SANTIAGO, Chile – Amid swank boutiques in the Providencia neighborhood of this sprawling city, afternoon shoppers unwind at the Foto Café over sweet coffee and even sweeter pastries as pictures of Hollywood idols and scraggly haired Tibetan children stare out at them.
Hernan Jara, the coffee shop owner, talks about his photographic experiences and his trips over the years to southern Chile where the snow-capped Andes and its scores of glaciers, all once so proud and mighty, now seem much smaller to him.
“The glaciers, they are shrinking,” he said.
Jara is getting out of the restaurant business and isn’t quite sure what he’ll do next. Like some other Chileans, he worries not so much about his economic future as he does about Chile’s economy, its energy needs, which are growing at upward of 6 percent a year, and the environmental impact of those needs.
Jara wonders what energy choices his nation will make and their effect on global warming.
Indeed, the challenge of balancing energy needs swirled through conference halls at the recent United Nations climate change meeting in Bali, and it provided the canvas for recent recommendations from a commission appointed by Gov. Martin O’Malley to cut global warming in Maryland by 90 percent by 2050.
In this country and elsewhere in Latin America, hardly a week goes by when energy needs and global warming are not in the news.
Environmentalists and indigenous people here are pitted in a running struggle over a massive dam project proposed for the Baker and Pascua Rivers in Chile’s southern Aysen region. The dam project has also galvanized environmentalists in the United States, with the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and International Rivers Network being prime among them.
Constructing a dam involves building a flood basin. The Aysen project would create artificial lakes flooding more than 14,700 acres of agriculture and ranch lands. According to International Rivers, the project would threaten the endangered huemul deer, as well as rare forest species.
The $4-billion project to dam the two rivers would generate 2,400 megawatts of electricity, a substantial portion of Chile’s energy needs. Currently, the nation’s four electricity operations generate about 12,000 megawatts per year. Typical coal- or oil-fired power plants can generate from 500-1,000 megawatts.
Proponents of the project say it will create thousands of construction jobs, as well as lots of hydro-electric power.
“Chile is growing, and as such it needs energy,” Bernardo Matte, president of the Chilean energy corp. Colbun, told El Mercurio, a Santiago daily. His company holds 49 percent of the firm created to build the Aysen dams. “In the next 10 years we’ll need to double what’s currently available in Chile.”
But Chilean environmentalists and others say nature will pay the cost.
To dramatize their opposition to the dams, more than 100 protesters rode horseback through the Aysen region for nine days in November to the small city of Coyhaique where “enthusiastic crowds” greeted them, according to the Nov. 28 Santiago Times.
“We can live without hydro-electric power. We can live without gas. But we cannot live without water. God gave us these rivers, and we the right to defend them,” said Ernesto Sandoval, a leader of the horse riders.
Hamlet Paoletti, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, notes that Endesa, the Spanish multinational behind the Aysen project, is currently involved in renewable energy projects in Chile and should pursue more of them instead of wanting to dam rivers.
“We’re not against all dams. It’s case by case. But we think there are better solutions,” he said. “They have the knowledge and ability to build [renewable energy projects], and they should be put forward.”
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicated in 2006 that reservoirs are a source of greenhouse emissions, and it called for more research.
Although they are challenged by the hydropower industry, studies conducted by Philip M. Fearnside, a U.S.-born climate scientist working in Brazil, contend that the emissions released through dam turbines and spillways exceed those of fossil-fuel energy plants.
On top of that, activists say that constructing the five dams will impact local villages. The dams would require clearcutting a 1,200-mile swath about 120 yards wide for a transmission line to feed electricity from southern Chile up to greater Santiago in the central part of the nation.
As planned, the transmission line would go through 12 areas that are granted protected status under Chilean law due to their environmental value.
Paoletti said, “It would go through pristine areas, natural reserves, parks and such.” He added that before the government allows the project, the University of Chile should be allowed to conduct an independent study of alternatives.
Paoletti, who is based in NRDC’s West Coast regional office, believes that Chile could benefit from more renewable energy and from better management of its existing energy generation.
He noted that in California stricter government oversight means that “the average per capita use of energy is the same as it was in the mid-70s. So, there are ways to make energy consumption more stable. We think that’s one of the things Chile should look into.”
Patagonia glaciers melting
With rising sea levels grabbing headlines last week due to speeded-up melting of Arctic sea ice, scientists familiar with the vast Patagonia ice fields in the southern hemisphere note that they are also melting and contributing to sea-level rises.
According to a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center, Arctic sea ice is melting so fast that some scientists believe it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.
In the southern hemisphere two large icefields in Chile are melting and, as is the case with Arctic ice, global warming is a cause.
“It is possible to say that glacier melting of [the] last decades in Patagonia is due to global warming,” said Dr. Paulina Lopez, a member of the Great Ice research group of Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement, a French research institute.
“The scientific community agrees with this idea,” she said in an e-mail interview from France.
As part of her doctoral thesis, Lopez studied the Northern and Southern Patagonia Icefields and Cordillera Darwin. She notes that several other studies and the Centro de Estudios Cientificos, a Chilean scientific research institute, concur with her findings about the effect of global warming on Patagonia glaciers.
From 1975 to 2000 about 4 cubic miles of the Patagonia icefields melted each year, Lopez said. She noted that accompanying sea-level rise was about .0017 inches per year.
According to NASA, based on its shuttle radar and other measurements, Chilean and United States’ scientists confirmed that the Patagonia icefields “are thinning at an accelerating pace and now account for nearly 10 percent of global sea-level change from mountain glaciers.”
The Third Person 