The magnificant Great Blue Heron Could measured use of DDT still have saved the Heron, but also millions of human lives?

California’s magnificant Central Coast, home to the elusive North American Condor. Saving this precious species is one of environmentalism’s finest achievements.

We should all be scared, VERY scared. It seems as if every day a new “study” is reported somewhere in the national media showing a statistical association between diet, lifestyle, or environmental chemicals and some disease or disorder.

Do you eat the “wrong” foods such as red meat, hot dogs, french fries, coffee, alcohol, grilled meats, too much fat, artificial sweeteners, preservatives, or NOT eat enough vegetables?

Are you overweight, and don’t exercise enough? Do you use deodorants, mouthwash, nail polish, electric razors or blankets, cell phones? Do you live near power lines, use birth control pills or take hormone treatments, have some radon in your basement, breathe polluted air or second hand smoke?

Do you worry and fret about all these things after reading the terrifying results of some new study? Then for sure you will surely die from some form of cancer or heart disease sometime next week, probably from the stress and loss of sleep of worrying so much!

All these studies are called epidemiological studies, which seek to find statistical correlations, mostly quite subtle, between diet, lifestyle, or environmental factors and disease. Real sciences, like chemistry and physics, seek to find cause and effect. Epidemiological studies supply only statistical links between this or that risk factor and some disease. Such studies almost never prove cause and effect, and they are subject to researcher bias and political agendas, poor design, confounding variables, bad data gathering and more. Unfortunately, most reporters who write articles on these studies are scientifically ignorant and simply parrot whatever the study authors say.

Author Mark Twain popularized the saying, “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”. An even better quote is from the renowned epidemiologist Alvan Feinstein of Yale University who quoted that, “statistics are like a bikini bathing suit: what is revealed is interesting, but what is concealed is crucial.” Let’s look at the history of this field of study.

Epidemiology: “The study of the distribution of diseases in populations and of factors that influence the occurrence of disease.” Classical epidemiology was fathered by an Italian physician named Ramazzini. Around 1700, he started looking into the possibility that various diseases in patients might be connected to their occupations. For example, miners and chemical workers might have some lung disease because they are exposed to dust, various chemicals, or toxic metals over the course of their careers. Years later a London surgeon, Percivall Pott, noted that virtually everyone he treated for cancer of the scrotum was a chimney sweep. Hummm, he must have thought to himself. It’s a non-communicable disease, so I wonder if all that soot and coal tar they breathe and get all over them every day might be the cause. This was a monumental proof of concept!

Classical epidemiology is like police work. If there is an outbreak of some kind of stomach ailment in a number of people in a city who all seek medical treatment (they were up all night throwing up and sitting on the pot, maybe some even died), public health investigators would seek to determine what history all these sick people might have in common. If it turns out 95% of them ate at Joe’s diner within the last few days, odds are Joe was serving E. coli burgers or maybe Salmonella oysters. A simple test would confirm it.

A recent example is the incidence of a disease identified in 1976, later named “legionnaire’s” disease, which is a form of pneumonia unknown before then. Hundreds of men were affected, and 32 died. It was found that all of them had attended an American Legion convention in Philadelphia. Voila, they identified a bacterium living in the ventilation system of the hotel where the convention took place. That is classical epidemiology. Now let’s discuss a branch of epidemiology that uses “clinical trials” to try to find the facts about disease, cause, and prevention.

Probably the first “study” we now might loosely call a clinical trial occurred in 1753. Scurvy was a common illness among sailors at the time. James Lind, a surgeon in the British Royal Navy, wondered if perhaps it had something to do with the fact that sailors on long voyages ate almost no fresh fruits and vegetables. We now know that scurvy is caused by a deficiency of vitamin C, but at the time the necessity of vitamins to our health was unknown. He tested his hypothesis by dividing a number of scurvy sailors into two groups, one of which was given fresh fruits (we now know to contain vitamin C) to eat, while the other group continued eating hardtack and rum. ALL the sailors sucking limes got over their illness, while ALL the sailors in the group that we now would call the no veggie “control” group still had scurvy. Eureka! From then on British sailors sucked on limes and stayed healthy, while those poor French and Spanish sailors stayed sick and lost lots of sea battles to the British.

Another classic example of an early clinical trial was conducted by Walter Reed, a U.S. army medical officer stationed in Cuba in the 1890s. Yellow fever was rampant at the time, and he wondered why it was only prevalent in tropical climates. His trial could never be done today for ethical reasons. He suspected mosquitoes might somehow be spreading the disease through their bites. He recruited a small number of healthy volunteers, half of whom deliberately were bitten by mosquitoes, while the other half were not bitten. Most of the poor guys with the bites came down with yellow fever, and one of them died! None of the bite free guys got the fever. That was definitive, whereas today various studies and trials are rarely so (with one famous exception that I discussed in my Ecoworld article entitled “Chemophobia“).

The following is a perfect example of how an epidemiological study should be conducted in order to give definitive results, NO question about the results, even if it wasn’t planned that way and would be considered unethical and way too expensive to conduct if it were. AND, this was a really BIG study.

Back in the 1960s, this study enrolled tens of millions of volunteers (the test group) who volunteered to inhale huge amounts of suspected carcinogens every day of their lives for at least 20 years, AT THEIR OWN EXPENSE! The same number of people who did not inhale the suspected carcinogens (the control group) was compared with the test group after 20-30 years to determine the rates of various cancers in the two groups. Absolutely unequivocal results showed that people in the test group had an increased incidence of various cancers and heart disease over the control group, and the most striking result was that people in the test group were about 15 times more likely to get lung cancer than people in the control group!

