The evidence from Bangladesh:

One unexpected consequence of the rising water levels in Bangladesh is that river erosion has reduced the number of operable ferry berths, so men wait longer to cross, which in turn increases the demand for prostitution.

Digerati and creative minds of all stripes and backgrounds are gathered in Maine this week for Pop!Tech, one of the coolest conferences around. (You might call it TED before it got too focused on established celebrities at the expense of bold new ideas.)

This isn't just some talkfest in which smart, important people meet other smart, important people, exchange business cards, and pat each other on the back. Today, Pop!Tech launched a carbon offset initiative with eBay. At a special eBay online store, you can calculate the rough amount of carbon you put into the Earth's atmosphere and then choose between three projects that will not only compensate for your pollution, but also do some good in their own right. Learn more about the initiative here or just head straight to the checkout counter.

I spoke today with Jim Rogers, chairman, president, and CEO of Duke Energy, and Tom Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), which represents shareholder-owned electrical utilities. Along with leaders of seven other utilities, Rogers announced an initiative "seeking regulatory reform and approvals to increase [the utilities'] investment in energy efficiency by $500 million annually to about $1.5 billion annually." His group's commitment will mean the equivalent of taking nearly 6 million cars off the road, Rogers says, and "avoid the need for 50 500-megawatt peaking power plants."

FP: What is motivating Duke Energy, and why aren't more utilities getting on board?

Jim Rogers: Well, I think the seven utilities who are here today are all very progressive with respect to energy efficiency and addressing the climate issue. And in fact, our entire industry—and Tom Kuhn's here, president of the EEI—as you know, early this year our industry changed our policy position on this and really said, "We support regulation of CO2 consistent with a set of principles." So we are going to work, because we realize our industry has about 35 to 40 percent of all the emissions of CO2, and our assignment is to find a solution. And so we turned our attention to finding the right regulatory framework and finding the right technical solutions so that we can solve the problem.

FP: Does that mean lobbying on Capitol Hill for mandatory emissions caps?

JR: We are now—There's a rich debate going on on the Hill today, and we are very involved.

Tom Kuhn: We're very much in favor of establishing a price for carbon. And I think that we are very strongly behind the whole idea that the only way you're really going to accomplish it ... is also to move these technologies together aggressively. And that means all the technologies, starting with energy efficiency, which is the fifth fuel (but maybe we call it the first fuel, too), but then renewables, moving the transmission that it takes to get the renewables to market; moving nuclear energy forward, which is a zero-emission technology ... We now generate 50 percent of our electricity with coal. If we want to maintain coal as an important option for the future, we've got to move forward aggressively with carbon capture and storage. So, it is the full basket of things that we need to do, the full toolset that we need to make our global climate goals, but we fully agree with the need to get a price for carbon.  

JR: President Clinton really said it pretty well today with respect to this whole energy efficiency issue. While we call it the fifth fuel, it's really the number one option right now. And while people and politicians are debating how to move forward with climate regulation and how to develop an international framework, we can go today to work in implementing these energy efficiency regulatory changes and investing in energy efficiency as a way to reduce our carbon footprint right now. And what we need is action right now.

Make no mistake: Self-interest is motivating these guys, who are uneasy about patchwork, state-level regulation and fear the uncertainty that could come from not having a seat at the table. EEI opposes, for instance, a federal renewable portfolio standard that would require a certain percentage of electricity to come from renewable sources. Moreover, it's far from clear what, exactly, the proposed regulatory reforms entail. They certainly deserve scrutiny going forward. Still, the fact that they're seeing the light on energy efficiency is a good thing.

Yesterday, I spoke with Reverend Jim Ball, who is president and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Movement and a senior advisor to the Evagelical Climate Initiative. Rev. Ball was a panelist here at CGI, and he's a major player in the "creation care" movement, an initiative by some evangelical Christians to influence the climate-change debate:

FP: Where does the evangelical community fit into the U.S. political landscape?

Rev. Jim Ball: Depending on how you define "evangelical," we represent about 25 percent of the population. So, a significant amount. And obviously a good number of us vote and so political leaders tend to take what we do a little seriously. We think we can make an important contribution in terms of getting those who may not listen to other voices. They may not listen to environmentalists or they may not listen to former Vice President Al Gore, but maybe they'll listen to us and give this issue a hearing. We've got Republican governors really taking a lead now. We have Governor Crist [of Florida] and Governor Schwarzenegger [of California]; we have Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, who is an evangelical Christian himself, taking bold leadership steps. Governor Pawlenty is now the chair of the National Governor’s Association and he has made energy and climate his issue.

