Yesterday's news could be tomorrow's biofuel. Photo: Lisa Batty (Flickr)

Why not do something useful with those stacks of holiday cards languishing at home? Like re-charge your cell phone.

Japan has taken recycling to the next level: Sony recently unveiled a paper-powered battery prototype. How does it work? Engineers use the enzyme cellulase to break down paper matter into glucose sugar. Combine a few more enzymes with a dash of oxygen and you get a bona fide biofuel.

The process is pulled right from nature, researchers explained: it's used by white ants and termites, which use digested wood as a form of energy.

The paper-fueled battery is still in the early stages of development, but even low-output experiments have big potential. If brought to market, the prospect of using paper waste to recharge mobile phones or run small devices such as fans or lights is a bright spot on the innovation frontier. Whether off-the-grid in rural Africa or struggling with energy payments in the U.S. or Europe, turning paper waste into usable energy can play a part in alleviating poverty.

Perhaps the newspaper industry can capitalize on this green initiative to generate a little green of its own.

Industrial emissions are a major source of CO2 contributing to climate change. Photo: United Nations Photo (flickr)

The ongoing global financial crisis should not impede the fight against climate change. That's the concern coming from a surprising corner of the world: China.

As the latest round of UN-sponsored climate talks continue in Durban, South Africa, Chinese officials warn that financial hardships in Europe, the United States and elsewhere are no excuse for inaction on climate change.

With the Kyoto Protocol about to die, the global financial crisis could add another dimension to the already complex relationship between rich and poor countries when it comes to climate change.

China’s top climate official said a global pact to fight climate change should be a top priority for developed countries, even as they face severe economic challenges at home. "After the financial crisis, every country has had its problems, but these problems are just temporary," Xie Zhenhua, vice-director of the National Development and Reform Commission, told reporters, according to Reuters. He expressed concern that rich countries will break their promises to help poor ones mitigate and adapt to climate change.

According to The Economist, the vast majority of ‘climate finance’ for developing countries comes from western nations. Over $75 billion a year, or more than 75 percent of climate finance to the developing world, comes from a combination of private donors and multilateral and bilateral banks funded by taxpayers in wealthy countries. These sources have been hit the hardest by the global financial crisis.

"Climate change hasn't become less important because of the international financial crisis, but it has become less prominent," Xie said.

Developing countries, meanwhile, would be hit hardest by climate-related disasters. They lack the infrastructure and financial resources to deal with problems they have had less of a hand in causing. The 2010 climate talks in Cancun included a commitment of $30 billion to poorer nations to adapt to impacts of climate change, and an increase to $100 billion a year by 2020 for this ‘green climate fund.’ Now, says China, even the initial $30 billion commitment seems unlikely to be met.

China might seem an unlikely voice of support for carbon cuts, as it has surpassed the United States as the world’s leading producer of CO2 emissions. Under the Kyoto protocol, China was deemed an emerging economy, and not bound to the stipulations placed on developed countries. Yet China has pledged to reduce its emissions intensity by 40 to 45 percent by 2020, and hopes western countries sign on for an extension of the protocol’s commitment period. Kyoto signatories Canada and Japan have already refused to extend the protocol’s requirements. The United States has also said further negotiations are off the table.

That means the Durban discussions themselves may well determine the direction of climate funding and its impacts. And without climate action, the financial crisis could soon seem like a small-scale problem.

Erik Mandell is a graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont. He is currently pursuing a master's degree in public administration and global leadership at Portland State. Read his other contributions to Global Envision.

China's many factories are one aspect of its booming economy that propelled it to Number Two. Photo: Collin Manuel (Flickr)

China’s consistently high growth rates, strong exports, and expanding industrial sector have been turning heads. So it may come of little surprise that China’s GDP recently surpassed that of Japan, making it the second largest economy in the world, writes the LA Times.

Though China's total output has surpassed Japan's before, this time analysts predict China won't relinquish its lead. "[E]conomists say China is poised to be ahead for good," reports the LA Times. “China's economy will almost certainly be bigger than Japan's at the end of 2010," agrees the Huffington Post, because "China is growing at about 10 percent a year, while Japan's economy is forecast to grow between 2 to 3 percent this year.”

Yet, the Huffington Post points out that China's growth has not been unequivocally beneficial.

