Builders plan for 2008 tests, leading to passenger flights in late ’09

A passenger-carrying suborbital spaceliner and the airplane that will serve as its first stage are starting to take shape on the factory floors at Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif.

Work on the SpaceShipTwo prototype is moving forward, as is the fabrication of the White Knight 2 mothership, and at this point spaceline operator Virgin Galactic is eyeing late 2009 as the beginning of commercial flights with paying customers.

Scaled Composites is the firm led by aerospace designer Burt Rutan, whose team designed and built SpaceShipOne, the vehicle that made a trio of piloted suborbital flights in 2004, snagging the $10 million Ansari X Prize by completing back-to-back suborbital hops within a two-week time period.

Renewing a Call to Act Against Climate Change

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — Some are born earnest, some achieve earnestness, and some have earnestness thrust upon them. Bill McKibben qualifies for inclusion in at least two of these wedges of humanity.

In 1989, at the age of 28, he achieved earnestness of a dour, frowning sort as one of the first laymen to warn of global warming in his book “The End of Nature.” In the ensuing 18 years, he said recently while cross-country skiing in the woods near his home, he felt caught in a bad dream, forever warning heedless people of a monster in their midst.

Now, when Mr. McKibben is 46, his role as the philosopher-impresario of the program of climate-change rallies called Step It Up, has thrust new earnestness upon him. This time with a smile.

Mr. McKibben’s title — scholar in residence at Middlebury College — seems far too passive to encompass his current frenetic pace. His online call for locally inspired, locally run demonstrations on April 14 has generated plans for a wave of small protests under the Step It Up banner — 870 and counting, in 49 states (not South Dakota) — to walk, jog, march, ski, swim, talk, sing, pray and party around the idea of cutting national emissions of heat-trapping gases 80 percent by 2050.

Skiers in Wyoming plan to descend a shrinking glacier. New Yorkers plan to form an unbroken human line (dress code: blue shirts) along what might be the new southern shoreline of Manhattan. A group of Dominican sisters and a Wisconsin environmental group are organizing a conference on Sisinawa Mound overlooking the Mississippi River.

“It’s a source of eternal pleasure for me to turn on my computer every morning and see what people have come up with the night before,” Mr. McKibben said. “Like: We’re going to scuba dive with a banner off the endangered coral reefs.” Or “I’m going to take my bar mitzvah and make it into a Step It Up rally.”

But Mr. McKibben also noted in a column on the environmental Web site Grist.org that popular momentum had lagged. “We don’t have a movement,” he wrote. “The largest rally yet held in the U.S. about global warming drew a thousand people. If we’re going to make the kind of change we need in the short time left us, we need something that looks like the civil rights movement, and we need it now. Changing light bulbs just isn’t enough.”

The rallies, organized online by a half-dozen Middlebury graduates (well, one is still finishing his thesis) hunched over laptops in an otherwise bare conference room in Burlington, could filter a kind of passion and fashion reminiscent of the 1960s through a YouTube lens.

All the scattered “actions,” as Mr. McKibben and Company are calling them, are to be photographed, with the results put up on the Web on the evening of April 14.

If one takes the social and political movements of the 20th century as a template, of course, the climate-change movement has been doing things completely out of order. Instead of the old sequence (call to arms, demonstrations, politicians take note, legislation is passed, businesses and communities come around, society internalizes the need for change), the big demonstrations are coming late in the game, long after the call to arms.

There will be other demonstrations. On Tuesday, environmental groups are busing people to Washington to buttonhole legislators on keeping oil and gas drilling out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on cutting emissions. On Friday, the Interfaith Walk for Climate Rescue will leave Northampton, Mass. Then, on April 9, Laurie David, a producer of the Academy Award-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” and the singer Sheryl Crow will begin a 12-city college tour.

Why is all this happening now?

“I think it’s been too big for people to get their heads around,” Mr. McKibben said. “Those who wanted to do something did things at home — your car, your light bulb. Washington was blocked off for work for a long time. People worked really hard at local levels.”

He takes it as a given that the Bush administration’s strategy, working with Asian nations, particularly China, on a voluntary basis on alternative cleaner energy alternatives and setting goals for reducing the amount of heat-trapping gases emitted per unit of gross domestic product is not going to work.

Instead, Mr. McKibben said, “only with national and then international commitments are we going to get the scale of things we need done in the small window of time the scientists say we’re given.”

Van Jones, director the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, Calif., is one of relatively few black community organizers to find common cause with those calling for drastic cuts in emissions from the country’s tailpipes and smokestacks. Such changes could make poor peoples’ electrical bills go up. But Mr. Jones says climate change will hit the poor first and harder than any increase in their electricity.

“Two thousand seven is the year that global warming will become a marching issue; 2008 is the year it will become a voting issue,” Mr. Jones said. “McKibben is one of the main drivers in moving this thing from the cafes and blogs into the streets.”

Mr. McKibben’s proselytizing over the past two decades has not given him the kind of profile enjoyed by Al Gore, the movement’s American Idol. As a journalist and the son of one (his father worked for The Boston Globe), Mr. McKibben is more comfortable as a watcher than a climate preacher and more at home putting on his boots in his mud room than standing behind a lectern.

Mr. McKibben drives a mud-splattered 2003 Honda Civic hybrid to and from the home he and his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, built in Ripton on land once owned by the poet Robert Frost. They moved there and helped design the house — which won an award from a state conservation group for energy efficiency — because they wanted to send their only child, Sophie, 13, to a better school than the one she was headed for in upstate New York and because of a position at Middlebury College.

