912. How the Sub-Saharan Cheetah Got Its Stripes: Californian Feral Cats Help Unlock Biological Secret

The spots displayed by a typical cheetah (standing),
compared with the blotched pattern of king cheetahs.
(Credit: Courtesy of the Ann van Dyk Cheetah Preserve)

By ScienceDaily, September 20, 2012 

Feral cats in Northern California have enabled researchers to unlock the biological secret behind a rare, striped cheetah found only in sub-Saharan Africa, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine, the National Cancer Institute and HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama. The study is the first to identify a molecular basis of coat patterning in mammals.

The scientists found that the two felines share a biological mechanism responsible for both the elegant stripes on the tabby cat and the cheetah's normally dappled coat. Dramatic changes to the normal patterns occur when this pathway is disrupted: The resulting house cat has swirled patches of color rather than orderly stripes, and the normally spotted cheetah sports thick, dark lines down its back.

"Mutation of a single gene causes stripes to become blotches, and spots to become stripes," said Greg Barsh, MD, PhD, emeritus professor of genetics and of pediatrics at Stanford and an investigator at the HudsonAlpha Institute.

The differences are so pronounced that biologists at first thought that cheetahs with the mutated gene belonged to an entirely different species. The rare animals became known as "king cheetahs," while affected tabby cats received the less-regal moniker of "blotched." (The more familiar, striped cat is known as a mackerel tabby.)

The study will be published Sept. 21 in Science. Christopher Kaelin, PhD, a senior scientist in the Barsh laboratory, is the co-first author; Xiao Xu PhD, from the National Cancer Institute-Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research and the Sichuan Key Laboratory of Conservation Biology on Endangered Wildlife in Sichuan, China, is the other co-first author. Marilyn Menotti-Raymond, PhD, of NCI-Frederick is the senior author.

Barsh and his lab members have spent decades investigating how traditional laboratory animals such as mice develop specific coat colors. His previous work identified a variety of biologically important pathways that control more than just hair or skin color, and have been linked to brain degeneration, anemia and bone marrow failure. But laboratory mice don't display the pattern variation seen in many mammals.

"We were motivated by a basic question," said Barsh of the turn to the study of big (and little) cats. "How do periodic patterns like stripes and spots in mammals arise? What generates them? How are they maintained? What is their biological and evolutionary significance? It's kind of surprising how little is known. Until now, there's been no obvious biological explanation for cheetah spots or the stripes on tigers, zebras or even the ordinary house cat."

The research relied primarily on DNA samples from feral cats in Northern California captured for sterilization and release, on tissue samples provided by the City of Huntsville Animal Services group, and on small skin biopsies and blood samples from captive and wild South African and Namibian cheetahs. It also hinged on the recent availability of the whole-genome sequence of the domestic cat. (Menotti-Raymond's research focuses on the genomic analysis of the domestic cat to better understand many human diseases.)

"The Laboratory of Genomic Diversity at the National Cancer Institute has long championed the cat as an animal model of human disease," said Menotti-Raymond. "Studying color variation in cats provides the opportunity to uncover new principles of gene action and interaction that may have unexpected applications to understanding developmental and morphologic variation in natural populations, including humans."

Comparing gene sequences of feral cats with different patterns allowed Kaelin and Xu to identify mutations in a gene they dubbed Taqpep associated with the blotched tabby markings: 58 of 58 blotched tabbies had a mutation in each of its two copies of Taqpep, while 51 of 51 mackerel tabbies had a least one unmutated version.

Taqpep encodes a protease normally found in the cell membrane, but that can also be cleaved to allow it to diffuse outside the cell. This ability to float freely and interact with other molecules in the extracellular soup is a key component of a principle called reaction diffusion proposed by the famous computer scientist Alan Turing, PhD, in 1952 as a way to explain how periodic patterns (like stripes and spots) can arise out of randomness.

"Turing realized that, under specific conditions, diffusible 'activator' and 'inhibitor' molecules can self-organize into a variety of periodic patterns," said Barsh. "We are excited about the idea that Taqpep might be an entry point to understand if, and how, reaction-diffusion mechanisms can explain 'how the leopard got its spots.'"

After nailing down Taqpep's role in tabby stripes (and analyzing its sequence in more than 350 other cats of 24 distinct breeds), Kaelin wondered if it might play a similar role in generating and maintaining the spots on wild and captive cheetahs. He obtained blood samples from a king cheetah named Kgosi, a resident of a wildcat education and conservation program in Northern California, and found that Kgosi also had a mutation in Taqpep.

