Stop Shopping … or the Planet Will Go Pop

by David Smith for the Observer

‘Many big ideas have struggled over the centuries to dominate the planet,’ begins the argument by Jonathon Porritt, government adviser and all-round environmental guru.’Fascism. Communism. Democracy. Religion. But only one has achieved total supremacy. Its compulsive attractions rob its followers of reason and good sense. It has created unsustainable inequalities and threatened to tear apart the very fabric of our society. More powerful than any cause or even religion, it has reached into every corner of the globe. It is consumerism.’

According to Porritt, the most senior adviser to the government on sustainability, we have become a generation of shopaholics. We are bombarded by advertising from every medium which persuades us that the more we consume, the better our lives will be. Shopping is equated with fun, fulfilment and self-identity. It is also, Porritt warns, killing the planet. He argues, in an interview with The Observer, that merely switching to ‘ethical’ shopping is not enough. We must shop less.

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Mountaineers testify to warming's effect

by JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer Sat Apr 7, 6:36 PM ET

BEND, Ore. - Mountaineers are bringing back firsthand accounts of vanishing glaciers, melting ice routes, crumbling rock formations and flood-prone lakes where glaciers once rose.
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The observations are transforming a growing number of alpine and ice climbers, some of whom have scientific training, into eyewitnesses of global warming. Increasingly, they are deciding not to leave it to scientists to tell the entire story.

"I personally have done a bunch of ice climbs around the world that no longer exist," said Yvon Chouinard, a renowned climber and surfer and founder of Patagonia, Inc., an outdoor clothing and gear company that champions the environment. "I mean, I was aghast at the change."

Chouinard pointed to recent trips where the ice had all but disappeared on the famous Diamond Couloir of 16,897-foot Mount Kenya, and snow was absent at low elevations on 4,409-foot Ben Nevis, Britain's highest peak, in the Highlands of northwest Scotland. He sees a role for climbers in debating climate change, even if their chronicles are unscientific.

"Most people don't care whether the ice goes or not, the kind of ice that we climb on and stuff," he said. But climbers' stories, he added, can "make it personal, instead of just scientists talking about it. Telling personal stories might hit home to some people."

Alpine climbers are worrying about the loss of classic routes and potential new lines up mountains that are melting, from the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest and the Alps in Europe to the Andes in South America and the Himalaya in Asia.

Their anecdotes often reflect what science is finding, but with stories and pictures from places where most scientists aren't able to reach.

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Dire Warming Report too Soft, Scientists Say

By Alan Zarembo / Thomas H. Maugh II for the Los Angeles Times

A new global warming report issued Friday by the United Nations paints a near-apocalyptic vision of Earth’s future: hundreds of millions of people short of water, extreme food shortages in Africa, a landscape ravaged by floods and millions of species sentenced to extinction.Despite its harsh vision, the report was quickly criticized by some scientists who said its findings were watered down at the last minute by governments seeking to deflect calls for action.

“The science got hijacked by the political bureaucrats at the late stage of the game,” said John Walsh, a climate expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who helped write a chapter on the polar regions.

Even in its softened form, the report outlined devastating effects that will strike all regions of the world and all levels of society. Those without resources to adapt to the changes will suffer the most, according to the study from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“It’s the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit,” said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, which released the report in Brussels.

The report is the second of four scheduled to be issued this year by the U.N., which marshaled more than 2,500 scientists to give their best predictions of the consequences of a few degrees increase in temperature. The first report, released in February, said global warming was irreversible but could be moderated by large-scale societal changes.

That report said with 90% confidence that the warming was caused by humans, and its conclusions were widely accepted because of the years of accumulated scientific data supporting them.

In contrast, the latest report was more controversial because it tackled the more uncertain issues of the precise effects of warming and the ability of humans to adapt to them.

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Palm Oil: The Biofuel of the Future Driving an Ecological Disaster Now

by Ian MacKinnon from the Guardian

KALIMANTAN, Indonesia - The numbers are damning. Within 15 years 98% of the rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia will be gone, little more than a footnote in history. With them will disappear some of the world’s most important wildlife species, victims of the rapacious destruction of their habitat in what conservationists see as a lost cause. 0404 07Yet this gloomy script was supposed to have included a small but significant glimmer of hope. Oil palm for biofuel was to have been one of the best solutions in saving the planet from greenhouse gases and global warming. Instead the forests are being torn down in the headlong rush to boost palm oil production.