FP: What about President Bush? Have you gotten an audience with him?

JB: Well, no, not literally. He is aware of our work and his senior advisors who deal with the religious community are obviously knowledgeable about what we're doing. But if the president is not ready to take significant action, we're not waiting for him. We're going to continue to move forward. I think the president's getting together of leaders of the 16 large emitters is a positive step. But if all that they agree to do is voluntary measures, we've been doing that for 17 years. We've tried voluntary and it hasn't worked. We need a mandatory approach so that all business decisions that have anything to do with global warming, they understand that there is a bit of a cost there. We believe in the markets. We believe that once you get the price right, that the price really reflects the true cost of what you are doing. The free markets are going to solve this problem, I am totally and utterly confident.

FP: So you think it is doable, that climate change can be stopped?

JB: We say we are going to help solve global warming, with the Lord’s help. It is a huge task to solve global warming and there are going to be serious ramifications throughout this century. But there are so many positive benefits to addressing this issue: reducing pollution that harm’s human health; reducing mercury pollution that impacts the unborn; making our industries more energy efficient; creating the technologies that we can sell to others. There is no way that energy is not going to be a growth industry in this century. Why shouldn't we be the ones selling the technologies to everybody to else? As a Christian, I shouldn't be so biased about who sells it. But United States needs to get in this game, because once we really start to lead, then the world is really going to get seriously engaged and involved in this issue.

FP: The Bali conference in December is shaping up to be a huge deal, and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has made it a top priority. What is your organization looking for from President Bush in Bali?

JB: Ideally, we would love for him to go there and say, "We are ready to make a commitment on a mandatory approach." I don’t think that is very likely. But if we can't have that, if what they are doing now with the 16 other nations can be a positive compliment to what they are doing in Bali, then that would be helpful.

Back in 2004, NASA sounded the alarm. Recent satellite measurements showed that the great conveyor belt of the Atlantic, the Gulf Stream, had weakened by as much as 30 percent over the previous 12 years—presumably due to global warming. The implications of such a decline, according to NASA, would be catastrophic for northern Europe, as warm waters would no longer feed tropical heat to the area and sustain the temperate climate. In short, it suggested London could be heading for an ice age.

But it appears there's no need to break out the mittens and galoshes just yet. A more recent study published in Science concluded that the Gulf Stream was merely undergoing a cyclical adjustment, and that the full effects of climate change on the behaviors of ocean currents are still too complex to predict.

Today's map was crafted by Benjamin Franklin and Timothy Folger sometime around 1786, and it's credited with being one of the earliest charts of the complete Gulf Stream system. Now in the collection of the Library of Congress, the map contains some great notes by Franklin:

The earliest known record of the current was in a log book kept by Ponce De Leon in 1513. The log noted: "A current such that, although they had great wind, they could not proceed forward, but backward and it seems that they were proceeding well; at the end it was known that the current was more powerful than the wind."

You can explore the Gulf Stream yourself via real-time data collected from buoys stationed in the Atlantic by NOAA. It can tell you the precise temperature of various points of the ocean, as well as wind speed and wave height. Ben and Ponce would have a field day with it.

BRUNO VINCENT/Getty Images News

One of the major players pushing the agenda forward on climate change these days is Hilary Benn, Labour MP and environment minister for Gordon Brown's government. In a session for a few of us here in the UK mission's offices, Benn gave this succinct take on Monday's meetings:

Nobody is really arguing about the science. Everybody acknowledges the cost of doing something is a lot less than the cost of doing nothing. Everybody acknowledges that each of us has a part to play. The question is, how do you define that? The commitments that everyone has made to date aren't enough to deal with the scale of the problem, and time is running out. So, in terms of framing where we are, there's actually a lot of agreement.

Benn, and everyone else I talked to, stressed the importance of the December meeting in Bali. "We can't have another gathering where people say, 'Hmmm, yeah, hmmm, I'll think about it.' We've got to get going." Anything less than binding emissions reductions targets would widely be considered a failure, since only binding targets will make a carbon market viable. And it's the holy grail of a working carbon market and the associated prospect that developing countries can sell carbon credits to developed countries that will make a global regime politically workable as well.