Thus we now know for sure that smoking can cause lung cancer and various other health problems. Now THAT was a really good epidemiological study! It is, however, not even conceivable to design and carry out such a clinical trial for ethical reasons: and in addition, the time and expense would be prohibitive. So let’s look at how those “study” authors do things today. The reader may have already figured out that I perceive most of the “studies” to be mostly what is often called “junk science.” I do not, however, believe real science is involved at all in most statistical studies, so I call them “bad (pretend) science” or BS for short. I won’t go into the statistical details and methods, but I will show many wonderful examples of famous BS. You can get the underlying methods by reading Steven Milloy’s “Science Without Sense” and “Junk Science Judo.”

Here are the “seven deadly sins” of epidemiology (epiBS from now on) as practiced today:

1) Have a political, health, or moral agenda and design (rig) your study in order to get the results you want. This applies to all sides of the political spectrum and official government agencies. Real scientific method is: put forth a hypothesis, then gather data to determine whether your hypothesis is correct or not. EpiBS method is: Have a mandated or acceptable conclusion in mind, then go select only the data that appear to support your already reached conclusion (see famous example below).

2) Assume that a statistical correlation that you found in your latest study between some disease or disorder and some exposure to some perceived risk factor is proof of a cause and effect relationship. EVEN if there is no apparent biological reason to think so, you can still think of some improbable rationalization for your results!

3) Data dredging: Don’t bother with any hypothesis prior to gathering your data, just ask a large group of people lots of questions about lifestyle, diet, drinking habits, ect., over a period of time. Feed the data into your computer statistics program and see if something correlates to something, who knows what you might find?

4) Don’t bother to verify any data you gather through questionnaires. Just assume nobody ever mis-remembers or lies about their lifestyle, diet, shoe size, or anything else you might have thought to ask about. Ask a subject how much alcohol they drink per day, and they understate the amount by 3 or 4 times at least. It’s like a wife asking her husband how much money he lost playing the slots at the casino.

5) Design studies that are fatally flawed from the beginning, but because you don’t know anything about the biochemistry involved (after all, you are either a medical guy or a statistician), you have no clue why you got the associations you did, but you believe it and publish it anyway.

6) If your study doesn’t find any association between, say, radon exposure and lung cancer, perform a meta-analysis combining the weak, statistically insignificant results of numerous studies by other researchers with your own, and you don’t even have to do a study of your own at all. It doesn’t matter how good or bad or even how similar in their design all those studies were (the old apples and oranges comparisons), combining them just might give a statistically significant correlation.

7) ALWAYS call the news media immediately after finding an association between, say, exposure to some hot issue chemical and some disease state. The reporters know absolutely nothing about how these studies are done and will uncritically report whatever you say. Your study will make big headlines tomorrow, and you will be quoted as saying, “the results are important, but more research is needed”. That translates into, “I need more grant money to continue to do BS.”

The most egregious example I will give of epiBS combines the deadly sins #1 and #6, and its results have had enormous implications on nanny state public policy. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) original mission was to establish rules and regulations meant to protect the environment, such as from air and water pollution. However, over the years mission creep occurred, and they now exist to protect public health. This gives them vastly more power to institute regulations that the agency was never originally intended to do.

In 1993, the EPA conducted a now infamous study that kicked off the anti-smoking crusade that continues today. At the time, more than 30 epidemiological studies from around the world had been conducted to see if the spouses of smokers were more likely to get lung cancer than spouses of non-smokers. None of them were definitive, perhaps showing a very weak correlation. Some of those studies actually suggested (also weakly) that exposure to second hand smoke, or environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) might actually protect the spouse against getting lung cancer. This is a plausible biological process called “hormesis”, i.e., very low levels of exposure to a toxin can protect a person against high levels of exposure later.

The EPA has even admitted that the average annual exposure to ETS particles for a non-smoker is less than actively smoking one cigarette. Anyway, the EPA ignored those studies and selected only 11 studies to combine in a meta-analysis that they hoped would establish a statistically significant correlation between ETS and lung cancer in spouses of smokers. They also chose not to include in their meta-analysis any of some 30 available studies that were designed to determine if ETS in the workplace, as opposed to spouses of smokers, could be responsible for an increased risk of lung cancer in non-smokers so exposed. A large majority of those workplace studies found no statistically significant association between workplace ETS exposure and lung cancer risk. Is that why they did not include any of those studies in their meta-analysis?

The meta-analysis used by the EPA to analyse the effects of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS, or 2nd hand smoke) committed two of the cardinal sins of epidemiology. First, they selected only those studies that might show that ETS causes lung cancer. Thus they designed it to be a one-tailed test. That means you assume a priori that the test substance can only be bad, so you don’t include any data that might show the opposite of what you expect (or want) to see. Including all studies in their meta-analysis, even those that may indicate that ETS could possibly be beneficial, would make it a statistically acceptable two-tailed test.

The second cardinal sin of epidemiology they performed is that they used a confidence interval (CI) of 90%, instead of the gold standard 95%, in order to get a statistically significant result. What does that mean, a statistics-ignorant person might ask? At a 95% CI, your statistically significant results have a 1 in 20 probability of being due to pure chance (1/20 means p=.05 in stat language). All good epidemiological studies use the 0.05 CI. The EPA chose to use a CI of 0.1 (one in 10 chance of your results being false instead of a 1 in 20 chance) because they knew beforehand that their results would not be significant otherwise. In other words, they rigged the “study” to get the result they wanted, epiBS in its most flagrant form. They knew that smoking is bad for the health of smokers, but they couldn’t regulate smoking unless they could claim ETS could cause disease in innocent bystanders. This is perverting science because they believe, that for a worthy cause, the end justifies the means.