More startling is that conservationists believe the move to clear land for this “green fuel” is often little more than a conspiracy, providing cover to strip out the last stands of timber not already lost to illegal loggers. In one corner of Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, a mere 250,000 hectares or 1,000 sq miles - almost twice the size of Greater London - of the 6m hectares of forest allocated for palm oil by the government have actually been planted.

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Global warming driving Australian fish south

By Michael Byrnes for Reuters

Global warming is starting to have a significant impact on Australian marine life, driving fish and seabirds south and threatening coral reefs, Australia's premier science organization said on Wednesday.

But much more severe impacts could occur in coming decades, affecting sea life, fishing communities and tourism.

In particular, warmer oceans, changes in currents, disruption of reproductive cycles and mass migration of species would affect Australia's marine life, particularly in the southeast.

Already, nesting sea turtles, yellow-fin tuna, dugongs and stinging jellyfish are examples of marine life moving south as seas warm, said the report by the government-backed Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

"It's not a disaster for the ones that can move south. It is for the ones that can't move south," lead author of the report, Dr Alistair Hobday, told Reuters.

"If you're at the tip of Tasmania, you've got nowhere else to go," he said, referring to Australia's southern island state, the last major part of Australia before the Antarctic.

Atlantic salmon, which are farmed in Tasmania, face a bleak future. Salmon farming businesses would become largely unviable as the ocean warmed the predicted one to two degrees over the next 30 years, Hobday said.

Fisheries and aquaculture are worth more than A$2.5 billion a year the report, "Impacts of Climate Change on Australian Marine Life," says. It is the first major study in the Australian region to combine the research of climate modelers, ecologists and fisheries and aquaculture scientists.

Coral in the Great Barrier Reef off Australia's northeast may be hit by more frequent bleaching events, every two or three years compared with five or six years at present.

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Climate Science and The Politics of Economic Growth

by John Buell in the Bangor Daily News

***

The politics of global warming is a telling and consequential instance of economic power corrupting political judgment.

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which adds further support for the relationship of greenhouse gases to global climate change, has provoked an odd reaction among many business leaders. Even some who have long denied any connection between hydrocarbons and global warming now concede the link, but they take a new tack. They claim that any serious attempt to slow the pace of global warming will do serious damage to the national economy. They can reach this conclusion because they equate their short-term bottom line with “the economy,” and surprisingly many in the media follow them in this judgment.

Oil industry defenders portray leading climate scientists as hell bent to place draconian curbs on the U.S. economy. Yet prominent climate scientists are, if anything, too restrained in their pronouncements. Even the most conservative introductory economics texts, like that by former chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers Gregory Mankiw, recognize that markets have imperfections. When the purchase and use of a commodity harms third parties, government has an appropriate role in taxing and thus discouraging consumption of that commodity. In the world of economic textbooks, a neutral and informed government calculates the extent of the damage and enacts an appropriate tax.

Yet in our contemporary corporate economy, oil, auto, and private utility interests have enormous market power, which they eagerly translate into political power. They already enjoy vast favors in the forms of subsidized leases, government supported highways and emergency services, and lower tax rates. A tax on gas that reflected not only carbon content but much of our military cost as well as air pollution, congestion, and highway accidents would substantially impact several key corporations. Nonetheless, is their welfare synonymous with “the economy?”

Tax and regulatory policy in the late eighties and nineties led to major gains in energy efficiency and if anything were very beneficial to overall economic development. James Hansen, one of the mad scientists most reviled by leading oil companies, has put this case in language that reads as though it came straight out of market economics 101: “The U.S. is still only half as efficient in its use of energy as Western Europe, i.e., the U.S. emits twice as much CO2 to produce a unit of GNP, partly because Europe encourages efficiency by fossil fuel taxes. Available technologies would allow great improvement of energy efficiency, even in Europe. Economists agree that the potential could be achieved most effectively by a tax on carbon emissions… The tax could be revenue-neutral … leaving government revenue unchanged; and it should be introduced gradually. The consumer who makes a special effort to save energy could gain, benefiting from the tax credit or decrease while buying less fuel; the well-to-do consumer who insisted on having three Hummers would pay for his own excesses.”

