration of air freight to deepsea. Air freight, though 3% of total volumes, account for 34% of carbon emissions.

The end result for Boots on this specific supply chain, after two years, was to reduce its CO per cu m by 29%.

But Mr Barnes cautioned that the Maersk/Boots model for carbon reduction could not be applied universally. "The challenge for the industry as a whole is to find a validated model so that the problems can be addressed on the same field."

April 25, 2008

The Sustainable Supply Chain

By Daniel Mahler, A.T. Kearney -- Supply Chain Management Review

• Sustainability in Action

• Key Characteristics of Sustainability

• Guidelines Going Forward

April 2008
Volume 1, Number 3

Logistics carbon footprint measurement: How deep will you go?

(This Article Was Extracted from eyefortransport at www.eyefortransport.com

When I read articles about carbon footprint labeling, carbon emission measurement tools, and sustainability reporting, the focus tends to be on what the company in question is measuring: what product, which parts of the supply chain, and over what time period.  But now that so many are in the game, the rules are starting to change.  The new focus is the breadth and depth of the measurement: the breadth of what is being measured (are direct and indirect energy, materials, capital goods, and business travel included?), and the depth to which the footprint is measured (are material extraction, transformation, distribution, use, disposal and recycling all taken into account?)  What once looked a fairly straightforward proposal - how much does the vessel emit, how many products on the vessel, divide one by the other - becomes a complicated, long-winded, and expensive prospect.

A third factor - precision - also comes into play, and was the focus of many of the discussions at our recent Green Transportation & Logistics World Summit in Zurich.  The scrutiny focused not only on how precise the distances measured were, whether backhaul lanes were taken into account, and what the impact of the standards at the point of manufacturing were, but also on the reliability of the data used to measure a carbon footprint in the first place.  For, even if you've done your best to include the most relevant sections of the supply chain, average distances to as accurately as possible, and have accurate and up-to-date software to track your emissions, there is no standard measure of the greenhouse gas emissions from each process measured.  Thus, depending on which projected measures you (or the software developer) elect to use (Defra projections, for example), your carbon footprint may look vastly different than what it would have been had a different measure been used.  One mile of a delivery route in the same truck on the same day ends up having a different GHG output estimation under each scheme, and taken across the whole logistics operation for a product, the discrepancies can be significant.

This creates a lot of problems, including a dilemma for shippers: do I use the measure that I believe to be most accurate, or that which gives me the lowest reportable result?  And what are my suppliers and competitors going to do?  The obvious solution is one standard, global set of emissions projections regulated and taken to be the most accurate, but until that comes (and it looks to be a long way off, though the UK, for example, may soon lead the way nationally at least), it's down to individual companies to decide where their priorities lie.

What I found especially interesting was that most of the shippers I have been speaking to actively want standard emissions projections.  Measurement reporting is complicated enough without the added burden of choosing between schemes without knowing the risks involved and the full implication of doing so down the line.  

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Colony Collapse Disorder, Then What?

Almond Pollination Exposed Vulnerabilities, and Resilience in Bee Colonies

(This Article Was Extracted from The Daily Green at www.thedailygreen.com)

Colony Collapse Disorder made its first appearance in the California almond orchards this year. Well, it probably did, since the rules that define it, though fairly straight forward are still a multitude number of shades of gray. The symptoms are pretty well defined ...

• a rapid depopulation of the colony – that is, in only a few days to a week or so a large, well populated colony loses most to all of its adult bees (the collapse part)

• left-behind brood, often lots of brood

• a handful of very young bees (just hatched, so they are light colored and still fuzzy) tending the queen

• lots of honey and pollen still in the hive

When samples are taken in-hive pesticides to control honey bee pests are found in the wax and maybe the honey; ag chemicals are found in the wax, honey and pollen; and examined bees tend to have a plethora of problems, but not all the same, and not all the time. Several viruses have been found that are as lethal or worse that that Israeli virus – and others not-yet identified have been discovered. Of course the evil varroa mites are found, sometimes, too, but not always, and not always in great numbers. Then there’s that new Nosema that shows up almost all the time, but not all the time, and not in great numbers some of the time.

Too, there seems to be an absence of all the usual suspects, those scavengers that normally come in and rob out the honey, any dead bees, and even the pollen form a colony that has died of causes other than CCD. These include ants, small hive beetles and wax moths. Eventually, though, these opportune thieves arrive and start to work if the colony hasn’t been picked up and put somewhere safe.

That’s the classic case. And it happened in almond orchards this spring in lots of operations affecting lots of colonies. It wasn’t quite so dramatic this year because there were lots of reinforcements in California ... lots ... so there were ample recruits to fill the gaps of those that fell in battle.