Kaelin next contacted Ann van Dyk, who maintains a cheetah conservation center in South Africa from which all captive king cheetahs, including Kgosi, originate. (Van Dyk was the first to learn, though meticulous breeding records, that the king cheetah pattern is due to a recessive genetic mutation.) Van Dyk obtained DNA samples from all her cheetahs, allowing confirmation that a Taqpep mutation is responsible for the king cheetah pattern.

Mammals aren't the only animals with patterned hair or skin, obviously. Fish, salamanders and some invertebrates also have stripes and spots. However, there is an essential difference. While the non-mammals simply add stripes or spots as they grow to adulthood, mammals keep the same number and pattern by increasing the surface area of the contrasting colors.

"Somehow, cells in the black stripes know they are in a black stripe and remember that fact throughout the organism's life," said Barsh. "We were curious about what's happening at the boundary between light and dark stripes and spots. How do these spots know to grow with an animal?"

When Kelly McGowan, MD, PhD, a senior scientist in Barsh's group, studied fetal cat skin after seven weeks of gestation, she found that the tabby pattern begins to arise only when the hair begins to grow. In other words, there are no apparent differences between the cells themselves -- only in the color of hair they produce. That suggested that the changes in color are due to differences in the levels of expression of certain genes within the cells.

Lewis Hong, a former graduate student in Barsh's lab, used a technique he developed called EDGE to identify changes in gene expression levels between black and yellow areas of cheetah skin (obtained under anesthesia). He found several differences, many associated with a pathway influencing the expression of a gene called Edn3. McGowan found that Edn3 mRNA was produced at the base of the follicles making the black hairs. To test their theory, the researchers collaborated with a group at Florida International University to study a yellow-colored laboratory mouse that had been engineered to express Edn3. The coats of the resulting animals were much darker than their unmodified peers.

"This is very strong evidence that Edn3 is a critical regulator of black versus yellow hair in animals," said Barsh. The researchers hypothesize that expression of Taqpep is required to establish a pattern of stripes or spots in early feline development that is then carried out by Edn3 as the hair grows.

Clearly, not all cats are patterned. In particular, some big adult cats like African lions and mountain lions are distinctive for their lack of color variation even though their cubs are striped. Furthermore, Taqpep mutations are surprisingly common in some non-striped domestic cat breeds like the Abyssinian and the Himalayan.

"We know there's a mutation that suppresses pattern formation in some cats," said Barsh. "We'd like to investigate that mechanism as well."

In addition to Kaelin, Barsh, McGowan and Hong, Stanford researcher and technician Hermogenes Manuel also participated in the study.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the NCI and the HudsonAlpha Institute.

911. Global Trade, Local Land Use, and Ecosystems

Fallow rice paddies in eastern Taiwan

By ScienceDaily, September 20, 2012

The pressures of global trade may heighten disease incidence by dictating changes in land use. A boom in disease-carrying ticks and chiggers has followed the abandonment of rice cultivation in Taiwanese paddies, say ecologist Chi-Chien Kuo and colleagues, demonstrating the potential for global commodities pricing to drive the spread of infections.

Their work appears in the September issue of ESA's journal Ecological Applications.

After Taiwan joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, active cultivation of rice paddies fell from 80 percent to 55 percent in just three years. The government of Taiwan subsidized twice-yearly plowing of abandoned fields to reduce the spread of agricultural pests into adjacent fields still in cultivation. Compliance has been spotty. Kuo found that, while plowing did not suppress rodent populations, it did inadvertently reduce the presence of the ticks and chiggers that use rodents as their primary hosts.

"The government considers only agricultural pests such as insects and rodents. They don't think about the disease factors," said Kuo. But land use policy can have complex and unexpected reverberations in the ecology of the landscape.

Chiggers, the larval stage of trombiculid mites, spread scrub typhus (Orientia tsutsugamushi), a bacterium that gets its name from the scrubby, dense vegetation that often harbors its flesh-loving host. Scrub typhus is a common culprit underlying visits to Southeast Asian hospitals for flu-like symptoms. Without antibiotics, the infection is often fatal. Ticks (Ixodidae) transmit bacteria spotted fever group rickettsiae, causing fever, aches and rash similar to Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Neither pest prefers to live underwater.

Hualien, Kuo's study area, is one of the least populous of Taiwan's counties, yet had nearly the highest incidence of scrub typhus from 1998-2007. The county is a smattering of small villages surrounded by a patchwork of flooded, plowed, and abandoned rice paddies. Flooded paddies are poor habitat for ticks and chiggers, and so cultivation of rice, which locally means carefully managed flooding of fields to drown agricultural pests, likely suppresses ticks and chiggers as well. Even the seemingly unkillable ticks die after a few weeks of submersion, and chiggers are similarly terrestrial. Though studies are few, limited data indicate that most chiggers die after a month under water.

This study did not assess flooded paddies due to the difficulty of finding and collecting rodents, ticks, and chiggers underwater. Instead, Kuo trapped rodents in fallow and plowed fields and examined their tick and chigger passengers, testing the arachnids for presence of disease-causing rickettsial bacteria. He found 6 times as many ticks on the rodents living in fallow fields -- and the proportion of infectious ticks in fallow fields was three times higher, compounding the risk. Chiggers rode rodents at a rate 3 times higher in fallow fields than plowed fields.

"This study is a great example of the kinds of indirect effects that trickle down from human policies," said Bob Parmenter, an ecologist unaffiliated with the study. "It tells a nice story about how changes in international trade barriers can have unforeseen consequences." Parmenter is director of the USDA's Scientific Services Division at Valles Caldera National Preserve near Los Alamos, New Mexico, and an expert on the influence of ecology on deadly Hantavirus outbreaks, like the current episode in Yosemite National Park (California, USA) that has infected nine visitors and killed three.

The consequences of economic pressures on land use are also present in the eastern United States, where the small farms of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries have reverted, to a large degree, to forest. With the return of deer and wildlands has come a rise in ticks, and concurrent rise in Lyme disease. Conversely, opening new land to farming or housing can bring its own disease risks.

Many studies have investigated influence of global forces on disease, said Kuo. "Most are focused on how climate change, global travel, or habitat destruction will affect the emergence of vector-borne and zoonotic disease. We show that economic organizations can actually affect human health, by influencing the landscape."

910. Seasonal Melting of Arctic Sea Ice Stops, but New Record Low Is Set

Seasonal melting of arctic sea ice has set a
record due to global warming

By Justin Gillis, The New York Times, September 19, 2012

The drastic melting of Arctic sea ice has finally ended for the year, scientists announced Wednesday, but not before demolishing the previous record — and setting off new warnings about the rapid pace of change in the region.

The apparent low point for 2012 was reached Sunday, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, which said that sea ice that day covered about 1.32 million square miles, or 24 percent, of the surface of the Arctic Ocean. The previous low, set in 2007, was 29 percent.

When satellite tracking began in the late 1970s, sea ice at its lowest point in the summer typically covered about half the Arctic Ocean, but it has been declining in fits and starts over the decades.

“The Arctic is the earth’s air-conditioner,” said Walt Meier, a research scientist at the snow and ice center, an agency sponsored by the government. “We’re losing that. It’s not just that polar bears might go extinct, or that native communities might have to adapt, which we’re already seeing — there are larger climate effects.”

His agency waited a few days before announcing the low to be sure sea ice had started to refreeze, as it usually does at this time of year, when winter closes in rapidly in the high Arctic. A shell of ice will cover much of the Arctic Ocean in coming months, but it is likely to be thin and prone to melting when summer returns.

Scientists consider the rapid warming of the region to be a consequence of the human release of greenhouse gases, and they see the melting as an early warning of big changes to come in the rest of the world.

Some of them also think the collapse of Arctic sea ice has already started to alter atmospheric patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, contributing to greater extremes of weather in the United States and other countries, but that case is not considered proven.

The sea ice is declining much faster than had been predicted in the last big United Nations report on the state of the climate, published in 2007. The most sophisticated computer analyses for that report suggested that the ice would not disappear before the middle of this century, if then.

Now, some scientists think the Arctic Ocean could be largely free of summer ice as soon as 2020. But governments have not responded to the change with any greater urgency about limiting greenhouse emissions. To the contrary, their main response has been to plan for exploitation of newly accessible minerals in the Arctic, including drilling for more oil.

Scientists said Wednesday that the Arctic has become a prime example of the built-in conservatism of their climate forecasts. As dire as their warnings about the long-term consequences of heat-trapping emissions have been, many of them fear they may still be underestimating the speed and severity of the impending changes.

In a panel discussion on Wednesday in New York sponsored by Greenpeace, the environmental group, James E. Hansen, a prominent NASA climate scientist, said the Arctic melting should serve as a warning to the public of the risks that society is running by failing to limit emissions.