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Supreme Court Rules Against Bush in Global Warming Case

by James Vicini for Reuters

WASHINGTON - In a defeat for the Bush administration, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that a U.S. government agency has the power under the clean air law to regulate greenhouse gas emissions that spur global warming. The nation’s highest court by a 5-4 vote said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency “has offered no reasoned explanation” for its refusal to regulate carbon dioxide and other emissions from new cars and trucks that contribute to climate change.

The ruling came in one of the most important environmental cases to reach the Supreme Court in decades. It marked the first high court decision in a case involving global warming.

Greenhouse gases occur naturally and are also emitted by cars, trucks and factories into the atmosphere. They can trap heat close to the earth’s surface like the glass walls of a greenhouse.

Such emissions have risen steeply over the past century and many scientists see a connection between this rise and an increase in global average temperatures and a related increase in extreme weather, wildfires, melting glaciers and other damage to the environment.

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the court majority, rejected the administration’s argument that it lacked the power to regulate such emissions. He said the EPA’s decision was “arbitrary, capricious or otherwise not in accordance with law.”

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Scientists say Antarctic ice sheet is thinning

HOUSTON (Reuters) - A Texas-sized piece of the Antarctic ice sheet is thinning, possibly due to global warming, and could cause the world's oceans to rise significantly, polar ice experts said on Wednesday.

They said "surprisingly rapid changes" were occurring in Antarctica's Amundsen Sea Embayment, which faces the southern Pacific Ocean, but that more study was needed to know how fast it was melting and how much it could cause the sea level to rise.

The warning came in a joint statement issued at the end of a conference of U.S. and European polar ice experts at the University of Texas in Austin.

The scientists blamed the melting ice on changing winds around Antarctica that they said were causing warmer waters to flow beneath ice shelves.

The wind change, they said, appeared to be the result of several factors, including global warming, ozone depletion in the atmosphere and natural variability.

The thinning in the two-mile-(3.2-km)- thick ice shelf is being observed mostly from satellites, but it is not known how much ice has been lost because data is difficult to obtain on the remote ice shelves, they said.

Study is focusing on the Amundsen Sea Embayment because it has been melting quickly and holds enough water to raise world sea levels six meters, or close to 20 feet, the scientists said

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Climate Change: Coastal Mega-Cities in for a Bumpy Ride

by Srabani Roy

NEW YORK - About 643 million people, or one-tenth of the world’s population, who live in low lying coastal areas are at great risk of oceans-related impacts of climate change, according to a global research study to be released next month.The study, by researchers at Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Sciences Information Network and the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development, is the first of its kind. The researchers identified populations, particularly urban populations, at greatest risk from rising sea levels and more intense storms due to climate change.

0328 07“Of the more than 180 countries with populations in the low-elevation coastal zone, 130 of them — about 70 percent — have their largest urban area extending into that zone,” said Bridget Andersen, a research associate at CIESIN, in a statement.

“Furthermore, the world’s largest cities — those with more than five million residents — have on average one-fifth of their population and one-sixth of their land area within this coastal zone.”

The study, which will be published in the peer-reviewed journal Environment and Urbanization, assesses the risks to populations and urban settlements along coastal areas that are less than 10 meters above sea level, referred to as the low-elevation coastal zone, or LECZ. Although globally this zone accounts for only two percent of the world’s land area, it contains 10 percent of the world’s population and 13 percent of the world’s urban population, the study found.

The 10 countries with the largest number of people living in this vulnerable, low-elevation zone, include in descending order: China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, Egypt, the United States, Thailand and the Philippines.

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Global Warming Study Warns of Vanishing Climates

by James Randerson from the Guardian

By the end of the century up to two fifths of the land surface of the Earth will have a hotter climate unlike anything that currently exists, according to a study that predicts the effects of global warming on local and regional climates. And in the worst case scenario, the climatic conditions on another 48% of the land surface will no longer exist on the planet at all.The changes - which will have a devastating affect on biodiversity hotspots such as the Amazonian and Indonesian rainforests - will wipe out numerous species that are unable to move to stay within their preferred climate range. These species will either have to evolve rapidly or die.