What I’m hearing now is that for the most part the battle has been waged, the fallen retired, the almonds pollinated and now it’s on to new battlegrounds elsewhere. Those that didn’t have a problem before or during the month of conflict seem to be doing fine and have moved on to apples and other crops in the Pacific Northwest, crops in California, or else they are headed back home to get ready for the next pollination job or to make honey.

Those that fell are questionable, though, aren’t they? What do you do with a hive when the bees died of CCD?

The not-very-old rule of thumb here has been, "Once Infected, Always Infected," so putting more bees back in those boxes is a sure death sentence. And an expensive one, too, because when you put bees in a box like that they require food (honey or sugar syrup and pollen supplement or substitute), other medications and probably new frames and foundation, too. And then there’s all the labor involved. When a beekeeper should be making honey he’s tied up babysitting these new colonies. And then the bees die anyway, sometimes, without so much as a pound of honey to show for the work that it took to get them going. Well, that’s the rule of thumb anyway.

Airing them out was suggested, and may still work ... if you can leave them long enough. But, how long? Maybe the measure is to leave them be until the wax moths, small hive beetles and ants think it’s OK, and they go back. If it’s safe enough for them, maybe bees, too, eh? But not using some percent of your working capital, as it were, is expensive too. A beekeeper either has to run fewer bees or buy new equipment while he waits. That gets real expensive.

So while the world worries about the loss of bees, the pollination crisis and a reduced supply of food, there’s this other little drama going on: What do you do with the dead?

 

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Playing with Children's Lives: Big Tobacco in Malawi by Pilirani Semu-Banda, Special to CorpWatch February 25th, 2008 (This Article Was Extracted from www.corpwatch.org)