Mr. McKibben’s 10 books and frequent articles in places like The New York Review of Books have earned him the admiration of Steven Hayward, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group. “I don’t think he’s played as large a role as he deserves to have played,” Mr. Hayward said. “Serious and thoughtful people take him seriously.”

Well, maybe not entirely. To his Middlebury acolytes, he is Billy the Kibbs. They admire his knowledge and passion but not his computer skills. They got to know him in the college’s dining halls. It was there last fall that Jon Warnow, 22, suggested the name Step It Up for the Internet-connected rallies. It was there that Will Bates, 23, started figuring out how to be the quartermaster for last summer’s five-day march across Vermont, which begat the idea of a series of nationwide actions.

“It’s fair to say we jumped into this without completely understanding where it would end up,” Mr. McKibben added, looking around the little conference room.

Later, on a ski trail near his home, he mused about the sense of dread and impotence that is no longer grafted onto his psyche. “It’s so different,” he said. In the last year, he said, “everything just changed.”

In a little more than three weeks, he hopes to have 870 pictures to prove it.

Push to Fix Ozone Layer and Slow Global Warming

HONG KONG, March 14 — An unusual coalition of industrial and developing countries began pushing Wednesday for stringent limits on the world’s most popular refrigerant for air-conditioners, as evidence mounts that the refrigerant harms the earth’s ozone layer and contributes to global warming.

Greg Baker/Associated Press

The use of HCFC’s is rising in China by as much as 35 percent a year, and the Chinese oppose any new curbs.

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The coalition is pitted against China, which has become the world’s leading manufacturer of air-conditioners that use the refrigerant, HCFC-22. Most window air-conditioners and air-conditioning systems in the United States use this refrigerant, as well.

International pressure has grown rapidly this winter for quick action. “We scientifically have proof: if we accelerate the phaseout of HCFC, we are going to make a great contribution to climate change,” said Romina Picolotti, the chief of Argentina’s environmental secretariat.

An accelerated phaseout of the refrigerant could speed up by five years the healing of the ozone layer of the atmosphere. It could also cut emissions of global-warming gases by the equivalent of at least one-sixth of the reductions called for under the Kyoto Protocol.

The United States joined Argentina, Brazil, Iceland, Mauritania and Norway on Wednesday in notifying the Ozone Secretariat of the United Nations Environment Program that they want to negotiate an accelerated phaseout of hydrochlorofluorocarbons, or HCFC’s, at an international conference in Montreal in September.

The conference is tied to the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Montreal Protocol, which has reduced emissions of most ozone-depleting gases but left a loophole for HCFC-22 production by developing countries. China has repeatedly said it will honor all current rules of the Montreal Protocol but does not want to add new ones.

Recent studies have shown that steeply rising production of HCFC-22 by China, India and other developing countries has slowed the healing of the ozone layer, which protects humans, animals and vegetation from the sun’s dangerous ultraviolet rays.

A report last week by five American and European scientists found that sharp cutbacks in emissions of ozone-depleting gases since 1987 have been far more effective in combating global warming than the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement that was aimed directly at limiting climate change.

HCFC’s and other ozone-depleting gases are extremely powerful warming gases. Gram for gram, the ones used as refrigerants have thousands of times the global-warming effect of carbon dioxide. The ozone-depleting gases are released in far smaller quantities, though, than carbon dioxide, which is emitted when fossil fuels are burned by vehicle engines, power plants and other users.

The report by the European and American experts, published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the Montreal Protocol had proved to be 5.5 times as effective as the Kyoto accord was intended to be in cutting emissions of global-warming gases. The Montreal agreement has been in force much longer and applies to developing and industrial nations alike, while the Kyoto Protocol has binding limits only for industrial nations.

The report has caught the attention of countries in the Pacific and Indian Oceans that fear that global warming will lead to a rise in sea levels and a significant loss of their limited land.

“As small island nations, our main concern is that whatever touches the climate has to be dealt with fairly quickly,” said Sateeaved Seebaluck, permanent secretary in the environment ministry of Mauritius, an island nation well east of Africa in the Indian Ocean.

Mr. Seebaluck said that a flurry of news reports about HCFC-22 this winter had been widely e-mailed among specialists and had led to greatly increased international interest in addressing the problem.

The Montreal Protocol currently allows developing countries to keep increasing their production of HCFC-22 until 2016, and then freezes production at that level until 2040, when it is supposed to be halted. But that schedule was devised in the early 1990s, when HCFC-22 was used mainly in industrial nations; developing countries were seen as too poor ever to afford much of the chemical.

The Kyoto Protocol then exempted HCFC-22 and other ozone-depleting substances from production and consumption limits on the grounds that the Montreal agreement had already addressed those matters.

Use of HCFC-22 has soared in the third world with the economic growth of China, India and other countries, along with the sharp drop in air-conditioner costs that has accompanied China’s growing skill in making them cheaply. Mr. Seebaluck said Mauritius’s use of HCFC-22 had risen more than 100-fold in the last six years because of a boom in hotel construction and the rapid expansion of the fishing industry, which uses a lot of refrigeration to preserve freshness.

The use in India and China, far larger markets, has been rising as much as 35 percent a year lately, with specialists predicting that similar growth could last through 2016.

Industrial nations are required to phase out HCFC-22 by 2020, but most are moving faster. The European Union phased it out in 2004. The United States will ban domestic production in 2010 and is considering whether to ban imports then, as well.