“There is a real problem for conservation biologists,” said the lead author, John Williams, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “How do you conserve the biological diversity of these entire systems if the physical environment is changing and potentially disappearing?”

Studies already suggest that the ranges of species are shifting towards the poles at around six kilometers a decade, but what will happen when the rate of change intensifies?

His team used emissions scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the international scientific group that advises policymakers - to predict where changes in temperature and precipitation will occur.

As is already happening, the analysis predicts that as the planet warms climate zones will move north and south towards the poles. To work out the significance of these changes, the team compared them with the climate variation that occurs naturally. They attach greater weight to changes in regions that are relatively stable. This suggests that some of the worst impacts will happen in tropical and subtropical regions as they shift to new climatic conditions not currently seen.

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Antarctic melting may be speeding up

From Reuters by Michael Byrnes

HOBART (Reuters) - Rising sea levels and melting polar ice-sheets are at upper limits of projections, leaving some human population centers already unable to cope, top world scientists say as they analyze latest satellite data.

A United Nations report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in February projected sea level gains of 18-59 centimeters (7-23 inches) this century from temperature rises of 1.8-4.0 Celsius (3.2-7.8 Fahrenheit).

"Observations are in the very upper edge of the projections," leading Australian marine scientist John Church told Reuters.

"I feel that we're getting uncomfortably close to threshold," said Church, of Australia's CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research said.

Past this level, parts of the Antarctic and Greenland would approach a virtually irreversible melting that would produce sea level rises of meters, he said.

There has been no repeat in the Antarctic of the 2002 break-up of part of the Larsen ice shelf that created a 500 billion ton iceberg as big as Luxembourg.

But the Antarctic Peninsula is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, and glaciers are in massive retreat.

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Global Warming Activists Try to Stir Americans to Change

From the San Francisco Chronicle by Robert Collier

WASHINGTON - Washington is suddenly debating global warming this week, but the big challenge remains outside the Beltway -- coaxing Americans to adopt new technologies and change their energy-guzzling lifestyles.


A crowd gathers on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 20, 2007, during a rally against global warming. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
While former Vice President Al Gore prodded Congress to act Wednesday, activists in the Bay Area and nationwide were preparing a pressure campaign that they hope will boost their movement's public support, which recent opinion polls show to be respectable yet hardly overwhelming.

Environmentalists say the attention brought by Gore and his Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," is a godsend.

"Things are changing fast, and most people in Washington believe that there's more than enough public support now to enact federal legislation," said David Hawkins, director of the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Recent polls, however, suggest that public sentiment is soft.

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DISTILLERY DEMAND FOR GRAIN TO FUEL CARS VASTLY UNDERSTATED

A little more insight into the consequences of attempting to reduce oil dependence. From the World Watch Institute/Earth Policy News

World May Be Facing Highest Grain Prices in History

Lester R. Brown

Investment in fuel ethanol distilleries has soared since the late-2005 oil price hikes, but data collection in this fast-changing sector has fallen behind. Because of inadequate data collection on the number of new plants under construction, the quantity of grain that will be needed for fuel ethanol distilleries has been vastly understated. Farmers, feeders, food processors, ethanol investors, and grain-importing countries are basing decisions on incomplete data.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) projects that distilleries will require only 60 million tons of corn from the 2008 harvest. But here at the Earth Policy Institute (EPI), we estimate that distilleries will need 139 million tons—more than twice as much. If the EPI estimate is at all close to the mark, the emerging competition between cars and people for grain will likely drive world grain prices to levels never seen before. The key questions are: How high will grain prices rise? When will the crunch come? And what will be the worldwide effect of rising food prices?

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Material Shows Weakening of Climate Reports

From the New York Times
by Andrew C. Revkin / Matthew L. Wald

WASHINGTON — A House committee released documents Monday that showed hundreds of instances in which a White House official who was previously an oil industry lobbyist edited government climate reports to play up uncertainty of a human role in global warming or play down evidence of such a role.

In a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the official, Philip A. Cooney, who left government in 2005, defended the changes he had made in government reports over several years. Mr. Cooney said the editing was part of the normal White House review process and reflected findings in a climate report written for President Bush by the National Academy of Sciences in 2001.

They were the first public statements on the issue by Mr. Cooney, the former chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Before joining the White House, he was the “climate team leader” for the American Petroleum Institute, the main industry lobby.

He was hired by Exxon Mobil after resigning in 2005 following reports on the editing in The New York Times. The White House said his resignation was not related to the disclosures.

Mr. Cooney said his past work opposing restrictions on heat-trapping gases for the oil industry had had no bearing on his actions once he joined the White House. “When I came to the White House,” he testified, “my sole loyalties were to the president and his administration.”

Mr. Cooney, who has no scientific background, said he had based his editing and recommendations on what he had seen in good faith as the “most authoritative and current views of the state of scientific knowledge.”

Mr. Cooney was defended by James L. Connaughton, chairman of the environmental council and his former boss.

The hearing was part of an investigation, begun under the committee’s Republican chairman last year, into accusations of political interference in climate science by the Bush administration.It became a heated and largely partisan tug of war over the appropriate role of scientists and political appointees in framing how the government conveys information on global warming.

There's more, hit the link

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Ethanol's Growing List of Enemies

There are lots of reasons that bethanol isn't either a global warming solution, nor a good idea economically, at least in the US or produced from corn.
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As demand for the alternative fuel drives corn prices up, an unlikely assortment of groups are uniting with the hopes of cutting government support

by Moira Herbst

Paul Hitch has spent his entire life raising cattle and hogs on a stretch of the Oklahoma panhandle he says is "flat as a billiard table." His great-grandfather started the ranch in 1884, before Oklahoma was a state, and now Hitch, 63, is preparing to pass the family business on to his two sons.

But he worries that they'll face mounting pressures in the industry, particularly because of the soaring price for corn, which the business depends on to feed the livestock. In the past year, corn prices have doubled as demand from ethanol producers has surged.

"This ethanol binge is insane," says Hitch, who's president-elect of the National Cattlemen's Beef Assn. (NCBA). "This talk about energy independence and wrapping yourself in the flag and singing God Bless America—all that's going to come at a severe cost to another part of the economy."

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Asian rivers top WWF risk list from pollution, climate change

by William French

GENEVA (AFP) - Five rivers in Asia serving over 870 million people are among the most threatened in the world, as dams, water extraction and climate change all take their toll, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said on Tuesday

The Yangtze, Salween-Nu, Indus, Ganges and Mekong-Lancang rivers make up half of the WWF's "top ten" most threatened river basins, which "either already suffer most grievously under the weight of these threats or are bracing for the heaviest impacts," the organisation said.

Also on the list are the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo and La Plata in Latin America, the Danube in central Europe, the Nile-Lake Victoria in Africa and the Murray-Darling in Australia.

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Collapse of Arctic Sea Ice 'Has Reached Tipping-Point'

From the Independent/UK by Steve Connor

A catastrophic collapse of the Arctic sea ice could lead to radical climate changes in the northern hemisphere according to scientists who warn that the rapid melting is at a "tipping point" beyond which it may not recover.

The scientists attribute the loss of some 38,000 square miles of sea ice - an area the size of Alaska - to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as well as to natural variability in Arctic ice.

Ever since satellite measurements of the Arctic sea ice began in 1979, the surface area covered by summer sea ice has retreated from the long-term average. This has increased the rate of coastal erosion from Alaska to Siberia and caused problems for polar bears, which rely on sea ice for hunting seals.

However, in recent years the rate of melting has accelerated and the sea ice is showing signs of not recovering even during the cold, dark months of the Arctic winter. This has led to even less sea ice at the start of the summer melting season.

Mark Serreze, a senior glaciologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said the world was heading towards a situation where the Arctic will soon be almost totally ice-free during summer, which could have a dramatic impact on weather patterns across the northern hemisphere.

"When the ice thins to a vulnerable state, the bottom will drop out and we may quickly move into a new, seasonally ice-free state of the Arctic," Dr Serreze said.

"I think there is some evidence that we may have reached that tipping point, and the impacts will not be confined to the Arctic region," he said.

Some studies have linked the loss of sea ice in the Arctic to changes in atmospheric weather patterns that influence such things as rainfall in southern and western Europe and the amount of snow in the Rocky Mountains of the American Midwest.

The Arctic is one of the fastest warming regions on Earth and scientists fear that temperatures could rise even faster once sea ice melts to expose dark ocean, which absorbs heat more easily without its reflective cap of ice.