Cartoon by Khalil Bendib Sickly and malnourished, Kirana Kapito began his working life on a large commercial tobacco estate in Malawi's northern region. The farms sell their produce on the country's auction floors directly to international corporations including Limbe Leaf Tobacco, majority owned by the Swiss-registered Continental Tobacco Company and U.S.-based Alliance One Tobacco. Kirana is one of 250 million children across the world involved in work that is damaging to their mental, physical and emotional development. Some 57 million of these endangered children live in Sub-Sahara Africa. And with an estimated 1.4 million child laborers, the small, southern African nation of Malawi has the highest incidence of child labor in southern Africa, according to the Olso, Norway-based, FAFO Institute for Applied Social Science. Kirana was eight years old when he first went to work in the fields. Estate owners transported him and his parents from their home village, Mulanje, along with 45 other families. The truck journey covered more than 1,000 kilometers and ended in the tobacco fields in Rumphi in northern Malawi. Kirana's mother, Jane Kapito, 45, says the family left home seeking a better life. “Four years later, my whole family is still struggling with poverty. My son has to work as hard as everyone else if we have to afford the basic necessities. The money that my husband and I receive from the tobacco estate is not enough,” she says. Now 12, Kirana has never been to school. For the past six months, his health has been failing and he can no longer work as hard as he used to. His mother says her little boy is malnourished and therefore contracts different infections easily. The family often goes without a proper meal for up to three days. “Just in the past two months, Kirana has been afflicted by malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia,” Jane Kapito said. “He's my only child and I am so scared of losing him.” This family's struggle is repeated throughout Malawi's tobacco industry, where poverty ensures that every member must contribute to the workload. Virginia Import Now Main Malawi Export Malawi's sprawling tobacco estates are not only a source of national economic pride, but of lovely pastoral vistas as well. Up close though, the sight of child laborers in the hot fields exposes the ugliness at their core. Commercial production of tobacco in Malawi goes back as far as 1889, when settlers from the U.S. state of Virginia introduced the crop. In those days “foreign masters” forced the native people and their children to work in the farms for little or no pay. Over a century later, this exploitation continues -- with no end in sight. Increasingly, critics are demanding that the tobacco companies take responsibility for ending the abuses. Given their key role in Malawi's economy, they wield significant clout. Malawi derives up to 70 percent of its foreign exchange earnings from agricultural crops, and the tobacco industry makes up 10 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP). Malawi’s exports account for five percent of the world's total tobacco exports and two percent of the world's total production. But the wealth generated by this resource is not spread evenly across the country. The Malawi Tobacco Control Commission (TCC), a local government watchdog for the tobacco market, estimates that it takes $1 for farm workers to produce a kilogram of tobacco , which they usually sell at $.70 for a loss of $.30 per kilo. Hardworking farmers who cannot make a living turn to child labor. TCC's 2008 campaign is demanding that farmers get a profit at least 15 percent above production costs. Despite the TCC campaign, farmers and their families are still at risk of losing money on their crops. And this year the farmers' plight may be further exacerbated by heavy rains that are predicted to cut the country's tobacco production by about 3 percent. Tenant Farmers’ Dilemma Up to two million Malawians, mostly poor, depend on tobacco and related industries for their income. Virtually all of the up to 900,000 adult growers are “smallholder farmers, tobacco tenants and casual farm workers,” according to a 2006 research paper by the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education (CTCRE), an independent center based at the University of California, San Francisco. Tenant farmers are allocated a plot of land by the estate owner and required to produce a specific yield. The owners loan the tenants inputs including seed and fertilizer and deduct the debt from future profits -- if any. The owners are also supposed to supply food rations, but when monthly allocations run out, workers and their children go hungry. Many also lack such basic necessities as medication, proper housing and safe drinking water. Not surprisingly, workers on tobacco estates and their dependants are among the poorest and most oppressed people in Malawi, according to a survey released last December by the Center for Social Concern, a Catholic organization that monitors the welfare of the people. A minimum of “78,000 children are working on a full- or part-time basis in the tobacco fields, according to the CTCRE study. “Forty-five percent of the child workers are 10-14 years old and 55 percent are 7-9 years old,” the study found. Meanwhile, the tobacco companies have received nearly US$40 million in revenues over four years through the use of unpaid child labor in Malawi. In 1995, the Malawi government, through the Ministry of Labor in collaboration with the Ministry of Justice, started drafting a Tobacco Tenancy Labor Bill to regulate the relations and transactions between the tenant farmers and the landlords. The bill has been taken through a number of revisions but it has not yet been taken to Parliament. Supporting Children or Exploiting Them? Multinational tobacco companies are aware of the public relations implications of profiting not only from tobacco itself, but doing it through the cycle of poverty and child labor. Tobacco companies in Malawi including Alliance One, Africa Leaf (Malawi) Limited, Premium and British American Tobacco (Malawi) are sponsoring the Eliminating Child Labor in Tobacco Growing Foundation (ECLT). The project, which includes other agricultural industries, is run by Together Ensuring Children Security (TECS), a registered trust set up in 2001 by tobacco exporting corporations operating in Malawi: Africa Leaf, Dimon, Limbe Leaf and Stancom Tobacco. In 2001, ECLT budgeted US$2 million for a four-year effort to combat child labor. Six years later, in October 2007, the 20 companies within the supply chain of the tobacco industry had ponied up somewhat less than $100,000 of that amount, according to TECS'S corporate newsletter. The University of California researchers are skeptical of the inherent conflict of interest in having tobacco companies influence social policy. They concluded that in Malawi, transnational tobacco companies are using child labor projects to enhance their corporate reputations and distract public attention away from how they profit from low wages and cheaply produced tobacco . Others argue that even when useful, the TECS program is a drop in an ocean of poverty. Up to 45 percent of the population is poor, according to the 2007 Malawi Millennium Development Goal (MDG) report. Registered as a Trust under the Trustees Act of Malawi, TECS projects have taken what it calls “a poverty reduction strategy approach” to improve food security, water safety and HIV/AIDS intervention and education. The trust has built schools, planted trees and constructed shallow wells to address the use of child labor in tobacco farming, according to TECS Programs Director Limbani Kakhome. While not directly undermining child labor, these programs will eventually bear fruit in better social conditions that will diminish the problem, Kakhome said. “We are also addressing health issues to ensure that the children don't skip school because of illnesses,” says Kakhome. Once they stay home because they are ill, they are easily taken up by child labor.” It is difficult, he said, to supply the market for child labor once the children are absorbed into the school system, have safe water and are financially secure. Too Little, Too Late? It is too late for children like 15-year-old Martha Kalima who dropped out of school at 12 years old to work in the tobacco fields. Pregnant at 14, she continued working in the fields until she gave birth. The father was the 16-year-old son of another tenant farmer. “There is nothing like maternity leave for tobacco workers,” Kalima said. “No one is entitled to sick leave nor is there transport to hospital. I gave birth at home because it was too late for me to get to hospital.” Martha is back in the tobacco fields carrying the baby on her back. Chances are slim that she will return to school. Some 15 percent of girls and 12 percent of boys drop out of school, according to Malawi government statistics. Around 22 percent of primary school age girls never attend school at all, while 60 percent of those enrolled do not attend regularly. The TECS corporate newsletter confirms that children with few options are pulled from school. Some are “coaxed from the poverty-stricken homes to work in order to keep body and soul together. They are exposed to hazardous environments where they work long hours and do jobs not befitting their ages and they are often beaten and abused.” That was the fate of 16-year-old Ekari Maliwasa, says she has just returned to her village in the south of Malawi after working for five years in the tobacco estates in the northern part of the country. “My parents took me with them to work in the tobacco estates in the north [when I was 11] and I only escaped back to my village two months ago after realizing that I was being abused. I am now staying with my elderly grandmother,” says Maliwasa. She says the estate manager beat her whenever he found her resting from the hard work in the tobacco fields. Ekari also went without food or drink for long hours, she said, and was not allowed take a break until she had worked for five hours. Enforcement of Labor Standards Difficult Maliwasa's treatment, like that endured by many of Malawi's child laborers, violated not only international standards but also legally binding treaties. Malawi is a signatory to a number of conventions against child labor including the 1973 International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 138 which sets a minimum working age of 18, and the 1999 ILO Convention 182 which outlaws child labor. The country also ratified the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. (ILO has set 2016 as the deadline for countries around the world to eliminate the worst forms of child labor.) Child labor cannot be ended overnight says TECS Executive Director Bobby Maynard. “You can manage the supply chain to a certain degree but you can't control it fully,” he says. “The problem is that over 80 percent of tobacco is grown with no contracts from the tobacco companies -- as such it is difficult to intervene directly.” Tobacco companies note that they are involved in policing child labor violations at estates where they have direct control, and that they subscribe to Good Agricultural Practices (GAP), whose first principle is “no child labor.” But their results in curbing the practice have not been impressive. Relying on British American Tobacco's own internal documents, the University of California study found that, “rather than actively and responsibly working to solve the problem of child labor in growing tobacco , the company acted to co-opt the issue to present themselves over as a 'socially responsible corporation' by releasing a policy statement claiming the company's commitment to end harmful child labor practices, holding a global child labor conference with trade unions and other key stakeholders, and contributing nominal sums of money for development projects largely unrelated to efforts to end child labor.” International agencies are also involved. Kusali Kubwalo, communications officer for UNICEF Malawi, said the United Nations has joined Malawi's government and several non-governmental organizations to fight the problem from several fronts. A national “Stop Child Abuse Campaign” aims to break the silence shrouding all forms of child abuse, including child labor. “The campaign aims to mobilize leadership and a commitment at all levels to prevent and respond to all forms of abuse,” says Kubwalo. “Violations of children's rights take place every day in Malawi and are extensive, under-recognized and underreported.” She insists that Malawi, as a signatory to the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, is obligated to respect, protect, facilitate and promote the fulfillment of the rights it guarantees. “This instrument must therefore be translated into concrete legislation, interventions and development programs,” says Kubwalo. “Ratification alone is not enough.” EDITOR'S NOTE: Since publishing this article,  Project Manager and Acting Director of ECLT Foundation, Mr. Alain Berthoud, issued a response.