What, you still think ETS causes lung cancer in non-smokers? The EPA epiBS meta-analysis study was done in 1993. A study sponsored by the World Health Organization in 1998, which covered seven countries over seven years, showed no increase in cancer risk for spouses and co-workers of smokers. It was, however, another meta-analysis. I don’t like meta-analyses in general, even when there may be no political agenda involved as in the EPA study. So has there been one huge study done right, no meta-analysis BS? YES!

In 2003, a study published in the British Journal of Medicine found no relationship between exposure to passive smoke and mortality. It was a HUGE, very believable study. It spanned 39 years and included over 35,000 Californians. So why is such a really good study ignored in the media and the epiBS community? POLITICAL CORRECTNESS?

Disclaimer: I DON’T SMOKE, AND I AM VERY ANNOYED BY ETS, so don’t accuse me of loving tobacco companies. I agree with laws banning smoking in public buildings, transportation, and enclosed areas where one must go to do business.

About the Author: Dr. Wheeler earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1970. As a research scientist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Berkeley, he did pioneering research on how one’s nutritional status and cancer are interrelated, and how our immune systems handle food bourn carcinogens. He published 25 research papers in peer reviewed scientific journals and gave numerous talks (and listened to many, many more) at various scientific meetings. He left the USDA to work for Nabisco in New Jersey as head of the food science research unit. Now retired, he writes brilliant articles for “ecoworld” pro bono. He is the resident contrarian for ecoworld.com.

What future will this young Indian inherit?

“Why only a boy? Are these not girls?” India Directorate of Family Welfare

“A child is another mouth to feed, but he will have two hands to work and bring in money for the family, especially as the parents grow older,”

…said Mrs. Asha Rane, explaining why it is often the poorest families who have the most children.

The world population in 1930 was about 2 billion; in the year 2000, around 6 billion; and in 2050, according to estimates from the U.N. Commission on Population and Development, it will hit 9 billion. 98 percent of this growth will be in the developing world, where resources are being consumed faster than they can be renewed - and India will be at the forefront of the crisis.

Rane, who was a professor at the Tata Institute for Social Sciences, now sees the effects of this phenomenon first-hand at the Hamara Club, a project which helps children living on the street in Mumbai. Understanding how and why poverty leads to increasing population is essential to curbing, or at least slowing, the tide.

Currently at 1.1 billion people, India is not far behind China’s 1.3 billion; and, because of China’s well-known government policy of one child per family, its population has stabilized and is expected to level off soon. According to the U.N., India’s population in 2050 will have overtaken China at around 1.6 billion, to claim the ominous title of the most populous nation on earth.

What are the causes? Aside from the aforementioned reasoning of more children helping the family survive, one major factor has been the increased life expectancy in India. In 1947, when India gained independence from British rule, the average life expectancy was only 33 years. Now, thanks to improved standards of living and healthcare, that number is in the mid-60’s.

As life expectancy increased, the birth rate has been falling– but not fast enough to make up the difference. India was the first country in the world to launch a national family planning program, which has had success. The total fertility rate has declined by more than 40 percent since the 1960’s, and today the average number of children per woman is around three.

“Big family: Problems all the way” (left), “Small family: Happiness all the way” (right). India Ministry of Health and Family Welfare

The current approach focuses on improving women’s educational, social and economic opportunities - statistics show that as their status in these realms improves, their family size declines naturally.

This positive message is in part an effort to make up for a backlash against the harsher messages of the family planning program in the 70’s. At that time, the government declared a population “state of emergency,” which implemented forced sterilizations in the country’s poorest regions and even rewarded medical workers who performed the most operations. This led to a conception, especially among women, that birth control was synonymous with sterilization - an all-or-nothing decision that they then chose to forgo entirely.

Current aspects of the family planning program include financial incentives for families, and their children’s educations, when they do get sterilized. Birth control pills are incredibly cheap and easy to obtain, especially in comparison to supposedly “developed” nations’ policies– in India the cheapest brands cost about 8 rupees (appx. $ 0.20) per month at any pharmacy, with no prescription necessary and no questions asked.

Another key issue targeted by Indian public awareness campaigns is favoritism for male children, a value deeply ingrained and interwoven with the cultural structure. Traditionally, when girls get married, they first of all must offer a dowry, and secondly they go to live with and care for their new husband and his parents.

It is not unusual for a poor family to spend their entire life savings on their daughter’s dowry and extravagant wedding (which is also their burden). Then, unless the girl’s parents have a son as well, they are left with no one to take care of them in their old age. Thus the desire for boys drives couples to either keep having children if their first or second children are girls, abort female babies or even commit infanticide.

This preference for males has resulted in women being outnumbered by men in India by 32 million, according to the U.N. While the implications of this discrepancy are still largely unknown, it is not likely to benefit women or make them “more valuable,” as the law of supply and demand might imply.

Geeta Rao Gupta, president of the Washington, D.C.-based International Center for Research on Women, says that evidence suggests the opposite– that if the sex ratio imbalance worsens, so will conditions for women. She said that it forces women to marry at a younger age, if less women are available. She also predicts that there will be a greater entrenchment of the dominance of men, because there will be fewer women to speak up, and show that they are valuable. And raising the status of women is essential to lowering the fertility rate.

In ancient India, women enjoyed power and freedom in the family, marketplace, government and even scripture - for every god in Hinduism there is a goddess. But a thousand years of invasions and occupations by outside forces led to women being secluded in the home, and excluded from community and even family decisions. Superstitions and cultural mores continued to reinforce practices that had lost their usefulness. But outdated thinking has changed widely in urban areas.

“For a healthy family, wait three years before your second child.” Family Planning Services Agency

“Birthrates are declining primarily because of improved access to modern contraception,” said Rao Gupta. “Also because of improvements in women’s status globally, and by that I mean improvements in educational status, access to economic opportunities, and a new perception of women’s role in society. Many Indian women have employment and hold the highest positions in industry and government. Indeed, we’ve had an Indian prime minister who was a woman.”

“Yet the reality is that the majority of young Indian women are very disempowered. They have a much lower status with regard to education and literacy, with regard to income and economic opportunities, with regard to access to health care and health-care services. Women, especially young women, have very little control over reproductive decision-making for themselves.”

Often, especially in poorer, more traditional families in India, the husband’s family has as much or more to say about how many children a couple should have and how fast they should have them than the husband and wife themselves. Since the burden of raising and caring for children is borne primarily by women, Rao Gupta says, given free choice, they almost always will choose smaller families than society will for them.

The status of women, however, has improved and continues to change as India changes– the economic boom, technological advances, and the increased mobilization of society has altered in many cases the entire family structure. Joined families, a household consisting of parents, their sons and their sons’ wives and children, are becoming less common, and nuclear families are on the rise.

More and more, two incomes are necessary or desired, so women are working outside the home. And, in a nuclear family, although there are certainly disadvantages to this development, the in-laws’ influence, or pressure to have more children, is less than in a joined family. And without grandparents and aunts and uncles in the home to help care for the children, especially if both parents are working, it is simply not feasible to have a large number of children.

India has a quota for women in government– it is currently 33 percent for local government bodies, and bills have been repeatedly introduced to make that number 50 percent locally and nationally as well, although they have not been passed.

It is now illegal to demand a dowry for marriage (although giving gifts is legal). It is illegal for a doctor or medical worker to reveal the sex of a baby from a sonography report, although it is still done.

Women’s employment is increasing more quickly than any other group in India, which is key to raising their status. Goverment investment in girls’ education (secondary as well as primary) has also been shown to cause a chain reaction of positive results. An educated woman is statistically more likely to earn an income, have less children and provide those children with better nutrition and health care. This outcome benefits the family, community, and eventually the world.

The numbers, however, are not slowing down fast enough. To support a population of 1.6 billion in 2050, India would have to dramatically increaase agricultural production– but there is no way to increase the amount of available fresh water, which is already in short demand.

Montek Singh Ahluwali, deputy chairman of India’s influential Planning Commission, argues that India can eventually provide such a population.

India Ministry of Health and Family Welfare

“Resources at the moment are very sub-optimally used. I think it’s possible to manage that kind of population provided there is a systemic change in how we deal with resources which are becoming scarce. The scope for increased efficiency is very large. That’s the nature of the development challenge that India faces.”

Ahluwali may be looking at the glass as half full, but the empty half depends on the increased efficiency of primarily government agencies– which sounds to many like a contradiction in terms.

It also always seems to be under debate in India to barr individuals with more than 3 or 4 children from entering politics as a public example. This idea, however, has not been put into law, and probably won’t be. The poster child, or rather anti-poster child, for this cause is Lalu Prasad Yadav, a member of Parliament and the Minister of Railways. He has nine children, which he claims is a personal protest against the forced sterilizations of the 1970’s. For those familiar with the economic and population trends in India, it comes as no surprise that Mr. Yadav hails from, and was formerly Chief Minister of, the state of Bihar.

In Bihar, which literally means, “the land where Buddha walked,” the average number of children per woman is more than four, and the life expectancy less than 60 years. Contraceptive usage is less than half of the national average, and only 35 percent of women have heard of HIV/AIDS, compared with 57 percent nationally. According to the the National Family Survey of 2006, only 17 percent of the women in Bihar had access to three rounds of antenatal care before their last child was born. What will happen to these little buddhas? For the poorest 20 percent of Indian children, the chances of survival is worse than in Bangladesh or Vietnam.

Yet, in Southern states like Maharastra, income and literacy rates are high and fertility is low– about 2 children per woman, balancing out the poorer, more rural states to the North like Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar and pulling the national average fertility rate down to 3. One of the most essential issues to be addressed is the discrepancy between these different states and regions of India.

According to the United Nations Population Fund’s 2007 report on the state of the world population, 2008 will be the year that the global urban population outnumbers the rural half of the world for the first time, at 3.3 billion. And, by 2030, this number is expected to reach almost 5 billion. The urban population of Africa and Asia will double in less than a generation. This unprecedented shift to the cities, large and small, could enhance development, create opportunities and accelerate sustainability– or it could deepen poverty exponentially, and accelerate environmental degradation.

The outcome will depend largely on the management of the migration by governments, city planners and social agencies– most of the newcomers will be poor, and demographically young. They often have little choice but to live in city slums, which have higher fertility rates, higher rates of disease due to poor sanitation and water, and higher casualty rates in natural disasters.

“Tying the tubes of women is now simple. Laparoscopy is the newest method. The hospital releases you quickly. The scar is very light. This service is available at hospitals and health centers.” India Ministry of Health and Family Welfare

It is not necessarily, however, a gloomy prognosis: historically, the urbanization of countries generally leads to development and a higher standard of living, as we see in the Southern states of India.

Identifying populations at risk, planning infrastructure and housing policies, orienting furure urban expansion, and generating early-warning indicators about rapidly growing population growth in particular areas are all tools that can help policy-makers manage the changes ahead.

One aspect of urban planning that must not be forgotten in the rush is open space and vegetation. While cities may benefit humans economically, it is important to remember that living in such close quarters with one another, and away from greenery and natural landscapes, is not natural for us.

The hardness, grey color and anonynmity of cities often leads to a loss of a feeling of commumity and friendliness; this contributes to lonliness, depression and to the higher crime and homicide rates in urban areas. The shift to the city is often a move away from extended family members to begin with; migrants find themselves suddenly in a harsh and unfriendly environment.

Public spaces like walkways and parks are often the only leisure the poor can afford to enjoy, and they are crucial to a sense of well-being in cities. Everyone is welcome in open public spaces; they are key to keeping the peace and benefitting the whole.

While the increasing population is a reality that must be planned for and managed, there is a recent theory among economists and the media that India’s booming population is not a problem at all, but a “demographic dividend” that will pay off for everyone.

Many developed nations’ birth rates have stabilized, and some are even negative, like Japan and Italy. They are increasingly facing a greying of their workforces, and will have shortages of workers in the future. Even China’s stabilazation will ultimately result in a workforce crunch within 25-30 years, as the current workers grow older. Only India is projected to still be a “young” country at that time, with the majority of its population in the working age. So, the logic goes, India will be in a position to both attract jobs and export workers to the “old” countries.

While the theory certainly has some truth to it, the demographic dividend that is earned will not amount to much when the human and environmental cost of such a large population is taken into consideration. The population issue has been pushed so hard by the Indian government for so long that it feels refreshing, especially to the media, to hear that there might be a flip side to it. Imagine being nagged for years that smoking is bad for your health. If you find an article that says it might increase hand-eye coordination, you might make a copy for everyone you know. But that won’t stop you from getting cancer.

While other countries may export jobs, they are not likely to export water, land, clean air or forests. If there are some positive side effects to India’s booming population, that’s great. But that doesn’t make the disease any less deadly. We have to keep nagging, keep trying to shake each other awake. Because in the end, while some suits may reap a dividend, it is the children who will pay the price.

Additional EcoWorld Features on India:

- India’s Water Consciousness

- India’s Solar Power

- Nuclear Power in India

- Technology & Sunlight, India’s Green Future

- India’s Biodiesel Scene

- India’s Water Future

- India’s Energy Future

- Clean the Ganges

Food & Fuel - Corn becomes more prized than ever.

CORN GROWING AREAS IN CHINA

Source: USDA Joint Agricultural Weather Facility

China is the world’s second largest corn producer, but a growing appetite for grain combined with ambitious fuel ethanol targets may make the country a net corn importer, possibly as early as this year.

China may become net corn importer despite move away from grain ethanol. At present, grain accounts for about 80 percent of biofuel feedstock, and consumers are finding themselves at increased competition with the country’s burgeoning energy needs for limited domestic resources.

Although China can essentially meet its own grain demand for the moment, it is a tight balance that could easily be thrown off. With 20 percent of the world’s population but only 7 percent of global farmland, the country’s grain supply is under long-term pressure from a growing population, and rising incomes, while urbanization gradually nibbles away at cultivatable land.

By 2010, China plans to consume 6.7 million tons of blended ethanol fuel gasoline and 11 million tons of bio-diesel-blended diesel annually, which would meet 10 percent of forecast demand for transport fuel. Government targets caused demand for corn from the ethanol industry to explode, which has raised concerns about how the policy will impact the country’s grain supply safety and price inflation.

Although the government has suspended the approval of new corn-based fuel ethanol projects and encouraged the use of non-grain feedstock for ethanol plants, industry insiders remain doubtful.

“China has just started on its mass plantation plans for cassava and sweet potato for industrial use, and it takes time for such crops to grow and mature,” said an official with a foreign equipment manufacturer whose products include those used in bio-fuel production. I believe that within three years time, grains such as corn and wheat will still be the leading feedstock for ethanol fuel.”

Henan Tianguan Enterprise Group Co. Ltd., one of the country’s four major ethanol producers, currently uses a mix of 60 percent wheat, 20 percent corn, 10 percent cassava and 10 percent sweet potato to produce the fuel.

China has just started large-scale production of crops such as cassava, sweet potato and sweet sorghum. However, the country lacks mature technology to produce cellulosic ethanol, which is seen as the future of large-scale ethanol fuel industry.

China’s concerns about rising food prices and grain supply concerns are not unique. A report published last year by the Sri Lanka-based World Water Management Institute said biofuel production will increase demand for land at the expense of the environment, and will also require large quantities of water, already a major constraint to agriculture in many parts of the world, including China. Other reports have said that ethanol production may severely impact upon the food industry, since, at excessive levels, it can use the food industry to feed energy needs.

The International Monetary Fund has said higher bio-fuel demand will push up food prices, especially for the world’s poor, and increase food import costs, thus curbing economic growth. In the last 15 years, China went from being the world’s largest soybean exporter to the world’s largest importer. With similar trends emerging in soy meal, edible oil, and grains, rising import costs will affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

China began promoting the production of corn-based ethanol in 2001, when the country’s corn production was booming, and net corn exports increased from 10.47 million tons in 2000 to a high of 16.4 million tons in 2003. After peaking in 2003, imports began to fall rapidly. Last year, China’s corn exports reached 4.8 million tons, but this was mainly due to the fulfilling contracts signed in 2006.

CHINA’S GRAIN OUTPUT: 1997 - 2007

Source: China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS)

The dramatic reduction of export quotas for this year from 3 million to 1 million tons, the ongoing introduction of stricter usage policies, and the cancellation of all tax rebates on grain exports belie the official stance of grain security, especially insofar as corn.

Consumption in 2008 is estimated at 141.5 million tons, of which nearly two-thirds is for animal feed. In January, pork prices surged 58.8 percent year-on-year. Further rapid price growth, coupled with government support to the industry, may see pig production increase at a faster-than-anticipated rate, which means livestock feed estimates are likely too conservative. An increase of 5 percent in this area could put severe strains on domestic supply. Corn and soy meal are used to produce approximately 70 percent of animal feedstuffs. Note that these figures have not yet been adjusted for damage and losses caused by the current snowstorm crisis that has battered China since mid-January.

CHINA’S GRAIN DEMAND: 1997 - 2006 (million tons)

Source: China Customs, Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, Interfax research. (In this report, Interfax uses the sum of domestic grain output and net grain import to estimate total domestic demand for grain.)

The USDA estimates China’s state corn stockpiles are in the region of 35 million tons, but it is difficult to verify this figure. However, given China’s aggressive state auction policy designed to stabilize market prices, this figure may be optimistic, although it could serve as a cushion in the event of a production shortfall.

Planting intentions, while difficult to predict as farmers tend to delay decisions, may be affected by corn ethanol restrictions. The tendency may be to shift to wheat and, where possible, soybeans which are more profitable, and China may have to resort to significant corn importation, possibly this season. This may be a continuing trend, given the scarcity of arable land and water resources.

If China does become a net corn importer this year, the impact on the price, both domestically and globally, will be dramatic and a price of $6 per bushel, up from current price of $5 is probable. The question now is how China will impact other agricultural commodities, like wheat, soybean and edible oils, in the year ahead.

Edited by Erik Dahl with contributions from Victor Wang, Tinko Hua, Yang Jing, and David Harman. This article was originally published by Interfax-China, and is republished with permission.

Findings in the article are based on extensive research from the Interfax-China China Commodities Report Grains & Softs 2008 industry report. Interfax-China’s team of in-country analysts track China’s industries and markets, providing comprehensive daily coverage of China’s energy sector. Learn how more about these markets and the opportunities they offer your business. Learn about energy in China through our China Energy Weekly and focused energy reports carbon trading, clean & renewable energy, CTL, oil & gas, and power generation. Free Trial: Contact Andrew Billard; andrew@interfax.cn or by phone at 86-10-8532-5021 (Beijing, China).

Additional EcoWorld reports on China:

- China’s Coal

- Cleaning Up China

- China’s Energy Demand

- China’s Renewable Energy

- Wind Power in China

- China’s Energy Outlook

- Fuel Cell Development in China

- China, Canals & Coal

The Chevy Volt - In Showrooms by November 2010?

The Chevy Volt is an integral part of GM’s strategy to “take the car out of the environmental equation,” according to GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz.

Only 67 weeks ago GM announced the Volt concept car, and if all goes according to plan, in only 138 weeks this revolutionary vehicle will be in dealer showrooms. Is this for real? Will they be ready?

Last week, GM hosted about 80 journalists from around the world to provide an on-site update on the progress of the Volt, guiding us through several venues at their Technical Center in Warren, Michigan.

The significance of GM’s Chevy Volt is not easily overstated. Referred to as an “EREV” (extended range electric vehicle), the Volt has an all-electric drive train, can travel up to 40 miles on plug-in battery power only, but has an onboard gasoline engine turning a generator in order to extend the range up to 440 miles if necessary. Because the Volt is designed to operate on gasoline power only, it will not end up being underpowered once the battery is largely depleted, which can happen with conventional hybrids. And since typical commutes are under 40 miles, most of the time the gasoline engine will never be turned on.

The Chevy Volt is intended to provide the best of all worlds - the zero-gas and zero-emission function of a pure EV, along with the range and versatility of a standard high-mileage gasoline powered car. It is also likely the EREV will eventually cost less than a conventional hybrid - unlike the standard hybrid which has an incredibly complex transmission, the EREV requires no transmission at all. Most other components are common to both designs.

This revolutionary design for an EREV has also been called a “series hybrid,” because the gas engine turns the generator which powers the electric motor in a series configuration, whereas by this logic conventional “parallel” hybrids have both the gasoline engine and the electric motor involved to provide traction. The EREV has also been referred to as a member of GM’s “E-Flex” family of vehicles, since eventually the same design could accomodate, for example, a fuel cell to provide electricity instead of an onboard gasoline engine and an electric generator. With E-Flex, as GM’s VP of Global Program Management Jon Lauckner put it, “the only thing we’re ruling out is steam.”

Jon Lauckner GM VP Global Program Mgmt. “The only thing we’re ruling out is steam.”

So will GM deliver the first EREV designed for mass production? According to Frank Weber, GM’s Chief Engineer for E-Flex Systems, “we are working with incredible speed, and this is the number one priority project we have at GM.” Weber went on to say “all project plans we have now are targeting November 2010. We’ve never before had a technology program and a vehicle program moving forward simultaneously.”

During the day-long guided tour of GM’s research facilities, it appeared most if not all of the top engineers and managers involved with the Volt program were available to speak with the journalists. And after a brief initial briefing on the morning of April 3rd, not one of the venues we visited was a standard press briefing room. Everywhere we went, we were taken to actual work areas where we could see work in progress on the Volt.

During one of our first stops, we sat in an engineering visualization studio where, using 3-D glasses relied on by GM’s engineers, the Volt was built for us one component at a time, starting with the battery and stopping just short of the final exterior shell. Many technical specifications were revealed for the first time.

The Volt’s battery will hold 12 kWh of charge; it will weigh 170 kilograms and be 1.8 meters long. The bottom of the battery is strengthened to improve the overall strength of the car, and is designed to be integrated with GM’s standard next generation compact car underbody. The gas tank will have a special unit to reprocess evaporation, something important to manage since the gas in many cases will rarely be used.

The battery pack was designed to allow the Volt to do zero to sixty MPH in 8.5 seconds, have passing capability, deliver a 40 mile range in city driving, have a cycle life of 150,000 miles (in mixed 100% EV and “charge sustaining” mode), and last 10 years. The Volt will have no transmission, and will have a top speed of 100 miles per hour. The engineers would not comment on the top RPM of the electric motor, nor would they reveal the reduction gear ratio. They would disclose that the electric motor-generator that will provide traction for the Volt will deliver 120 kilowatts of peak power and 370 newton meters of torque.

The E-Flex Extended Range Electric Vehicle Operation Modes

From 100% battery power, to using the gas generator, to recharge.

The Volt’s power consumption profile is a good way to see just how brilliant - and practical - the EREV (using an onboard gasoline engine turning an electric generator) design really is: As the table indicates, in the pure electric vehicle mode, the battery charge is gradually depleted as the car runs on power exclusively from the battery. The upward spikes on the overall downward slope represent energy returned to the battery by the dual-mode motor-generator whenever the car brakes or deaccelerates. Once the battery is depleted to a certain minimum - not the absolute minimum because by keeping charge in the battery a buffer resource for surge power is maintained, and the battery life is prolonged by not being totally depleted each cycle - the gasoline engine is turned on. In this state, the battery’s state of charge alternates between a minimum level and a somewhat higher level created by the gasoline engine’s generator power delivering more electricity than the electric traction motor requires, wherein at a certain point the gasoline engine shuts down again to let the battery drain back to the minimum. This cycle repeats itself until the duty cycle of the vehicle is over, and the vehicle is parked and plugged in. This third mode, of course, is the charging mode, where the vehicle is shut down and the battery is recharged from a stationary source.

Volt production design battery packs in testing.

The next stop for us on the tour was the battery testing lab, where production versions of the final battery packs for the Volt were being subjected to a variety of tests - essentially designed to simulate ten years of wear into a two year testing cycle. The batteries were subjected to cycle, calendar, temperature, vibration, longevity, road conditions; all conceivable forms of abuse and normal wear were being simulated in this lab.

Possibly the most unforgettable sight on this tour was in the back of the lab, where one of the Volt battery packs was on display next to a battery pack from the legendary EV-1. The comparison was dramatic - both battery packs store 12 kilowatt-hours of charge, but the Volt battery pack weighed 400 pounds (170 kg), and the EV-1 battery pack weighed 1,200 pounds. Both battery packs were in the shape of a “T” - where the long center portion forms the spine of the vehicle, and the somewhat shorter top section ran from side to side in the rear of the vehicle. But the EV-1’s battery pack dimensions were 2.35 meters (7′8″) by 1.38 meters (4′6″), compared to the Volt’s battery pack dimensions of only 1.63 meters (5′4″) by .83 meters (2′9″).

These recent improvements in battery technology cannot be overemphasized, because it is the reason the series hybrid - or EREV - technology wasn’t viable sooner. As John Lauckner patiently explained, the comparison between batteries using lithium ion chemistry (used in the Volt), nickel metal hydride (used in conventional hybrids), and lead acid (used ten years ago in the EV-1) is a best explained by the ratio 3:2:1, i.e., for the same amount of stored energy, the battery pack in the Volt has 1/3rd the volume and mass of the battery pack used in the EV-1, and 1/2 the volume and mass of typical battery packs used in conventional hybrids. Moreover, the ability of the lithium ion battery to provide surge power is significantly higher than that of the nickel metal hydride batteries, and this is the only way the gasoline engine can be disconnected from the drive-train, while still enabling a car to display normal acceleration while in all-electric mode. Based on their current progress and projections, it is possible that GM and their partners have the most advanced lithium ion battery packs in the world today for automotive applications.

Also present at GM’s battery lab was an intact - and very polished - EV-1, one of the few remaining. It was inspiring to view this legendary vehicle, an engineering feat that was not ready for mass production but nonetheless an icon that will never be forgetten. GM learned a great deal from the EV-1 program that they are applying to their Volt program, increasing the likelyhood that the Volt will be a breakthrough, rather than a footnote, in the pages of automotive history.

Volt cross-section. Electric traction motor & gasoline motor for the generator are all under the front hood. The battery runs down the spine and to each side behind the rear seats. The gas tank is in the rear.

Probably most significantly, in GM’s battery lab for some tests were two “mules,” prototype Volts that had Volt components installed and running, yet each of them used a 2005 Malibu shell for their bodies. According to GM’s Mickey Bly, Director of Hybrid Vehicle Integration and Controls, this month the first lithium ion battery packs will come off of the testing floor and go into the mules. These prototypes, the first EREV’s ever built, have already been on the track, where GM engineers reported they were “a great handling, spirited car.” Bly stated there would be three more prototypes on the track by summer, using “production intent design” batteries.

Another unforgettable moment was the tour of GM’s wind tunnel, directed by Ken Carbon, GM’s Chief “Aerodynamicist.” One of the largest in the world, GM’s wind tunnel operates 24 hours per day, five days per week, testing every vehicle GM makes as well as many vehicles manufactured by competitors. In the testing section of the wind tunnel, a 1/3rd scale version of the Volt was standing - with tape covering much of the body in order to avoid revealing design details. The wind tunnel has two turntables; the smaller one that the 1/3rd scale model sat on was able to rotate 360 degrees, in order to allow the engineers to evaluate the aerodynamic profile of the vehicle from all angles. The larger turntable was much larger, about 25 feet in diameter. Not only did this turntable rotate 360 degrees, but embedded in the turntable were four smaller turntables, approximately five feet in diameter each, that also had full rotation. Embedded on each of these four smaller turntables was a scale - itself able to rotate. The purpose of all these adjustable turntables is to allow a vehicle of any size to sit with each tire resting on one of the scales, wherein the vehicle can be subjected to wind from any angle, with the the effect of the wind on the weight displacement of the vehicle precisely measured.

GM’s Wind Tunnel Rotor - 43′ diameter, six blades of laminated spruce.

After assuring us that the motor could not be accidently activated, Carbon escorted our group around two turns - filled with huge curved vertical “turning vanes” that provided for smooth airflow - of the circular wind tunnel to view the fan. Built in 1980, this almost unreal rotor is 43 feet in diameter, with six blades constructed from laminated Spruce. Until surprisingly recently, Spruce was the best choice for a fan of this size. The material has a high strength to weight ratio and is very durable. Unlike virtually all materials short of recently developed composites, it is not subject to hardening or fatigue. The rotors had balsa tips to absorb impacts from any objects that conceivably could make it through the many screens covering turns one and two in the tunnel and hit one of the tips. The orange center nacelle, 18 feet in diameter, almost the size of a blimp, was designed to smooth the flow of air over the rotor and protect the motor. The 4,500 horsepower DC electric motor has an RPM of 270 and is able to bring the airspeed up to 400 MPH. Once this the air travels around turns three and four to enter the testing section, it can still reach a maximum of 138 MPH.

Chief Engineer Frank Weber would not reveal the aerodynamic drag coefficient of the Volt; he would only say they are targeting under .295. He also noted the Volt has been spending a lot of time in the wind tunnel as the body contours undergo their final refinements. The EV-1 had a drag of .19, which remains the lowest in history for a production vehicle.

Aerodynamic drag is referred to as counts by Bob Boniface, director of both exterior and interior design for the Volt. “Computer Artists” can direct specifications into simulations of aerodynamics, then scale models are milled using a Taurus SC-67 3-axis computer guided milling machine cutting into a clay covered wood and styrofoam armature. Clay can be added later if a particular edge needs to be higher, and the drill can precisely re-render the edge.

“We can go from a foam armature to a finished car in two days, said Boniface, but a car’s exterior only begins there. The many interactions between Boniface’s exterior designers and the wind tunnel tests created a language - every .01 degree change in the vehicles drag coefficient equates to ten “counts” of drag. To shave just a few counts of drag off a vehicle, designers will send a new model into the tunnel, with, for example, the cross-section of the side mirrors reduced slightly. We only saw a glimpse of one corner of the front and rear of the latest exterior version of the Volt, and Boniface had added a special heavier underlayer of covering onto the design prototype in order to prevent a “wardrobe malfunction.”

Inside the Volt. Center shift lever, concave door interiors.

The interior of the Volt is a good mix of next generation controls and traditional features. The Volt is designed to be driven by someone completely unfamiliar with the Volt, but who knows how to drive a car. In a way, the Volt benefits from coming in after many new standard new interfaces, such as GPS navigation, have already been added. The Volt is adding its uniqueness as an EREV onto a mature grouping of next-generation interfaces. The center spine - where the battery adds a low center of gravity mass and structural strength - also adds spaciousness to the cab, since the four seats are necessarily further apart. This center spine also makes feasible a more spacious driver interface, with plenty of room for a navigation console and a center-placed ignition and shifting lever. The impact of a widened center is countered somewhat with negative (concave) surfaces on the doors to allow the Volt to have a roomy interior while retaining an excellent drag coefficient.

Volt interior designer Tim Greig emphasized how the Volt will incorporate a “human machine interaction” that will take advantage of modern technology along with traditional automotive signals that humans intuitively associate with operating a vehicle. Accordingly, the car will recognize the key from a distance, preparing the car for operation in anticipation of being occupied by the owner - per a user-defined program. “The entire driver experience is being carefully choreographed,” said Greig, “sight, smell, sound, lighting.”

It is clear the Volt design, interior and exterior, is nearly ready to take the next steps towards production. As Boniface put it, “We are starting to freeze surfaces.” Also being finalized is the interior power management system. The Volt’s state of the art systems will be extremely efficient. As Weber puts it, the “baseload electricity budget of the Volt is only about 50% of the typical modern car.” Yet the Volt designers also paid attention to affordability - to get that extra mile of efficiency, for example, they did not go to LED headlights - nor an alumnium frame, for that matter.

Frank Weber GM Chief Engineer E-Flex “We are working with incredible speed.”

It is also clear GM isn’t kidding. In response to criticisms that to meet a 2010 launch, production version prototypes should be on the road right now, Frank Weber said “You will not see a final Volt with a final propulsion system until 2009, it isn’t necessary.” The Volt, again, is the first time GM has ever had a technology (EREV) program and a vehicle (Volt) program moving forward simultaneously - but the design and development tools available today make this feasible while ten years ago it might not have been. As GM’s Jon Lauckner put it, “GM is spending a lot of talent and treasure on the Volt.” Is this the most expensive development project GM has ever done? Without answering specifically, Laukner compared the Volt program to the 1979 “X-Car,” which introduced unibody construction and front wheel drive, two revolutionary and enduring innovations.

Can the Volt “take the car out of the environmental discussion?” It certainly appears a car like the Volt could shift primary reliance from gasoline to electricity for most passenger transportation miles, if not more. EREV technology offers affordable cars that can run on cheap electricity, only requiring gasoline for infrequent longer trips. In late 2006, Vice Chairman Lutz instructed VP Global Product Development Jon Laukner to “lead development of a game-changing concept car to announce in January 2007.” With the Chevy Volt EREV, GM delivered the announcement, and at about one-third of the way between announcement and the planned November 2010 launch, GM is still playing for keeps. The Volt’s EREV technology, arriving alongside smart-car features and enhanced safety features - all parts of GM’s “new automotive DNA” - is going to change how we think of cars forever.