“The scientific community realizes that we have a planetary emergency,” Dr. Hansen said. “It’s hard for the public to recognize this because they stick their head out the window and don’t see that much going on.”

A prime concern is the potential for a large rise in the level of the world’s oceans. The decline of Arctic sea ice does not contribute directly to that problem, since the ice is already floating and therefore displacing its weight in water.

But the disappearance of summer ice cover replaces a white, reflective surface with a much darker ocean surface, allowing the region to trap more of the sun’s heat, which in turn melts more ice. The extra heat in the ocean appears to be contributing to an accelerating melt of the nearby Greenland ice sheet, which does contribute to the rise in sea level.

At one point this summer, surface melt was occurring across 97 percent of the Greenland ice sheet, a development not seen before in the era of satellite measurements, although geological research suggests that it has happened in the past.

The sea is now rising at a rate of about a foot per century, but scientists like Dr. Hansen expect this rate to increase as the planet warms, putting coastal settlements at risk.

A scientist at the snow and ice center, Julienne C. Stroeve, hitched a ride on a Greenpeace ship in recent weeks to inspect the Arctic Ocean for herself. Interviewed this week after putting into port at the island of Spitsbergen, she said one of her goals had been to debark on ice floes and measure them, but that it had been difficult to find any large enough to support her weight.

Ice floes were numerous in spots, she said, but “when we got further into the ice pack, there were just large expanses of open water.

909. Global Warming: Race Is On as Ice Melt Reveals Arctic Treasures

Greenland's receding ice has exposed vast deposits of valuable minerals and new opportunities for an island in economic decline.

By Elisabeth Rosenthal, The New York Times, September 18, 2012

NUUK, Greenland — With Arctic ice melting at record pace, the world’s superpowers are increasingly jockeying for political influence and economic position in outposts like this one, previously regarded as barren wastelands.

At stake are the Arctic’s abundant supplies of oil, gas and minerals that are, thanks to climate change, becoming newly accessible along with increasingly navigable polar shipping shortcuts. This year, China has become a far more aggressive player in this frigid field, experts say, provoking alarm among Western powers.

While the United States, Russia and several nations of the European Union have Arctic territory, China has none, and as a result, has been deploying its wealth and diplomatic clout to secure toeholds in the region.

“The Arctic has risen rapidly on China’s foreign policy agenda in the past two years,” said Linda Jakobson, East Asia program director at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, Australia. So, she said, the Chinese are exploring “how they could get involved.”

In August, China sent its first ship across the Arctic to Europe and it is lobbying intensely for permanent observer status on the Arctic Council, the loose international body of eight Arctic nations that develops policy for the region, arguing that it is a “near Arctic state” and proclaiming that the Arctic is “the inherited wealth of all humankind,” in the words of China’s State Oceanic Administration.

To promote the council bid and improve relations with Arctic nations, its ministers visited Denmark, Sweden and Iceland this summer, offering lucrative trade deals. High-level diplomats have also visited Greenland, where Chinese companies are investing in a developing mining industry, with proposals to import Chinese work crews for construction.

Western nations have been particularly anxious about Chinese overtures to this poor and sparsely populated island, a self-governing state within the Kingdom of Denmark, because the retreat of its ice cap has unveiled coveted mineral deposits, including rare earth metals that are crucial for new technologies like cellphones and military guidance systems. A European Union vice president, Antonio Tajani, rushed here to Greenland’s capital in June, offering hundreds of millions in development aid in exchange for guarantees that Greenland would not give China exclusive access to its rare earth metals, calling his trip “raw mineral diplomacy.”

Greenland is close to North America, and home to the United States Air Force’s northernmost base in Thule. At a conference last month, Thomas R. Nides, deputy secretary of state for management and resources, said the Arctic was becoming “a new frontier in our foreign policy.”

In the past 18 months, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea have made debut visits here, and Greenland’s prime minister, Kuupik Kleist, was welcomed by President José Manuel Barroso of the European Commission in Brussels.

“We are treated so differently than just a few years ago,” said Jens B. Frederiksen, Greenland’s vice premier, in his simple office here. “We are aware that is because we now have something to offer, not because they’ve suddenly discovered that Inuit are nice people.”

Chinese activity in the Arctic to some extent mirrors that of other non-Arctic countries, as the region warms.

The European Union, Japan and South Korea have also applied in the last three years for permanent observer status at the Arctic Council, which would allow them to present their perspective, but not vote.

This once-obscure body, previously focused on issues like monitoring Arctic animal populations, now has more substantive tasks, like defining future port fees and negotiating agreements on oil spill remediation. “We’ve changed from a forum to a decision-making body,” said Gustaf Lind, Arctic ambassador from Sweden and the council’s current chairman.

But China sees its inclusion “as imperative so that it won’t be shut out from decisions on minerals and shipping,” said Dr. Jakobson, who is also an Arctic researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. China’s economy is heavily dependent on exports, and the polar route saves time, distance and money to and from elsewhere in Asia and Europe, compared with traversing the Suez Canal.

So far there has been little actual exploitation of Arctic resources. Greenland has only one working mine, though more than 100 new sites are being mapped out. Here, as well as in Alaska, Canada and Norway, oil and gas companies are still largely exploring, although experts estimate that more than 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas reserves are in the Arctic. Warmer weather has already extended the work season by a month in many locations, making access easier.

At one point this summer, 97 percent of the surface of Greenland’s massive ice sheet was melting. At current rates, Arctic waters could be ice-free in summer by the end of the decade, scientists say.

“Things are happening much faster than what any scientific model predicted,” said Dr. Morten Rasch, who runs the Greenland Ecosystem Monitoring program at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Ownership of the Arctic is governed by the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, which gives Arctic nations an exclusive economic zone that extends 200 nautical miles from land, and to undersea resources farther away so long as they are on a continental shelf. The far northern Arctic Ocean belongs to no country, and conditions there are severe. In a place where exact boundaries were never much of a concern, haggling over borders has begun among the primary nations — between Canada and Denmark, and the United States and Canada, for example.

The United States has been hampered in the current jockeying because the Senate has refused to ratify the Convention of the Law of the Sea, even though both the Bush and Obama administrations have strongly supported doing so. This means the United States has not been able to formally stake out its underwater boundaries. “We are being left behind,” Deputy Secretary Nides said.

But experts say boundary disputes are likely to be rapidly resolved through negotiation, so that everyone can get on with the business of making money. There is “very little room for a race to grab territory, since most of the resources are in an area that is clearly carved up already,” said Kristofer Bergh, a researcher at the Stockholm Institute.

Even so, Arctic nations and NATO are building up military capabilities in the region, as a precaution. That has left China with little choice but to garner influence through a strategy that has worked well in Africa and Latin America: investing and joining with local companies and financing good works to earn good will. Its scientists have become pillars of multinational Arctic research, and their icebreaker has been used in joint expeditions.

And Chinese companies, some with close government ties, are investing heavily across the Arctic. In Canada, Chinese firms have acquired interests in two oil companies that could afford them access to Arctic drilling. During a June visit to Iceland, Premier Wen Jiabao of China signed a number of economic agreements, covering areas like geothermal energy and free trade.

In Greenland, large Chinese companies are financing the development of mines that are being developed around discoveries of gems or minerals by small prospecting companies, said Soren Meisling, head of the China desk at the Bech Bruun law firm in Copenhagen, which represents many of them. A huge iron ore mine under development near Nuuk, for example, is owned by a British company but financed in part by a Chinese steel maker.

Chinese mining companies have proved adept at working in challenging locales and have even proposed building runways for jumbo jets on the ice in Greenland’s far north to fly out minerals until the ice melts enough for shipping.

“There is already a sense of competition in the Arctic, and they think they can have first advantage,” said Jingjing Su, a lawyer in Bech Bruun’s China practice.

The efforts have clear political backing. Greenland’s minister for industry and mineral resources was greeted by Vice Premier Li Keqiang in China last November. A few months later, China’s minister of land and resources, Xu Shaoshi, traveled to Greenland to sign cooperation agreements.

Western analysts have worried that China could leverage its wealth, particularly in some of the cash-poor corners of the Arctic like Greenland and Iceland.

But Chinese officials have cast their motives in more generous terms. “China’s activities are for the purposes of regular environmental investigation and investment and have nothing to do with resource plundering and strategic control,” the state-controlled Xinhua news agency wrote this year.

Michael Byers, a professor of politics and law at the University of British Columbia, said the Chinese were unlikely to overstep their rights in a region populated by NATO members. “Despite the concerns I have about Chinese foreign policy in other parts of the world, in the Arctic it is behaving responsibly,” he said. “They just want to make money.”

Next February, the Arctic Council is scheduled to choose the countries that will be granted permanent observer status, which requires unanimity vote. Though Iceland, Denmark and Sweden now openly support China’s bid, the United States State Department, contacted for comment, declined to say how it would vote.

908. Relieving China's Traffic Jam

By Chengdu Living, September 10, 2012

China’s recent stimulus push, involving dozens of infrastructure projects and hundreds of billions of yuan, boosted stock prices around the world, bolstered confidence in the Chinese economy and took the country one giant leap further down the urbanization road. But as with most of China’s big plans, the implementation tends to be a chaotic mixture of scientific efficiency and headlong, creative destruction. Transportation in particular presents a knotted conundrum of middle class aspirations, global market forces, shady construction projects and big, black clouds of CO2.China’s recent stimulus push, involving dozens of infrastructure projects and hundreds of billions of yuan, boosted stock prices around the world, bolstered confidence in the Chinese economy and took the country one giant leap further down the urbanization road. But as with most of China’s big plans, the implementation tends to be a chaotic mixture of scientific efficiency and headlong, creative destruction. Transportation in particular presents a knotted conundrum of middle class aspirations, global market forces, shady construction projects and big, black clouds of CO2.

The Volkswagen production facility in Longquan, 35 minutes southeast of Chengdu’s city center, represents the global, scientifically efficient side of China’s infrastructure boom. The facility employs nearly 7,000 workers, who, together with more than 400 robots and amazing feats of engineering like Durr’s Eco Dry Scrubber, churn out sedans for China’s car-hungry middle class. Volkswagen plans on producing 1 million automobiles a year out of Longquan, most for the southwest China market.

Sagitars are already rolling out of the facility’s doors and they will soon be joined by the new Jetta. At around 80,000 yuan, both cars target the growing middle class in southwest China. This emerging consumer wants to not only drive to work, but also take day trips out to Leshan, Ya’an and Xichang – the new nongjiale (homestay) destinations for urbanites seeking solace from the city.

Chengdu has an estimated 3 million registered vehicles and about 1,000 more are added every week. The city, including outlying districts like Dujiangyan, Dayi and Longquan, has a population of 14 million and city planners expect that number to increase to 20 million in the next 15 years. Right now 40 out of 1,000 of own a car, but that ratio is expected to grow to at least 200 per 1,000 in the next decade.

“People in Chengdu want to be mobile and value being mobile,” said Christian Koch, VW China’s executive vice-president of products and logistics. “We go where the customers are.”

One huge traffic jam

China currently has an urban population of 600 million people. In 15 – 20 years, 350 million more will be added, an increase equal to the entire population of the United States. By 2030 there will be 1 billion urbanites spread out across 220 cities, each with at least 1 million in population, together accounting for almost 90% of the country’s GDP.

One of the biggest questions facing China is how to provide adequate and efficient transport for all of those urbanites. One quick look around shows that the country is going full-steam ahead with roadway, highway, railway and subway projects. Chengdu has added two Metro Lines, two high-speed rail links (and another on the way to Leshan), thousands of miles of freeway, and a host of rail links in the last 10 years. Yet the roads and rails are still jammed and the buses and subways are almost always packed.

Today Chengdu is once again a big construction site. There was a small breather for a year after the Metro Line 1 was completed, but now the entire Second Ring Road is receiving an upper deck. Construction on the ring road has made traffic almost unbearable and it will stay like this until the Fortune Global Forum next June, the deadline for construction set by the city’s authorities. The recent opening of Metro Line 2 may provide a saving grace. The line, which stretches east to west across the city, had a soft opening earlier this month and is fully operational as of Sunday September 16th. The city plans to roll out two more lines in the next few years, but the plans also call for an elevated level for the First Ring Road. Citizens are bracing for another five years of traffic jams.

This year’s Chengdu Motor Show will attract up to 600,000 people – buyers, dealers and outright gawkers – who will check out the 420 different models on display. FAW VW already reported 1,000 orders of the new Jetta, on display at the show, and those numbers are sure to rise in the weeks ahead. As Chengdunese place orders in the largest car boom in the history of mankind, a plaintive voice of opposition makes the rounds on Sina Weibo. Entitled “Chengdunese have had enough“, the post laments a decade of traffic jams and the numbing spectre of a decade more ahead:

“10 years ago, when they started re-building the transport network, the Party and the government told us: today’s inconvenience is for tomorrow’s efficiency. We endured! 10 years of construction and traffic jams later, the Party and the government told us: the subway is on its way, the traffic jams are almost over. We endured! Construction on the metro started everywhere; roads were blocked, one couldn’t take a left anywhere and the city was riddled with one-way streets. The Party and government told us, only a few more years and it will be over. We endured!

The big boss changed and now we’re back to building again. Today I was two hours late for work and had my salary docked. Please tell me, how long must we endure this? Urgent request: Relevant organs, please start managing the city planning. Don’t build recklessly everywhere, or, as soon as someone new takes charge, start digging. You have “professional cars” and “white license plates” all we can do is endure. No more

A mad scramble for the cash

Building a functional, modern, and sustainable transport network up from scratch is a huge undertaking. Countries with decades of experience, billions in funds and the added luxuries of low population density and manageable social pressure still consider traffic management to be one of the most complex and expensive civil engineering challenges around. China has but 20 years of practical experience, a massive population and a vocal and growing middle and upper class that wants good transportation. But they do have the cash.

Even so, one major issue impedes the efficient use of all that cash. Namely, serious inter-ministerial conflict, corruption and miscommunication. The Ministry of Railways and the Ministry of Transportation do not work that well with each other, or the half-dozen other government bodies involved in road and rail construction, such as the Public Security Bureau, the Bureau of Standards and various provincial construction and transportation bureaus. Add to that the fact that most railway construction companies also own the highway construction companies, allowing the rail people to move into road building (such as the failed venture in Poland). There is a different government body in charge of highway statistics, construction, maintenance, and planning; every single one is plagued by corrupt officials, unscrupulous contractors and a dozen internal and external factions competing for central government funds.

Worse still, much of that funding is now being handled on the local level, so corruption, incompetence, and injustice go unchecked by any form of authority. Farmers are pushed off of their lands while local officials siphon off compensation funds; contractors under-bid and then either demand more money or do a sub-par job; and ministry officials rotate in and out of office, passing the buck on to the next guy. Projects are often held hostage to the political aims of leaders out to impress someone, as may be the case with the Second Ring Road improvements, so efficiency and need take a back seat to immediate political or material gain. The general manager of an expressway construction company is a coveted position and everyone from low-level transportation officials from the townships to the provincial level construction bureaus is vying for the spot, or influence with whomever has temporarily landed it.

Yet even with all of the chaos and piracy, this movement will not stop. Urbanization is the key to transforming China into a consumer-based society and consumption means, among other things, building roads and buying cars.

An unstoppable force

In 1986, 28.2% of the Chinese population used public transportation, 62% rode bikes and a mere 5% drove cars. By 2009, those numbers changed to 38.9%, 18% and 34% respectively. How can China promote public transportation among the middle classes and thereby pull some percentage points away from car ownership? Massive upgrades in public transportation are big help, as are usage incentives or dis-incentives. Guangzhou and Beijing are already regulating usage and have quotas in place. Every other major city in China, including Chengdu, is mulling over similar regulations, while barreling forward with infrastructure projects to help alleviate the pressure.

And the verdict is still out on electric cars, once the anointed savior of the driving class. Although the technology for electric batteries exists – and the Chinese are some of the best in the world at making batteries – integrating new and old tech in an affordable and efficient car has so far escaped even the most advanced automobile manufacturers. No manufacturer has put together an electric car with mass appeal yet and even if they did, there is still a huge elephant lurking in the corner: even promising prototypes have to get their electricity from somewhere.

For China today, coal is the number one source of electricity production. China handles 1.5 billion tons of it annually, by far the number one producer and consumer of coal in the world. According to the International Energy Agency, ”China’s share in global coal production is almost four times that of Saudi Arabia’s production of oil … (and) … China’s share in global coal consumption is more than twice that of the demand for oil in the United States.”

Even if electric cars were able to minimize exhaust, the coal China uses to power the electrical grid would more than make up for any decrease in pollution. China currently has around 70 million cars on the road and that number may increase to somewhere between 400 and 550 million by 2030. The added exhaust will pump an approximate 3 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere; we inject 7 billion tons into the sky today.

But even that may not be the end of China’s growth. The estimates for 2030 hover around 200 automobiles per 1,000 people (up from 40 per 1,000 today). In Europe the ratio is 400 to 1,000 and in the US it is as high as 600 to 1,000. If Chinese drive as ardently as American. 

907. Video: Mother Earth: She Is Alive, She Is Beautiful, She Is Hurting

906. Harvesting a Climate Disaster

By Mark Hertsgaart, The New York Times, September 12, 2012

FARMERS went to Washington yesterday. Members of a coalition representing more than 80 agricultural organizations rallied on Capitol Hill to demand passage of a new farm bill that has been stalled in Congress.

The Democratic-led Senate has already passed its version of the bill; the Republican-controlled House is squabbling over a competing approach (one that sharply cuts food aid to the poor). Irate farmers want both sides to shut up and pass something that can replace the current farm bill, which expires on Sept. 30.

All of the parties, though, are focused on the wrong thing.

The farm bill is not only the centerpiece of United States food and agriculture policy, it is also a de facto climate bill. And in this respect, both the Senate and House versions of the legislation are a disaster waiting to happen.

Consider, for a moment, the summer of 2012. For an agricultural superpower like the United States, it should have set off alarm bells. The hottest July on record and the worst drought in 50 years — both driven partly by global warming, scientists say — have parched soil and withered crops across the Farm Belt. Yet America’s lawmakers aren’t even remotely addressing the issue in a piece of legislation that will affect the climate profoundly for years to come.

The proposed farm bill — Senate- or House-style, take your pick — would make American agriculture’s climate problem worse, in two ways. Not only would the bill accelerate global warming by encouraging more greenhouse gas emissions, it would make the nation’s farms more vulnerable to the impacts of those emissions.

Indeed, instead of helping farmers take common-sense measures to limit their land’s vulnerability to extreme weather, the legislation would simply spend billions more on crop insurance — sticking taxpayers with the bill. “It’s like giving a homeowner cut-rate fire insurance but not requiring fire extinguishers,” Jim Kleinschmit of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy told me in an interview.

Except in a technical aside, neither the bill passed by the Senate or by the House Committee on Agriculture even mentions climate change.

Coal and cars are blamed, but agriculture is also a major contributor to global warming: by some estimates, it accounts for roughly a third of emissions globally. The industrialized, meat-heavy food system of the United States takes a heavy toll on the atmosphere; it takes an enormous amount of fossil fuel to run farm equipment and harvest the mountains of corn that fatten livestock. And most fertilizers contain nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 298 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a century.

Both of the farm bill proposals would maintain agriculture’s large climate footprint, mainly by continuing to skew subsidies toward a mere handful of commodity crops. The “big five” — wheat, rice, soybeans, cotton and above all corn — have received 84 percent of subsidies since 2004, according to the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group critical of the practice. Subsidies increase with output, encouraging farmers to run highly mechanized operations that plant “fence row to fence row” and apply oceans of fertilizer and pesticide, all of which boost emissions.

But industrial agriculture’s ability to produce gargantuan amounts of food also makes it exceptionally susceptible to climate change. Relying on vast monocultures — the miles and miles of cornfields one passes when driving in Iowa — captures economies of scale. But that lack of diversity invites trouble. A monoculture’s uniformity means that if temperatures spike or a new pest arrives, the damage is likely to spread throughout the entire planted area. By contrast, the diversified landscapes of organic agriculture — corn planted between, say, other vegetables and chicken pens — tend to limit damage.

Farmers can best boost resilience to climate change, scientists say, by improving their soil’s fertility and capacity to retain moisture. That means cutting back on chemical fertilizers, which kill many of the microorganisms that ventilate soil, and shifting to compost and manure fertilizers and crop rotations.

Instead, leading lobbyists for agribusiness want to retain the current production system but shift the mounting climate risks to the taxpayer. Both versions of the farm bill would expand the $11 billion crop insurance program, a move championed by the National Corn Growers Association. The Senate bill, for instance, would authorize $3.8 billion a year for additional insurance.

But neither version would require farmers to take other measures to reduce their climate vulnerability, like investing in healthier soil. In fact, the draft bills would actually make it harder for farmers to do that because the expanded crop insurance would be paid for by cutting the Conservation Stewardship Program, which helps farmers improve their land’s ecological health.

Shifting federal policy from a longstanding emphasis on industrial agriculture to more organic approaches is too large a task to complete by Sept. 30. But Congress could pass a one-year extension of the old bill and direct the Department of Agriculture to use the extra time to develop, with farmers and other stakeholders, a plan to segue to climate-smart agriculture as soon as possible. As the summer of 2012 has reminded us, this agricultural superpower has already waited too long to take climate change seriously.

Mark Hertsgaard, a fellow of the New America Foundation, is the author, most recently, of “Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.”