I asked Benn what I've been asking a few other people here as well: "How do you get the issue of climate change to the point where a congressman in Ohio needs to worry about losing his seat over it?" Because unless and until the U.S. Congress gets on board, you can forget about meaningful progress on this issue.

Benn stared at me for a second, and then responded:

This is not just an environmental problem. It's an economic, it's a political, it's a migration problem. What are we going to do as a world, I would say, when people start fighting not over politics, but water? What are we going to do when refugees turn up on the shores of your country fleeing not political persecution, but environmental catastrophe? Economically, what are you going to do when the markets that maybe your constituents earn their living making goods to sell into are no longer there because they're too busy swimming for their lives because sea levels have risen? In other words, whichever way you look at it—because, the evidence is clear, in the end it's going to have impacts on all of us in lots of different ways. Now, that makes for a very strong moral and a practical case for doing something about it. And again, it's going to affect all of us wherever we happen to live.

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Months ago, Passport highlighted the extent to which the issue of climate change had gone "mainstream," with both Lehman Brothers and UBS investment banks publishing reports on the topic. Other major financial players, such as HSBC and GE, are betting that going green can bring in the greenbacks. Not to be outdone, Morgan Stanley has created a carbon bank "to assist clients seeking to become carbon neutral."

Here's how it works. Morgan Stanley will work with emissions data certifier Det Norske Veritas (DNV) to offer clients a system through which they can buy and sell carbon credits as well as purchase offsets. The credits and offsets can then be verified and certified—"all in accordance with the highest international standards," according to Simon Greenshields, the global head of power, power fuels, and carbon trading at Morgan Stanley.

I'm skeptical. Even the highest international standards are notoriously low, while offset schemes are famously flawed and so far ineffective in producing real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Morgan Stanley will rely on the monitoring standards of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative, the greenhouse gas accounting framework used by the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme. Yes, the scheme that's "widely acknowledged as a failure because governments set the cap above real emissions levels and issued too many permits." Further, the carbon bank, via DNV, will provide clients with "carbon zero" certificates. That's the same DNV that the British House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee found to have questionable accounting practices in projects in Thailand and Brazil (pdf - see pgs 108-117).

True, David Yarnold, Executive Vice President of Environmental Defense, has hailed the idea and praised Morgan Stanley for "supporting a significant, credible and responsible expansion of the carbon market itself." But it's interesting that in January, Environmental Defense hired 20-year Morgan Stanley veteran Jon Anda as its New Environmental Markets Network president. Is this really the most objective assessment?

It's refreshing that the private sector is taking an active interest in climate change. But there are certainly strong reasons to question some of these initiatives. Especially when there are a whole lot of people getting rich out of carbon trading and offset projects, while many more must—by the very structure of the system—remain poor.

What if instead of airline miles, cash back or hotel stays, your credit card paid you back in carbon offsets?

That's exactly what GE's new "Earth Rewards" card will do. One percent of your purchases go directly toward buying carbon offsets, which supposedly finance eco-friendly projects around the world designed to limit greenhouse gases and stop climate change.

It's a nice idea, but part of the problem with climate change is that we will never be able to buy our way out of it. Encouraging consumption in order to offset just one percent of that consumption is a futile effort at mitigating environmental issues. Using the GE Earth Rewards card is probably better for the environment than redeeming rewards for carbon-emitting airline flights. Still, the whole concept remains a bit ironic.

NASA/Getty Images

Using an array of sensitive, sophisticated techniques, scientists have discovered that our rotund planet Earth is a bit smaller than previously thought: a whole 0.1 inches (2.5 mm) smaller from surface to center on average.

Some of the other updated measurements the scientists made after two years of measuring include:

• Continental drift. North America and Europe are parting ways at 0.7 inches (18 mm) a year.
• Post-glacial rebound. Scandinavia and northern Canada are increasing in height by 0.2 to 0.3 inches (5 to 8 mm) each year. Their elevation is increasing because they've had an enormous weight of ice lifted off them since the end of the last ice age.
• The frisky Pacific. The Pacific seabed is the most active of all, heading northwest at a whopping 2 inches (5 cm) per year.