"While the Arctic is losing a great deal of ice in the summer months, it now seems that it also is regenerating less ice in the winter. With this increasing vulnerability, a kick to the system just from natural climate fluctuations could send it into a tailspin," Dr Serreze said.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, changing wind patterns flushed much of the thick sea ice out of the Arctic Ocean and into the North Atlantic, where it drifted south and melted away.

A thinner layer of young ice formed in its place, which more readily melts during the warmer, summer months - leading to the appearance of a greater area of open water that absorbs sunlight and heat. The summer sea ice reached an all-time minimum in September 2005, with September 2006 the second lowest.

"This ice-flushing even could be a small-scale analogue of the sort of kick that could invoke rapid collapse, or it could have been the kick itself. At this point, I don't think we really know," Dr Serreze said.

Julienne Stroeve from the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado said that the winter sea ice failed again this year to recover fully.

"The freeze-up this year was again delayed, and ice extents from October through to December set new record lows during the satellite era," she said.

Computer models suggest that summer sea ice could disappear altogether by 2080. Some forecasts even predict an ice-free summer by 2040.

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Winter warmest on record worldwide

From AP By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON - This winter was the warmest on record worldwide, the government said Thursday in the latest worrisome report focusing on changing climate. The report comes just over a month after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said global warming is very likely caused by human actions and is so severe it will continue for centuries.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the combined land and ocean temperatures for December through February were 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit above average for the period since record keeping began in 1880.

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Renewing a Call to Act Against Climate Change

From the New York Times by Felicity Burger

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — Some are born earnest, some achieve earnestness, and some have earnestness thrust upon them. Bill McKibben qualifies for inclusion in at least two of these wedges of humanity.

In 1989, at the age of 28, he achieved earnestness of a dour, frowning sort as one of the first laymen to warn of global warming in his book “The End of Nature.” In the ensuing 18 years, he said recently while cross-country skiing in the woods near his home, he felt caught in a bad dream, forever warning heedless people of a monster in their midst.

Now, when Mr. McKibben is 46, his role as the philosopher-impresario of the program of climate-change rallies called Step It Up, has thrust new earnestness upon him. This time with a smile.

Mr. McKibben’s title — scholar in residence at Middlebury College — seems far too passive to encompass his current frenetic pace. His online call for locally inspired, locally run demonstrations on April 14 has generated plans for a wave of small protests under the Step It Up banner — 870 and counting, in 49 states (not South Dakota) — to walk, jog, march, ski, swim, talk, sing, pray and party around the idea of cutting national emissions of heat-trapping gases 80 percent by 2050.

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China About to Pass US as World's Top Generator of Greenhouse Gases

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0305-02.htm

From the San Francisco Chronicle

by Robert Collier


Far more than previously acknowledged, the battle against global warming will be won or lost in China, even more so than in the West, new data show.

A report released last week by Beijing authorities indicated that as its economy continues to expand at a red-hot pace, China is highly likely to overtake the United States this year or in 2008 as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

This information, along with data from the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based alliance of oil importing nations, also revealed that China's greenhouse gas emissions have recently been growing by a total amount much greater than that of all industrialized nations put together.

"The magnitude of what's happening in China threatens to wipe out what's happening internationally," said David Fridley, leader of the China Energy Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

"Today's global warming problem has been caused mainly by us in the West, with the cumulative (carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases) in the atmosphere, but China is contributing to the global warming problem of tomorrow."

New statistics released in Beijing on Wednesday by China's National Bureau of Statistics show that China's consumption of fossil fuels rose in 2006 by 9.3 percent, about the same rate as in previous years -- and about eight times higher than the U.S. increase of 1.2 percent.

While China's total greenhouse gas emissions were only 42 percent of the U.S. level in 2001, they had soared to an estimated 97 percent of the American level by 2006.

"The new data are not encouraging," said Yang Fuqiang, China director for the Energy Foundation, a San Francisco organization that works extensively with Lawrence Berkeley scientists and the Chinese government on energy-saving programs. "China will overtake the United States much faster than expected as the No. 1 emitter."

China's top environmental official admitted Wednesday that the results show the government's environment agenda of the past few years has been ineffective.

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