China's rise has produced glaring contradictions. The wealth gap between an elite who profited most from three decades of reform and its poor majority is so extreme that China has dozens of billionaires while average income for the rest of its 1.3 billion people is among the world's lowest.

In China, per capital income was $3,600 last year, standing in stark contrast to Japan's $37,800 per capita income, according to figures in the Huffington Post article. This intrenched disparity highlights how using GDP — a country's total output — can mislead when used as a measure of prosperity. Accordingly, many Chinese told the LA Times that their country is not necessarily better off than Japan, a sentiment explored in this LA Times video.

So, while China has further cemented its economic superstar status by gaining the title, "Number Two Economy," to truly flaunt these laurels, the country must also address its pervasive poverty as well.

The G-20 is meeting this week in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Chaired by President Barack Obama, the purpose of the summit is to, “review the progress made since the Washington and London Summits and discuss further actions to assure a sound and sustainable recovery from the global financial and economic crisis.” I’ve heard of the G-8, but the G-20? I began to wonder about this alphanumeric soup of organizations. Who are they and what are they concerned with? The following scorecard should help interested followers of this subject keep track of the major players.

The G-6: Organized in 1975 by the finance ministers of Germany and France who were frustrated with the formality and structure of larger international meetings, the G-6 and subsequent evolutions of this body are strictly informal bodies that meet to discuss economic issues of mutual interest. After the creation of the G-8, the term G-6 is now used to refer to the six most populous members of the European Union. The member countries are: the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan

The G-7: Formed in 1976, this is an informal forum for the finance members of seven big industrial economies to discuss economic issues and seek agreement. Member countries include: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, United States. Now also includes the European Union.

The G-8: An evolution of the G-7, membership grew to include Russia. The European Union is a limited member; it cannot host a meeting or hold the presidency of the body. Members are: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, United States, Russia. European Union (limited member)

The G-8 plus Five: Recognizing the growing influence of other countries, the original group sometimes broadens their meetings by including the Outreach Five. As with all meetings, other countries are sometimes invited to attend. Members: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, United States, Russia. European Union (limited member) Plus: Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa.

The G-20: According to their website, “[t]he G-20 was created as a response both to the financial crises of the late 1990s and a growing recognition that key emerging-market countries were not adequately included in the core of global economic discussion and governance.” Where the earlier groups (G-6 through G-8) were organized around the industrialized countries of the world, the G-20 begins to bring emerging economies into the dialog. Their first meeting was in Berlin, Germany. The Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the President of the World Bank, plus the chairs of the International Monetary and Financial Committee and Development Committee of the IMF and World Bank, also participate in G-20 meetings on an ex-officio basis.

The G-20 is made up of the finance ministers and central bank governors of 19 countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, European Central Bank

The G-33: The name for a group of developing countries that coordinates on trade and economic issues. It was created in order to help group countries which were all facing similar problems and give a unified voice to countries that were traditionally excluded from discussions among the industrialized countries. Members: Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Benin, Botswana, China, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guyana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kenya, Laos, Mauritius, Madagascar, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, St Kitts & Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent & the Grenadines, Senegal, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Tanzania, Trinidad & Tobago, Turkey, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

There are other groups variously labeled as G-8, G-20, G-33, and even N-11 (countries which Goldman Sachs considered in 2005 to have a high potential of becoming the world’s largest economies this century: Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Turkey and Vietnam).

One of the best, reliable, sources of information about these groups and their members may be found on the websites of the World Trade Organization and the previously mentioned G-20.

You can Track the ongoing discussions of the Pittsburgh G-20 Summit here. But be prepared for slow page loading. It is a very busy website.

As unemployment increases worldwide, countries are looking at ways to stop the bleeding. Spain, Japan and the Czech Republic have decided to pay unemployed immigrants to return to their homelands.

Spain is offering immigrants from outside Europe an average of $18,500 in unemployment benefits to leave. The government is hoping to lower its 17.4 percent unemployment rate, the highest in Europe. Those who take the deal get 40 percent up front, 60 percent once they arrive in their countries of origin. They can't reapply for work visas in Spain for three years.

Japan is offering a one-time payment of 300,000 yen (about $3,100) to South American factory workers of Japanese descent who buy a plane ticket home, plus an additional sum for each dependent. Immigrants taking the deal agree not to "return until economic and employment conditions improve." Japan's unemployment benefits pay nearly $2,100 per month. So, unemployed immigrants could theoretically make more money without a job in Japan than they would by taking the offer to leave.

The Czech government will provide unemployed non-EU citizens with a ticket home plus 500 Euros — more if the worker has young children, reports the Wall Street Journal. When the program started, there were no restrictions on when a worker could return. On April 1, however, the Czech Republic stopped issuing work visas for five countries including Mongolia, whose citizens represent two-thirds of those in the pay-to-leave program.

Impacts on unemployment have been negligible at best. The Czech Interior Ministry says that their program has been a success: it's filled nearly 65 percent of its 2,000-person quota. Still, that number is less than 1 percent of all unemployed workers. The 4,000 people who've accepted Spain's offer is far from the government's goal of 100,000. And fewer than 400 people have applied for the program in Japan.

It seems that many immigrants are choosing to weather the economic storm where they are. Their chances of gainful employment in the country they left must not be any better.

Cambodia depends heavily on water for the growth of rice which is one of the country's main exports. Photo: Fredalix (flickr)

Why would two countries with the same average rainfall have varying amounts of accessible water? Japan and Cambodia both receive around 160 cm of rainfall per year but the average Japanese person uses nearly 400 liters per day while in Cambodia the average person will likely use one-tenth of that amount. "The scarcity at the heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality," says a UNDP report, "not in physical availability."

Developing countries depend mostly on agricultural production as a means of income, but because agriculture accounts for roughly 70 percent of our world's water use, people in these countries heavily dependent on agriculture are left with little water for personal consumption.

In contrast, industrialized countries can use more of their water for personal use as they are able to import much of their food from other parts of the world. In Japan, agriculture makes up only 1.4 percent of GDP while in Cambodia 31 percent of GDP is dependent on the productivity and output of agriculture. This means that a water shortage in Cambodia would be far worse for the citizens and economic growth than in say, Japan.

As the world's euphoria following Barack Obama's election fades (watch VOA's Africa coverage above), what can Africa expect from America's first African-American president — especially when it comes to issues of global poverty?

Many Africans are hopeful that Obama will work to vigorously tackle poverty and disease throughout Africa. Former South African President Nelson Mandela echoed those sentiments in a note of congratulations to President-Elect Obama: "We trust that you will also make it the mission of your presidency to combat the scourge of poverty and disease everywhere."

Are those hopes well-founded? Perhaps. President-elect Obama was a key sponsor of The Global Poverty Act which seeks to cut global poverty in half by 2015. After its passage in February of this year, Obama stated:

With billions of people living on just dollars a day around the world, global poverty remains one of the greatest challenges and tragedies the international community faces. It must be a priority of American foreign policy to commit to eliminating extreme poverty and ensuring every child has food, shelter, and clean drinking water. As we strive to rebuild America's standing in the world, this important bill will demonstrate our promise and commitment to those in the developing world.

Some humanitarian agencies, like World Vision, are already strongly urging President-Elect Obama presidency to increase foreign assistance, food aid in order to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals.

But will the current global economic crisis limit these commitments to poverty alleviation? During the Vice Presidential debate, Vice President-elect Joe Biden admitted that given the current state of the economy an Obama administration may need to "slow down" their previous commitment to doubling foreign assistance.

Obama isn't talking about poverty alleviation nowadays. He (and everyone else) is focused on the U.S. economy. So despite the world's hopeful outlook, it's still unclear how Africa — and its poor — will benefit from America's first African-American president.

Shinjuku, Tokyo. Photo: Joi (flickr)

Previously known for its economic egalitarianism, Japan is now experiencing a widening income gap. That’s because many workers are finding themselves without a steady job as Japanese companies are relying more and more on short-term labor contracts.

Market reforms in 2004 made it easier for companies to hire short-term workers in an attempt to make the Japanese economy more competitive. With these new policies, Japan may have unintentionally increased the very inequality that it’s prided itself on avoiding.

"In order to reduce costs, big companies increased their use of part-timers, as the cost of employing these temporary workers is roughly a quarter or less than regular workers,” Tadashi Nakamae, president of the Nakamae International Research Institute, told the Christian Science Monitor.

Income inequality rose twice as fast in Japan as in other rich countries between the mid-80s and 2000, according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The gap between rich and poor in Japan is wider than the OECD average. The OECD's 30 members include many of the world's leading economies, such as the USA, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, France and South Korea.
Similarly, Merrill Lynch Japan Securities found that the top 10% of Japanese male wage earners now earn 3.2 times what the bottom 10% make; the figure had been steady at around 2.6 times in the late '90s.

Though many see inequality as negative, some economists point out that reforms to reduce labor costs may be necessary to keep some companies afloat. Even still, In a country where 90 percent of the population has traditionally considered themselves to be middle class, this growing divide must be quite a shock to Japan’s egalitarian self-image.

It’s too soon to tell exactly how the U.S. financial crisis will impact the rest of the world, but, according to a report in The New York Times, the U.S. has just lost some free-market street cred.

In extending a last-minute $85 billion lifeline to American International Group (AIG), the troubled insurer, Washington has not only turned away from decades of rhetoric about the virtues of the free market and the dangers of government intervention, but it has also probably undercut future American efforts to promote such policies abroad.”

The shock waves from the U.S.'s financial woes are already being felt around the globe, with Russia suffering from “one of the worst market falls” since 1998 and Asian stocks hitting a three-year low.

The world's poorest countries will especially feel the pain of the crisis. This week, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he feared that the crisis could seriously hurt poverty-fighting efforts in developing countries. These efforts depend heavily on rich donor countries and if these countries’ capacity for funding development efforts shrinks, many will suffer. Resuming the collapsed world trade talks, Ban said, is even more important in the wake of the financial turmoil.

As of Friday, the U.S. government's nearly unprecedented bailout has stabilized the market, prompting worldwide stock rebounds, but causing skepticism that the action is only a temporary fix.

If worldwide confidence in the free market drops as The New York Times article suggests, could it hinder future world trade talks — and development efforts — to an even greater extent?

About a month ago, the Japanese company Genepax proposed to use water in a way it hasn't been used before: as a fuel source for a mass-produced power generator.

The company has unveiled a device that creates electricity from water without using any external energy sources. There's a lot of skepticism as to how this is possible, and the company has been very secretive about how it all works. But it's standing behind the product, which, if it lives up to its claims, means Japan could soon be inundated with water power.

The generator is called WES, Water Energy System. The above video from Rueters, says the generator can run on any kind of water, “river, rain or sea, they all make this car mobile; even tea works."

Genepax website claims that the "WES can continuously and stably generate power because degradation of the electrodes is minimal in the process of extracting electricity from water…" and “WES generates high voltage using serially connected layers of single cells.” But there is little detail as to how the exact process works.

These two statements and some diagrams are the company's only response to the criticism from other experts such as professor Theodosios Korakianitis of Queen Mary University of London. In an interview with Reuters, Theodosis explained: “Because water is not fuel it is impossible to do that unless you bring water from an external source to split the water; that can be either an electricity outlet or a stored source of energy.”

But for the sake of it, let’s remain optimistic. Say the generator really requires no external source of energy to run? What are the implications? Among the benefits cited by Genepax on its website: The generator omits no greenhouse gases, uses a non-volatile, locally available fuel, is easy to transport and cheap to operate.

Advocating water as a fuel source has its issues. An estimated 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, places like Niger and southern Ethiopia experience regular drought. Even here in the U.S. drought is a problem, the city of Atlanta recently said it might run out of drinking water in as few as three months.

The WES can run on non-potable water, but whether its using water from rivers or lakes or the ocean, it will take a substantial amount of water to replace gasoline and would inevitably leave some environmental footprint.

The water-powered generator may be a great idea for an island nation like Japan, but in the Middle East, oil may remain easier and cheaper to access. For now Genepax is focusing on expanding production within Japan, where it has all the water it needs.

In Japan, her overnight hospital stay would only cost her $10. Photo: Hamed Saber (flickr)

“Every 30 seconds in the United States someone files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health problem,” according to the National Coalition on Health Care.

The United States spends the most in the world on health care – about $2 trillion annually. Yet, the U.S. ranks 37th in world in terms of the quality and fairness of its health care, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The U.S. has no comprehensive national health insurance system. Those who have insurance get it through their employers, government programs, or private suppliers. However,there are 47 million people that are not insured. Furthermore, millions more are underinsured, which has led to a growing epidemic of medical debt and bankruptcy in the United States. A Harvard University report found that about 50 percent of all bankruptcy fillings were partially due medical debt.

In light of this growing problem, correspondent T.R. Reid traveled with Frontline to investigate if other free-market countries were having the same problems with medical-related bankruptcy. What he found was shocking.

Traveling to the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, and Switzerland, Reid found that health-related bankruptcy is almost unheard of in these countries. Unlike the United States, all five of the visited countries have universal health care and pay a lot less.

Switzerland spends the second-highest amount on health care, but the government still spends 44-percent less per capita than the United States.

The full program, "Sick Around the World," is available online, along with a list of resources and a Q&A with Reid.

All the countries have varying degrees of private, market-based health care, like the United States. They, however, also limit the level of freedom the health care market can have. According to Frontline:

First, insurance companies must accept everyone and can't make a profit on basic care. Second, everybody's mandated to buy insurance, and the government pays the premium for the poor. Third, doctors and hospitals have to accept one standard set of fixed prices.

It's unnecessary for health care costs to send hundreds of thousands of Americans into debt each year. As Reid has learned, it is possible to make health care universal and affordable in a free-market economy.

Fisheries are being demolished, while nations argue over who and what is to blame. Photo: Christingo (flickr)

As fisheries decline, nations are busy arguing over who's to blame. Japan is pointing to whales as a culprit, and in doing so, drawing the ire of conservationists and scientists.

Japan has claimed that whales' eating habits are responsible for the diminishing numbers of fish. Many say this is because Japan has been campaigning to end the ban on whale hunting and is looking for international support.

At the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission, a coalition of conservation groups and scientists accused Japan of dodging responsibility for the declining stocks.

Daniel Pauly, director of a renowned fisheries research center, said whales are "no more responsible than the Martians" and that Japan's accusation "prevents the very small resources of West African countries from being devoted to understanding the real reasons why their fisheries are declining."

According to Dr. Pauly’s decade-long study, only about 1 percent of what whales eat is also desired by human consumers.

He and others blame not whales but East Asian and European fishing fleets trolling the coast of West Africa.

"Unless we fundamentally change the way we manage all the ocean species together, as working ecosystems," says Stanford's Steve Palumbi, "then this century is the last century of wild seafood.”

Here's one thing you can do to make sure that doesn't happen: Urge the U.S. Senate to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty, which would ensure that the world's oceans are managed sustainably.

The World Wildlife Federation, whose website offers letters you can email to your Senator and e-postcards to alert your friends, gives ample reason why the law is needed:

"Two-thirds of fish stocks that supply the global market have been overexploited or fished to maximum capacity; more than half of the world's coral reefs are threatened by human activity; and close to one-fifth of Southeast Asia's reefs have been damaged or destroyed by coral bleaching.

Global emissions trading under debate. Photo: mhaithaca (flickr)

Last week Prime Minister of Japan Yasuo Fukuda announced on that as part of Japan’s innovative new program to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 60-80 percent by 2050, Japan will invest in the global emissions trading market.

Yet the success of an emissions’ trading strategy is currently in hot debate.

Emissions trading is where a capped, or limited, amount of greenhouse gas emissions is agreed upon internationally, as in the Kyoto Treaty. Countries are then limited in the amount of pollution they can emit. Those countries emitting more than the cap are permitted to buy "credits" from those producing less. These credits allow the countries buying them to produce more than the agreed upon amount of pollution, and rewards the countries selling them for reducing emissions. The idea is that greenhouse gases will be reduced as time goes on because the allowed amount of gas will become smaller and the credits more expensive.

Yet some argue that because the accounting in emissions trading is not transparent and there is limited accountability, a tax based system would be more effective. Furthermore, recently researchers have found that the result of emissions trading has frequently been exporting carbon-intensive industries into developing countries. President Bush’s chief environmental adviser admits that emissions targets “cause a shift offshore” of pollutive industries. In other words, the U.S. and other developed nations are “saving” their emissions by forcing developing countries to account for them.

As factories in developing nations usually use more energy than those in the developed world, this leads to an overall increase in greenhouse gas emissions. The National Center for Atmospheric Research found that the U.S. ‘saved’ about 3 percent in carbon emissions over seven years by outsourcing to China, while in that same amount of time Chinese CO2 output rose 14 percent.

As a developed country, Japan stands to gain from this dedication to reducing emissions through increasing the emissions trading market. And while cutting their emissions by 60-80 percent is a costly challenge now, in the long run Japan will likely be a major player in establishing rules and norms for carbon trading, and could hugely profit in the future when they sell their credits.