So what? Well, the more accurate measurements give scientists a better baseline against which to measure and track environmental changes such as melting ice caps and evaporation from the Amazon Basin. If the sea level is rising somewhere, it's important to know whether that change is due to a sinking continent, or due to, say, global warming. Regardless of the important implications of the new measurements, we at least now know for sure that it's a smaller world after all.

VINCENZO PINTO/AFP

The bureaucrats of the European Commission have taken a radical step toward reducing their carbon footprint and halting the progress of global warming: Neckties have been declared "optional."

The logic is that tie-free men will tolerate greater heat, and by setting the air conditioners just one Celsius degree higher, they can cut their 56,000 metric tons of annual carbon dioxide emissions by 10 percent. Apparently, the always snappily dressed Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy got the idea on a trip to Japan.

Considering that the high in Brussels today is a balmy 66 F (19 C), I can't say I have much sympathy for the EC's noble civil servants (it's 100 F in Washington). If they really want to make a difference, they could probably turn off the air conditioners altogether.

Matt Stroshane/Getty Images

The scientific and policy communities in Washington and elsewhere are acting as though NASA Administrator Mike Griffin's now notorious interview with NPR yesterday morning was the first time his logic has seemed a bit goofy. Come on, people. The symptoms have been around for years. Here's Griffin in 2005, just a few months after taking office, rationalizing spending hundreds of billions of taxpayers' dollars to fund the building of space camps on the Moon and Mars:

Now, you know, in the sense that a chicken is just an egg's way of laying another egg, one of our purposes is to survive and thrive and spread humankind. I think that's worth doing. There will be another mass-extinction event. If we humans want to survive for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, we must ultimately populate other planets....

I'm talking about that one day, I don't know when that day is, but there will be more human beings who live off the Earth than on it. We may well have people living on the moon. We may have people living on the moons of Jupiter and other planets. We may have people making habitats on asteroids....

And here's the best part:

To me it's important because I like the United States, and because I know -- I don't know the date -- but I know that humans will colonize the solar system and one day go beyond. And it is important for me that humans who carry -- I'll characterize it as Western values -- are there with them. You know, I think we know the kind of society we would get if you, for example, carry Soviet values. That means you want a gulag on Mars. Is that what you're looking for?

It's worth remembering that Griffin was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate in April of 2005. So not one U.S. senator voted against his nomination. Why are his views on global warming just coming to light now?

This map from France's Centre International de Recherche sur l'Environnement et le Développement and Ecole Nationale de la Météorologie projects what the weather might be like in a few European cities come 2071. Note that Londoners will be treated to a climate generally experienced in western Portugal. Barcelona will be not unlike Rabat.

(Hat tip: The Guardian)

If "Green" is the next Red White and Blue, then Texas and California have an early lead in the race to redecorate. The American Wind Energy Association just released its 2006 status report, which includes a ranking of U.S. states by how much wind energy they generate. Last year, 2,400 new megawatts (MW) of wind energy came online in the United States. The 34 wind energy-producing states churn out a total of 11,603 MW. (For reference, the Three Mile Island Nuclear power plant is rated at 816 MW.)

The top five states for wind energy are:

1. Texas (subject of FP article The Green Rose of Texas)
2. California
3. Iowa
4. Minnesota
5. Washington

These states are moving aggressively on wind, but I'm disappointed to see that North Dakota, which ranks as highest in wind-energy potential, still lags at number 14 (although that may be due to change soon). See the full list, as well as the 16 states with no wind power after the jump.

Here's a bizarre science experiment: Researchers at the U.K.'s Birmingham University are fitting 50 wild penguins with heart monitors to measure the effects of climate change on their habits:

The 'guinea pig' penguins live on the Crozet Islands, in the southern Indian Ocean, about 1,500 miles north of the Antarctic.

The monitors record each penguin's heart rate, location, the surrounding pressure and hence water depth, and the temperature at the back of its throat, telling the scientists when it has swallowed a cold fish.

The birds, famously awkward and ungainly on land, are released back into the wild to go on their usual diving expeditions and caught again a few months later when they return to land to breed.

The scientists expect to find that the flightless birds are swimming and waddling further afield to find food. They'll compare these results to data from the control group, ten penguins that were run through their paces on treadmills while their vital stats were recorded.

So, what does a penguin on a treadmill look like? Click on the video below to find out: