The next step: providing energy efficient solutions and products to 16 million customers. Outi Koo(flickr)

Apparently around 52 million.

After announcing a 35-percent rate increase, British Gas is sending free energy-efficient light bulbs to customers to help lessen the blow of higher prices.

In response to the rate hikes, British Gas managing director Phil Bentley, said:

The only answer to cope with higher energy prices, I'm afraid, is for all of us to be more energy efficient and we will be contacting all our British Gas customers to show how they can save energy to try and offset these price rises.

The first step taken by the company was to send four free energy-efficient light bulbs to every customer. British Gas has also added a new section to their website that focuses on energy efficiency, featuring information on solar panels and energy-saving home improvements as well as a place to purchase green gadgets such as solar battery chargers and wind-up flashlights.

British Gas clearly isn't alone in feeling the pain of rising fuel prices but their willingness to educate their customers is refreshing — could you imagine your local gas station handing out tire pressure gauges to drivers waiting at the pump? As other energy companies are faced with tough decisions, they may want to take some hints from British Gas and increase awareness of energy efficiency among their own customers.

The endangered mountain gorilla calls the Virunga National Park in the DRC home. Unfortunately so do soldiers, poachers and the illegal charcoal trade. Photo: Ramon Azofra (flickr)

It was about this time last year when four gorillas were murdered in cold blood in the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

A photo of the 530-pound Senkwekwe, head of the massacred gorilla family, being carried to burial by Congolese villagers, ignited international outrage and garnered the public’s attention, if only for a moment. Almost a year later, National Geographic has published a magnificent piece examining the gorilla murders in the Virunga National Park.

Poachers were quickly dismissed as suspects due to the intact remains of the animals, leaving soldiers from the Congolese military or two other rebel factions as the likely culprits. Soldiers on all sides of the conflict have wreaked havoc on local communities, killing indiscriminately and raping women, including children as young as three years old. Despite such acts, soldiers insist they are under strict instructions not to harm the gorillas.

So who — or what — explains the murders?

"Follow the trail of charcoal," Emmanuel de Merode had said at the WildlifeDirect office. "Charcoal is the biggest threat to the park."

Charcoal, as we discover over the next few days, is the main source of energy, and evil, in North Kivu. Charcoal is used by 98 percent of the households for cooking, boiling water to make it potable, and also for heat. In the city of Goma, a constant pall of charcoal smoke smudges out the sun and makes the rough streets, rumpled with hardened lava from the 2002 eruption of Nyiragongo, appear to be pathways to hell.

Hardwood charcoal is the economic prize in the DRC and it comes from old growth hard wood trees found within Virunga National Park — home to half the world's population of mountain gorillas.

A sack of charcoal sells for $25 on average. Doing the math De Merode estimates that in 2006, when gorilla tourism brought in less than $300,000, the Virunga charcoal industry was worth more than $30 million.

It is estimated that at the rate that charcoal is harvested from the park, the entire southern portion of the park will be gone in ten years. An area considered to be perhaps the most biologically diverse and best of its kind, may soon vanish.

Aware of these facts, and the local implications, neighboring Rwanda has banished the internal production of charcoal. However, this approach does nothing to mitigate Rwanda's own internal demand for the product. They just buy it from the Congolese.

But what does this have to do with the death of four gorillas in July 2007?

Writer Mark Jenkins met with Paulin Ngobobo, chief warden of the Virunga National Park, to hear his story. When Ngobobo worked for the National Parks he quickly realized that all sides were profiting from the charcoal trade, from the Congolese military to Hutu militias and local chiefs — even the park rangers. In a struggle for conservation of the gorilla's home, he realized that the charcoal trade had to be stopped in its tracks.

At this point Paulin Ngobobo was detained and beaten, allegedly by men directed by the former chief park warden, Honoré Mashagiro, who was actively involved in the very trade which was destroying the park he was charged with protecting. To discredit Ngobobo's anti-charcoal trade efforts it is alleged that Mashagiro had the gorillas killed and blamed their murders on Ngobobo. Despite Mashagiro's efforts, Ngobobo has been cleared of the accusations and remains free. Mashagiro, on the other hand, has been imprisoned in Goma and awaits trial for the killings of the Virunga mountain gorillas.

The story of the DRC's illegal charcoal trade is a difficult one. Who is to blame? A culture of corruption which ensures that park rangers and soldiers will smuggle charcoal to supplement a non-existent salary? Citizens of Goma and neighboring Rwanda who demand the charcoal for cooking?

One thing is for sure: along with peace, the DRC is also in desperate need of alternative energy sources.

These squares represent how much land would be needed to power the world, Europe or Germany with solar-thermal power. Photo: Treehugger

A single solar farm in the Sahara desert could provide clean electricity for all of Europe.

Scientists are investigating solar farms in the Sahara, as part of a $62 billion plan to provide all green power for a new, carbon-neutral European super-grid.

Because the sunlight in northern Africa is more intense, solar panels in the Sahara can capture up to three times more energy then panels located in northern Europe.

Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission’s Institute for Energy said today at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona that a mere 0.3 percent of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle Eastern deserts would supply all the energy Europe needed.

The proposed solar farms will utilize advanced solar technology created by the California-based firm Ausra. These solar power plants use movable reflectors to concentrate sun light on pipes. The water in these pipes is solar-heated to produce high-pressure steam, which then goes through a turbine to generate electricity.

These innovative solar plants store enough hot water to make electricity even at night, and to increase production during peak demand periods. The plants are much more effective than traditional solar panel designs, allowing the plants to generate electricity at a mere 10 cents per kilowatt hour, much less than what the average consumer is paying now.

Ausra’s technology has been made cost-efficient by advances in transportation. Jaeger-Walden explained today that transporting the solar electricity would be relatively easy using new high-voltage direct current transmission (DC) lines instead of the alternating lines currently used. Energy loss using DC lines is very low, making the usual issue of transportation over long distances less of a problem.

Sixty-two million dollars for a project of this kind seems expensive — until you compare it with the more than $45 trillion in green-energy systems the world needs over the next 30 years to avoid global catastrophe, according to the International Energy Agency.

Doug Parr, Greenpeace UK's chief scientist, welcomed the project, saying:

"A large scale renewable energy grid is just the kind of innovation we need if we're going to beat climate change. Europe needs to become a zero-carbon society as soon as possible, and that will only happen with bold new ideas like this one. Tinkering with 20th-century technologies like coal and nuclear simply isn't going to get us there."

With the recent economic turmoil and the declining value of the dollar, some people are turning to gold for economic security in their time of need. In recent months, the price of gold has jumped to a high of nearly $1,000 per ounce.

In light of this, the World Bank’s private branch, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), has helped finance AngloGold Ashanti and Newmont Mining to open gold mines in the rich reserves of Ghana. These organizations claim that by developing the region's resources, they will be able to stimulate economic growth and pull the country's people out of poverty.

However, several NGOs in the region and the above Al Jazeera report claim that is the exact opposite of what this initiative has accomplished. Ghanaians in the west have been experiencing harder times as a direct result of the gold mines. Only the multinational companies that own the mines seem to be reaping the economic benefits. According to Al Jazeera, only 3 percent of the gold profits go back into Ghana.

To build the mines, these companies have also taken over many of the villagers’ farmland where they live and work. Many of the land owners of the region claim that the companies did not compensate them enough for their precious land. The people who worked on the farms were also only paid for a single harvest. Without these farms, many of these farmers have nowhere to live and no way to survive.

Furthermore, Oxfam and FIAN claim that the companies are not respecting the rights and safety of the nearby villagers. Community water sources have been polluted from improper drainage from the worker housing compounds and from the disposal of dangerous chemicals used in mining.

The development of the gold mines could lead to greater problems for Ghana on a national scale. The fertile lands of western Ghana allow even a small farm to be self-sustainable for several generations, which has helped to keep Ghana’s food stores stable. However, by favoring the gold mines over farms, Ghana may eventually begin to suffer the effects of the food crisis that is already plaguing many of its neighbors.

Despite record prices, the real beneficiaries of Ghana's gold remain questionable. Is it the people of Ghana, as the IFC and the mining companies insist, or is it the mining companies themselves?

Can a small group of people lift themselves out of poverty if given enough capital?

Economist Jeffrey Sachs and the U.N. Millennium Village project are aiming to do just that. Through a community-led approach, the Millennium Villages Project addresses extreme poverty in rural Africa through projects designed around achieving the Millennium Development Goals — eight agreed-upon targets to end extreme poverty worldwide by 2015.

In total, there are 79 Millennium Villages spread across the continent, that are grouped in 12 clusters. The villages are located in different agro-ecological zones that are representative of the farming, water and disease challenges facing the continent. Sachs believes this is why the Millennium Village Project is a scalable model that can be adapted across the different regions of Africa.

Sachs' theory suggests that starting with a big commitment to just these few villages and their small-scale farming might be the key to poverty alleviation. Each Millennium Village Project team works through poverty issues in each village by providing access to advanced technology that can better health, education, and farming productivity. For example, agricultural techniques have been improved by the introduction of fertilizers and crop diversification.

There are still many skeptics of the Millennium Villages' approach to ending poverty. Relaxing taxes on imports like fertilizer could do more argues development consultant Sam Rich in The Wilson Quarterly. These villages may have seen some positive impact early on but many persistent issues remain: dependence on subsistence crops is still depleting the soil and major infrastructure issues, like bad roads and a lack of electricity, have still not been addressed.

Last week I had the chance to visit a Millennium Village called Tiby, located in Mali, West Africa. I had expected to witness a tightly run program, with strong, scalable results. Instead I was shocked to see how disorganized the program was and how little had been accomplished by its third year. The community-based committees in Tiby were in place but had yet to receive any training in planning or management.

Each Millennium Village costs $110 per person every year over a period of five years. The majority of the funds come from donor funding through the Millennium Villages program but also include funding from local governments, partner organizations, and the villagers themselves.

It's easy to criticize the Millennium Village approach for spending a lot of money on a relatively small a group of people but let's this into perspective. In the first six months of 2008, the U.S. government contributed $830,353,769 to the World Food Program. That same amount would be able to support 1.5 million people through the Millennium Villages Project. In the long-run, the per-person investment through the Millennium Villages Project actually saves money — if the project proves successful, and the beneficiaries become self-sufficient and no longer depend on distributions from humanitarian aid groups.

So, can a small group of people really lift themselves out of poverty if given enough capital?

My own impression of the project, albeit from the vantage point of a single village, is that it is a band-aid for the symptoms of poverty, rather than a program that effectively addresses the root causes. The initiative's statistics may suggest otherwise, but the reality is that there is no quick fix to alleviating extreme poverty.

Photo: Michael Foley Photography (flickr)

Pouring aid money into Afghanistan seems to be like pouring water into a sieve?

For a country that has received billions of dollars in international assistance since 2002, some may be surprised to hear that many Afghans still don't have access to clean drinking water, sewage systems, electricity.

As of this year, the World Bank says "only 13% of Afghans have access to safe drinking water, 12% to adequate sanitation, and just 6% to electricity."

"What puzzles poorer Afghans," writes a BBC correspondent, "is why so many basic problems haven't been solved, despite the billions of dollars of international aid."

So, where has the billions of aid dollars gone?

One Afghan schoolteacher told BBC to look at the lavish lifestyle of corrupt officials. "Go and see who owns these expensive houses in (the suburb of) Wazir Akbar Khan and who is driving land cruisers," he says. "Karzai should ask these officials how they got so rich overnight, instead of making empty promises again and again."

Afghanistan is considered one of the world's most corrupt countries. It ranked 172 out of 179 countries last year on Transparency International's corruption-perceptions index.

Karzai's government insists they're trying to tackle corruption, but, as this Q&A between BBC.com readers and Afghan villagers reveals, people still feel like this government is letting them down.

Many, including Afghanistan's former NATO commander, think the country still risks becoming a failed state. U.S. Presidential candidate Barack Obama called Afghanistan's situation "precarious and urgent" during a high-profile visit there last week.

But perhaps addressing that urgency requires a different tack. Oxfam America issued a call on Saturday, timed to coincide with Obama's visit, for overhauling U.S. assistance to Afghanistan. "In particular," they said, "the U.S. should spend less on achieving short-term measures of success using costly consultants who are hamstrung by security constraints, and find more creative and sustainable ways to deliver the long-term development and security that Afghans really need."

Farmland such as this will now be leased to farmers. Gerry Vandermaesen (flickr)

Since he was officially sworn in as Cuba's president in February, Raul Castro has been busy giving back to his constituents in ways his brother never did — allowing Cubans to hold licenses for private taxis, stay in tourist hotels and own a cell phone.

But these are primarily symbolic changes. After all, many Cubans can't afford to purchase a cell phone or pay for a night at a hotel. The average monthly wage is only $20. Two of the most recent reforms, however, are potentially dynamic: the opportunity for farmers to lease state-owned land and for workers to earn production bonuses beyond their state-set salaries.

The land reforms are a response to rising global food prices. Castro recently estimated that the country would pay an extra $1 billion in food imports — enough for him to declare the food crisis a national security threat. Cuba has plenty of empty farmland left to cultivate: half of state-owned farm land is covered with weeds, according to estimates. The idea is that giving farmers an incentive to plant some of this land should reduce the need for costly food imports.

Then there's the new system of bonuses laid out by the country's vice-minister for labor, Carlos Mateu. "Writing in the communist party newspaper Granma Mr Mateu said workers would receive a minimum 5 percent bonus for meeting targets but with no ceiling on salaries," the BBC reported. "The minister pointed out that the current wage system sapped employees' incentives to excel since everyone earned the same regardless of performance."

These are revolutionary ideas in Cuba, a socialist system built on the egalitarian ideal. Last month Raul Castro challenged the governmental mindset when he said,"egalitarianism is not convenient."

When Cuba's president speaks out against the very foundation of a 49-year-old government system, it's hard not to believe that real change is happening.

In the future, farms will line the cities' skylines. Photo: Editrix, Curbed SF (flickr)

In the future, farming on expansive tracts of rural land will give way to 30-story-high self-sustained, temperature-controlled, organic farms that are only a city block away.

You might be thinking that this is a far-fetched idea from some science-fiction novel, but in fact it’s the very real brainchild of Professor Dickson Despommier from Columbia University. Along with some of his graduate students, Despommier came up with this idea for “vertical farms" in 1999.

Despommier believes that he has devised the perfect solution to the growing food, water and energy crisis: bringing farms to where a majority of the population lives — cities. Building farms vertically will save land and increase the world’s agricultural output.

Despommier envisions vertical farms as multi-leveled greenhouses that are built to skyscraper proportions. His website is full of charts and graphics and presentations — many produced by his graduate students — that presumably show how vertical farms will be able to produce food not typically found in greenhouses, like corn, wheat and even rice. The entire community will be engaged in the project, with a farmer’s market in the building and possibly even a restaurant.

This new type of farming has numerous advantages over more conventional methods. The most obvious advantage is that vertical farms will have year-round production with no worry of weather-related crop failure. They are also more environmentally friendly because there will be no plows, tractors, or shipping necessary. Furthermore, Despommier designed these farms to use alternative energy as their main source of power.

The project is still very much in its developmental stage, but the most up-to-date plans and designs are available on the project’s website.

Planners in cities like New York and Portland see great potential behind the idea and have already started developing vertical farm proposals. Having skyscraper farms in our cities might not be too far away after all.

Condoms prevent transmissions of disease, and could be key to population control. Photo: Rampant Gian (flickr)

CIA director Michael Hayden recently identified one of the biggest threats facing the U.S., something that occurs over 215 million times a day — sex.

“Population is the essential multiplier for any number of human ills," Hayden said recently. He said overpopulation in the poorest parts of the world is causing global political instability and extremism, climate change, and the food and fuel crises.

In the 1970s, environmentalists frequently discussed the problems of overpopulation, but in the last 30 years, rigid population control has been condemned.

Robert Engleman, vice-president at the Worldwatch Institute and author of the new book More: Population, Nature and What Women Want, says that after China's controversial one-child policy, "Environmentalists came to realize how complicated and sensitive this issue was.”

As food and fuel prices rise, so do concerns that the planet’s limits are finite. Population growth has slowed in developed countries, but is still rising in much of the developing world. With climate change forcing a fresh look at overpopulation, Engleman’s new book argues that “the key to limiting population growth is to give control over procreation to women.”

What Engleman is suggesting is not feminism, it’s just common sense. He says that even in societies with traditionally large families, when women gain control over family sizes with contraception access, birth rates shrink.

Fifty-year-old Linganni, who earns $2.50 a week sweeping streets in Burkina Faso, would certainly agree that too many children and not enough food is a problem. In an article that discusses how the food crisis is hitting women the hardest, The Washington Post describes how her 25 children share one meal a day. And Linganni always eats last.

In his recent article "What Condoms Have To Do With Climate Change", Time's Bryan Walsh suggests the best policy for the U.S. would be “vigorous foreign aid that helps make contraception safe, reliable and accessible in every country — too often women in the developing world who want to use contraception, can't get it.”

Contraceptive aid from the U.S. may be a difficult sell, considering that Americans are still obsessing over abstinence-only sex education and holding father-daughter purity balls. And around the world, contraception is often taboo, and the decision whether to use it is up to the man.

One solution is to support forms of contraception that give women control and are invisible to men, like the Pill or IUDs. But whatever the approach, women need to have control over the number of kids they have. Population control will only happen, Engleman reminds us, when "women are in charge."

Sleeping in airports just got more comfortable with the Mini Motel. Photo: Nibaq (flickr)

If you've ever spent the night in an airport, you know trying to sleep crouched down in the hard airport chairs is excruciating. And as airlines try to cut costs by eliminating hotel vouchers, painful and sleepless nights are becoming more common.

But one frequent flier has devised a solution. Frank Giotto’s new Mini Motel comes with everything you need to sleep comfortably for a night. The Mini Motel, which sells for $49.95 including shipping, is a one-person tent that comes with an air mattress, pillow, bed sheet, alarm clock, reading light, toothbrush, toothpaste, ear plugs, and eye shades. And it all folds down into a package about the size of a laptop.

And it’s not just for airports.

The Mini Motel can also be used by emergency organizations as a cost-effective replacement for emergency cots. They accommodate more people, require less storage space, and add the benefit of privacy.

For displaced people, disaster relief workers, or just a painful night in the airport, Mini Motels could prove to be very useful.

I learned today that I'm approximately the 650 millionth richest person on earth. That sounded pretty disheartening at first — and just about right, since I'm a recent college grad piecing together enough jobs to pay my rent — until I was told I nearly cracked the top 10 percent of all wage earners.

I found this information on "Global Rich List," a web site that takes your annual income and lets you know just how you measure up in the whole economic scheme of things. The website informs visitors that, Three billion people live on less than $2 per day while 1.3 billion get by on less than $1 per day. Seventy percent of those living on less than $1 per day are women. (There are currently 6.7 billion people on earth.)

Along with providing a picture of relative wealth, the site asks visitors to use some of their wealth to benefit those aided by the international relief agency CARE. After all, according to the Global Rich List, the roughly $10 I've been known to spend on coffee each week could buy more than two dozen fruit trees for Honduran farmers.

So, how do you measure up? Visit The Global Rich List and find out.

Eating bugs is already a common practice in over 13 countries. Photo: Vilhelm Sjostrom (flickr)

Scientists are jumping on an underutilized protein source that is abundant and environmentally friendly.

Sounds great — until you realize that what the scientists from National Autonomous University of Mexico are suggesting is dining on insects.

Entomophagy, or eating bugs, is already a common practice in over 13 countries, including Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia, according to this week's Economist.

And what better then bugs? Gram for gram, bugs provide more nutrients than beef or fish.

And while the Food and Agriculture Organization at the United Nations considers livestock “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global,” bug farming is a low-impact process.

Khon Kaen University in Thailand has already developed an inexpensive cricket-rearing technique and taught it to 4,500 families. On just a 100 square feet of land, a family can raise enough crickets to make a tidy profit. Or they can even be “grown” inside homes. Because bugs are a crop that doesn’t require much food or water, grows and reproduces quickly, the yield can be incredible.

The Mexican university researchers themselves cite numerous reasons for insect eating: the 75 percent rise in some food prices, the additional 100 million people pushed into poverty, and global warming as reasons to shift to these more sustainable sources of protein.

Of course, there are perils to introducing new species of insects to areas. And there are those who just plain won’t eat bugs.

A more palatable option suggested by the Economist might be to replace supplements in processed food or animal feed with insect-derived protein, which would still help make carnivorous habits a little more sustainable.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is getting an economic jolt from none other than Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps.

Dr. Bronner’s is an American company that has a 50-year tradition of environmentally and socially minded products. One of the company’s founding principles is that "constructive capitalism is where you share the profit with the workers and the Earth from which you made it!"

Following in that tradition, Dr. Bronner’s in 2005 started buying a majority of their olives from the Holy Land. Olive oil is the main ingredient in their magic soaps, and Dr. Bronner’s wanted to use its demand for olives to promote economic cooperation between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Their magic soaps are now made with a mixture of Palestinian and Israeli olive oil. Dr. Bronner’s gets 90 percent of their supply from the Palestinian Canaan Fair Trade cooperative. The other 10 percent comes from the Israeli women’s fair trade association Sindyanna and the Strauss family farm in Israel.

"Blending olive oil from Palestine and Israel is a symbolic but significant contribution to promoting the concept of coexistence and cooperation in this area," Dr. Gero Leson, director of special operations for Dr. Bronner's, says in the video above.

Dr. Bronner’s initiative might be relatively small in the greater scheme of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the project's ingenuity and potential has caught the attention of media such as American Public Media’s Marketplace.

While lots of companies have some sort of charitable arm or a mission that incorporates social responsibility, few are working in such a sensitive area and in such a deliberate manner to promote peace. Perhaps it's fitting for a company that has adopted this principle: "We are all brothers and sisters and we should take care of each other and spaceship earth!"

The Green Wall for the Sahara Initiative will plant a wall of trees to stop the spread of the Sahara. Photo: Dale Gillard (flickr)

Ever heard of the Great Green Wall?

Concerns about the rapid southern spread of the Sahara desert have prompted African nations to build a wall – out of trees.

The Sahara has been moving south at a rate of almost a square kilometer a year, consuming villages and wiping out agricultural lands.

Slowing the desertification has become a huge priority — and a huge community effort.

International aid groups are helping build community gardens, institute new irrigation techniques, and teach sustainable farming. Projects are especially successful in the areas of the Sahara, like northern Burkina Faso, where new farming techniques are taking advantage of increased rainfall due to climate change.

The biggest project to date is the Green Wall for the Sahara Initiative. The $3-million, two-year initial phase will plant a belt of trees 7,000-kilometers long and 15 kilometers wide, and was formally approved at the Community of the Sahel-Saharan States in Benin last month.

The African Union says future phases will plant trees from Mauritania to Djibouti in two parallel belts, creating a strip of protected topsoil for high-yield farming. Nigeria has launched its own complimentary Desert-to-Food Program.

The AU hopes the Green Wall Initiative will arrest soil degradation, reduce poverty, conserve biodiversity, and increase land productivity in more than 25 countries. Others hope the project will create millions of jobs, promote ecotourism, alleviate the food crisis, and even introduce new fishing and livestock-breeding industries.

Who would have thought a wall of trees could have such a big impact?

Before U.S. troops showed up, it’s doubtful that Afghan boys in Jalalabad had ever seen a golf ball. Today, some spend their time chasing after them.

Today’s Wall Street Journal shows that “war creates an economic logic of its own” by highlighting the sometimes-bizarre economy of northern Afghanistan, where the U.S. military “pays out as much as $25 million a month to Afghan companies” and soldiers buy blocks of ice, fragments of spent rockets and, yes, used golf balls from locals.

The golf balls are the same ones soldiers blast from their makeshift driving range atop a latrine building. Local boys collect those that sail over a river and come to rest in terraced fields, then sell them back to the soldiers for 10 cents each — until recently, that is.

The market has been disrupted by a middleman who pays the children a dime and raised the retail price to 20 cents, according to the soldiers. The troops consider the price-increase exorbitant and are holding out for the children to regain control of the golf-ball business.

It seems even a market as trivial as golf balls in Afghanistan isn’t safe from war profiteers.