FP Originals

ELIZABETH GLASSANOS/FP Original

The coal market isn't as sexy or as global as oil, so it often works outside the media spotlight. But when it comes to understanding how the U.S. energy-security-enviro challenge is shaping up, coal is an excellent place to look because, in America, coal is cheap, plentiful within the country, a huge provider of jobs and megawatts, and a tremendous source of greenhouse gases. 

The global outlook for demand is strong, as Asia's appetite for electricity grows. This year, China became a net importer of coal. As for the United States, part of its energy challenge is improving security of supply — reducing dependence on the understandably dreaded "foreign oil." Making liquid fuels using our own American coal sounds appealing. And perhaps no consumer is more interested in coal-to-liquid (CTL a.k.a. "Fischer-Tropsch") than the U.S. military, which has huge transportation fuel needs and few alternatives to oil (it's kind of hard to build a jet that runs on electricity).

For the coal industry, getting access to the American gas tank would be a tremendous boost, giving it a whole new market outside of power generation and heavy industries like steel. The WSJ filed a must-read report last week, "Coal Industry Hopes Pentagon Will Kindle a Market," that really gets at the key issues. CTL is a huge emitter of carbon dioxide, and the process uses between 5 to 7 gallons of water for every gallon of fuel it produces. But those inconvenient facts aren't dissuading some folks:

The effort nevertheless has some backers at the Pentagon. The Air Force, which consumes the most fuel of the military services, supports using coal-to-liquids fuel. It recently certified the B-52 bomber to run on a blend of Fischer-Tropsch fuel and normal fuel. The Air Force plans to do the same for its entire fleet by 2011. The Air Force intends to buy about 400 million gallons annually by 2016. The service supports legislation that would allow it to sign 25 year contracts for supply, even at historically high prices above $50 per barrel, said William Anderson, assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations, environment and logistics.

"If the legislation helps spur on a market that is necessary, we believe, to ensure our long term national security, we believe it's something that has a lot of merit," Mr. Anderson said.

According to Jeff Goodell, the author of Big Coal, the rise of Wyoming coal is one of the key industry dynamics fueling the CTL push. At 18:05 minutes into this excellent June interview with NPR's Terry Gross, Goodell explains how Wyoming coal, in comparison to Appalachian coal, is easier to mine, makes less of an environmental impact, contains less sulfur, burns cleaner, and requires utilities to spend less on scrubbers at coal fired power plants (but it has a lower heat content, so you have to burn more of it). You can practically "dig [it] out with a spoon" in Wyoming, Goodell says.

In contrast, Appalachian coal has been mined for over a century, and because much of the easy-to-mine coal has been extracted, the coal remaining is in thinner seams and is more expensive to extract. So part of the push for CTL, Goodell says, comes from eastern coal states, for which CTL could be a huge boost. Sen. Byrd of West Virginia has likened American coal to "acres of diamonds under our feet." A large federal backing of CTL hasn't come yet, but keep your eye on it. China, like the U.S. Air Force, is in the process of building CTL capacity. And we know how much U.S. legislators like to keep up with China.

ELIZABETH GLASSANOS/FP Original

Cambodia is finally taking a baby step to address its ugly history. A new book by Khamboly Dy, an expert on Cambodia's genocide, came out on Wednesday. Dy's A History of Democratic Kampuchea is significant because it's the first history book written by a Cambodian on the period from 1975 to 1979, when the Khmer Rouge terrorized the population and caused the deaths of some 1.7 million people. However, it was only approved for use a "reference text" in schools, so Cambodia's government—which is led by people with Khmer Rouge pasts—isn't exactly embracing truth and reconciliation with open arms. But it's a start.

You can download a PDF of the book here from the Documentation Center of Cambodia's website. Eighty-four pages are in English, with the other 125 pages in Khmer.

It begins eloquently:

Many Cambodians have tried to put their memories of the regime behind them and move on. But we cannot progress—much less reconcile with ourselves and others—until we have confronted the past and understand both what happened and why it happened. Only with this understanding can we truly begin to heal.

ELIZABETH GLASSANOS/FP Original

Food waste is becoming so pervasive in Hong Kong that restaurateurs are charging diners for leaving leftovers on their plates:

Customers often order far more dishes to boil in a "hot pot" of broth than they are able to consume, and everything they leave has to be thrown away. That is not just wasteful; it is unprofitable for restaurateurs. One restaurant charges HK$5 (US64 cents) per ounce of leftovers.

"All you can eat" sushi joints also have a problem with diners who pile their plates high and then simply eat the raw fish off the top, leaving the rice. One sushi restaurateur, according to local media, charges HK$10 (US$1.28) per leftover sushi.

Perhaps due to a combination of this all-you-can eat dining culture and unprecedented prosperity, uneaten food is not just a problem for restaurants; it also makes up a disproportionate amount of Hong Kong's garbage. One third of the city's 9,300 tons of daily waste is food, compared to 12 percent in the United States. Although food biodegrades in landfills, it smells foul and emits methane (a greenhouse gas) in the process of breaking down.

And thus Hong Kong's government welcomes restaurants' efforts to penalize food waste as complementary to its own. So far, the city has built a food-to-fertilizer conversion factory and encouraged restaurants to install sludge-producing "digesters" that can "eat" over 2,000 pounds of food a day. But money talks, and it's likely that the new, privately-initiated fines will be the most effective encouragement of all.

Editor's note: This post co-authored by Henry Bowles.

ELIZABETH GLASSANOS/FP Original

Did Hollywood's campaign to link Darfur and the Beijing Olympics work? The New York Times treats China's envoy to Sudan with kid gloves:

A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.

So what gives? Credit goes to Hollywood — Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg in particular. Just when it seemed safe to buy a plane ticket to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, nongovernmental organizations and other groups appear to have scored a surprising success in an effort to link the Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the killings in Darfur, which, until recently, Beijing had not seemed too concerned about.

But are the Chinese sincere about using their influence to stop the slaughter in Darfur? It looks like their main concern is averting a PR disaster:

During closed-door diplomatic meetings, Chinese officials have said they do not want any of their Darfur overtures linked to the Olympics, American and European officials said.

In an e-mail message on Thursday, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington warned anew against such a linkage. "If someone wants to pin Olympic Games and Darfur issue together to raise his/her fame, he/she is playing a futile trick," the spokesman, Chu Maoming, wrote.

That doesn't sound like a changed regime to me. 

ELIZABETH GLASSANOS/FP Original

The International Herald Tribune sent its reporters to seven different cities to find out where the garbage goes. My favorite recycling story? Reporter Andréa R. Vaucher found that Los Angeles' trash sometimes ends up as carpets in Alabama and T-shirts in China.

And Meg Bortin raises a good question: "[W]hat will happen when Asian manufacturing powerhouses like India and China begin to produce even a fraction of the trash produced in the West[?]"