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March 11, 2008 (This Article Was Extracted from the Solar Energy Idustries Associatio www.seia.org)

 February 27, 2008 (This Article Was Extracted from the Solar Energy Idustries Associatio www.seia.org)

Broad Coalition Urges Congress to Pass Renewable Energy Bill

A broad coalition of 120 corporations, environmental groups, investors, labor, nongovernmental organizations, public health organizations, and utilities urged Congress to pass H.R. 5351, the Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation Tax Act of 2008. The bill would extend federal tax incentives for energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies that have expired or will expire at the end of this year.

"America is on the cusp of a new, clean energy economy. The clean energy tax incentives in H.R. 5351 would help our country make the transition to this economy -- an economy powered by low-carbon technologies that help solve global warming, reduce energy prices for consumers and create new high-wage jobs," said the group in a letter sent to Congressional representatives yesterday.

The far-ranging group represents all sectors of the economy including corporate giants Wal-Mart Stores, Best Buy Co., The Home Depot, and Dow Chemical, and utilities including Florida Power and Light and Pacific Gas & Electric. Others include the Solar Energy Industries Association, Sierra Club, National Association of Home Builders, National Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation and the United Steelworkers.

"These incentives must be extended immediately to avoid significant harm to the developing clean energy industries in the United States. The technologies produced by these industries play a vital role in reducing global warming pollution, creating new high-wage jobs in our country, and saving consumers and businesses money on their energy bills," stated the group's letter.

The national sign-on letter was coordinated and delivered by the Solar Energy Industries Association in Washington, D.C. The House is scheduled to debate and vote on the bill today.

Solar Energy Industries Association is the national trade association of solar energy manufacturers, dealers, distributors, contractors, installers, architects, consultants and marketers. Established in 1974, SEIA works to expand the use of solar technologies in the global marketplace, strengthen research and development, remove market barriers, and improve education and outreach for solar.